A lich in time liches ge.., p.1
A Lich in Time: Liches Get Stitches 5, page 1
This is a work of fiction, and the views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author. Likewise, certain characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
A Lich in Time
(Liches Get Stitches 5)
Cover Art by Mattias (Baconstrap)
https://baconstrap.carbonmade.com/
Editing by Naomi Espinosa
Copyright © 2024 HJ Tolson
All rights reserved.
hjtolson.com
A Lich in Time
(LICHES GET STITCHES 5)
HJ Tolson
Since our sessions inspired several of the events in this book, it only seems fitting to dedicate this one to the best D&D group of all time. Mirco, Emma, Olivia and Edgar, if I ever had to fight a beholder in real life, I wouldn’t want to do it with you. Love you all. Hes
Table of Contents
The Story So Far…
Chapter 1: The Ennui Jamboree
Chapter 2: The Quellac Island Players
Chapter 3: Seraphim
Chapter 4: A Labyrinth of Lies
Chapter 5: Lovely Day for A Smiting
Chapter 6: Clerical Error
Chapter 7: Revelations
Chapter 8: Our Lady of Perpetual Knitting
Chapter 9: Witch Knot
Chapter 10: Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax
Chapter 11: Writ in Water
Chapter 12: Two Birds, One Bone
Chapter 13: Rolling in the Deep
Chapter 14: Seas the Day
Chapter 15: Crimson Tide
Chapter 16: A Bigger Fish
Chapter 17: Once by Men and Angels
Chapter 18: Baby Got Backstitch
Chapter 19: Mermaid Kingdom
Chapter 20: The Armada and the Emerald Seas
Chapter 21: Purls of Wisdom
Chapter 22: Manic Pixie Seam Girl
Chapter 23: Marry the Night
Chapter 24:Organic, Free Range Paladins!
Chapter 25: Shining Fingers
Chapter 26: Ineffable Gods. With Trumpets
Chapter 27: Coup d’etat
Chapter 28: Pickled Mermaids
Chapter 29: Better Lit Than Never
Chapter 30: A Thinking Woman Sleeps with Monsters
Chapter 31: Para Bellum and Fancy Hats
Chapter 32: Liminal Spaces
Chapter 33: Silently and Very Fast
Chapter 34: The Hostess with The Mostest
Chapter 35: I Have Wonders in my House of Sugar
Chapter 36: The Feminine Urge to Explode Planets and Kill Undead Gods
Chapter 37: Starry Golden Space Nautilus
Chapter 38: Dead Gods and Onions/The Parable of the Mad Woman
Chapter 39: If The Drink is Bitter Turn Yourself to Wine
Chapter 40: Crossing the Bar
Chapter 41: The Final Stitch
Chapter 42: The Meaning of Life
Chapter 43: Maud
Chapter 44: It’s Only Forever, Not Long at All
Chapter 45: Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Other Books By HJ Tolson
The Story So Far: From Hedge Witch to Lich Queen
Maud Greenleaf is a hedge witch. She lives in a cottage in the centre of the forest with her cat, Jenkins, and keeps herself busy with her garden, her cottage, and brewing various potions (both benign and otherwise) for the neighbouring village. Her life comes to an abrupt and unexpected end when a necromancer chooses her village as the site of his ritual sacrifice.
He slaughters the villagers one by one, bargaining with the Whisperer (the god of death) to create for himself a powerful phylactery. Alas for him, Maud stabs him in the back before his liching ritual is complete. She steals his souls for herself and wakes up unexpectedly skeletal. Her phylactery is not a fancy gem but the village rooster.
While initially a little confused, the ever practical Maud soon embraces her new undead life. With the help of Roland, the necromancer’s friendly draugr servant, she learns the whispered words of powerful necromancy. Mostly she just wants to get back to her garden. Unfortunately for her, people just won’t leave her alone. Neighbours, adventurers, paladins, she must kill them all in pursuit of peace. The violence escalates till she is forced to invade the local barony with an army of undead geese and handsewn corpses.
Setting herself up as Baroness, she commands everyone to leave her alone, and retires at last to her peaceful cottage for some much needed therapeutic crafting.
This cosy idyll is interrupted by the arrival of another lich: the impressively armoured Janvier, who has much more traditional views of how liching should be done. Initial attraction leads to yet another beheading and the start of a wicked feud. There is only room in Einheath for one undead ruler, and her name is Maud.
Janvier takes over the capital city of Fairhaven, turning it into an icy undead wasteland. With the help of a ragtag team of teenage girls, a goddess, and a mysterious portal candle, Maud saves most of the city’s remaining population, hiding them away in Downing Forest. With their souls safely out of Janvier’s clutches, Maud invades with her own army of wraiths and draugr. She defeats Janvier and his lich dragons, and fashions his remains into a fancy chandelier which she hangs in her throne room.
The newly crowned lich queen decides that being a monarch has its advantages. She gets to have some very nice dresses, which partially make up for the administrative headaches. All in all, however, war is noisy and much too socially distressing, so Maud attempts to broker peace with the paladins and other clerics.
Happy to live and let live (metaphorically speaking) Maud invites everyone to her newly rebuilt castle. Unfortunately, the Whisperer disagrees. He will have no peace, wanting only wanton destruction. The god himself appears in a fury and slaughters the peaceful contingent, which makes things very awkward indeed.
Maud is forced to obey, but thoughts of (his) murder settle in her cold black heart. In order to defy him, she must find a way to kill the god of death himself. It will likely cost her her ‘life’, but she has long since embraced the cycle of life and death. The world without living things (no sheep, no wool!) is too painful to contemplate, but she knows that destroying him will be no easy task to accomplish.
Maud has allies however: Elding and Tora and the Beastie (a memory eating, eyeball stealing monster, part raven, part eldritch horror, three bodies that share a single soul), her powerful grimoire, Roland, her council of witches and alchemists, the Adventurers’ Guild, the grateful city of Fairhaven, her corrupted paladins, and the Green Lady herself, the goddess she worshipped before her death. Jenkins is now a lich cat with magic of his own, and he is, of course, fiercely loyal to Maud. Her soul is safe, tucked away in the roots and soil of Downing Forest and watched over by a friendly tree spirit. And to her abject embarrassment, small churches dedicated to her worship have sprung up all over the country. These worshippers seem to lend her strength in her quest to defy the Whisperer.
She has to tread carefully. If he discovers her plans, her existence is done for, and his whispers are everywhere, chased away only by the sound of silver and whale song.
Her adventures take her to the hidden lands of the fae, and to the Whisperer’s own desert where she discovers a hidden silver city of elves. There she learns that gods may indeed be killed. One has been killed before—the goddess of portals, who opened one too many doors and let dangerous things through, which led to her own demise. Her blood powers the mysterious portal candles.
Whilst alive, the goddess of portals foolishly opened a doorway to a forbidden world. This world is dead, a shell, sucked dry of all life. Yet it is crawling with dangerous spirits, parasites that latch onto the living and hatch madness within their minds. This is what happened to the Whisperer, and the gods fought long and hard to rid the world of the parasites that came through. He is the last. Or so they thought.
In order to kill him, Maud must venture through the portal to the dead world.
Here ends book four.
Chapter 1
The Ennui Jamboree
Seasons pass. I watch from the high tower window as the heat of summer fades, the fields turn gold, and leaves drift by in shades of brown and grey. Snow coats the land in a suffocating blanket, but the stillness does not bring me peace. Years roll by. I lock myself in my castle tower, tending to my own needs, knitting and spinning.
At first, people bother me. I tell them to leave me alone. They think I will change my mind. I do not. As the seasons pass, it becomes clear that I do not intend to leave. Roland begs, Jennet whispers in my ear. The Fairhaven girls are growing older. When I next look up, decades have passed. They are bent and grey. The people that I love are dying.
I return to my crafting. A century goes by, then two. Three. All that I have built is crumbling. My tower is all that remains of my heart. Roland lies rotting in an unmarked grave.
Perhaps, finally, I am ready for death.
“Queen Maud?”
The voice jolts me awake.
Of course, I was not asleep. How could I be? I am a lich, I am dead. Liches do not sleep, we are perpetually awake. And yet it was a dream. Or a nightmare… The vestiges of that deep melancholy threaten to overwhelm me. It takes me a while to return to myself. Whatever it was, it was powerful. The taste of bitterness is thick in m
Not a dream then. A product of my own mind? A daydream? Or a vision sent from some interfering god or goddess? My money is on that last. I clench my fists in anger. If there is one thing I cannot abide, it is mad gods cluttering up the place and thinking they know better than everyone else. I know I will have to deal with the Whisperer. Soon. Very soon, or I will have to rot in my tower and let the world collapse around me. Death, one way or another. The scent of fresh mint and a few buttercup petals float past my nose. Yes, yes, message received loud and clear.
I glare at my knitting. I have dropped a stitch.
“Queen Maud?”
Ah yes, someone was talking to me. It is Roland. He looks mildly concerned and carries a sheaf of papers under one arm. But that is his way.
“You would never leave me, would you, Roland?” I interrupt, shaking a few petals out of the wool.
My chief minion and dear friend looks at me in confusion. His sheer disbelief soothes the hollow in my chest.
“Of course not, ma’am.”
And yet, I can see the body he wears is fraying. He will need another soon if he is to serve me in undead perpetuity. Of course, I can just keep upgrading his parts as I have been. An ear here, a new limb there. He has been through three sets of hands in the last year already, mostly because he works so hard. But as long as his soul is the same, does it really matter whose body parts he wears? He is a patchwork of stitching and mending, displaying his repairs with pride. And I am proud of him. He has come a long way since he slithered into my village, riding on the greasy coattails of the foetid necromancer who murdered me. May he rest in pieces.
“What did you want?” I ask.
“Prince Salazar is expecting you at the grand opening of his theatre,” says Roland. “I thought you might want to get changed?”
I stare at him blankly for a few moments while my brain catches up. Then I leap up, spilling wool and cat from my lap in a mad tumble.
“Thank you, I do!”
Jenkins yowls at me in disgust and stalks off, his tail whipping from side to side. I blow him a kiss before racing to my chambers to prepare.
“I’ll be right there!” I shout to Roland.
In truth I would rather skip the performance, but I did promise. And it has been a while since my subjects have seen me, I have been brooding in my palace since my return from the silver city. I must kill the Whisperer or die trying. But contemplating the death of the god who made me, of the god who gifts me his power, is a troublesome prospect for many reasons both practical and philosophical. It is particularly taxing since I cannot discuss it with anyone. The Whisperer might not be omnipotent, but there is always the chance that he might be listening. I believe his divine ears are bigger than a Fairhaven cesspit and twice as crusty.
Better to keep my plans inside my head until I am ready to make my move. The Green Lady has given me a clue and a dangerous quest. I must travel through the portal to another world, a world of death and parasites, and search for the means to his end there. He must not suspect. That would be catastrophic, not only to me personally but to my fledgling kingdom.
I shimmy into a luscious gown and cinch it tight. Regrettably I am scrawny again. I’ll need to do something to remedy the situation soon, not just so I can kill the Whisperer, but also so I can fill out my gowns in all the right places. It is imperative that I appear queenly—I am a queen after all. When I go out in an official capacity, I need to make an impression. It’s a good excuse anyway, and pretty much the only perk aside from power. This beauty is a jet-black satin, darkness layered over darkness but with some cheeky green stitching on the equally caliginous petticoat. It is only visible if I flash my ankles.
Atop all of this splendour, I affix a pretty black veil in delicate lace. This affords me some degree of privacy when I am in public, and rather romantically lends me the air of a grieving widow. The veil is topped off with an onyx crown and a couple of draugr roses. Cute. I am ready to go.
I wander back down to the great hall, enjoying the swish of my skirts on the corners. My entourage is ready and waiting for me. The fact that I have an entourage now is too horrible a thought to linger on, even if I am slightly fond of most of them. Such is the price of absolute power, I suppose. I can always kill everyone and have their instant obedience instead, but I do enjoy the shenanigans of the living. One never really knows what they will get up to next.
As the living go, they are not so bad.
They are looking remarkably well dressed and are disgustingly loud. Rachel is magnificent, having changed her formal robes of fire-mage red to a close-fitting gown of her favourite crimson hue. Lily is wearing a fine lace shawl, her soft cheeks flush with excitement as she talks loudly to Greeter and Dunwiddy. The self-styled king of the beggars, Dunwiddy smells and looks like the inside of a brandy barrel, but a particularly fine one. Greeter of New Arrivals, the Keeper of Gold, Secrets, and Books, and Maker of Pleasing Sandwiches always looks smart, even for a goblin. Today she is wearing an interesting little hat with dark green feathers, dyed to complement the mossy hue of her skin and tortoise-shell pince-nez. She is deep in avid conversation with Hrulga. This last is a sharp-eyed faery maiden with pebbled skin and white hair down to her knees. The fairy is the only one who has not dressed up for the occasion. Like me, she favours the feel of her bare feet on the ground, even the sticky and oft times dirty cobblestones of Fairhaven. To be fair, she is always fetchingly attired in a short gown made from willow fronds and bindweed that never seems to go off. Today is no exception.
The fairy and goblin additions to my council initially caused some degree of tension, echoing that of the city outside. But now things are bumping along nicely enough. My citizens quickly discovered the huge benefits of goblin-made arms and armaments, and the delights of fairy goods and services. The fae are happy with trade opportunities, being covetous creatures despite their airy appearances. I am happy with the tax. One can buy a lot of ribbons with the taxes I gather.
I cough to get their attention.
We adjourn to a black carriage that has been procured especially for the occasion. There is an air of excitement hanging about even the normally dour Greeter. I eye her with some suspicion as we trundle through the streets, feeling somehow betrayed by her merriment. What exactly have I let myself in for?
It is a short trip to the exiled Prince Salazar’s new theatre. An interesting octagonal structure, it rises from the remains of a destroyed site. I eye it with some interest. It is quite unlike the other buildings. Three or four storeys high, the walls are whitewashed and criss-crossed with dark timber beams. The roof is thatched. It might be the largest building in Fairhaven, barring Castle Rock, and possibly the Adventurer’s Guild.
The sun is setting as we alight from our carriage, throwing the scene into golden light. Many smoking torches hang from gleaming sconces, and there is the nip of autumn in the air. A large crowd is gathered outside, and from the sound of things another waits within, complete with various instruments and quite possibly a circus.
The curly-haired exile greets my party at the vestibule with bombastic enthusiasm. I had hoped work would make an honest man of him and suppress some of the noise level. I could not have been more wrong.
“Your Majesty!” he booms, sweeping a graceful bow so low his nose nearly brushes the cobbles. “You came!” As if he didn’t invite me. He is drenched in fragrance, and his voice could rattle the rafters of every building from Fairhaven to Downing and back again.
“Yes, yes,” I say. “Can we go inside? I would like to get this over with.”
A crowd of excited peasants in their Sun Day best are lining the waysides, held back by a velvet rope and beefy men who would look more at home at a tavern after midnight. Or on a moonlit road waylaying travellers.
My head is beginning to ache from all the noise.
“Delighted!” he yells. “My enchantment! My star! My inspiration! Your Majesty! You honour us with your presence! Your aura darkens the room, your beauty is as terrible as a—”
“I WOULD LIKE TO GO INSIDE,” I say.
He knows better than to bait a lich and stops performing long enough to lead us inside.
This is barely an improvement as the place is seething. Thankfully for everyone’s mortality, I am led to a spaciously appointed balcony.
