Bones were a lot more fragile than people gave them credit for. Comparatively, they were stronger than skin and muscle, but in the grand scheme of things, there was a reason nobody built tools out of animal bones when they had other, better resources on hand.

  That was before magic came into play, however. Human bones were nothing special. Animal bones, no matter how large they got, were never useful as more than ornamentation. But monsters had a tendency to get so big that normal bones couldn’t support them, and that meant they needed mana to reinforce their bodies. Humans did the same thing with invocations, but not on the same scale, and not indefinitely.

  The early necromancers had studied those monsters in an effort to reinforce the skeletons they controlled, and while it was largely agreed that it just wasn’t worth the effort for an entire army, the research had given rise to a line of necromantic minions known as the death knights. A lot went into the raising of a single death knight, and one of those investments was in creating a skeletal structure as hard as diamond.

  Liches took the process even further. With no base skeleton to modify, their bodies were made wholly of crystallized mana. Every inch of bone, every scrap of flesh or muscle—when they bothered to make such disguises at all—was pure mana given form. Their existence was the culmination of thousands of years of research in how to advance from stage nine to stage ten, to become a perfect mana being.

  We’d pretty much all agreed that lichdom was a dead end. It worked, after a sort, but the changes were too radical and, even otherwise ignoring the state of the caster’s soul, the loss of the ability to generate mana, to become completely cut off from the Astral Realm, was far too great a handicap for any self-respecting archmage to ever accept.

  Some lesser mages disagreed, of course. There were those that were desperate, at the end of their natural or unnatural lifespans, or just plain knew they weren’t good enough to advance another step on the path of immortality. Ammun was a prime example of what a lesser talent could do with the powers of lichdom. Being backed by an entire moon core was, admittedly, a pretty good compromise to the loss of a personal mana core.

  Now that he’d had a few years to invest in his current vessel, it was no surprise that the bones buried at the bottom of all his shields, barriers, wards, and enchantments were actually stronger than everything else. Systematically stripping away his protections had revealed a core of mysteel, or something close to it, but I had an answer for that, too.

  Delivering that answer was going to be tricky, as it required me getting within a few feet of him and holding him still long enough to hit him. Ammun wasn’t likely to cooperate with that, just judging from the fact that dozens of conjured comets were hurtling through the sky to crash down on my head.

  Conjured stone and real stone were not the same, however, and while dispelling a fellow archmage’s magic was out of the question, changing it was not. Every comet that got within a hundred feet of me abruptly unraveled, transforming from an amalgamation of stone, fire, and speed to one of fire, air, and inertia.

  To an onlooker, it would have looked like the comets simply evaporated, but what really happened was that the kinetic energy burst outward in a wave, hitting the comets trailing behind them and altering their course so that once the first ten or fifteen had been twisted, the rest came nowhere near striking me.

  At the same time I was defeating Ammun’s spell, I was enacting one of my own, an application of pure telekinesis even beyond the grand telekinesis spell, one that pitted my willpower against Ammun’s for control of the kinetic energy around his body. The very air itself stilled and became solid, an immovable jacket that could only be contested by Ammun’s own magic.

  He didn’t even notice – not at first. It was only when he tried to lift his hand and pull something else out of his phantom space that he realized what I’d done. That was when he started pushing back. Our battle took on another dimension then, in addition to the physical world we were destroying around us and the mental strain of holding off the various enchantments and divinations he’d kept up a light barrage of even after his shadow vanished.

  Now it became a sort of metaphysical wrestling match, one where we pitted ourselves against each other for control of the very magic in the air. The spell couldn’t be dispelled or countered; that was what made it so strong in the first place. Being unbreakable, all that was left to struggle over was control. If I overpowered him, he’d remain locked in place. That would hinder his spellcasting to some extent, but not stop him.

  If he won, he’d turn the spell on me, and I’d be the one under his control. Worse, my body was not nearly as indestructible as his. He’d be able to bypass all my wards and literally rip me apart – not that he needed much help there. This was literally a gamble with my life as the stake just to immobilize him.

  It worked, of course. A contest of willpower between the two of us was never in doubt. He struggled and flailed about and he no doubt mentally raged against me, but in the end, Ammun was the kind of person who took shortcuts, whose arrogance was backed by power stolen instead of earned, and who lacked the imagination and perseverance to truly overcome the challenges that accompanied this level of skill.

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  I’d seen it time and time again. Every time he unveiled something new, it was a spell or a machine he’d stolen from someone else. Every design he used was copied, but never properly understood. Oh, he’d done well enough, I supposed. Even as a cheat, he was a successful one, but originality wasn’t his strong point.

  As it turned out, being undead did nothing to change that. Maintaining control over that spell was never a contest, and all that was left to do now was survive the approach. More magic rained down on me, everything from conjured blades of force attempting to dissect me to frigid blasts of air so cold that they left trails of ice in their wake. Any of those spells could have killed me, had I let them.

  Instead, I kept a careful eye on the mana remaining in my reserves and calculated how much more I was likely to generate before this whole affair reached its now-inevitable conclusion, and decided to splurge a bit. Rather than fight my way through the rest of those defenses, I took the simple expedient of teleporting myself to Ammun’s side.

  As soon as I appeared, he did exactly what I’d expected. He tried to teleport away. I hadn’t put down a spatial denial field to stop him, knowing how obvious those were from the inside. If I’d tried that, he’d have spent the effort trying to relocate our battle again. The mana filter had given him reason to believe he knew what my goal in bringing him here was, that I’d simply miscalculated how effective it would be at slowing him down.

  Instead, the second field was hidden beneath the first, and Ammun hadn’t noticed that one. It had slowly permeated his magic, a subtle intrusion, a parasite just waiting for the right moment to strike. And right now, as Ammun’s confidence finally broke and he attempted to whisk himself out of danger, was that moment.

  His emergency teleportation failed, its mana eaten away from the inside. That was the whole purpose of the second field, to instantly destroy one single spell, even a contingency spell woven into his very bones. The field burned its mana up doing it, rendering it completely inert in the process, but it did its job. It kept Ammun here long enough for me to throw out the spatial denial now that I had his physical body locked down.

  “This changes nothing,” he roared at me. “Not even this can sever the connection to my phylactery. Destroy this body! It doesn’t matter. I’ll be back for you.”

  Even at this point, he didn’t stop fighting. I deflected, dispelled, or countered the magic pouring out of him, every spell draining my reserves just a little bit more. There was no time to waste, not if I wanted to end this before I ran out of mana and bled out.

  I summoned a vial from my phantom space, its contents based on the one that I’d taken from the Order to see how it interacted with mysteel. I’d already duplicated the formula, and without hesitation, I tossed it at Ammun. The vial crunched as it broke apart on his face, and the liquid inside phase-shifted into acidic, mana-devouring gas.

  The thing about having a body made of pure, crystallized mana was that no matter how sturdy it was, things that attacked mana directly worked very well on it. That could be compensated for partially by the nature of the construct – in this case, solid, physical matter. But then again, this particular gas also attacked solid matter, too. I’d seen it when it melted the floor back when the now-deceased Tredor had tried to kill me with it.

  In moments, Ammun’s physical vessel would melt away to nothing, and the soul tether would snap. His phylactery would start growing a new body for him to inhabit back up on Yulitar, and he’d return in a few months to try again. At least, that was what he expected to happen.

  I’d spent decades, centuries even, studying souls as the basis for my reincarnation magic. I doubted there’d ever been a more accomplished soul mage in history, even including those who’d decided to become liches. In the course of that research, I’d discovered there were a few things we’d held as immutable truths on the subject of souls that were actually anything but.

  I activated the third and final field of my ward stone rings, and what was left of Ammun immediately reacted. “No!” his voice howled, echoing around me as he formed the words with magic discrete from his body. Those spells were already broken. “This won’t stop me! It’s only temporary! Eventually you’ll run out of mana to power this trap!”

  “I’m not surprised you recognize a soul trap,” I told him. Then I reached into my phantom space and held up something. “Did you know I kept this, though?”

  It was the phylactery he’d tricked me with back when he’d first woken up, a phylactery he’d made by his own power, unattuned to him, but still tainted with the essence of its creator. That metaphysical bridge was enough for me to build on. It took moments to link it to him, to direct the soul trap into the phylactery.

  “Trapping this incarnation is meaningless. My real phylactery will just make a new body. All you’ve done is create two of me!” Ammun’s voice snarled. “I told you, you can’t win this. I’ll come back. I’ll always come back.”

  “Wrong again.”

  That was when I made my final move, the one thing I knew he’d never see coming. It was a spell that had only existed for about two years now, one I’d made myself by reversing the reincarnation magic I’d invented. Instead of guiding the soul outward through the afterlife and into a new form while keeping it insulated to preserve memories and personality, it drew a soul inward.

  And it did it using a lich’s soul tether. In a normal scenario, the soul tether would snap back from the vessel to the phylactery, returning all the memories the vessel had accumulated to be deposited into the new body once it was finished forming.

  My spell reached out to that tether and chased it all the way back to the source. The sheer distance was almost too much of a passive defense to overcome, but I’d made some modifications once I’d figured out where the phylactery was going to be, and super-long-range spells were no longer a new concept for me. My magic worked without flaw.

  The spell streamed up the soul link, found the phylactery, and ripped Ammun’s soul out of it. Somewhere up on Yulitar, no doubt buried near the core under hundreds and hundreds of miles of stone, was what was now an inert rock that had once been the center of Ammun’s existence.

  The soul came back down, chasing its tether to the end, where it reached its new home. The phylactery I’d turned into a soul trap grabbed hold of Ammun and drew him inside. For all intents and purposes, he was still a lich, but this was his soul’s new home.

  And I held it in the palm of my hand.

  I crushed it to dust with my magic, rupturing the prison and releasing his soul to the afterlife. Ammun, the man who’d ended the world, the lich who’d caused incalculable suffering, was finally, truly, once and for all, dead.