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“Tayil,” Tamara had said to her casually one day while they were changing the distilled water tank, way back when, “I wanna become a lich.”
That made Tayil start so badly she nearly dropped the glass jug of water and caused a huge problem for them both. “What?!”
“I wanna be a lich,” she repeated, “and I want your help doing it.”
Tayil bit her lip and focused on keeping the stream of water steady until Tamara called “Ninety percent!” and she put the jug down.
“Like … a lich-lich?” she asked dubiously. “Powerful, skeletal, tower-mad lich?”
Tamara rolled her eyes. “No, darlin’. You made a very interesting point in that chapter you added to your thesis the other day. About social upkeep costs for soul maintenance.”
“Oh.” Tayil hesitated and wiped the condensation off the lymph transfuser to stall for time. “So you want to perform the archlich ritual?”
The smile on Tamara’s crimson lips was sly. “Exactly. I’m reasonably sure you and I can work out what actually makes that ritual work. There’s no way it’s connected to morality, or faith, or anything like that. Interaction, genuine connection, that has to be the key to health in life and undeath.”
There was some water dripping down from one of the connectors, so Tayil cleaned that up, too. “It would be a lot more work proving that. I didn’t come up with the social cost theory without evidence, but you would need some hard facts. Probably more than a few experiments on live specimens. My thesis doesn’t have the scope for that, it’s just a quantitative examination of individual liches and revenants. And you won’t be able to execute the archlich ritual on your own.”
“I know,” Tamara said and put a hand on Tayil’s. Her skin felt hot in comparison to the damp rag in her hands. “But I know it’s possible, and there’s no one at the Academy I trust more than you.”
It would be an interesting project, Tayil thought. Tamara was a good mage, and her loss would be hard on the Academy, but it wasn’t her own life at stake. And if they succeeded, well! Their names would be listed among the greatest necromancers of Norrath until the end of time.
“Sure,” she said and pulled away her hand to hang up the rag. “Let’s make you an archlich, Tammy.”
-
What followed was a journey that lasted months longer than Tamara had originally hoped. There was always something that got in the way: teaching, submitting papers, sitting on thesis committees, helping the Foci with her own research… And Tayil had it even worse than Tamara because she was still an acolyte. She had to run labs and hound neophytes, which left little time for extracurricular research on top of her thesis work. But whenever they could, they would go up into the stacks or down into the depository and pick up any and all tomes that could, plausibly, point them in the right direction. They read manuals and biographies, didactic texts and theoretical ones, musings on blood and bone magic and treatises on the movement of souls. The issue of the ritual itself was solved when Tamara made a lucky find in the bowels of the Academy archives: the misfiled diary of an archlich who’d been a warlock in life. This fellow by the name of Ranjit Tau, whose affable way of narrating made the whole thing quite hard to read, had written obsessively about his own transformative process. A phylactery turned out to be unnecessary – she’d spared herself Miragul’s nonsense – as an intricate piece of luclizite jewelry she’d made herself would suffice to anchor her soul. The last problem was the potion. Tayil was confident she could reverse-engineer that from the list of ingredients (without quantities) and description in the book.
Once she could reliably produce a stable concoction, they went in on the mice. Tamara had, through means which Tayil neither knew nor cared about, gained access to great quantities of rodents, canines and kobolds, and while their technique underwent several adjustments, they got it down in the end. One of Tayil’s fellow acolytes was writing her own thesis on soul destruction and was very happy about the two dozen mice, the pack of stray dogs, and the three kobolds she could use for her own research.
“You know what they say,” Tamara had joked when they had wheeled the last cart of yipping dogs into Lab XII. “Necromancy is all about reduce, reuse, recycle.”
The kobolds had been especially useful. With the three surviving specimens, they had been able to confirm that archlichdom meant Tamara would retain her memories and her personality, the pure essence of what made her her , with the absence of bodily decay so long as she maintained a spiritual and social connection to the still-living around her.
Still, Tamara was meticulous. Tayil enjoyed that about her, the absolute will to go above and beyond on the tiniest detail. In this case, it was about her life, but she would have done the same for a birthday cake.
It took three formal requests and a significant bribe for the Foci to put in a request for three humans, convicts who had an upcoming appointment with Freeport’s beloved execution pit, but it was worth it. The first man Tayil performed the ritual on had simply collapsed once she’d doused him in blood, but the other two had been better prepared. One of them fell into the arms of Drinal, but the last one woke – and subsequently met his demise between the capable blades of the pit – and Tayil was finally sure she had the formula perfected.
“You know,” she said, scanning the final list of ingredients, “this whole thing looks a lot like what they did to the Overlord.”
Tamara smiled at her and tucked away a loose strand of hair. Tayil, who was by now very used to her touch, pressed her temple against her warm hand.
“If Lucan can survive it,” Tamara said nonchalantly and picked up her cup of coffee, “then it won’t be a problem for me!”
–
Two weeks later, Tamara summoned Tayil to her office and double-bolted the door. She’d put on clean, fresh white robes for the ritual, while Tayil was dressed in her usual black, with a white undershirt peeking out from under the collar. They were standing across from each other with hardly a foot of space between them with their hands clasped together.
“Are you ready, darlin’?” asked Tamara.
“Of course,” Tayil replied.
Tamara smiled weakly. “I’m gonna need you to let go of my hands then.”
Tayil did. She didn’t realize how tightly she’d been holding on until she saw the red imprint of her grasp on the backs of Tamara’s cloud-white hands.
“Tayil,” said Tamara, picking up her spellbook and opening it to the last page, which contained the sigils needed for the spell, “it’s been an honor doing science with you.”
“Don’t say it like that, Tammy,” Tayil picked up the ring Tamara had forged and slipped it onto the ring finger of her partner’s right hand. “That’s the kind of thing people say before they die.”
“Just covering all of my bases.” She chuckled and picked up the cup with the potion in it. “No, I’ve got complete confidence in your abilities. And mine.” She winked. “Come on, darlin’. Make me immortal.”
Tayil drew her (terrifying!) bladed wand from her belt and raised it as she began to chant the incantation for the archlich spell. Tamara eyed the way the ring glinted on her finger as she swirled the potion and Tayil worked through the magic. Each syllable seemed to hang in the air between them for a moment before dissipating. As she uttered the final word, she stretched out her forearm, offering it to Tamara, and delicately dragged the blade of the wand across it. She’d wanted to use the syringe, but Tamara had shot her down, saying there was no evidence in the literature for it and, besides, would it kill her to be a little bit romantic? Squeezing on her arm to get the blood out was hardly Tayil’s idea of romance, but there was something about the rapturous expression that overtook Tamara’s face when the blood painted her robes and dripped down on the pages of the spellbook that made her get where she was coming from.
“Drink!” whispered Tayil. “Tamara, the potion!”
Tamara nodded, eyes closed, and downed the cup in one gulp. She gasped. She stumbled forward and emitted a sound that was uncomfortably close to a death rattle – and then she collapsed.
Tayil caught her, wincing as Tamara landed right on her injured arm. She pressed her forearm into Tamara’s back to stem the bleeding and stroked her cheek with her other hand. Her body was still warm and limp, but she had ceased to breathe, and somehow, that knocked the breath out of Tayil as well.
She stared in horror at the corpse in her arms. Tamara’s eyes were closed, but her head had fallen backwards over Tayil’s arm and her mouth hung open. There wasn’t a pinch of her usual poise, her perfect control, the stiff amusement in every movement she made.
Tayil realized that Tamara was, as of right now, well and truly dead, and there was no way for her to be absolutely sure she would wake up again. There had, until the end, been a shadow of doubt about whether or not radicata would be a suitable replacement for chillensis , and they had never been able to test the potion on an erudite. What if there was some fundamental difference in their brain chemistry, Tayil thought, trying and failing not to panic, and she had just killed Tammy?
Her vision clouded. The clock on the table kept ticking. How long had it been? Two minutes? Ten? She couldn’t remember, and she cursed herself for not starting the timer, for not staying focused. If Tamara’s magical coma lasted any longer than twenty minutes, it wasn’t a deathlike sleep; it was just death.
It was crucial that she prepare herself for the most likely outcome. Tamara Paust’s dead body was in her lap, heavy and pale, her white dress stained red with Tayil’s blood, which was still seeping out the cut in her black jacket. Tayil lifted a hand and followed the shimmering runes on Tamara’s face with a blood-wet finger. The big one at the center of her forehead, which she knew stood for knowledge, and then along her bare eyebrow, to the little swirls on her cheeks. She watched the softly pulsing purple disappear under quickly browning red and prepared herself for the worst.
Tamara Paust was dead. She would sit here with her corpse until it had cooled and stiffened, until someone who needed Tamara broke down her office door and found them like this. She would be cool and collected about it – another failed experiment, an everyday occurrence, really, and go home to shower. She wouldn’t spare a thought for her best friend, who would get cut up by some poor neophyte in anatomy lab before they dumped her heart and brain into jars of formaldehyde. She would never hear Tamara make a dry joke about the Foci fucking the Overlord, she would never steal a sugar cube off her saucer at the Aurum, never again wake her up after another all-nighter in the archives, because Tamara Paust was dead, and dead people didn’t stroke her hair or hold her hand or press their leg against hers.
“Darlin’,” a familiar voice asked. “Tayil, are you cryin’?”
Tayil stared at Tamara Paust’s open eyes. “Tammy?” she asked wobbly and gripped her tighter.
The hand on her face – Tamara’s hand – was cold, and she gently wiped away the tears that Tayil hadn’t even noticed were rolling down her cheeks.
“We did it,” breathed Tamara. “We really, actually did it.” Her curled fingertips on Tayil’s cheek turned into a soft caress and, as Tayil sniffed, Tamara lifted her head for the first time in her undeath to kiss the woman who had made her what she was.