The lich didn't fight like anything Chris had ever seen.
Through the Rootmind — thin, ragged and wrong, and even without the Voice's amplifying it he could still somewhat tracked the old man's progress across the battlefield. A landslide in slow motion. The lich walked through the Imperial lines the way a river walks through a valley. No resistance. No urgency. Just a steady, implacable forward motion that bent everything around it.
Soldiers who got close withered. Not in the screaming way of mage fire or acid burns — a slower thing. A grey tinge spreading across exposed skin, joints stiffening, breath coming short and labored. The ones who touched the lich directly dropped where they stood. No convulsions. No final gasps. Their bodies went still, their faces went slack, and their weapons fell from hands that had forgotten how to grip them. Dead before they hit the ground.
Armor corroded. Through the ghost plants still clinging to the inner wall, Chris watched a squad in full plate advancing with shields raised, and the steel simply gave up. Rust bloomed across the surfaces like a rash, spreading from the edges inward, eating through the metal in seconds. Swords dulled and bent. Shield rims crumbled. The soldiers kept advancing for about five more steps before their hands came up empty, and then they broke — running back toward the lines with the desperate speed of men who'd just learned they were naked.
The mages threw fire at him.
First bolt hit him square in the chest. Through a gap in the smoke, the orange-white lance of flame streaked toward the lich's grey rags — and then nothing. The flames bent around him. Not repelled, not deflected. Bent. Split into two streams that curved around his body and rejoined on the other side, leaving him untouched. He didn't dodge. Didn't flinch. Didn't even slow his walk.
A second mage tried something different — concentrated cold, a lance of frost meant to freeze him in place. The air temperature dropped so fast the surviving plants shuddered. The frost hit the lich and shattered against something invisible, ice fragments scattering across the churned earth. The glow flickered once — briefly brighter — and then resumed its steady pale pulse.
He wasn't invincible. The scorch marks where the fire rejoined tracked closer to the lich with each attempt, the barrier wearing thin. The frost had made him flicker. He was burning through something — energy, will, whatever powered a walking corpse — and it wasn't infinite.
But he didn't need to be invincible. He just needed to be in the way.
The heroes finally engaged him.
Flashes through the smoke and the flickering ghost-plant glow. The woman in silvered armor was the first to reach him, her weapon — something between a sword and a lance — sweeping toward his midsection in a strike that would have bisected a regular man. The lich raised one hand. The weapon stopped. Not blocked. Frozen in mid-swing as if the air around it had turned solid. She strained, her armor creaking, and then the lich pushed — not with force, with something else. A wave of cold, grey pressure that rolled outward from his palm and hit her like a battering ram. She went back thirty feet, skidding across blood-soaked earth, her shield arm hanging wrong.
The others followed. A man with a massive war hammer. A pair working in tandem — one with a spear, one with a net. Each hit the lich and each was repelled. He wasn't trying to kill them. He was occupying them. Every second they spent fighting him was a second they weren't breaking through the wall.
Chris dragged himself to the base of the world tree after the Voice was torn out, pressing his hands into the soil, trying to force the Rootmind to cooperate. Underwater. That's what it felt like. Every command arrived late and mangled. The plants were still there, still connected, still technically responsive — but the Voice had been doing so much. Accelerating his thoughts. Processing the flood of sensory data from hundreds of plants simultaneously. Managing the background calculations that kept the whole network running. Chris hadn't accounted for how much of his control was actually the Voice's, filtered through him and made to feel like his own.
He tried to direct the thorn vines on the western breach. The vines responded by clamping down on empty ground ten feet from where the soldiers were actually pushing through. He tried again — right direction this time, but a full second too late. A squad of Imperial soldiers walked through the gap, and by the time the vines closed, the soldiers were already past them and into the inner courtyard.
One of the soldiers stepped on a fallen centaur's bow. The snap was audible even at this distance — a dry, incongruous crack, like a branch breaking in a forest. Nobody stopped to notice.
"Chris." Korr's voice came from somewhere above him. The demon had come down from the wall, his grey face streaked with soot and something darker. "Focus. The western breach is open. I need the thorn vines there."
"I sent them."
"You sent them to the wrong place. Try again."
This time the vines moved — not perfectly, not quickly enough, but they moved. They caught the next wave of soldiers, tangling legs, dragging two men down before the rest pulled back. Sloppy. Late. Barely functional. Something.
"Better." Korr was already moving back toward the fighting, sword raised. "Keep it up. I'll hold the line."
Chris was left with his hands in the dirt and a Rootmind that was coming apart in his grip.
Through the chaos, the lich was visible. Starting to show strain. His movements were less precise — a stumble here, a half-step too far there, his left arm trailing slightly behind the right as if something in his shoulder had come loose. The spells had gone wild too. Instead of the precise, economical gestures from the start, he was flinging cold and decay in broad waves, hitting allies and enemies alike. A cluster of Imperial soldiers went down. A centaur rider who'd gotten too close staggered sideways, her mount screaming, barely making it out of range before whatever the lich was radiating caught up with her.
The centaur elder appeared beside Chris. His face had gone pale, the grey of his coat seeming to have leeched into his skin.
"Your dead man is burning himself out." No preamble. No gentleness. "Whatever brought him back, it's consuming him. Every spell, every step, every moment he's upright is eating whatever's left of whatever he is."
Through the Rootmind, the lich's presence sat like a cold star — blazing bright and getting dimmer by the minute. The old man's mind, whatever scraps of willpower had rekindled in that grave, was using itself up.
"How long?"
"Hours, if we're lucky. Maybe until dawn." The elder's eyes tracked the battle. "He's buying us time. Don't waste it."
He walked away. Chris sat in the dirt. The battle roared on.
The lich stopped.
Middle of the battlefield, between the inner and outer wall lines, surrounded by bodies and frost-scorched earth. One moment he was walking — that slow, deliberate stride. The next, simply wasn't. Not the pause of someone resting or planning. The absolute stillness of something whose engine had cut out.
His shoulders slumped.
The glow dimmed. Not out — dimmed. Flickering between brightness and darkness. For a moment the lich was present in the Rootmind, the dying ember of whatever had been Theron making one last effort to hold itself together.
It went out.
The body stood there, empty. A husk. The rags hung off a frame that looked smaller than it should have been, the grey-white skin almost translucent in the firelight. No glow. No presence. No cold. A dead man standing in the middle of a battlefield, looking at nothing.
Then he crumbled.
No collapse. No final gesture. No last words. Skin and bone and cloth dissolving into dust and powder, starting at the extremities and working inward, like a sandcastle meeting a slow tide. Within seconds, nothing left of Theron but a small pile of grey dust on the blood-soaked earth.
The silence that followed was heavier than any of the screaming.
Through the Rootmind, Chris tracked the pause — a hesitation in the Imperial advance, a moment of collective uncertainty. A dead man had walked through their army and killed dozens of them and then turned to dust. That wasn't in any briefing.
The pause lasted maybe thirty seconds. Officers started shouting. The advance resumed.
But the soldiers moved differently now. Less certain. More cautious. The mechanical discipline replaced by something closer to fear. They'd seen something they couldn't explain.
Chris pulled his hands from the earth. Shaking. They'd been shaking for hours. The world tree's root coiled gently around his wrist — so small and unconscious a gesture that he almost didn't notice it.
He pushed himself to his feet. It took three tries.