I really wish hadn't learned all this. As I traveled the world, destroying Kel'Caldor clone farms and safehouses, I beca an expert in lichdom.
What is a lich? The answer was surprisingly simple but at the sa ti multi-layered. A lich is an undead spellcaster of the [Necromancer] persuasion. In life, they create so enchanted and alchemical items to transcend mortality. That's the core of the concept. A lich is a necromancer that escaped mortality through undeath. They gain a few powers in their new form, the paramount among them the ability to safely lose their current body and form a new one. When their physical form is destroyed, their souls flee across vast distances to a special urn which is a receptacle to their lifeforce.
The phylactery is a reliquary that holds the internal organs of the living necromancer that beca a lich. First, they must craft a lavish vessel. Pottery is used most often for the ease and precision of the engravings. The vessel must be unbroken, made of a single continuous piece of material. The interior will hold a myriad of magical circles and glyphs, a ridiculously complex chain of spells that will gather, circulate, concentrate, and feed lifeforce and magical power to the lich. Not only that, but it will also pull the soul back to safety if the body is ever damaged. Then another portion will use the refined energy to create a new body. A single misplaced stroke in the thousands of glyphs spells doom for the spellcaster.
Inside the phylactery, the aspiring lich stores their hearts, lungs, liver, kidneys, and gonads. No intestines, those are discarded. I think the reason why only those organs are preserved has sothing to do with chakras and life energy but that's just speculation. the first challenge in their transformation is to survive in a living state without those organs. The undead-to-be must excise their organs and prepare them with alchemical fluids to guarantee they can survive both the ravages of ti but also the potent energies the phylactery will circulate through them.
Damage to these organs is fatal to the lich. So is breaking the vessel and ruining the enchantnts. In a way, you can think of the phylactery as the real lich and the skeletal creature walking around as just a physical manifestation.
Once the phylactery is completed and enchanted, the necromancer starts with the least important organ to their survival, the gonads. Yes, they castrate themselves as the first step to undeath. The preserved gonads are then placed inside the vessel and the first test of its efficiency could be done before committing any further, for removal of one's kidneys can be fatal. Organ by organ, climbing up until the heart and lungs are removed, the ascending lich relies on their necromantic power to sustain their life while they work for years to complete the transformation.
The contradictory nature of using the power of Death to sustain one's life is an argunt thrown by many scholars that don't believe liches are real.
Once the lungs and heart are inside the vessel, the enchantnts of the phylactery kill the necromancer. Their brain is mulched and the information therein is absorbed by the phylactery. The soul is kept inside the body by the potent necromantic energies while all flesh shrivels and rots away. Once the bones are sparkly white without a single taint of sinew, the transformation is complete.
The survival rate for necromancers doing the transformation on their own is less than one in a thousand. Kel'Caldor perfected this craft into an art form and could succeed with one in every ten clones. After all, they had the mories of soone that did the process several tis.
It was so fucked up I felt like throwing up. Kel'Caldor planned to overthrow the Gods and take over the world. He was envious of because of my immunity to divine power. He coveted it after he learned of my existence in the catacombs. I considered him a threat as big as the next Demon Lord.
This plan ford when I saw them rotate the clones attacking . The reason I waited so long to break out of their containnt spell was to make sure I'd personally seen the biggest amount of clones possible. This way, I could use {Vendetta Contract} to track them down. Sotis I found the lich away from its phylactery. After destroying the brittle sack of bones, the soul would flee to the phylactery with the contract active. I followed it to the source and found the first phylactery farm.
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The clones of a Kel'Caldor cell stored their vessels together in the most guarded room of their underground fortresses. The protections were ridiculously strong and I took a week to break through the first one after I cleared the fortress and sent all the liches living there literally to respawn.
The trick of digging the whole room out and storing it was a no-go. The phylactery counted as a "living" being ironically enough. I added a spatial ward of my own to the mix, to keep the liches from portaling in and out with the phylacteries. After unraveling the wards, I got inside and fought a few respawned liches. The battle that followed was swift and brutal. They were scared shitless of breaking their glorified art class projects.
Once the reliquary was broken, however, the lich stopped functioning and the soul ca out, free as any dead creature's soul had the right to be. For a mont, at least. Then I captured it and added it to my collection. So urns belonged to liches away from the fortress. When I broke those, I gained no new soul to play with. I guessed they expired and remained wherever the skeletal body was.
But after the mystery of the lich organization was exposed, they were just undead mages. Panicked undead mages.
Kel'Caldor, the original, had a very peculiar and unique personality. The perfect storm of characteristics that led to the undying (snicker) loyalty his dead clones displayed before . At his core, the once-living breathing prince Kel'Caldor wasn't a person with evil intentions. He was gentle, loyal to a fault, kind, agreeable, hard-working, and determined. Good qualities, right?
Not on a prince. His family considered him a weakness. He was bullied by his brothers and sisters, estranged by his parents. Ignored by the servants. Never once he lashed out. All of his grievances were internalized and stored for later.
His sole source of solace was the library. Lo and behold, he found an old dusty scroll in so corner of the Royal Library (books didn't yet exist when he lived) and learned Necromancy. He used his stipend to learn more about this vile trade and eventually succeeded in becoming a lich.
His first act as undead overlord was, obviously, to exterminate his family and bloodline. Kel'Caldor knew he could only rely on himself. He knew he would love to have collaborators that were gentle, loyal to a fault, kind, agreeable, hard-working, and determined. He needed to work with himself.
We shared a common enemy. At the ti, the church of Bundeus, God of War, Humans, and the Sun, persecuted the undead abomination. The Sun Paladins chased after Kel'Caldor with divine zealotry for centuries, forcing him to seek sanctuary in the deep bowels of the world. Slowly, he kidnapped babies with great magical potential and ravaged their little brains by implanting copies of himself.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of newborn babies across thousands of years had their futures stolen before they could even know the warmth of their mother's love.
I loathed to compare myself to Bundeus' fanatics but I too hunted the liches with fervorous zealotry. My successful hunts made the cowardly undead run for the hills and scuttle away. At the sixth "Phylactery Nursery" as they themselves called it, I was t with a unified front. The liches cooperated to prevent my advance while a group at the back fought against my anti-teleportation wards and opened a portal.
A single one of them went through while the others threw themselves at to gain ti. No matter how magical, bones are brittle, proportional to the creature. To barbarian , the liches were puny nerds ready to be bullied by the light of my spear. I finished this suicidal group and tried to track the one that got away. It was a no-go. The contract was still in place but I couldn't get a bead on my mark. I only had a hazy feeling to follow.
So powerful magic protected the escaped lich. The magic of the original Kel'Caldor. I left that one for later and hunted down the others. Months after the intrusion in my throne room, only the last fortress, the Undead King Kel'Caldor personal sanctum remained.
I spent a lot of ti on a wild goose chase across the world, trying to find him. In the end, I didn't need to if I only thought on the subject for a while.
Prince Kel'Caldor, the young Royal scion turned necromancer turned lich turned world-conquering and baby brainwashing villain never was able to truly abandon his ho. He only dug deeper. Underneath the ruins of his kingdom, now eroded by ti to look just like so rocks thrown around in the middle of a forgotten forest in northeastern Pekothas, I found my target.
He knew I was coming. The welco committee had the undead mastermind in the middle, Sariandi, Spring, and Enantinos on the side. Hostages. All the remaining liches were there, together. The bonds of their proto-hivemind were thicker than blood.
"Welco to my humble abode, Queen Snowdrop," Kel'Caldor said with feigned politeness and barely restrained rage. I just needed to look at the flas in his eye sockets. "Shall we negotiate a hostage exchange?"
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