We All Must Attend the Deathbed of the Lich
When an immortal tyrant begins to die, the whole kingdom must decide what it owes him.
Content warning: This story contains depictions of violence, death, and authoritarian repression.
We all must attend the deathbed of the Lich, so naturally the line stretches far beyond the palace walls. And naturally, too, we whisper about this unnatural why. Isn't the whole point of becoming a lich the keen avoidance of this very moment? What lich has a deathbed? What lich so much as has the linen?
Rumors stir. The phylactery, that golden soul jar lit behind the thickest charmed glass and guards' sharpest lances in the Grand Hall of the palace—the phylactery is the only way to stop the Lich's ancient heart. The issue must be there. A knot of farmers in line by the apothecary posit a chip in the glass, some magical reagent in the spell depleting faster than it can be replenished as the summers blaze hot and wet and relentless. A chip, then a stray bit of damp or dust—Josten the cheesemonger, his daughter's married into the family of the smithy that made the phylactery all those ages ago, and he's said no metal can keep out the damp or dust forever, see. And, he reckons, a soul's not too dissimilar from a good jam. No seal and it'll start to fur and sprout.
Josten, though, we all know he's more full of shit than not. Ariella, his daughter, she's posted up all the way down by the old cemetery and she's vouching for her eons-great-grandmother-in-law's handiwork with enough ice in her stare to add another seal. Besides, she's saying, why does anyone care about the why at all? The Lich will soon be dead and good ridd—
We hush her, the whole line of us.
It's not as if he's dead now, is he?
Have some respect or pretend to. It's the Lich—the Lich, the center around which the kingdom's orbited since our people shifted away from the old tongue. The Lich grasped our little realm in his bony palm and lifted it into the light. The epics bind his exploits in verse, neat and unassailable. Ariella can talk however she wants, but we know her embroidery rarely strays from the Lich's poetic footsteps.
Recall, Old Tayron says from his perch on the lip of the fountain, how the Lich met with the ambassador of the Northern Alliance when they threatened invasion. He twisted the man's ascot through his fingerbones and yanked him into Hell. Straight through the earth! No portal! And the Northern Alliance have barely sniffed at us since!
Yes, yes, we all know the stories, a handful for each of the neighboring realms across the ages. The Lich rode alongside his generals against the forces of the Borys Emperor, robe snapping in the windrush and his heel bones digging into the meat of the steed's ribs, one hand tangled around the reins and the other lobbing fireglobes. The old kind, laced with shattered glass. The Borys cavalry's pincer collapsed in a bloody, screaming smog, and the Lich rattled the dried ropes of his vocal cords with a triumphant shriek. And—oh, Itak, you put it best—when he challenged their Imperial Guard hand-to-hand? What was it like to tackle him?
Smashing into a wall of diamond, that's right.
The Lich has always provided—
Except when he hasn't, sure, but this is his deathbed, and we shan't speak ill of the dying. We whose respect is gilded at best can abide by that much, surely.
The wait is long, though, and only growing longer as those of us outside the capital come streaming in to join the line, and the line is only moving in one direction: out. Past the dockworkers' pub, sounds like, and the day's turning into a real scorcher. The brickwork in the main square will cook us like an oven at this rate, and it's not even midday.
Tollius and Yevenia might not last long enough to be cooked alive, the way they're shouting. A couple of us reshuffle that section of the line to put people between them, but those two are barely shorter than the Lich himself, and besides, Yevenia's armed with her baker's paddle and has already knocked Tollius's hat off. Yeah, the weird one with the orange feather. Which isn't important but—
No, it would be nice if a mule's business managed to stink it up past wearability, but if the damn thing's survived this long—
The shouting, the threats, right. We know their fights by heart, the cadence of them, the eddies where they slip to and linger, and with a step back they form the outline of their son. Erlo. Squire in the Lich's guard, prestigious for his station. Delivered back to their doorstep four months later, just before his nameday, in an infant's coffin. There wasn't enough of him left to warrant the full size, and there wasn't enough by way of answers.
Tollius's crushing grief softened at the knowledge Erlo passed in service to the kingdom.
Yevenia blamed the Lich.
She does not want to be in this line.
Those of us closer to the palace gates can hear her, distance and echo smearing the individual words into their base emotions. Or, just the one. Rage. It's all-encompassing, swallows everything else. We can't look at her, or the direction from which her voice rises, or at each other. Word travels up the line once she quiets—an armored guard, a lance tip angled to catch the sun, the glint of it digging into the eye. We all must attend the deathbed of the Lich, and there's no use causing a fuss. She's fortunate, really. The baronies in the eastern reaches would have snatched her in the middle of the night and dropped her into exile long before this point.
So who can say that he doesn't provide?
An hour passes. They kick up again, but we hear Tollius first, somehow. Fear turns the world wobbly in this kingdom—some deep magic in the stone and sea—and his every word rings bright across the line, end to end. Plea upon plea, begging. A litany of stop collapsing into pure animal noise.
Those of us who can watch don't.
They did warn her, and the Lich's justice isn't really our business. It's meted out like the weather—if you see dark clouds, hurry on inside. The rain's coming either way. You don't have to get wet.
The Lich was once a man; all liches are. And there was a before to his rule, as all things must. What we've discerned on those matters is loose, simple, brought to light by logic rather than anything we could hold in our hands or find under glass at the university library. The break from the old tongue turned surviving records into art pieces, pretty and useless. There was never enough coin in the royal coffers to fund a classics department, and the scholars learned to stop asking.
So we stare up at the statue of the Lich in the central plaza and wonder. The marble received a fresh coat of paint last season and the navy-gray of his bones melts the surrounding air into a shimmer. His teeth gleam, gold and grinning. We've all grown up with tales of how, after dark, you may catch the empty eye sockets humming with a faint pulsing red. Sometimes, though we'd never openly admit it to each other, we still check. Some of us are checking now, squinting up with craned necks, blocking the sun as best we can with a flattened hand.
We're not sure what it would prove if we did see it. The Lich uses magic!—not a revelation. But perhaps if we could spot it, then we'd know in our own bones exactly what it was for. And knowing, as they say, is half the battle when—
No, Sir Guard, no, we were just talking nonsense. Admiring the statue, is all. No, Olcher's red in the face from the sun, not—what did you call it? Revolutionary fervor? No, no, that's—
Well, this is our own fault. The deathbed of the Lich is no time to pick apart old childhood myths.
Not that kind, at least. Separately, we consider not the Lich as a man, but a boy, a song whistling through the fresh gaps in his teeth as he ran across the grazing fields, heeding the dinner bell. In the schoolhouse, feet swinging under a chair he hadn't yet grown into, or whatever it was they had back then. A father's calm instruction by the barn, a mother's patient fingers beside his as they traced the old runes. At some point came the deathbed of a childhood, the kind that's poorly attended and dourly colored. Perhaps there are many such deathbeds. And perhaps that's why such a man would kneel at the deathbed necrotic, a cursed knife to his throat. Sever the soul, flay the skin, burn the bones blue as night.
So we agree something terrible must have happened, but terrible things always do. Still, there is only one lich.
We wait. Some of us sit on the cobblestones, an overturned bucket, a chair fetched from the closest shop or home. Shadows grow long, melting together once the horizon begins to bleed. The line hasn't progressed, but we don't dare take our leave, even with the promise to return early the next morning. Murmurs start up about doing just that, flattened to nothing when the guards bring Olcher back—pale, trembling, missing his left little finger.
We give him a stiff nod and a seat in the shadow of a palace tower. He wants to go home. We hand him a chunk of cured goat passed up the line from the butcher on the corner, like it's an answer.
Just as we start to search out ways to pad the night, a new figure approaches the head of the line. Not a guard or a local—the leatherwork is odd, not the style of Pedric or Sorena or even Old Dharrow, and no one in the kingdom has hung a scabbard at the hip in a century. The copper scarf, tied around her head in the manner of the western isles, hides her profile, the loose tail hanging just above her shoulder. Her tanned hand grips the pommel of the sword, knuckles blanched from the squeeze.
We hold our breath as she stares up at the farthest spire of the palace, and when she turns to the guards before the front gate, the setting sun catches in the opaline surface of her false eye.
I hear, she says, that my father is dying.
Her name is Feriana, and there is much that none of us, including her, knows.
The Lich had a wife once. We suspect he's had several wives over the ages, spread far enough apart so that the kingdom's citizens only ever know one at a time. Little is written about them in official histories or recovered ephemera from us common folk, though we have a handful of names. Jethima, of the Golden Expansion. Winifrine, of the Borys War. Nelizher, of the Wheat Famine. More than a millennium under the cloak of the Lich, and this is all that has lasted. Lasted, not survived. Survival would imply a death date, a single adjective to pin under their entries in the Record of Nobles, any detail at all.
Feriana does not know her mother. We hadn't known the Lich had taken a wife until he announced that she was dead. We hadn't known of Feriana until she appeared in the center plaza, all of seventeen years old, and announced she was leaving for good.
Perhaps she was adopted, an orphan carted home after the skirmishes with the mountain nomads; or magicked into existence, vermilion smoke spewing through the sockets of his skull and leaving an infant behind; or created the common way, though we're rather certain the effort would be fruitless. Looking at her now, she appears to have the same high cheekbones and delicate brow the Lich displays openly, but again—we don't know much.
How long has it been since she left? Twenty years?
We crane our heads to watch as she crosses to the gate and starts up the imposing marble steps. The door to the palace is ten times the height of any of us, ebony inlaid with gold, and when it shuts, the noise rolls through us like thunder.
Have we been waiting this entire time for her?
The lead guard slams the butt of his lance on the stonework three times. We all, he shouts, must attend the deathbed of the Lich.
Come morning, Feriana leaves, disappearing without a word to the hills beyond the city, and our procession inside is finally allowed to begin.
For all the pomp, the individual moment is surprisingly simple. We kneel at the Lich's bedside, where his arm has been propped up on a velvet stool, and bow our heads beneath the chandelier of his fingerbones. The tips tap against our crowns, cold in a way that reaches down our throats and straight to our knees where they ache against the floor. We rise.
That's it.
The Lich says nothing, doesn't so much as twitch for any of us. And we start to wonder what took Feriana so long last night; and behind the walls of our homes and shops, out in the fields and barns and forests, pictures emerge. We're all two or three relations away from someone who works for the palace, or at the very least a sneaky, nosy sort who we will, for today, refrain from calling a bastard for their trouble.
The accounts settle themselves into two camps, and we'd usually cut a line down the middle between them and call that the truth. Here, though, they diverge so greatly that the compromise would have Feriana standing stock-still before the Lich all those hours before taking her leave, and that's more absurd than the dreck Shyber spun up at the pub.
Then again, maybe she did. Maybe all she could do was stare at her father, the once-man. She looked to us to be the age where standing that long would strain the knees past their bounds, and her departure wasn't a hobbled one.
We're not used to not knowing—or not having a consensus, more like. We try to grab at the details straddling the two tales, few as they are. They're anchors to hold onto in the gulf.
So they go something like this:
Feriana, hand still on the pommel of her sword, steps inside the Lich's receiving chamber, the one in the southeast tower of the Grand Hall. Not his usual choice of setting, and not its usual furnishings. The desk and plush seating have been replaced by the deathbed, a side table, and a high-ranking guard.
Some say —Her lip curls when she catches the empty eye sockets of her father, and the guard reflexively tightens the grip on his lance. That clink of armor gives way to a duller rattle—she knows the way his bones approximate laughter. Her feet shift like she's about to approach the deathbed but decide against it. Her mouth, too, molds the shape of words it does not say, wide and open, showing off the fleshy parts her father hasn't had for a millennium. Her knuckles pull stark white across the pommel until it seems about to rocket out of her grip, sweat-slick, and then she's fumbling in her satchel for a bundle of rags. A glint of flaking gold leaf peeks through a hole. | Others say —She does not make eye contact with the guard, nor with her father, staring instead at the sheets where his kneebones have formed sharp peaks. Her face twitches, conflicted, as if it's trying not to collapse into something soft and raw. And her knees don't collapse, but they do fold, bringing her to the bedside, her eyes falling on the chiseled line down his sternum. A scar from a duel many ages old, a story she's heard from the epics and his own tongueless mouth countless times. With shaking hands, she pulls the leather satchel from her back and removes a bundle of embroidered linen; it falls open. |
The phylactery. The real one, kept on her person for the last twenty-odd years. The double behind all that charmed glass has fooled us all.
Some say —I know you think I did this to you, she says, but I've been a little preoccupied. The rags around the jar fall, little winks of gold trailing after. Aside from the gilding's bald spots, it appears untouched. Her father's rattling laughter starts up again and she mutters to herself, inaudible, staring down at her hands and scowling and flushing a splotchy red with anger. When she snaps, the words all trip over themselves: I didn't do anything to it, I knew the blasted thing failing would drag me back if I did, I know how your hex works—she pauses to catch her breath—and why would I want that, so here I am, have at me! | Others say —I kept it far away, she says. I tried to keep it safe, I was—her voice falters. She tries again, and it catches on a knot in her throat as she thumbs at the angry oily crack running down the phylactery's side. A hum rises from her father's skull, hollow. It was a night of drink, she says after a long thread of silence, and the song the rest of the caravan was singing brought my younger years rushing back to the surface. My anger burned like dry kindling. I threw the bag with it against a tree where we'd made camp, and the song stopped, and I wanted, at last, to tell my comrades everything. Where I came from, why I wail in the night, how I lost my eye. But I didn't. I didn't. |
She waits for him to say something. She doesn't know if he can, in this state. What he does manage, though, is turning his head away, toward the ceiling, and beckoning her closer with the crook of his finger.
Some say —Nothing? she scoffs. She eyes the guard, then raises the phylactery high above her head. She's not a tall woman, but the strength in her arms radiates through the room, and the guard instinctively lowers his lance. Straight at her throat. Waiting. She smirks. Then she brings it down. A flash of teeth, of sharpened steel, of iron chips flying, snapped like pottery from the strain of all that magic. The lance tip hovers at her throat and her father rattle-cackles and she glances past the guard to the debris at her feet. Broken metal rings around a small pile of white sand with a crystalline sparkle, the same found on the beaches of the western isles. Her fists clench. The guard notices, too, and drops his stance, the transgression forgotten—or, not forgotten, but revised. That can't be all a phylactery is, she says, or are you not a lich? Which is it? Tell me, tell me, you owe me that much! But he doesn't tell her. He only laughs, until he can't even manage that anymore. | Others say —I'm sorry, she says. She shuffles closer to the head of the bed. I'm so sorry. I was angry, but I didn't want this, not really, I swear it. Her father runs his hand across the folds of her headscarf like it was the long gold braid she wore her last day in the kingdom. He points to the phylactery, then to the table beside them; the wood creaks under its weight when she sets it down as instructed. The crack has split farther, leaking in earnest. A fat bead of white with a rainbow sheen dribbles down the side and splats on the tablecloth with a sizzle. It wouldn't be long now, her father seems to say, his hand closing over hers. Bone on flesh. The guard ducks his head, as much privacy as he can afford them without shirking his duty. She doesn't beg for forgiveness more than she already has, and she will not beg for his contrition, but she does not rise from her kneel at the bed. She does not let her gaze stray from the contours of her father's skull even as the phylactery scalds the table, drip after drip. |
The Lich died as the morning lightened in anticipation of sunrise. The Lich, or whatever he was, depending. He was dead when we were marched into the palace, and he was dead when we knelt below his impeccably posed arm, and he'll still be dead, of course, when his retinue decides to formally draw up the edict. These matters are complicated, Old Tayron keeps repeating, as if he knows better than any of us.
The successive days pile on, though, and the work never stops. There's still the bulk of the kingdom that needs running, the boots and hands in the earth, but we all tilt an ear palace-ward, listening for who knows what. A gong from the bells in the spire, a chord from the royal horns—what is the rite of succession when no one in living memory has borne witness to it? We dare not speculate; the guards still stand on corners, eyes glazed with boredom. We've not been especially well-behaved lately, so perhaps their ennui's all for show. Still, we play our part—there's the post, look busy. But the season turns and they start to doze off against the lanternposts. The season turns again, bitter cold, and a few have tucked little books inside the ties of their faulds, and when we poke forth questions while they're reading, they actually answer.
Only one possible successor, they say. The law is, apparently, clear as midsummer's day: the throne may only be filled by the Lich's blood. Nothing anyone can do until her return.
The Lich is dead.
Feriana is never coming back.
The Lich, officially, still lives.
We all attended the deathbed of the Lich.
In the night we pull from our barns and sheds and closets all manner of tools with sharp edges and heavy swings.
Dust falls from the flat end of Yevenia's baking paddle as it towers over the heads weaving through the city.
The guards at the palace gate are asleep, and they do not wake as the torchlight licks at their faces.
We all must bury the coffin of the Lich.
Haden Cross is the author of The Uncontinented Stars, which was a finalist for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. Their short fiction has been featured in The Deadlands and Shadowrun: Augment.
Editor's Note:
Thank you for reading “We All Must Attend the Deathbed of the Lich” by Haden Cross.
One of the pleasures of this story is how quickly its grand fantasy premise becomes a civic inconvenience. An immortal ruler is dying, and everyone has to get in line. From there, Cross builds a whole political order out of gossip: cheesemongers and bakers trade theories, old men repeat official legends, guards overhear the wrong conversations, and centuries of history survive mostly as stories people have learned when to tell and when to swallow.
That collective “we” is the story’s great device. It gives the kingdom a voice without granting any one citizen the comfort of individual authority. Everyone knows something. Everyone has heard something else. Together they construct the Lich from rumor, propaganda, family history, fear, and the practical knowledge of what happens when somebody speaks too loudly. Even Feriana’s private encounter with her father reaches us in competing versions. By then, uncertainty has become a political condition.
The title’s “must” gains significance each time it returns. At first it sounds ceremonial, then coercive, and finally communal in an entirely different sense. The people have spent generations defining themselves by the Lich’s permanence. His death leaves them with the stranger problem of imagining a life after him.
Cross saves the story’s harshest turn for that realization. Power survives partly because people learn its rituals so thoroughly that obedience begins to resemble ordinary life. Once the ritual falters, the same collective voice that whispered its way through the story discovers that it can speak as a body. And, eventually, act like one.—Jon Negroni
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