Lich's Gully

_{Create a building which is feared by a culture of your world}

NECESSARY CONTEXT

Necromancy is a Magical Way in the Universe of Sharitarn, and Ways are their equivalent to branches or schools of magic. Perhaps the closest equivalent in our world would be the different sciences: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc. Each one has object, method and a language that are characteristic and cannot be entirely reduced to the method and language of any other science. At the same time they all make reference to objective reality, and describe it according to basic principles of rationality that are common to all sciences and predates them.
Necromancy derives from Healing Magic both Ways deal with the connection between the physical organism of living things and what the Sharitarnes call "dream body" or "magic body". Without being too specific: the oldest Way pushes and pools the Physical, making it closer or more distant to perfect (ideal, timeless) health, while the derivation mixes the ideal and the physical completely and in doing that creates something else. Undeads.
Because of that undeads ought to be hard to destroy. They are less vulnerable to time than most other things on Sharitarn, and far less so than anything that following the normal laws of physics.
Users of magic can be sigraxes or mages. Sigraxes can be product of a mentor/pupil relationship, what makes them "wild sigraxes", or of a Magic University, and in that case they are "civilized sigraxes". Mages are always product of Magic Universities, and those institutions only exist in the most powerful state cities on Sharitarn. Mages are far more powerful than sigraxes (about the same difference between an honest 9mm pistol and a nuclear bomb) and there is archmages who are about as more powerful than mages as those are more powerful than sigraxes. However, regardless if you are a wild or civilized sigrax, a mage or an archmage, all (orthodox) magic users follow the same Ways.
The spells you practice don't depend essential on being sigrax or archmage. All spells (again, talking about orthodox magic here) belong to a Way, they follow the internal logic of that Way. And as any magic user can learn basic spells of different Ways each one can only follow one Way, and only the followers of a Way can go beyond the trivial first steps (true to be told, what is trivial for an archmage isn't the same thing that is trivial for a sigrax. And when you put enough brute power behind a spell, even the most basic move often produces more effective results than better magic with less pure Xar).
Creation of undeads is not the only thing necromantic spells can do, but (and that goes without saying) that this is the necromancer's business card. Low undeads are hard to make if you are not an necromancer, too hard for archmages bother trying if they have basic common sense. But any necromancer can make them. Low undeads don't come with spirits, they are not people, but they may contain some memories, "pieces of broken ghosts" the necromancers call it. High undeads are a totally different matter.
For a sigrax do create a high undead alone he needs a lot of help. Powerful magic tools, a handful of sacrifices, and a favorable place to work. The work is usually done by circles of sigraxes, as many as possible. What is seldom more than a dozen because is really difficult to harmonize that many magic users. Mage necromancers find no difficulty in create high undeads, and they manage to do so faster than groups of sigraxes, but even mages and archmages need to invest time and hard work to design each high undead they make. If they want it to be something they can be proud of.
Each high undead is unique, there is "models" that provide broad characteristics but one mummy is very different from the next. And once the creation ritual is finished there is no possibility of "fixing" mistakes. That individual undead will carry the flaws on their creators for all his existence.
Liches are undeads, but they are different of all other "models" in one aspect. Is impossible to transform other person into a lich. All liches are former mages or archmages, followers of Necromancy. The spell that transforms a living person into a lich is the magnum opus of Necromantic Magic.
Liches are very difficult to hurt, extremely difficult to destroy. They keep all magical knowledge and power they used to have as living mages, and continue evolving in that area. To that they add a collection of capacities that sound like preposterous overkill considering how powerful mere ephemeral mages already are. But human mages age, and liches don't. Sooner or later even the most powerful living archmage will decay and die at old age, the only alternative is to became an undead.
All undeads must pay a price for their timeless existences, and that price is a little different for each model.
Liches, like many other undeads, have no sensibility in their bodies. They cannot feel physical touch, a part of them register it and things like temperature and movement, but is more a intellectual information than actual sensation. Sight and hearing can still provide a lich some pleasure, but taste, smell and touch cannot.
For your typical candidate to lichood that isn't much of a lost. You don't get to be good enough in Necromancy to perform the ritual that creates a lich (nor even to understand it) without a lifetime of obsession for study and practice of magic. Study and practice of magic is what you want to do, and be a lich only adds to that goal. Mostly.
One element of being a lich is actually inconvenient even for those who only want to develop themselves as mages. Liches cannot stay in the same place for long, and they cannot have living neighbors either.
The very presence of a lich contaminates existence. Everything the lich touches or sees, even what just is nearby, the stones bellow his feet and the air outside the room, all that is affected.
Mortals overreact a little, in most places. Just share a room with a lich for a few hours does not causes any meaningful consequence. Even a couple of years living in the same house could hardly hurt a health human adult. However, most people don't assimilate that notion. They will expel any lich from their cities or will die trying.
Even Mimbao, know as Undead City, has no liches residing inside walls. Nor even in the island where the city is. They welcome their lich citizens periodically, for holidays of some importance. But that is all.
Even liches are not match for the Mage's Brotherhood. When a lich goes mad enough to establish a home in one place and refuse to move for so long that the taint of necromantic Xar spreads far and deep, and became impossible to ignore, the undead community is the first to react. Other liches do try to persuade their rogue brother to came to his senses and pack. That failing the Brotherhood takes action.
A lich can be completely erased from existence, or moved to far away and locked in some Mirror Dimension. From there his taint cannot affect Sharitarn.
After a lich moves his energy remains in the area for some time, and slowly fades away. Some very old members of that category move back to the same house after it is clean. They have a number of Gullies around the world, sometimes even one or two in Undersea or in some Mirror Dimension, and return to each home after a thousand years or more.

THE GULLIES

Is complicated to make the physical description of those places, because they don't really have a architectural stile one can mention. The liches came from all Ages and have little more in common that the fact that all used to be mages and followers of Necromancy Way in life.
They have huge magical power, and usually walk in the middle of vast armies of low undeads. Some will use Creation Magic to reproduce a same building to the smallest detail (often their family castle, for those who used to be Noble Caste before enter a Magic University) time and again. Others will enter whatever ruin or natural formation they find interesting and adapt it to their convenience. They all know very well that any shelter they build has to be temporary, in a few decades or centuries those timeless mages must move. The longer they stay in one place far away they will have to go.
The variety of decorative styles, shapes of roofs, numbers of doors and widows, does not make entirely impossible for your average wild tribe or lawless band to recognize the places where liches live or have lived recently.
Plants growing near to the building smell like rotten corpses, and they look dead and decay but neither brake nor fall like natural plants should. The smell disappears when you pay attention to it, as if it was more an idea than a reality, people are never entirely sure they have felt it in the first place, and easily forget the experience like a bad dream. That's why is important to speak right away, and compare impression with those of others in your group.
Animals get sick in the proximities, talking animals are no exception. And those who die in a few kilometers have the habit to came back as low undeads (zombies, skeletons, your occasional ghoul) and gravitate the building until something destroys them. Those 'natural undeads' are feral violent beings, that usually attack and kill anything that approaches (except for the lich) unless magically stopped. Some variations of undead will hunt talking animals to eat them (ghouls are particularly competent in that) but they will travel back.
If the necromantic contamination in strong enough there is a chance that high undeads will be created spontaneously. That is rare, very rare, but those beings can belong to any undead model created in the Gully. They are driven to the building like their lesser brothers, and driven to protect and obey the lich that caused the contamination. However, being intelligent they do have some chance of resist the urge to remain nearby, and move away to take care of their own business.
On the other hand, after the Lich abandon the Gully other necromancers are likely to show up and ling by. Living necromancers and undead ones, just not other liches: those are sensible enough to avoid places already tainted by their equals.
You must deal with the lesser undeads left behind by the former owner of the place. But it is a good business because necromancy works better in places like that. The objects and plants, water and dirt of those places sing the song of Necromantic Xar, they have a "purple glow" according to magic users.
On the other hand, all living things became weaker in the area. Nightmares spread from those places in all directions, terrible images of death and suffering.
Takes centuries, in the best cases, for those areas return to normality. Thousands of years, more often than not.
Wild folk usually hate liches for taint their lands in that way. Even those tribes that have necromancer sigraxes of their own don't rejoice with the visit of a lich. However, those are mages with undead powers (the most powerful undeads that exist, by far), barely impossible to destroy and very hard to fight against. Most wild tribes can do nothing against those intrusions.
Even lawless bands avoid Lich's Gullies. Those people however, unlike the wild folk, have little love for the land they sleep on. And simply move away.


ONE EXAMPLE FOR ILLUSTRATION
A Pretorian H Magnetic Rifle 56 Orbital was my weapon of choice in good old Earth. The PrH-56 is about as heavy as what the snipers used to carry in order to do their jobs in WW 2, it uses projectiles about as large as what those fire weapons used, but little less than twice heavier. The metals aren't the same, the weapon itself is more ceramic and plastic than anything else. It was designed to put down things from distance: shot people in the surface of Earth from space stations in orbit, or vice versa. Or hit a target considerably closer, but who is behind a kilometer of two of dense materials.
If I had a PrH-56 in my hands right now it would be on fire, and so would I. The weapon is obviously very well covered by the interdiction against Technologies from other Universes. However, accepting for the sake of illustration that I had a free pass for this Pretorian 56, and also had enough ammunition to win World War 2 single handed, I could take down a blackpee with three or four shots. Those fellows came from that Parallel Planet where they developed human variants for military purposes, Rhalpav, they are their equivalent to heavy tanks. Would take me three times more shots to put down a stone dwarf, a kind you seldom see in this region, from a very different Parallel Universe. I could cut the number of shots in both cases by using special bullet, you know, things designed to put down buildings more than just go through them. Yet, no ammunition ever used on planet Earth would be able to go through the most ordinary magic armour.
That is a frustrating aspect of existence here on Sharitarn. Isn't just that you are not allowed to have most technological tools you where used to have on Earth, that would be less than ideal, but not as bad as the realization that all technology developed on Earth would not be a match for their spells and magical weapons.
All that makes a place like that look ridiculous. A bad joke, told by a lazy drunk.
The individual who lives here is supposed to be one of the most powerful kinds of mage they have on Sharitarn. A lich, more than one million years old. More than a match for a dozen living archmages. That's a shithole.
I don't mean that literally. If you ask my guess I will say they probably don't shit. The liches, I mean.
Ghouls do eat a lot of meat, preferable from intelligent species and ideally from the specie they used to belong before die. I suppose ghouls must put out of themselves all that raw material, somehow. However, they are magic beings in their own right. So perhaps the logic I am following do not apply to them. Maybe they don't shit. Anyway, there is a lot of those monsters walking around, at least one of them was a blackpee before die and became a large and particularly ugly ghoul. I suppose would take me at least a hundred shots to put it down for good now.
Common melee weapons, Bronze Age style, obviously would not do the job. Not even start it.
What I mean by shithole is that this old house looks like a place a vagrant beggar from Cold War days of Earth would only enter if a tempest was about to fall. It is large to a normal house but not large enough to be called a castle, and not fortified enough to deserve to be called a fortress either.
That's, wrong. The place isn't in ruins but perhaps would give a better impression if it was.
We are about two kilometers south from the nearest thing that could be called a "road" by the most charitable soul. Two easy enough kilometers in case you like to walk, but that is a wild country. They have carnivore bats around here that hunt at day as well as at night, and are barely invisible in day light despite being as large and heavy as horses. The closest peasant settlement is one week west in that road, there is no visible signs of civilization except for the house. And it is clearly a urban residence.
To the left it even ends in an odd angle, like that sort of construction do when they are build to take advantage to a public structure instead of build all walls.

THE SILENT PARTNER's INN

One day I ought to have myself tested for magic potential by a wild sigrax, or in one of those Welcome Towers. Would be nice to carry around one of those fancy magic swords that can actually cut a stone dwarf in half. But I think that against a dude such as the blackpee coming in my direction I would prefer a magical spear. Three meters high, if possible.
Necromancy improves in what is already there, and there was a lot there when this guy died.
Fortunately to me this undead stopped at the same distance the others had, and allowed me passage. I had expended the last three nights in the top of threes, burning oil in my lamp to be as sure as possible that the owner of this place was aware of my presence, and had noticed the direction I was travelling.
The merchant called this place "Silent Partner's Tavern" but I was honestly surprised to see how closely it resembles an actual medieval pub from outside. The sort of place you find in most human state cities of Sharitarn. Even has the large doors for festive days, with the smaller one cut in it that stays open normally. Only thing missing is the city that should be flanking a establishment such as this.
Live Green in the door and in the small circular windows spread through the first floor. No glass. Glass is pretty rare and expensive nowadays here on Sharitarn, and I suppose that must have been the case for most the Ages after the Exclusion Law was imposed.
The front is decorated with leafs of copper, forming symbols I am not familiar with. Suppose they must refer to nationality. The shields or some nation long lost and forgotten.
Bright new. In the second and third floors there is the long lines you expect to see, strategically positioned windows designed to give maximum advantage for archers inside. The original building this one is copping was not a Noble Caste fortress, perhaps the city where it was build felt in ruins before the Clan Age when the true Kings find the origin of their royal lineages. It was probably in some sort of Port Sector, or in an Alien Ghetto.
Above the two floors that would have been occupied mostly by rooms, and perhaps some deposit, the last two, smaller than the rest, are probably where the owner and his family lived.
Three sides are just as you would expect, you almost can see the narrow streets and smell the urban confusion flowing between shadows. Despite the bright sun and the empty infinite fields in all directions save for the one I am coming from. One side is oddly empty. That is the one with uncanny angles and a curve shortening the two higher floors.
Must have been a bridge of some sort, or a city wall with an arch. Some structure of stone the builder of this tavern took advantage of.
Door was open. The small door, of every day business that should deliver me in the wooden corridor if that was a cold day (or if that was one of the cities where is always too cold to open doors right in the outside). That being a warm enough time of the year (as it was) they would have disassembled the corridor to make more space and the small door would open right in the action. The main room of the pub.
Since door was open, that suggested a hot day outside the pub.
Well, that was a hot day.
I was the only person outside, that was not a mindless undead, but I was not planning to became a regular costumer. Closer to a salesman, actually.
Not that I was a merchant, in any sense. I just work for merchants. Who, by some reason, do not want to travel all the way to this place and talk to the lich who "lives" here face to face. Because some liches are mad, and you never know which ones until is much too late.
Gullies represent a interesting dilemma for merchants.
Liches naturally neither drink nor eat. They can create things with magic, using creation spells or just making undead servants manufacture the objects. So if a lich chooses to place his home as far as possible from global commerce there is nothing preventing him from do just that. They don't need living merchants.
On the other hand, as powerful they are even liches don't have infinite magical energy. Or attention, for that matter.
Living mages, and even sigraxes, can go without eat or drink for ever. But is far more practical for them to buy food and drinks. Creators (followers of the Magic Way of Creation) buy things they could make with magic, because that saves them time and energy they can dedicate to projects that are both more interesting and more profitable in every sense.
Aside that, all mages dedicate their times to rituals and experiments that consume considerable volumes of expensive magic materials. Alive or dead makes no difference, mages are single minded machines of burn fortunes for abstract and cryptic purposes.
When alive, and inside their cities the mages have all costs of their experiments covered. By their cities, more often than not. By business partners that pay for the privilege of use the mage's name, sometimes.
Liches usually loose the support of their cities right away. They eventually loose most business partners as well.
A lich without business connections is an immense opportunity. Because naturally, this fellows always have a lot of precious goods to negotiate. They can provide precious services. 
At same time, on the other hand, as I mentioned before but you would certainly not need me to, liches are not always as stable in their perception of reality as your average living person. Hundreds of thousands of years, millions and in some cases even billions of years, make people who originally where humans somewhat less predictable. And humans are not as predictable as you would like them to be in to begin with, not when they have the powers of a mage. 
A simple list of what the lich wants to buy worth a fortune for the right person. You can negotiate prices later. 
To get that list one must talk with the lich, which means travel to his home. What involves a risk, if the lich happens to be in no mood to talk with mortals. The undead mage could ignore you and let his walking articles of decoration devour you. Or he could invite you to participate in some experiment that involves pain, no chance of survival, and no possibility of decline the invitation. 
Most merchants don't choose to take the risk personally. Instead, they pay someone else to make the trip and talk with the prospective client. See if there is business to be made in this particular case. 
That's what I am doing here. 
Most mercenaries would bring a dozen swords with them, since the wild is such a dangerous place. I got the notion that it would be like burning money. And I was correct, looks like. 
All dangers of the wilds that can be faced by warriors with swords avoid this region as if it was not a good place for living things to be. The animals and plants around are sick and twisted, not too hard to avoid. The things that are hard to avoid are undead. 
If I had to fight my way to those, I would have no reason to do that. Because my mission would have failed before it start. 
So, I will have the payment of a dozen swords more my own. All to myself. 
All I have to do is pass through that open door, find the magical monster that build this place, and take notes of what supplies he wants to buy. Is bright daylight outside, and there is no way I would not be able to see the room inside from where I am. Yet, I can only see darkness up there. 
When I was a kid on Earth I used to hack the net to find forbidden prefeminism books. My favorite where those from H. P. Lovecraft, but even them seemed silly to me the way he described evil as if it had a color, a shape. Something that could be pointed and recognizes by you, deeply in your guts, with no possibility of mistake. 
After I grew up, and choose kill people as my profession, sometimes I stopped looking at a person and asking myself if this person was more or less evil than the one behind her. If I was as evil as any. 
Many times I though that would be nice if Evil was something like that. Something you could recognize from distance. In the architecture of some building. In the very air inside a room. 
Evil is not like that. So I gave a step in the direction of that door, and then another. Whit something inside me crying that I shout turn back and run, run without think, without stop, dodge the undead beasts and keep running all the way to the land of living beasts. Where the worse thing that could happen to me was to be eaten alive by some predator. 
One more step, and I would pass the open door, inside the dark shadow.

Type

Castle