From less than a hundred feet away, the Lich watched the structure rising just above its lair with great interest. Even though it should have hated the idea of a rival god building a grand temple on its very doorstep, it was fascinated by the process. This fascination wasn’t limited to the physical either. It included the way the structure and the devotion of its builders resonated into the ether, trying to change the entire landscape. Anywhere else, it would have already dominated the region, but not here. Here, no matter how powerful the beacon, it was the Lich that held sway.

Every day, something about it changed, and a new course of stones was set into place, or another pillar was erected. It couldn’t look away because if it focused on something else, even for one night, opportunities would be lost. Compared to its usual efforts, the construction proceeded quite quickly, and day after day, the temple grew. That was only during daylight hours, though. Once the builders went home, its servants desecrated in a thousand little ways night after night. The remains of the minor sacrifice that young acolyte had found were the least of those efforts. The fools shouldn't have trusted the rain to clean up their mess for them, but no real damage was done in the end.

The boy's investigations had hardly slowed it down, and everyone continued to do their part the moment the busybody walked away. Of course, some of the people who worked on fitting the stones together with great care knew they were accomplishing something greater than the goals of the church, but most did not. None of them knew they were working for it exactly. They just felt the need to obey and carry out their little acts of defiance. It was a game of shadows, and the darkness had been getting better about manipulating people without being too heavy-handed. When one was attempting to undermine the holy without making the entire work seem profane and tarnished enough for the foolish humans to start anew, one had to proceed slowly and carefully.

An animal sacrifice here. A curse etched into the underside of a block there. Every piece of work was marred and blighted in ways that no one might ever notice. It would, though. It could see the abomination that was being erected, as every part of The Sunset Temple was turned into a house of cards so that it would be the perfect vessel for what came next.

It knew how thin the layer of consecrated earth was and how little energy it would have to use to burn that flimsy barrier away to nothing. Gone were the days when the Lich needed to fear the might of a single temple. The priests might feel like they were building a fortress of faith, but there were already rats in the walls, and they had gnawed out most of the strength that should have been there, replacing it with nothing but darkness.

Violating the new temple wasn’t the only project the Lich was working on, of course. In the time since it had returned from the depths weeks ago, it had been very busy. It would have been content to leave the traitorous Krulm’venor in a block of ice for decades as punishment for his latest slights, but the Lich found it difficult to stay angry at one of its favorite and most useful toys. Krulm’venor might not be loyal or obedient, but he did have a knack for bringing new and interesting toys into the Lich’s possession, and the anguish that the godling felt over the desecration it had been forced to play a part in was utterly exquisite to behold.

After the Lich had killed the dwarvish avatar of the All-Father with Krulm’venor’s hands, devoured every last shadow, and shattered the ice that had restrained it while it devoured the darkness, the Lich had used the broken limbs of its enemies as paintbrushes to open a portal of shadows from Mournden to the depths of his own lair. Then it sent a small army of drudges in to loot that hallowed place until there was nothing left. It would never forget the way that the army of the dead poured into that distant place from so far away, grasping and clawing for every sacred dwarven relic that they could get their decaying fingers on.

The dwarves had thought that an infinite distance from the surface would grant their dead eternal peace. They’d been wrong.

It had felt Krulm’venor quailing in the back of its mind as The Lich dug up the bodies of heroes and their weapons and stole the bones of ten thousand elder dwarves. It had taken only a few days, and in the end, when the temple was nothing more than a dark and empty room with nothing but a few profane bloodstains to hint at what had happened, the Lich relinquished control of the godling and left it there with the commandment to go ever deeper into the dark.

Krulm’venor would venture deeper and deeper still. Even the dwarves had no idea what to expect beyond a certain point, but the Lich hungered to better understand the element of earth and the creatures that dwelled within it. It was certain that past the layer of darkness, where there were no more souls to steal, it would find something even stranger that it could use. Maybe even something that could finally unlock the secrets of aetheride.

The Lich still only had two anti-elements in the form of stygium and cholerium, and it would need more information if it ever hoped to complete the equation and distill aetheride and strangulite. Sadly, without a proper example to study, the Lich had made little progress. It doubted that it would have ever figured out the complex nature of the other two substances without spirits of both elements to study. That made sense, though. You could only ever understand unlife by watching what happened to a human when it died, and everything inside it that existed to keep its heart beating slowly came to a stop.

The magic of the portal was only viable in two locations of perfect darkness, sadly, and even a hint of starlight without at least a dozen feet of bedrock to block out the irritating light would be enough to disrupt it. Still, it would be effective when it came time to confront the All-father and the cities that worshiped him directly. For now, that could wait, though, as the Lich focused on its inevitable showdown with the lord of light.

Tsson’vek had been growing used to his new body, too, though he was filled with nothing but hate and revulsion at the idea. The Lich’s instincts, in this case, had been correct: it needed the spirit of a hunter to occupy the fearsome body of the dragon, and since it had no powerful air spirits to chain to it the way it had melded its river dragon and swamp dragon together, the mind of a reptile hunter was the next best choice.

Of course, none of these minor projects were as important as the artifact it had focused most of its attention on for the last several months: its own body. Though the Lich generally saw no need for movement, it knew that when it came time to do battle with Siddrim, such things would be required in the same way that a mortal might don armor. The core of the Lich was a fragile mummified shell of a dead wizard, and it wouldn’t be able to stand up to an armed mortal, let alone an angry god. Its encounter with a shard of the All-Father had made that very clear.

Krulm’venor’s body had been built to take a surprising amount of abuse from the goblin souls that ran amuck inside it, and even so, two blows overflowing with divine might had been almost enough to shatter it. And those were just the physical attacks, the Lich reminded itself. Even worse than those hammer blows was the memory of the holy fire itself. It tried to burn away its steel fingers to nothing and would have succeeded, too, if the Lich hadn’t had an ocean of darkness to draw upon.

It had been a harrowing thing, but only a taste of the crucible that was now on the horizon. It was an inevitable conflict, of course. The Lich might have hidden away from it if it could, but it had already taken all of the lands and the souls that no one was likely to notice. Anything beyond the bounds it currently controlled would have to be fought for.

So, it wielded its fleshcrafters as one, and they all stopped what they were doing and turned to the special section of its mortuary that was set aside for the bones of holy men that it had dared not touch for so long. Men like Kaligos had taught it to fear the light, but now it would use them to snuff it out for all time.

The project the Lich envisioned was a complex one, all centered around the slowly beating heart of the Templar that he’d never let die. The man’s comrades might have burned the body and scattered the ashes, but they had no idea that the person they inflicted that torment on was still alive. It had been a delicious moment of accidental betrayal, and the Lich had feasted on it for days both during and after.

What it needed now, though, wasn’t betrayal but raw materials. A body built from ingredients enured to the light would be painful, but not so painful as being burned to dust in a conflagration of blinding incandescence. The Lich would happily wear an iron maiden into battle if it was enough to ensure victory.

So, it would start with the heart of a hero and the bones of devout and holy men, and then it would layer those in steel and gold before covering the entire abomination in a layer of mithril armor. The result would be the mockery of the Templars that fought it at every turn, but that only added appeal for the Lich.

It would need more than a body and armor that could hold back the light, though. It would need a weapon capable of penetrating its opponent without being annihilated by the forces of creation, too. That had been the most important lesson in its proxy duel with the All-Father. If the thing hadn’t foolishly attempted to use ghosts to fight a lord of death, then the Lich would have struggled to land a clean blow.

Even as its flesh crafters began to select the best bones for the task and bring them to the forges so they could be dipped in molten metal and then polished, the shape was already forming in its mind. It wasn’t the clumsy armored form it had seen so many times on the heroes that had tried to invade its swamp, though. No, this would take more inspiration from the exquisite efficiency of insects that made up its most numerous branch of followers. The Lich would give its body three legs and four arms so that it could better defend itself in the fight ahead.

Two eyes were likely too limiting as well, and it would have to decide how to cope with that after a few more experiments. Even the eyes would have to be tested lest it be blinded mid-duel. Even sapphires were likely too weak, so faceted onyx or obsidian would make a better choice. Of course, if its helmet had louvered blinders that it could manipulate to avoid the worst of it… The Lich’s mind trailed off as each improvement spawned ten more ideas, and each of those had iterative improvements of their own that might be implemented.

The Lich passed those ideas off to be further explored by its library. It might not need such a creation for years yet, and there was no need to rush things. The head could wait until the body had been built and battle-tested. It might only ever be needed for a single fight, but that was a fight that the Lich could not afford to lose.