Work Text:
Lydia has long since understood the nature of the universe, the flow of magic and matter and energy. Over the interminable centuries of her immortality, she’s seen it, time and again. Life ends, the soul forfeit to a scarcely more-than-mortal goddess. Magic dies, spells and enchantments dimming and dulling with time. And love? Love cannot only fade but crack and warp and fester.
That’s where they’d gotten Wonderland. Their love, the love the twins had held for each other, had held for their younger brother, did not so much fade as decay, rotting from the inside out with sickeningly sweet glee and delighted malice at the suffering of others, blistered by the corrosive despair of Keats’s loss and fear of their own. And Lydia and Edward had found they’d been the stronger for it. That’s where the game had truly begun, and they’d built Wonderland into the perfect sink with their contestants’ unending suffering as the source. Perfect. It really had been perfect.
Until Lydia, screaming, splintering, shattering, holds the ashes of her brother in unstable hands cloaked in the darkness of the robe she had become a lich in, magic unmoored just as her soul had been crackling over and around her like blackened strips of lightning.
“I guess… I guess we still needed each other after all.” Her voice is soft, but as she looks up, the ashes sliding through hands no longer capable of holding them, she looks with such rage at the four responsible as makes all of Wonderland quake around her. Lydia points at them.
Lydia screams. And in the space of a heartbeat she has long since not possessed, a lifetime, and the eons beyond that, rise and overwhelm her fracturing consciousness.
Lili is a child, young, wild, already magically gifted and feeling invulnerable, as children so often do. She plays with her brother, all sorts of games, from the mundane ones they can even play with other children to ones with a touch more magic, the kind only the two elven twins can wield.
Lili is a child, hand in hand with Eddie, barely tall enough to peer into the bassinet holding her new brother, Keats. Ever the leader, Lili squeezes her brother’s hand. He follows suit, the silent communication a vow to always protect the newest member of their family.
Lili is a still a child, but forced to be so much more. The plague comes quickly, a grim and unwelcome guest, and it visits their home. By the time it leaves, with the smell of decay and fire in its wake, Lili’s happy home of five has become an empty house, with three young children still standing outside with nowhere to go. Lili looks to Eddie, who, sensing it, turns to her. Both carefully squeeze the hands holding Keats’s. Keats looks between his brother and his sister and squeezes back.
Lydia is an adult, or most of the way there at least. By elven standards, she and Edward have a long way to go, but then, Lydia knows with the utmost certainty that she has seen more in her years than most of the adults. It’s why they’d changed their names already, their adult identities forged through hardship and suffering. And there is more to come. Lydia knows this, knows this and fears this. Keats’s health is uncertain, his grip on her hand far more tenuous than her own on him. But Lydia is determined not to let go yet.
Hand in hand with Edward, Lydia leads her twin to the necromantic circle. They are young, so much younger than most of the members. But no one can tell under these ghastly black cloaks anyway. And with their talent for magic? No one would even think to look. Lydia’s magic, hers and Edward’s, blossoms in the dark like some sinister flower on a moonless night. But as her magic blooms, Keats fades.
Lydia again knows loss. Her hand is clamped around Edward’s, too tight, painful like a vise, her nails digging in sharp and drawing blood. Her other hand carefully holds Keats’s hand, limp, cold, lifeless. For all their powerful magic, all their prodigious talent, all their love for their darling baby brother, they’d been unable to keep him here. Well. They’ll just have to bring him back then.
Lydia stands in a circle, painstakingly researched and constructed, every detail perfect. She’s wearing that black robe again, standing in a crowd of them. At the last moment, she reaches out her hand. Edward, beside her, already has his own hand extended toward her. She takes it and squeezes it. After a moment, Edward squeezes back. And when their bodies fall, leaving magic and soul behind, expanding, writhing, surging, at once infinitely powerful and impossibly unstable, they are anchored, to each other, and to a plan.
Lydia is a lich.
Lydia shrieks, choking on bitterness and rage and the biting taste of despair. Another failure. Why? Why? The twins are powerful, more powerful than they’ve ever been. They should be able to bring Keats back. She surges, wildly, an explosion uncontained, razing every trace of their failed resurrection spell. It is only Edward, Edward’s familiar magic and familiar soul, reaching out to her own that can quell the storm. She takes it, less a hand and more a grounding line. Slowly, gradually, Lydia is quiet.
Lydia is thoughtful. They need more power. They need… help. The peculiar concept is foreign in her mind. Lydia and Edward have not had help, true help, in over a century, since before their parents. None had truly wanted to step in and help the desperate orphaned siblings. Deep within the darkness of the black cloak of her form, Lydia smiles with too many teeth. No one had ever said that help had to be entirely willing.
Lydia stands in a massive tent. It’s dark, but only if you don’t know how to see. It’s empty, or it appears it be. Lydia knows how to see, and she can see through the space, to the black and white stripes of the canvas. Black, like their forms. White, like the hope they will harvest. Lydia knows the tent is not empty, because she can feel her brother’s presence, pulsing like a heart neither of them has. And soon, soon the tent will hold far more than the twin liches. Lydia reaches out to her brother with a shadowy hand, squeezing when he takes it. Welcome to Wonderland.
Lydia is… bored. Wonderland is… fine. They bring people in, run them through challenges, charge up on their hope and joy manifesting as white smoke, set them loose with whatever it was they wanted. It’s stable. And they’re stable, or stable enough. But Lydia, Lydia and Edward, don’t have what it is they really want.
Lydia is dissatisfied. So, when a barbarian (and they’re a barbarian, they’re built to take a hit) gets hurt, a grunt and a trace of black smoke passing through their lips, Lydia is… intrigued. She lets go of Edward. Lydia pursues the faint trace of suffering before it can dissipate altogether, and, well, it’s energy, and if it’s in Wonderland, it’s theirs anyway. In an instant, Lydia immediately discovers that suffering is a far more delectable way to sustain herself.
Lydia has left Wonderland. Temporarily of course. She’s still anchored to the suffering that Edward is eagerly extracting in her absence. Wonderland has seen something of a downturn in business within the past few months. Even those who receive flyers or enchanted necklaces to point the way are somehow not quite finding their way to the Felicity Wilds. Whatever’s going on in Faerun at large is bad for business. So Lydia intends to find out what the problem is and correct it.
Lydia instead finds a Tabaxi with a bell, surrounded by dozens of fallen forms. She yowls when she sees Lydia, brandishing the bell like some sort of weapon. With the ringing in her borrowed ears, Lydia finds herself curiously displaced. The body she’d been possessing drops like all the others, but, being a lich, Lydia doesn’t simply go away. Instead she looms over a now even more terrified Tabaxi, the bell tinkling in her shaking grasp. Lydia tilts her head, hearing something rather more curious coming from the bell. A voice. How intriguing. “Now, now, darling,” Lydia croons, “cats might have nine lives, but liches, dear? Liches don’t need them.”
Lydia returns to Wonderland with both answer and the Animus Bell.
Lydia is ecstatic. The Animus Bell, while not entirely to their aesthetic, amplifies Wonderland’s power both inside and out. Inside, they can manipulate contestants in countless new ways. Outside, well, the best advertisement is word-of-mouth, and it’s far easier to possess a still living body that is no longer inhabited. They survey their creation, and Edward reaches out to Lydia. She takes it, more from habit than obligation, for the twins are no longer dependent on each other as an anchor. Wonderland is, at this point, truly perfect, and Lydia is sure they can continue this way forever.
Lydia watches their newest contestants enter with a careful eye. It has been several years since anyone came to Wonderland in pursuit of the Animus Bell. Indeed, it seems all but forgotten by the outside world. Yet this woman, this young human girl, seeks it, armed with a staff and a sorcerer. In the dark of Wonderland, Lydia’s grin is full of malice.
Lydia watches the last trio, the only others here for the Animus Bell, approach. She watches again, as though through someone else’s eyes, as their game runs its course, Edward is lost, and Lydia is snapped back into what, in the end, she knows is her final moment. After all, without an anchor, even a lich will follow the way of the universe.
Both in Wonderland and far from it, Lydia’s soul explodes outward from unstable equilibrium into a supernova, magic and soul breaking down, down, down, molecule by molecule spreading out into the quiet unknown. For the first time, for the last time, Lydia follows Edward.