“You talked to an elf, and it told you there was an army of wights and worse led by a lich camping on our most direct path to the surface…”

They were sitting in Hasan’s house—a two-story stone building near the center of the village. Reshid was the first to see Em and Charlie returning, since he had been anxiously keeping watch for them while working on his essence tree. When they arrived, Hasan ordered them into his house for debriefing. Reshid followed them in and then tried to blend into the background, leaning against the wall by the door. All the walls were intricately carved with patterns and images, probably by Hasan himself, and the furniture was made of many different kinds of stone in various colors. Agatha, Idrin and a few of Hasan’s other lieutenants were also present to hear the report. So far, no one had told him to leave, and he hoped it would stay that way.

The situation in the village had turned out to be more complicated than he originally thought, and he wanted to know as much as possible about what was going on. Not only were some of the humans in the village a threat, the ghoul attack had shown that the village was vulnerable, no matter how well guarded it seemed. While he and Lonnie hadn’t been close, he was worried about what they were probably doing to him.

Hasan was rubbing his temple with one stony hand, making a repetitive grating sound that sounded to Reshid like nothing so much as a mortar and pestle.

“A talking elf?” Agatha was buzzing with excitement. “We need to bring it back here! Their relationship to essential magics is incredible—totally different than ours. If I could actually talk to one…” She trailed off, seeing Charlie’s visible discomfort at the suggestion as a few of the other revenants made hand signs meant to ward off elves and their curses.

Reshid restrained himself, but he sympathized. Elves weren’t evil, per se, but they were devious and their tricks weren’t always harmless.

“Liches are real?” Another voice muttered somewhere in the room.

Hasan glanced over in the direction of the speaker.

“Yes, but not exactly the way you hear about them in stories.” Hasan sighed. “No one has seen one in over a hundred years, as far as I know.”

He frowned, thinking for a moment.

“Agatha, please go and bring Frederick and Bartholomew here. This concerns both their people, and if anybody knows anything about liches, it’ll be the trogg.”

While they waited, the others started talking amongst themselves, but Reshid kept quiet, hoping that no one would take notice of him and decide he didn’t need to be here.

Charlie looked tired, staring down at the floor exhaustedly. Being drained by a ghoul or a wight or whatever couldn’t be good for the body or the soul. Meanwhile, Em was chatting amiably with Idrin and the other revenant lieutenants, asking about the state of the village after the attack, and whether anyone had been hurt.

As they went through who had been wounded and whose homes had been damaged, Reshid was startled to realize that Em wasn’t just asking to be polite—she was asking specific questions. She actually knew all of these people and had built relationships with them.

How had she found the time? Surely, they hadn’t been here long enough… then again, Em was always going somewhere to meet someone or to take care of something. He supposed running errands for people in your free time would do it—not that he was eager to try it. He didn’t want to become a part of this place, to join Hasan’s guard or fight wars against Ghouls. But he did want to see his new friends safe, and that meant learning everything they could from their hosts. Em might not share his motivations, but she was probably doing more to ensure their future freedom than he was.

His train of thought was interrupted as someone mentioned his name.

“Yea, her eye was completely gone, but he just clapped his hand over the wound and grew it back. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The man speaking was an ash revenant whose name Reshid didn’t remember. His voice came out in a silky whisper, but it was loud enough that everyone heard. He was entirely gray, from his skin to his eyes and hair, and parts of him disintegrated constantly into fine ash before reconstituting themselves as if nothing had happened. He didn’t remember seeing him at the impromptu field hospital, but it wasn’t as though he’d been looking for him.

Both the ash revenant and Em were looking at him now, with other heads turning his way as well. Just then, though, Agatha opened the door and entered, followed by first Bartholomew and then Frederik.

At Hasan’s prompting, Em and Charlie told the two new arrivals what they’d found. When they reached the part about where the ghouls were camped, Frederik’s eyes widened and he sucked in a breath.

“They cut off our communications. The nearest way out is at Iljaska, but that’s five days’ walk at least. If they’re moving to raid Duskhaven directly, we won’t have time to warn them—even if the Iljaskans believe who I am and let me use the relays to send a message.”

Iljaska. The name brought a swirl of images and homesick emotions up in Reshid, memories both clear and half-remembered. An orange sunset that looked as though it had been painted on a mountainside, a sprawling maze-like market and steep and narrow paved streets. A small house on one of those streets that looked as though it had been squeezed between its larger neighbors. His house. Or it had been, for a time. A safe place, all his own and free of monsters, magic, and political interests.

He wondered who lived there now.

Hasan shook his head. “That isn’t the fastest way up.”

“What do you mean?” Frederik looked taken aback, “we have detailed maps of the Deep Paths in this entire region, I’ve never heard of another exit anywhere near Duskhaven.”

Hasan and Bartholomew both snorted at the same time. Reshid silently agreed. In his other life, his calling as a traveling merchant of only minor success had taken him down many back roads in sparsely populated areas—he’d seen more than one unmapped entrance himself, and traded with a few of the people that lived near them, though he couldn’t remember any of their names now.

“I don’t want to impugn the capacity of your cartographers,” Bartholomew said, “but they missed a few fairly critical bits. Accurately mapping the upper levels in this area, along with all of the tunnels leading to and from them would take decades, even for a team of cartographers.”

“There’s a natural entrance about twenty miles from the city.” Hasan explained. “You can reach it in about a day and a half if you hurry. That’s not necessarily enough time, but it should work if they aren’t already moving to attack.”

“We killed one of their guards,” Em interjected, “they’ll know that we’ve found them. There’s no way they’ll launch an attack if we can block their retreat. They’d be exposed in the middle of a city. The priests would be able to call the gods down on them.”

Charlie cleared his throat. “The wight said that the vampire wasn’t supposed to attack us. So, they don’t necessarily know… Lonnie could just be a wild revenant the vampire happened across, and there are a lot of dangerous things running around out there that could be responsible for a picket disappearing.”

“Alright…” Hasan sighed in resignation, “We’ll need to cut off their retreat and make sure that they’re aware of our presence. A band that big is far too dangerous to let into a city. Still, I’m not sure we can do this. Wights are only as powerful as a normal ghoul, but they’re much smarter. Together with the vampires and were-creatures, we don’t stand a chance in a direct conflict.”

“Oh, I’d say it’s worse than that.” said Bartholomew. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Hasan raised an eyebrow at him.

“I mean the lich!” Bartholomew elaborated, sounding exasperated, “What were you planning to do about that?”

“I don’t know much about them, so I can’t really account for it, except to try to avoid it. Why? Do you know something?”

“Yes, I do.” Bartholomew’s features sagged slightly, making him look older. “Liches are something all the Amoa’dan know about. We don’t use aspected essential magics the way you humans do. It’s a corruption of a purer power. We gather that essence, and it blesses us with long life and health.

“What’s an Amoaran?” Charlie asked, voicing the same question Reshid had been thinking.

Bartholomew blinked at him. Idrin smiled, clearly amused, while Agatha looked mildly uncomfortable, as if embarrassed on Charlie’s behalf.

The trogg recovered, smiled slightly and answered. “Amoa’dan literally means ‘children of Amoa, the Dead Mother. And it’s me and my kind. We don’t call ourselves troglodytes—that would be ridiculous.”

“Oh.” Charlie said, clearly uncomfortable. If his attunement hadn’t changed his body so profoundly, he might have blushed.

Bartholomew cleared his throat in the awkward silence and continued, drawing everyone’s attention back to himself.

“The process doesn’t end there, though. Through the accumulation of essence, the eldest of us, some even older than these caverns themselves, eventually ascend to become true immortals. They have power far beyond mortal understanding. Their magic isn’t limited to any essential purpose—they can do almost anything they can imagine, provided they can bring enough power to bear.”

At that, Reshid perked up and he saw he wasn’t the only one. Agatha was leaning forward now, as if trying to make sure she caught every word.

Were troggs immortal? How old was Barty? And what was this other magic?

He saw Agatha open her mouth to ask, but Hasan caught her eye and raised a hand to stop her, then turned to the trogg.

“And you’re saying these are the liches?” Hasan asked. “Immortal trogg-sorcerers?”

Bartholomew recoiled as if struck.

“Hmph. No, of course not! An elder could wipe Duskhaven from the map in minutes, if our histories are anything to go by.” He gathered himself and then went on, gesturing at all those present. “In our own language, the word “lich” includes you. It refers to anyone who becomes a revenant. Almost all of us accumulate enough essence in life to ensure a Return after we die—but that is not our way. Our dead are ritually laid to rest, their bodies burned, and their power placed in the keeping of our elders.”

“Yes, alright. And this lich?” Hasan was clearly starting to get impatient. Agatha, by contrast, had produced a bit of paper and was taking notes.

“Liches are all those who seek to escape their fate. It takes millennia to ascend properly and until then, we can die of a simple fall from a ladder, just like anyone else. Some people just run out of patience. They learn to seize their own essence, their soul, and bind it to a pure, uncorrupted essence crystal, a soulstone. The process kills them, but if they succeed, the soulstone becomes a source for their entire essence. In time, it manifests a new body for them.”

Bartholomew grimaced, as if he smelled something rotten, then continued. “It’s their version of an attunement to their own essence, you might say. It anchors their being, their essence, in the physical plane with the soulstone. That’s what makes them immortal, and also allows them to work sorcery—though it’s not well understood how, and only a shadow of what an elder can do.”

“So, they are immortal trogg-sorcerers.” Hasan repeated, stone faced. Bartholomew looked like he was about to argue, but Agatha spoke first.

“That’s incredible! Barty, think about what this means. It’s a recipe for immortality!” She stopped, then frowned at him accusingly. “Why didn’t you tell me you had this?”

The trogg turned on her with a thunderous expression. “Because it is an abomination, a perversion of the True Path and a sin against the memory of our creator!”

He took a breath, mastering himself.

“There are practical considerations as well. Liches and their cults undermine the survival of our entire race. Our elders are only a step beneath our gods themselves. Their combined power shields us—all of us—from the wrath of the Betrayers. Liches threaten this order with their selfishness. In the past, several even combined their forces in an attempt to topple our elders, and our civilization, entirely.”

“But Barty, we aren’t Troglodytes.” Agatha insisted, puzzled. “If you shared this process with us, we could become much more powerful allies. I’m sure we could get volunteers for it, even if it meant living in the Deep Paths permanently.”

Bartholomew shook his head, looking tired.

“No. Becoming a lich isn’t just immoral, it’s also foolish. Killing yourself is part of the process, you know. That’s not exactly something you can practice to ensure that you’ll get it right. And there’s nothing to say a human could even do it. We are not the same, after all. Humans can become reventants, and that is already a lesser kind of immortality. Finding ways to improve their power is a far safer approach.”

“Then why don’t those troggs just become revenants instead?”

“Quiet.” Hasan cut in, “You can discuss this later on your own time. Barty, how do we deal with it?”

“Well,” he mused, “not by fighting it, if you can help it. If the accounts that I’ve read are anything to go by, it takes overwhelming power beyond anything you have access to here to even slow it down. There’s really nothing you can do.”

Frederik swallowed visibly and turned to Hasan.

“I just need time. We need to warn Duskhaven and get the guardians into position. If they break out of the crypt and into the city, it could be a disaster.”

Hasan sat unnaturally still for a moment, thinking.

“Charlie, you said the vampire was acting against orders, raiding the village?.”

Charlie and Em nodded simultaneously, and he went on.

“Then we might not need to fight at all.”

“What do you mean?” Frederik asked apprehensively. “If you don’t, they could reach the city in just over a day. That’s an incredible risk—we’re lucky they haven’t already left!”

“Relax,” Hasan said, holding up a hand, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t stall them for you. You should leave immediately, though. I’ll have someone show you the way.”

“Alright. What’s your plan?”

“I’m going to need everyone. That means I can’t have your troublemakers running around my village, stabbing us in the back while we’re busy saving your ass.”

Frederik didn’t hesitate, relief evident on his face.

“Done.”

“Alright, then here’s what we’re going to do..."