Lich Returnee, Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Chapter 1 – The Return

The Grand Summoning to bring heroes into the world was not a secret. The basic elements were all common enough knowledge. There was a cost, of course, and that was often a cost that people were not willing to pay, except in the direst of circumstances.

Of course, Thangvald’s Third Rule of Magick clearly stated that, “For every Magick, there is an equal and opposite Magick.” While this normally was meant to describe counterspells and the like, it could also apply to summoning spells. Namely, there was a ritual magic to reverse that of the Grand Summoning.

The Returning magic was less well known, but the archives of every country with the resources to perform a Grand Summoning had the knowledge stored inside. After the Fall, finding the information in Athelia’s archives was simple enough. Even gathering the proper amount of power was easy, if you were willing to make sacrifices. The problem was the Catalyst needed to perform the Ritual of Returning: the heart of the Hero’s enemy, killed by their own hands.

The Catalyst was, in part, symbolic. Certainly, the heart of a powerful enemy would have a certain amount of natural Magickal energy to it, making it a useful reagent. However, the intent of it being the heart of an enemy the Hero slayed personally, and, ideally, being the cause of the trouble that necessitated his summoning in the first place, had an exponential effect on the power of the catalyst, and dramatically reduced the other power requirements of the spell.

The reason for the different requirements was simple enough, really. If you thought about it, the Hero returning to their old world was not the same as the one who was summoned. If you take an empty waterskin, and fill it with hard-earned experience, then it takes more effort to lift it than it did when it was empty. This is simply common sense.

Naturally, the same principle applies to sending people across the veil between worlds. Which is why the power required to send one Archlich, well versed in magic and possessing forty years of experience upon the battlefield, back where she came from was on entirely different level than it is to bring twenty schoolkids who did not have the slightest concept of how to hold a sword, much less how to use magic or anything like that. So, a Catalyst was needed to supplement the power, unless you wanted to go and convince an entire city to willingly sacrifice themselves to power the spell. And yes, it had to be a willing sacrifice, since that ‘intent’ gave more power to the magic.

After finishing her business with the Demon King, the she had taken her legions of the dead, and returned to Risen Athelia. Behind her, in the lands formerly ruled by the demon kingdom of Haerth, she left nothing. Haerth itself was wiped off the map, its people put to the sword to reinforce her Legion.

The lands Haerth had conquered got off lightly, in comparison. All industry, all trade, all government, anything that had supported the Haerth war machine had been destroyed. The only exceptions were the farmers and their fields. The people would have food, if they stayed, but for everything else they were essentially starting from scratch.

This would not have been a problem if the she had any intention of staying and ruling the former Demon King’s lands. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Instead, she stripped the archives, treasuries, and armories of the conquered lands bare, leaving no weapons in the ‘freed’ lands more potent than a kitchen knife, and left the survivors to their own devices.

The Free Kingdoms did not care. She had kept to the terms of her contract with them, after all. She had fought the long fight, giving the kingdoms time to recover, without the threat of invasion, and she had ended the threat of the Demon King forever. And, as agreed, she had not sought mastery over them when it was done.

What they had not realized was that she was not going to simply stay there, and help pick up the pieces of the fallen world. The war-ravaged lands of Haerth would likely spawn untold horrors, as both monsters and undead arose due to the amounts of magic thrown about during the war. It would take generations of work to make those lands safe again.

As for Risen Athelia, well, the situation was much the same in ‘her’ lands. Death magic hung in the air, and all manner of monsters were spawned there, a result of her conquest of the land during the wars after the Fall. Only the work of her legions kept the monsters contained within Risen Athelia, her undead making certain to cull and contain, but never eliminate the monster populations. She wanted their population to be strong, and healthy, after all.

Athelia was home to the dead, and none others. No people lived here, now, and much of the country’s cities and downs had been consumed, their materials turning into materiel for the Legion’s wars. In another twenty years, as the death magic faded, nature would reclaim Athelia.

But that was later, and she had no interest in seeing it happen. She was the Lich Queen of Risen Athelia, and had lived as such for forty years. Now, her mission was done, and she intended to leave this world behind.

She had no love for this world. She’d never asked to be summoned. No one got her permission before making her a hero. No, they just went and kidnapped her entire class in the middle of the school day. No warning, no chance to escape, no right of refusal.

No, one moment she was learning social studies, and the next she was in this very chamber, in the dungeons beneath the royal palace of Athelia, surrounded by people in fantasy clothes, like something out of a damn isekai novel. There looked to be a mix of warriors with swords and shields, and others in robes, with long, wooden staves. There was even a princess-looking person, being helped up by a man who was clearly a knight, as some weird glowing symbols on the stone floor started fading away.

Part of the Summoning apparently gave them the Polyglot boon, granting them the ability to speak and read any language. That was great, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to understand when the shitty king who summoned them welcomed them, and told them that they were heroes who would safe the fucking world. As if schoolchildren knew anything about fighting demon kings!

But they hadn’t been given a choice. They were taught to read their Status, and then sent off to their class trainers, to learn the skills they would need to save the world. When they tried to object the king had them fitted with slave collars, to keep them from raising a fuss, and made them train twice as hard.

She’d been almost grateful when the assassins came. The Lychblood Ichor they had used was a potent poison, deadly against any living creature, with no known antidote. You either survived it (unlikely), or you didn’t (almost certainly). Unless, that was, you found a loophole.

Like the rest of her class, she had received a class and three boons during her kidnapping. The first of those boons was the Polyglot ability, which they all had. The other two were different for everyone. Hers were… uniquely suited to this situation.

The first, Panacea, granted her great resistance against all poisons and diseases, even magical ones, like Lychblood. It was not a perfect defense, of course. Resistance was not the same as immunity, after all. In this case, it did slow the progress of the magical poison, turning what would have been instant death into ten minutes of untold agony.

Her second ability, Crystalheart, was, on the surface, a fairly useless ability, since all it did when she got it was allow her to turn her heart into a crystal gem upon command. Since the heart did not do well at the whole ‘pumping blood through the body’ thing while it was a crystal, this was generally considered to be useless for any living creature. And it would have been, except for the fact that her class was Necromancer.

As the poison coursed through her, slowed, but not stopped, by Panacea, she had activated Crystalheart. A crystal gem may not have been much use as a heart, but it was perfect for a lich’s phylactery, and her knowledge of Necromancy made the transformation possible, with the ‘assistance’ of a shocked noble who had been, only moments before, hoping to order her to bed with him.

The king’s death disrupted the control her collar had on her, as he had bound them all to himself, and then ordered them to follow orders of their trainers. The moment his daughter, the Princess, took up the crown, it would slam down on her again, but that was time enough. No living being save the owner could remove a Slave Collar once it was locked in place, but the moment she became a lich, she was no longer amongst the living!

With the castle in chaos, no one noticed (or cared), when she slipped out in the confusion, pausing only to leave the snake that Carol, her classmate that had become a witch, used as her familiar in the princess’s bed. She made her way into the city, where the intended to lay low for a while. When the Princess died the next day, after receiving a snake bite, the Fall began in earnest.

The country erupted into civil war as the nobles squabbled over who would take the throne. No one of importance bothered to check the cemeteries, or noticed that, after every battle, the bodies would disappear. By the time that locals could get anyone to listen to them, it was too late. Her army of the dead was enough to wipe out the remaining nobles, one by one.

After becoming the Lich Queen, she had gone from place to place, ostensibly gathering allies for the coming war against the Demon King. In reality, she was going to every archive and library in the land, and stealing all references to the Grand Summoning. In the place of each scroll or tome she took, she replaced it with an identical-looking one that was completely blank, save for the words “NEVER AGAIN!”

That was her final revenge against this world. The breeding grounds of monsters and the undead had been fueled with twenty years of constant warfare, and the Free Kingdoms’ armies had grown soft, as commanders relied on her Legion to hold the line against the Demons and monsters, instead of standing beside her. Now, she would leave, and unleash the monsters once more. Only this time, they would not be able to summon heroes to save them.

Alone in the summoning chamber, she checked her inventory again. With her power, her inventory space (to say nothing of the bottomless bags she carried) was large enough to fit, well, all the treasures and libraries that she had looted, as well as the majority of her Legion. Which is exactly what was in there now. No sense just leaving such resources behind, after all.

The runes of the Returning spell glowed brightly as the Heart of the Demon King was placed in the center of the circle, with the hearts of his ten generals, six children, and three wives arrayed around it in a reinforcing formation. This, combined with her own power, was enough to power the spell. All she had to do was say the final incantation.

“Ανοίξτε το δρόμο για μένα και επιστρέψτε με ασφάλεια στο σπίτι μου.”

The runes exploded in power and light. Well, there was also a real explosion, reducing the city of Arela, capitol of Arelia, to molten slag. But that wasn’t her problem. The instant she uttered the final word of the incantation, she was whisked away.

In another world, an archlich looked up and saw neon lights for the first time in forty years. If she could, she would have cried tears of joy. “I DID IT!”