"So you said it talked to you?" asked Cheis skeptically as the three of them made their way down the rickety ice bridge. Whatever it was out there in the harbor was obviously waiting for them, and not idly; she could sense a vast black shroud of power around it with a blinding glow of magical complexity at its heart, even at this distance. "What did it say?" She wasn't exactly thrilled about facing some sort of mysterious death god, but draining the vanoille into her power reserves currently had them returning a capacity of 5.617e9%; she was at least moderately confident that she could take down a second dark deity today, if she had to.

Galar looked frustrated. "I couldn't understand its language. Something about 'Vis Hobex' and remorse. I thought it was telling me to regret my sins."

Linduin eyed his father balefully. "Might as well ask a rock to swim."

"'Vis Hobex'?" Cheis was intrigued. "That's Auld Shula. It means 'behold' or something like that. Pels had a scrap of a poem with a partial translation... oh gods."

"What?" Linduin was surprised almost to the point of shock; he'd never seen anything scare Cheis of Veraleigh before. "What is it?"

"If it's speaking the Shul language... I've heard legends, but I never thought they were true." Cheis was turning a sort of whitish-green color. "Supposedly, they had a way to make their powerful spellcasters into undead. Liches, in other words."

Linduin frowned. "I thought you said you spoke their language?"

"Not me." Cheis shook her head. "My compilatory self." She omitted the part where she had no memory of telling him any of this; presumably it had happened in one of the large stretches of time she'd lost in her mental checkpoint restore, or in some block of memory that hadn't survived the reparation of the damage from the fight with the vanoille. Or the fight with the council. Holy shit, she needed a vacation.

"I'm afraid you have me at something of a disadvantage here, madam," said Galar as tactfully as he could. "Are you telling me that the mysterious robed figure which brought me here from Temurin is an undead mage of some sort?"

Cheis shrugged. "I'm not sure. We'll see when we get closer, I guess, but --" she stopped as the distant figure began glowing red and summoned a big-ass horde of zombies out of the ground. "Nope, nevermind, yeah. It's a Shul Lich, and we're super fucked."

Linduin raised an eyebrow. "You're not seriously suggesting that we run, are you?"

Cheis shuddered. "I'd sure like to. But I did kind of just kick the crap out of the only other people within a few hundred miles that might have stood a chance against it." She sighed. "Guess we're all there is."

"Do you think it was the demon king's master?" Galar winced; it would certainly be embarrassing if he had been sharing a boat with the architect of all this evil.

"Probably." Cheis was rebuilding her wards and adding new ones; this was really going to suck. "The Shul Empire basically invented demon summoning, and they were good at it too. You know, right up until it destroyed their civilization."

Linduin drew his dagger, spinning it nonchalantly in his right hand. "Sounds bad for property values. How do we kill it?"

"Realistically," said Cheis, sighing, "you should be hanging back and trying not to get turned into a zombie or cloud of ash. But if you took out a rakshasi, I can't actually afford to turn down your help. Celebrate, kid; you're about to succeed at getting yourself killed."

Linduin shrugged. "Doesn't answer my question."

Galar Kayle frowned and leveled his glowing spear at Linduin. "Don't be a fool, son. War is no game."

"Fuck you, dad." Linduin spat. "I've been fighting on my own for days. I've taught myself magic to survive. If you want to patronize me, do it after the battle." He pointedly turned away from Galar to Cheis. "Does it have any weak spots? Is it vulnerable to iron?"

Cheis winced. The Linduin she'd known had been just about to undergo his mage-trial; obviously she was missing a bit of the plot, here. "You've been learning on your own, so I don't know what you've mastered; what can you do?"

"Telekinesis, creatively." Linduin had a bit of a sour expression. "Some basic processing using the collar's calculator and timer functions to set up function triggers. A couple of visual overlay tricks."

"You killed a rakshasi using tricks you cobbled together from your training item?" Cheis was impressed, and that did not happen often. "You've got potential, kid. Maybe I'll make a good apprentice out of you yet." She reached out and touched his dagger, which began to glow with a bright greenish light. "That's the best disruptor charm I can throw on there without more prep work; it might do something, and it might not, so don't get yourself killed trying for a hit. Look for runes, gems, or glowy bits; if they're there, they'll be the weak points."

Galar sighed with a bit of relief. "You have fought one of these creatures before, then?"

"Nope." Cheis didn't sugarcoat things. "It's just my best guess. I sure hope that spear you have is magical."

"Ah." Galar managed to look a little embarrassed. "Not as such, no. But it seems to be a suitable channel for the power Santorana entrusts to me."

"Oh, good, we've got a god on our side. That'll even the scales a bit." Cheis noticed, with more than a little trepidation, that the glowing red figure was coming down the ice bridge towards them. "Here we go. Try not to die."

The lich's figure was now close enough to be seen with the naked eye; a black, glossy skeleton wearing a cape of tattered red cloth. Galar gulped, unnerved despite himself; Linduin just reversed the grip on his dagger for parrying and sniffed disdainfully. Cheis spent a few seconds admiring her opponent's spellwork; thirty zombies and a cool red aura? She was more than a little jealous.

Velinaer strode to within striking distance of the adventurers, doing his best to make his voice sound suitably ominous. "So," he boomed, "you've come. Only three to face me? You must be very brave." He felt a little silly, doing this when they couldn't understand him, but one had to follow the script.

"What's it saying?" asked Linduin idly.

Cheis shook her head. "Beats me. Something about courage, I caught a bravas in there. I only know, like, nine words."

"Perhaps it mocks us," said Galar, tightening his grip on his spear. He was remembering how poorly he'd fared against the undead that had attacked Pols Sedis, and that had been a lot fewer zombies.

"Yeah? Well, it can mock this." Linduin muttered his combat precognition macro and leapt into the fray, stabbing zombies and dodging clumsy blows and grasp attempts; with each strike, an undead minion deanimated and fell off the bridge into the dark water.

"Go, my minions!" thundered Velinaer, warming to his act a bit. "Crush these foolish, uh, fools!" The zombies swarmed forward, flowing around Linduin towards Galar, who obliterated six at once with a sweep of holy power. Dang, Cool Staff Guy was awesome. Velinaer wished he'd known his real name.

Cheis, who was standing back a bit and observing their foe, kept quiet; she was risking a peek through a heavily-secured astral filter at the lich's body, and was getting quite seriously daunted by the complexity and artistry of the spells binding it together and animating the undead minions it commanded. Wow, look at that instruction density. Was that a recursively encrypted command exchange stack? She added more wards to herself, feeling underdressed.

Velinaer, doing his best to cackle convincingly, directed a couple of zombies towards the chubby guy (girl? he wasn't sure) in the black robe, just to see what they'd do, and was impressed when they chopped out a hella concise unbinding macro and turned two of them into dust before they could even get within five feet. Hot dang, was that a real-time entropic reversing algorithm being used as a one-off? This was a serious pro, here! He got so distracted analyzing the stack trace that he almost failed to notice the others making short work of the rest of his zombies; oh shit, he probably needed to do another line, or something. And probably more visual effects. He threw together a hacky force cylinder and a low-poly triangular photon absorption field; it was a shitty Dark Evil Sword, but it was the best he could do short notice. He did his most resolute effort at a flourish, then beckoned to the others. "Come, then! Let us see if your steel is as bold as your spirits!" Fuck, he sounded corny. Good thing none of them spoke the language.

As Galar swept forward, Velinaer tried for one of those dramatic sword-clinch moves, but mostly just stumbled and got stabbed in the chest. His kinetic inverter enchantment rejected the spear, but he still got a lot of damage warnings from the orthextropic energy coming off of it; he probably couldn't afford to fool around with Cool Staff Guy and his holy magic spear, or whatever. Frankly, he felt a little peeved that he was getting attacked by somebody whose life he had saved not too long ago. With a gesture, he melted Galar's spear and amulet, then knocked him off the bridge into the icy water. Hope you can swim, duder.

The smaller guy with the glowing green dagger -- the party's rogue, he guessed -- swooped in for a stab; the little dude was fast. And also covered with a whole bunch of astral shenanigans; Velinaer let a few stabs bounce off him while he inspected the runic overflow. Hey, that was a neat cognikinetic hack, there -- was the kid a wizard also? And come to think of it, didn't he look a lot like Cool Staff Guy and Cool Staff Guy's Dead Wife? Maybe this was their kid. That was cool. Adventuring as a family bonding activity. He injected a malformed packet into the kid's data processing pipeline, making him lock up with momentary paralysis. "Don't trust your inputs, bro," Velinaer said helpfully as he elbowed Linduin into the water along with his dad. The paralysis should wear off before the kid drowned. Probably.

Okay. Now it was just him and black-robe hacker. Velinaer ditched the crappy prop sword (it wasn't like he was going to hit anybody with it, anyway) and stepped closer, hoping to get a glimpse of his opponent's face. Cheis herself, who had been carefully watching the battle in hopes of gaining important information about her foe, blinked as a sudden gust of wind blew her hood back. Damn. Now her hair was going to get even worse.

Perhaps three feet apart, Cheis of Veraleigh and Velinaer Dax'taxu regarded each other cautiously. Velinaer was mostly caught off-guard; really top-notch female magi had been a rarity in the Shul Empire, and it should be noted that he spent a little bit more time than was perhaps proper lost in her warm green eyes and beautiful emulator signature. Cheis, on the other hand, was torn between skepticism about how this whole encounter had played out thus far and a pernicious, nagging desire to try out her burstingly-supercharged power reserves. It was a long, perfect moment where anything could have happened.

Eventually, however, it came down to a simple question of natures. Cheis of Veraleigh was, at heart, an architect of solutions; a problem-solver, an engineer of expediencies. The unfortunate fact that many thought of her as a warrior or killer was mostly a coincidence; war and death were merely frameworks in which she operated, a set of unique specialties she had cultivated only after discovering that they were widely compatible with various problem domains and tended to be well-supported in nearly all contexts. If her early life had been more nurturing, perhaps she might have gone a different path; if her adolescent or adult relationships had gone differently, she might have had a slightly broader skillset. But, at the end of the day, the facts were inescapable: when all one has is a hammer, one tends to perceive the universe primarily as an environment which allows one to interact with nails. Peace never stood a chance.