Yvain didn't have the luxury of watching the lich emerge from its ancient slumber. The tomb around him was crumbling. Stone, mortar, and forgotten bones giving way under the combined forces of the lich's awakening aura and the cataclysmic backlash of his own starfire.
He ran.
Faster than he thought possible, his boots striking uneven ground, barely keeping ahead of the collapse. Behind him, a low, grinding roar built as stone columns fell and centuries-old architecture finally surrendered to time and magic.
Yvain burst into the cellar, lungs burning, robes singed, eyes wild. He didn't stop.
He couldn't.
Up the cellar steps he flew, taking them three at a time, until at last, air.
The baron's courtyard, cool and moonlit.
The stone archway behind him gave a final shudder, and then collapsed in on itself in a thunderous roar of rubble and dust. A wave of dirt and old bones vomited out behind him, sending a plume skyward.
By then, the banquet had already fallen into chaos. Guests, nobles, and staff had all spilled out into the courtyard, drawn by the commotion. Wine goblets were abandoned, laughter smothered in confusion.
Celeste was the first to reach him.
She ran straight to him, face tight with worry, her hands cupping his dirt-smeared cheeks as he struggled for breath.
"What happened?" she asked, her voice urgent.
Yvain could barely speak. "You need… to get everyone out."
Before she could respond, a new voice cut through the din.
"What in the hell is going on here?!" the baron bellowed, storming toward them. His face was a mask of rage and terror, powdered with dust. "You've ruined my estate, you insolent—"
"Get everyone out!" Yvain snapped, his voice cracking like a whip.
"I—You don't command me—!" the baron roared, stepping closer.
But then he saw it.
And rage evaporated. Terror took its place. Something—someone—was crawling out of the wreckage.
All turned. All saw.
The lich.
It stepped into the moonlight like a shadow made flesh, its tattered robes whispering in the wind. They were ceremonial once. Perhaps noble, but now they clung like burial wrappings, stained and scorched. Its flesh was gray parchment stretched across bone, tight and thin. Its face was a death mask: empty sockets burning with hateful, sunken fire. Its presence hit like a wave of entropy.
The lich raised one skeletal hand.
The earth answered.
From beneath the lawns, the gravel paths, even the shallow burial plots of long-dead retainers, corpses began to claw their way up. Some were little more than bones strung with sinew, others still had skin, hair, teeth. All of them wore the mark of undeath. And all of them obeyed.
"By the gods…" Celeste whispered, her eyes wide. "That's a lich."
Ser Hardron, a man once rumored to have stared down a cannibal king, took one look at the rising horde and ran. A heartbeat later, panic exploded.
The guests broke into screams and motion. Gowns tore, boots pounded the stone, a chandelier fell and shattered as nobles fled in every direction—shoving, shouting, scrambling. Chaos. Pure, uncut chaos.
"I'll handle it," Yvain said, voice steel beneath the ash. "Take care of the knight."
Celeste turned to him sharply, her eyes narrowing. "Are you sure? That thing—"
"It's a lich," she finished, half in awe, half in warning.
"I know." He looked at her, expression calm. "Trust me."
Her eyes searched his for a moment longer, then nodded. Without another word, she turned and sprinted after Ser Hardron, her form disappearing into the tumult.
Yvain stood alone in the eye of the storm.
Dust still falling from his shoulders, ash clinging to his tongue.
The lich tilted its head slightly, its voice like rusted iron dragged across stone.
"I sensed there was someone with Breath to rival my own," it said. "Didn't expect that someone to be so young."
Yvain's eyes narrowed. He took the moment of conversation to reorient his mind, pulling in strands of residual Breath from the world around him.
"You remember who you were?" he asked, keeping his tone casual, but his posture ready.
"Fragments," the lich murmured. "Long ago, I was a warlord. Led my legions against a wizard whose name I've long forgotten. Foolishness. He broke us like twigs, scattered our bones across ten valleys. I was the last to fall."
Yvain studied the creature's face, if it could be called that. There was no sorrow there. No longing. Only the cold, glimmering hunger of undeath.
"What was your name?" he asked.
The lich made a scraping sound that might have been a laugh—or a cough echoing through dry lungs.
"I don't remember. They called me Khan," he said. "A title, not a name. Maybe that's all I ever was."
He stepped closer, necrotic energy trailing behind him like smoke from a fire that could not be quenched.
"Do you intend to fight me?"
"I do," Yvain said, steady.
"To protect this city?" The lich asked, gesturing with a skeletal hand toward the skyline. Smoke rose faintly in the distance, backlit by moonlight. "These trembling fools, these courtiers and their coin-counting kings?"
Yvain shook his head. "No."
The lich paused. Something ancient stirred behind his hollow eyes. "Then why?"
"Because I woke you," Yvain replied, simply.
There was a silence between them, thick and crackling. Then the lich spoke again, slower this time. "This city… It was once mine. I walked its streets. I bent its rulers to my will, laid its foundations with conquest and flame. And now I will reclaim it."
His voice grew darker, louder, colder. "If you stand in my way, I will scour every trace of you from the living world. I will turn your name into a curse spoken by the dying. I will burn every home that held you dear, salt the graves of your ancestors, and grind their bones into dust. I will make your memory scream."
Yvain took a step forward now, drawing himself upright, cloak billowing with latent power. "Pity, someone else has done all that."
The lich's fingers flexed. A tremor rippled through the earth. "So be it."