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StLQ Chapter 1 - Lich Queen
🕑 Added 2025-08-10 10:55:00 +0000 UTCLuna’s skeletal finger pressed against my forehead.
Blood pooled underneath my feet, onto my kitchen floor. I could not move. A coating of mana formed on my skin, as if the air around me was solid steel. The Lich Queen’s arcane dagger pierced my chest.
The purple mist enshrouded her skeletal figure. Her eyes were a vibrant red, beautiful in their own strange way, pointed sharply at me, though the look was devoid of emotions. Lush black hair grew from her scalp of smooth skin, down past her cheek bones, where her face turned skeletal. Her teeth were fully visible with a mouth incapable of smiling.
Mana flowed from her finger, into my head. Mind magic. Her presence invaded my thoughts like a magnetic needle piercing my mind, pulling at the memories within. I was no longer the sole owner of my own head. Luna’s consciousness explored the contents as if skimming through a bookshelf.
I wondered what exactly I’d done to deserve a death like this. I guess I was the last witness of Luna’s lich transformation. The disaster at our magic academy had happened years ago, and Luna had committed far worse crimes since then. It wasn’t like I was planning to hunt her bounty; I wasn’t nearly strong enough at offensive magic.
I struggled to think through all the lost blood. More purple mist oozed into the kitchen from somewhere behind me. My left eye twitched, reacting to the mist. Lich sight, my mediocre superpower, reacted to the event.
The mana around my skin was suddenly lifted off. My limbs became free. I collapsed on the puddle of my own blood, droplets splashing, my body sprawled powerlessly on the ground.
Luna turned around, leaving me dying on my kitchen floor. I watched her bare skeletal feet head out.
She paused at the doorstep. “Sorry. You were always nice. I didn’t hate you…”
The hell? I thought.
Luna glanced at me with empty eyes. Then she walked off. I heard the front door open as she exited as if nothing had ever happened.
I snorted, then coughed. I’d lost too much blood to stand, let alone drag myself to the infirmary. I doubted anyone short of the sacred priests themselves, with their healing magic, could save me now.
What the hell do you mean ‘always nice?’ I lost three years in a coma trying to stop your transformation, Luna… And now you’ll just kill me?
The purple mist whirled before me, its weird energy concentrating around my chest.
My left eye twitched harder now. The void hole spun above me, at the spot where I’d been stabbed.
A stupefied chuckle escaped my mouth. Lich sight, my superpower, gave me one ability: to witness traumatic events of the past through the eyes of the victim. Emotional reactions left behind mist that only I could see. Stronger emotions, traumatic or excessively joyful, evolved into void holes, which I could gaze into, entering visions. The ability had granted me a job as Lokora’s head investigator, but compared to Luna’s powers, I was fairly useless.
The void hole above seemed to be my own, left behind by the surprise of being stabbed to death. If I activated it, I would simply see my own death in the past, as it happened minutes ago.
The thought was somehow hilarious. I’d never had a void hole appear from my own emotions, but I guess it made sense.
I lay sprawled on the ground, utterly powerless, and the only thing I could do was replay my own death.
I didn’t want to open it. My body had accepted death by now…
My left eye twitched painfully hard, as if begging me to open the void hole. Tendril-like wisps of mist oozed from within. The hole itself seemed to be growing in size.
God fucking dammit, I thought. Did you really have to kill me, Luna? Your innocent old neighbor?
I felt my consciousness slipping away. Light left my eyes, the last of my energy disappearing.
Biting my lip, I focused my left eye on the void hole. The blackness of the void grew in size and devoured me, clouding the remainder of my senses. My consciousness shifted from my dying body into a dimension that scientists referred to either as hell or the weird lich realm.
I felt myself lapse into sleep, and the vision of the past began.
***
My head pressed flat against a hard desk. The room smelled of wood, old paper, and needlessly potent perfumes. I heard snickering around me, and a vague voice. I lifted my head and rubbed my eyes.
Something is not right, I thought right away. This was not the mixture of scents I had experienced prior to my death. The smells rekindled a vague memory from my school years. That specific lavender perfume was the only one sold in Lokora for the longest time, leading to just about every girl at the academy competing for who could use the most to stand out.
“Kai Willswort,” someone said.
My name. I flinched, eyes opening, and I found myself in a vision that should not have been possible.
I was in a classroom. The walls were uneven and the ceiling was circular, as if we were inside the branch of a tree. Students in uniforms surrounded me. Boys wore red and black suit-like uniforms. The girls wore a similar outfit with long skirts. Red and black—the color of sophomores in Lokora’s Magical Academy.
The older woman ahead pointed her spectacled eyes at me. Her graying hair was tied in a bun. She wore a green mage’s dress with embroidery in pretty patterns. I hadn’t seen outfits like these in Lokora in years. Ever since the mage academy burned down, I’d been the only mage left in town, and I tended to dress myself in more regular outfits.
“Well?” the woman asked. I realized she was Mrs. Camila Davolt. My former arcane ethics teacher. “Have I misunderstood your enthusiasm, Kai? You have not slacked off studying the most important topic of your sophomore year, have you?”
Old classmates snickered around me. The girl next to me had long wavy blonde hair and an expressive, easily recognizable face. What was her name again…? Emma? Enly? Something that started with E.
“Kai?” Mrs. Camila asked. “Are you alright?”
“Ah, sorry,” I said, realizing that my demeanor must have appeared totally psychotic.
More whisper-like snickering came from around me. Any louder, and Mrs. Camila would have shouted for silence. I remembered her as one of the stricter teachers of Lokora’s academy.
Nothing made sense. Why had I been sent into a vision thirteen years in the past? Why could I talk inside lich sight’s vision? Usually, I didn’t even have a body to move and use.
Mrs. Camila was still staring at me. I asked, “What was the question again?”
“The safety of spellcasting, dear,” Camila said. “The protection of one’s mana core. We have discussed the ethics of offensive magic, and the environment at which such magic should be cast. No environment, however, will be safe if a mage skips the steps that happen inside their own core. What preventive measures must a mage take to avoid destroying their core with their own mana?”
How to protect the mana core while channeling, huh?
I paused to think about my answer. I quickly realized I didn’t remember a damn thing from Mrs. Camila’s lessons. These days, I cast magic so intuitively that I barely thought about any of the stuff taught in school.
“Simply put…” I said, “mana must always be channeled outward, out of the body. No active mana should ever flow back into the core after it has been called active. Nasty reactions will happen otherwise.”
Mrs. Camila nodded. “A vague but good answer. Another question: what is the most secure method of protecting the mana core from one’s active magic?”
“A good mage knows when and how to block off their mana core,” I said. “If a spell goes wrong, the most important step is to ensure that mana won’t invade its way back to the core. A good mage, however, does not need to block their core while casting magic. As long as every output hole of the mana core points outward, a mage is free to continuously cast magic even with their core unprotected. Like this.”
I figured that a demonstration would be a better answer than my flawed theoretical explanations. I channeled a slight amount of mana from my core, through my veins and into my right hand, where I snapped my fingers and turned the mana into fire. A slight candle-like flame appeared on my hand.
Mrs. Camila gasped in shock. “Stop at once!”
Huh? I thought, but stopped. I pushed the excess mana out of my body.
Then I remembered that casting any amount of magic was strictly forbidden in the academy without permission and supervision.
“Kai Willswort!” Mrs. Camila said. Now she was definitely frowning. “Such recklessness! Who in the name of all magic do you think you are, young sir?”
I laughed awkwardly with my hand behind my head. “Sorry! I forgot the rules for a second. Won’t happen again…”
“No matter how proficient a spell you cast, a violation of the rules will lead to a mark on your account. This will be discussed with the headmaster.”
I nodded, still utterly baffled about the whole situation.
Mrs. Camila’s frown stayed on me for a moment longer. Finally, she turned away from me. The lecture continued.
With nobody’s attention directly on me, I had some time to think. By now, my head was pounding with a thousand different thoughts all at once. What in the flipping shit was happening?
I recalled my death, bleeding out in my own kitchen. As a funny last-ditch effort, I’d activated the void hole created by my own death, taking me into a vision.
This, wherever I was now, was not a recollection of lich sight. It felt like reality. I had just held an actual conversation with my old teacher. This wasn’t a dream. It felt way too real to be a dream.
So what the hell was going on?
I had gone back in time. How?
As I looked around, I started to recognize faces around me. This was my class, as it had been thirteen years ago. I recognized some of my old friends. Higu, Joshua, Isaac. People I hadn’t heard from in over a decade. There were the popular girls, the class clowns, the geniuses, and the idiots. Everyone wore their uniforms. Most faces were clear, though I struggled to connect my classmates to their names.
A lot of people were glancing at me thanks to my stunt casting magic. My friends especially. But as Mrs. Camila moved onto explaining the basic method of shutting one’s mana core, the lecture became difficult enough to require attention.
I wasn’t listening. Half of my head was still stuck in delirium. I expected myself to snap back to reality any moment now. There was no way I had gone permanently back in time. I refused to believe it.
I mean, a second chance, before my mom died, before the academy burned down, before I lost my dreams in exchange for a stupid superpower… It was too good to be true.
The thought instinctively made me glance over my shoulder, toward the leftmost corner of our classroom.
There she was. The girl who killed me. Lich Queen Luna—in human form and thirteen years in the past, now around fourteen years old. She had short pitch black hair and red eyes, vibrant with color but far from lively. Luna had always had red eyes. As in, the colored part of her eyes was actually red.
The same indifferent look was embedded into her face, as if nothing around her really mattered. She was listening to the lecture every now and then, but mostly, her eyes were out of focus, staring at nothing at all. I couldn’t even imagine what a genuine smile would look like on her face.
Luna felt my gaze and glanced at me. She looked confused, as if a stranger was staring at her. I blinked, and I probably stared a little longer than I should have.
The girl who killed tens of lords, who single-handedly destroyed Lokora’s magic academy, turning into a lich in the process, who turned my dreams into a coma and killed me on top, now sat not four desks away from me.
Luna Quine, my neighbor and former classmate, and a prodigy of magic.
On the first day of the month of the grey winter, she would turn into the most deadly lich the world had ever seen.
