SelkieMyth
patreon
Chapter 646 - Interlude - Thanwa Temirak - Orbital Mechanics
🕑 Added 2025-04-18 14:00:14 +0000 UTCAN: Last chapter of 15! ONE BOOK LEFT!
==============
Thanwa Temirak had fucked up.
He had fucked up badly.
Thanwa’s jaw worked endlessly, not a sound coming out.
As he spun through the vast emptiness of space, he occasionally contemplated if there had ever been an elvenoid who’d fucked up as badly as he had. He didn’t really have anything else to do.
Many eons ago, he’d come to the conclusion that people who’d made a bad decision and gotten killed over it were better decision makers than he was.
He’d done the math. The integral of the single decision’s function over time.
Thanwa screamed into the void, and had no voice.
Thanwa didn’t include people who had negative things happen to them, oh no. This was all his decision, and he’d had a few centuries silently screaming about it all before coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that everything bad that had happened to him was exactly his fault, and nobody else’s.
He had fucked up. Badly.
Thanwa was a lich, and there was quite a culture among the liches of ‘who can make the best defenses for a phylactery’. They were Immortal, and far more durable than most other elvenoids. Their bodies were temporary, and could be easily reformed from their phylactery, should the worst happen. Shattering the gemstone structure meant instant death, but it was far easier to disrupt a biological creature’s delicate hemostasis, versus shattering a small crystal. Able to independently move away from their phylactery, armoring and protecting them had a whole different dimension. Only the smallest gap was required to form a new body.
Wrapped in magic metals? Penujuman was the premier consumer of the rare materials. It didn’t matter how rare liches were - there were always more layers to add.
Lethal defenses? The only people approaching a lich’s phylactery meant them harm. The phrase was even a euphemism for elaborate suicide in Kra-Dai.
Curses? Misdirection? False layers, deadly traps, outrageous bribes to leave them alone? That was the basic package, before they started to get esoteric. After a hard day’s work, most liches had the hobby of figuring out new and imaginative ways to protect their phylactery.
Thanwa wished he’d been a little less imaginative. Thanwa wished he had shared his particular ‘great idea’ with his friends and gotten their opinion. Thanwa kicked and punched out in all directions, not touching a single thing.
Almost no light met his eyes. Just a hundred million sharp pinpricks of light all around him, in the vast emptiness of space.
Thanwa had royally fucked up, and he had eternity to pay the piper.
The first rule of phylacteries: Don’t tell people where it is. Hostiles couldn’t destroy a phylactery they didn’t know the location of. Liches got creative. Underground lairs, a single tree in a forest, thrown into the depths of the ocean. Thanwa had skipped that particular fad, and was glad of it. A dozen liches who’d tried the ocean deep for protection had popped in a single day, something in the depths destroyed them all.
No, Thanwa’s bright idea had been to send his phylactery to space. He’d always been fascinated by the stars, the moons, the planets and the sun. He’d studied it extensively, and gotten a brilliant idea.
He had bet he could launch his phylactery out into the depths of space, where nobody would ever find it. He’d spent so many years calculating velocities, orbits, and trajectories, hidden away in his secret lab, so convinced that he could do it, that he never paused to think if he should do it. The day he confirmed everything was correct, that he had all the skills needed, and that it would work was the day he sent his true body hurtling into space.
He managed to keep it quiet for a week, before he started to brag about his accomplishment.
If only he’d told someone before he launched… ah, regret was bitter, and had no cure.
His friends had promptly told him he was an idiot of the highest order. When his body was ‘destroyed’, he’d reform at his phylactery.
The one heading into deep space.
Thanwa resolved to live like most Immortals, and avoid taking risks to his projected body. It worked well enough. For around 800 years he’d lived a normal life, with the occasional tease from his friends reminding him of what an idiot he’d been. They’d granted him the mocking title of ‘the safest lich ever’.
Then he’d gotten caught up in an Immortal War, and found himself reforming in the depths of space. The same depths he’d been spinning in ever since.
The System was his constant, only companion. He tried to talk to it now and then, not a single sound made in the empty reaches of space. He’d tried to commit suicide a dozen times, attacking the protections on his phylactery. Unfortunately, past-him had been far too competent at protecting his phylactery, and his efforts were for naught.
Thanwa had leveled at an excruciatingly slow rate. Passing the boundaries of the solar system and getting a solar-wide notification of his accomplishment had been nice, and a good number of levels, but it didn’t fix his damn problem!
He tried to adjust when he finally classed up, but still found he wasn’t powerful enough to destroy himself. Thanwa tried to send himself back to Pallos, and succeeded once - for a given definition of success. He’d burned up on re-entry, and found himself reforming back at his phylactery, another year added to his age counter.
He spun through the vastness of space, thought to himself, and was quite insane.
He’d fucked up, moreso than anyone else in history. They had the option to escape, somehow.
No god would put him out of his misery, no matter how much he cursed, begged, or pleaded. Perhaps his cursing stopped them from helping, and any god that cared to look could see that he was trapped in a worse hell than anything they could devise.
Had Thanwa always lived in space? Was Pallos simply another hallucination, another [Pleasant Dream] he let himself slip into?
Did it even matter? Everyone who might know him was gone. If he ever made it back to Pallos, how would it be any different than an alien world? New people, new cities, new landscape as Immortals threw around vast powers - how was the Pallos he left at all the same to a Pallos he’d come back to?
Thanwa drifted.
Thanwa plotted.
Thanwa daydreamed.
Thanwa tried to scream, and had no voice.
Thanwa wondered how his age counter worked. Was it still based on a Pallos year, or had he drifted close enough to a planet to change how his age was being counted? Was it working off solar rotations? Galactic time? The numbers seemed to fly forward at some point, rapidly clicking up like a waterwheel turning a gear. Other times his age seemed to stagnate, staying at the same number for an eternity and a half.
It was vaguely irritating when a micro-meteorite hit him, and forced his body to reform. He’d properly protected his phylactery against strikes, but not his projected body.
Occasionally the lich passed a rock, or another object. The trick was seeing the rocks against the darkness of deep space. Only when they shadowed out the stars - stars Thanwa had long ago memorized the position and color of - could he catch a glimpse of them. There was literally nothing else to do but study the rock, and trace out its destiny. Orbits of every object in Pallos’s solar system had been immortalized in his skills. From the sun to the planets, the rings around the gas giants to every moon, Thanwa had plotted them all out. His skills helpfully told him where they were, and how they’d interact with each other. Every new comet and meteorite he could plot. This comet would pass by Pallos in 67 years, and be seen again in 419 years, before coming too close to the largest gas giant and sinking into its gravity well. That meteorite was going to pass terribly close to the sun, and barely come out scorched on the other end. Celestial navigation at its finest.
The Gravity skills he’d taken to launch himself into space were equally good at nudging things. A tiny adjustment to the comet would let it swing by Pallos multiple times without getting destroyed.
Then, one day, Thanwa hit upon the holy grail. The potential solution to his problems.
Thanwa first spotted the planetoid when it was tens of thousands of miles away, a few stars blotted out. He initially thought it was a close rock passing by, but as time went by, as more and more stars were darkened out, he started to realize the magnitude of the object. If there was better light, he would’ve seen that it came in a thousand vivid colors. No mere comet, the rock was large enough that gravity was pulling it together, a small rejection of Creation floating past the grasp of Pallos’s sun.
And the trajectory!
Oh, the trajectory was almost right.
Thanwa performed the same calculations he had a million times, plotting all the different ways he could nudge the planetoid. It was new, it was novel, he gained several levels from seeing all the different ways he could tap the planetoid with just the smallest amount of force, and send it careening through Pallos’s solar system. It was novel, mostly because the planetoid’s mass was significant enough to make a few other orbits wobble a hair, which adjusted the rest of the calculations.
He didn’t have much time.
He had no friends to bounce ideas off of.
The gods had abandoned him.
Why?
Why not?
It was a potential escape from the never-ending hell he was in.
Thanwa Temirak nudged the orbit oh so slightly, setting the planetoid on a collision course to Pallos. The difference in their speeds meant he wouldn’t be able to catch a ride, and if he was successful, he’d gain enough levels to ascend to godhood, and finally be free of his personal torment.
After it had picked up more speed by performing an orbital slingshot on the rest of the solar system.
It would take thousands of years for his little nudge to get the planetoid into position, but what was time to a man trapped for eternity?
Thanwa grinned… and looked for anything he could send as a follow-up shot.
Comments
Sean Shivers
Given dragon mommy on the cover (we do not say her name... so this is the way we talk about her, right?), i'd guess that the world is successfully destroyed and it becomes a reacue rather than just healing.
Sean Shivers
if it's warded against even his own magic... couldn't he still just grab it when he reformed and throw it back? Sure, it would throw him further away but if he just killed himself then it doesnt really matter.
Sean Shivers
Why doesnt he just use his gravity skills to influence where his phylacary flies?
Katrex
Yet
Grumlen
This is one of the rare times where a plan to destroy the world makes sense: he does not, in fact, keep all his stuff there.
Cormac
That is a great find, well done.
SwitchBlaze
Oof... BEEG oof. Thank you.
puppy0cam
I don't think Elaine can heal an entire planet without divine help. And with the divine help, she probably dies as a result like priest demos did in the formorian war.
enderman
Thanks to a comment from @Phsteven I checked back and during Chapter 299 when Elaine was casting [The Stars Never Fade] on Leandros the [Lawyer] due to the deal she made with Emperor Augustus the description "blue crystal spinning through space, with a skeletal person ‘swimming’ away from it, heading to a nearby planet." So Thanwa Temirak had been in outer space even before the Remus empire was founded.
Katrex
So planet wide healing people through a meteor impact is gonna level Elaine to godhood?
Mad Dessert
Thanks!
tr13ze
Thanks for the chapter 😁
Thomas Todd
From what he said the Gravity skills are good at nudging things, I'm guessing that he can't move himself enough to reverse his direction completely now he's so far away, he's on the completely wrong trajectory.
Nematrec
Nope, he's waaay beyond even the moons. So far away that nothing is being hit with light and he has to identify things by the stars that get blocked
Eliezer
Not the first lich that's happened to.
TurnkeyFish
Is there really one book left 😢
TroubleFait
I searched through all the books for the terms "lich" and "skeleton," but I couldn't find it.
TriNcess
Oh poor guy Hopefully you land on the moon and Selene takes pity on you or something
Markus
I would guess it is the one from the global notification we got when Elaine appeared after the fairies. There was one about someone leaving the solar system. And here he mentioned that he got a global notification about leaving the solar system.
Roombot
I don’t think his gravity magic depends on his own mass
Roombot
I’m confused, why isn’t he able to use the same gravity magic he launched his phylactery into space with to redirect it back towards pallos?
M. Lampi
Unless he had the mass of a planet, it would be him who moved rather than the planetoid.
Phsteven
wasn't there a skeleton in space one of the times Elaine used the stars never fade? Idk why I seem to remember something like that...
Joshua Little
Thanks for the chapter.
Radius Morse
Reminder that there was more than one immortal war and the author never stated that the one mentioned here was the most recent one. This could be a thousands of years in the past.
Anonymous
Based on the dingpocolypse this guy has been out there a few thousand years. If he had just spent the whole time sending mana to a god, he should have had enough goodwill saved up for a miracle to blast him out of existence even accounting for the distance because according to the moon goddesses, they need a worshiper to interact with something so far away.
Joseph Marin
Wild theory: Elaine focuses on healing, but her healing has mostly been "you are not allowed to die near me," so maybe instead of ascending as a god of healing, she'll become a god of protection, maybe by protecting everyone from Lun'Kat or this planetoid. Her Oath even has themes about protecting her patients
Kurosov
That's the difference. Phoenix rebirth involves the Phoenix actually dying, then getting better. A Lich losing their puppet body is not death, In this setting they ARE the phylactery.
AntiClimax she her
Do they have to fight her? Maybe work with her, pallos captures another moon, then she can ascend to being a moon goddess without displacing the existing ones.
Kurosov
No, it's literally his fault and even he agrees. His situation is the consequence of his actions alone. Nobody even goaded him to do so.
Kurosov
I'd say that's pretty much impossible. From the sounds of things the guy's been up there a very long time and he used his own skills to get there. Elaine and Iona's trip involved dropping stuff off at the moon.
Jim Smith
Especially since he is slowly leveling, he may eventually reach the required levels to escape anyway. As an immortal I guess it’s just the limited stimulus more than anything. Still, either it works, or he tries enough to get someone or something angry enough to murder him.
Daniel Everest
Can't people ask white dove// black crow to end their lives, they at least can give people the option to not come back when they die given their conversations with Auri whenever Phoenix rebirth triggers
Shoto
Elaine is going to cure what?? It's a planetary destruction event here. It's not about healing, it's a big target that we have to shoot with everything we have. Void Mages can even be authorized, they are specialized in destroying matter. Even Elaine has this ability with her shield.
Jason Hardman
Presume Selene and Lunaris can track the rock and let Iona and Elaine know in time for them to respond. Question is, does the Lun'kat fight happen before or after this event?
Bryn Thomas
Lmao dinosaurs are about to get wiped out again
joss sim
For me it's a toss up between godhood Elaine and planetoid smashed Lun'Kat.
Anthony Kafka
Time to be an outlier, i don't blame the guy at this point anything he does is kinda not his fault anymore given hes been tortured (isolation is considered torture) for several centuries now, granted i wouldn't have exterminutis a planet but i haven't been put in space hell
Andrew
Thank you!
Tsorov
Or by just shooting it with a giant laser in "protection of her wards"
Khal Lee
Poor dumb bastard... and here I was starting to feel sorry for him, a little, and he goes does another "war". . . Wonder if that phylactery was something Elaine and Iona put up there though when they went to the moon... wouldn't it have made more sense than launching yourself forever floating in space?! Well I hope somehow he dont get the levels. LoL. Thanks for a ... partial sob story and then just wanting to see Auri or Artemis fry him one way or the other or maybe both.
CringeWorthyStudios
To be fair, I’m pretty sure you’d be insane enough to do something similar after being trapped in a box for ten thousand years too…
Kurosov
Well as dangerous as that sounds I’d laugh my arse off if it arrived just as Elaine got strong enough to heal everyone so he gets 0 kill xp and instead pushes her to ascend.
Tilen Praprotnik
Thanks for the chapter
AntiClimax she her
One kind of expects liches to be evil, deserved or not, but not like this. Wow.
James Skinner
Crikey.
Cormac
Without a doubt, the most astoundingly evil person in the entirety of this story. Wow.
Nate Slattery
Tftc I guess Elaine reaches god hood by healing the world through the meteor or sheltering them in her pocket dimension
