Mary was riding next to Mr Fantastic — self-proclaimed Mr Fantastic that is. His oiled muscles caught the sunlight like a signal mirror, occasionally blinding her. Every time Reralt noticed; he smiled, puffed up his chest, and winked.

  “Yes magnificent, aren’t they?”

  Mary’s eyes rolled so far back they nearly saw her brain.

  “You want to touch them?” Reralt offered, placing a bicep directly under her nose.

  “Gently,” he added. “Don’t rub off the oil.”

  She’d done it once, thinking it would make him stop asking. She had a lot to learn about travelling with Reralt.

  The lush green fields gave way to a harsher, desert-like landscape. The air smelled wrong — putrid, metallic — as if evil had a personal perfume deal. Broken pots and vases lined the road at suspiciously regular intervals, wafting the stench like cursed incense.

  Every signpost carried a vulture. Whether they were real or automata, Mary couldn’t tell. But each time they passed one, it squawked the same line twice in a grating monotone:

  “Evil is near. Defeat the evil. Find the phylactery.”

  In the far distance, a mausoleum floated above the desert like a long-forgotten treasure.

  As they drew closer, the signposts — vultures included — helpfully displayed its name in thick, red paint: Kenneth’s Mausoleum. The word Evil had been crammed in between, as if added later by an overzealous marketing department.

  Reralt pointed at the sign. “Does that paint have glitter?”

  They reached the gates just as the sun began to set. Reralt lingered outside, visibly puzzling over something.

  Mary sighed. She knew that look. Narro’s stories had prepared her for another sanity-draining discussion.

  “It’s not a ruin. Someone lives there,” she said, riding into the surprisingly tidy graveyard.

  “He’s undead,” Reralt replied slowly. “Not sure that counts.”

  “Why are you scared of ruins?” Mary asked, annoyed at the delay. “Aren’t heroes built for this?”

  “Every hero’s supposed to have a weak point,” Reralt said, still frozen in the gate.

  Mary thought about it. “So… you decide whether you’re afraid?”

  A few seconds later, she smacked her own forehead. “You picked this as your weak point, didn’t you? And now you’re sticking with it.”

  “Yes, well… I wrote down either runes or ruins. Can’t remember which. So I decide on a situational basis.”

  Now he was stroking the fluff on his chin, really putting in the work to decide whether the mausoleum counted.

  “But you’re not actually afraid of ruins…or runes?” Mary already knew the answer but needed to hear it.

  “Afraid, afraid… I see it more as a character trait,” Reralt said, finally nudging his horse forward. “Keeps the stories believable.”

  Mary nodded. And quietly died a little inside.

  ***

  The moment they pushed open the large ornamental doors — which, if Reralt saw correctly, depicted playing children, a wedding, and some sort of rainbow pasture filled with very friendly-looking bears — the mausoleum let out a maniacal laugh.

  Smoke curled.

  They took two steps into the main chamber. At its center sat a weird-looking chair — once a velvet throne rich with ornaments, now reupholstered in a hundred embedded swords. The whole thing stood on a base of shiny white bones.

  “I don’t think those bones are real,” Reralt whispered.

  Mary glanced and nodded.

  On the throne sat Kenneth, the lich — a thin man draped in an orange monk’s robe, hood pulled so tight it seemed to be strangling him.

  “Hunnngggg… ungggg… unggg…” came a noise from under the hood.

  Before Mary could ask, lightning flashed from every wall at once. Smoke, fire, thunder — every sense assaulted at once, with the putrid tang of death thrown in for good measure.

  “You wish to kill the evilest of liches!” boomed Kenneth’s voice, each syllable over-enunciated like a stage actor who’d been paid by the vowel. “You can only succeed… by destroying my phylactery! HAHAHA!”

  Silence.

  A few awkward seconds passed.

  “It should be around here somewhere,” the same voice added, noticeably less booming. A side door creaked open, revealing a room stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes, papers, and miscellaneous junk. “Start here.”

  Mary folded her arms. “You lost your phylactery, didn’t you?”

  Kenneth let out a deflated grunt. “Yeaahnnngg…”

  Reralt, sword in hand, scanned the room.

  “Surprisingly low amount of death and decay here. Are we sure he’s evil?”

  Mary sighed. “I never said he was evil. I said evil is complicated.”

  “Well, I’m also not sure,” Reralt admitted.

  Mary opened her mouth, realised the conversation had already fallen off a cliff, and shut it again.

  “I am evil,” boomed the voice — apparently some sort of spell echoing from the lich. “Very evil. Grrr.”

  The growl that followed sounded like a man doing a bad dog impression at a dinner party.

  Kenneth looked from Mary to Reralt.

  “I’m undead. Didn’t you go to hero school? We’re classified as evil by default.”

  Reralt raised his shoulders and nodded, took a step toward the throne, sword raised high. His duty as a hero was suddenly clear.

  “Stop!” Mary’s voice cracked like stone against stone. It hit Reralt so hard he flinched. Her hair shifted. Her stance swayed as if she wasn’t quite standing on legs anymore.

  “No,” Kenneth’s voice said, suddenly defeated. “You have to destroy the phylactery. Killing me just makes me regrow here.” He kicked at a fake skull at his feet. “It’s… very annoying.”

  Reralt tried to speak, but Mary shushed him.

  Of course, Reralt had never been shushed before and was now trying to figure out what it meant.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Show me my daughter,” Mary demanded, slithering toward the throne. “Where she is, where she’s going — then we’ll find your phylactery and you can kill yourself.”

  “Wait—” Reralt finally cut in, brow furrowed. “You want to die? Undie? Die-er?”

  Kenneth sighed, the sound of a thousand years packed into one breath.

  “I’ve lived too long. I’ve seen it all.” He paused, voice dropping to a desperate whine. “There are days even the sun annoys me.”

  “Have you tried counselling?” Reralt offered helpfully.

  Mary and Kenneth exchanged a glance.

  “I believe I ate my last shrink’s soul,” Kenneth admitted.

  Mary nodded. “A light snack at most.”

  They both laughed.

  Reralt didn’t get the joke.

  ***

  “Fine. You get the phylactery, I’ll use my powers to see where Syril is, then destroy it.”

  The voice still boomed, but the boredom and despair underneath were now impossible to miss.

  Mary nodded and was already halfway into the clutter room.

  Reralt lingered, shifting his weight like a man deciding between battle and brunch.

  “Come on, Reralt,” Mary called back. “You’ll probably trip over it within a minute.”

  “Yes, well… I can’t. This is basically helping with euthanising,” Reralt said, plopping onto the floor in theatrical defiance.

  “But I’m an evil lich,” Kenneth protested, his voice so thick with weary boredom it could barely hold the consonants together.

  “Oh please — you have Care Bears on your door.” Reralt jabbed a finger toward the entrance.

  Mary sighed. “So… we get the phylactery, you kill yourself?”

  Reralt considered it, then nodded and stood. “I can live with that.”

  “Ehh…” Kenneth hesitated. “I… can’t destroy it myself.”

  Mary threw her hands skyward. “For the sake of the gods!” Then, muttering, “Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll destroy the damned thing.”

  “You can’t,” Reralt said gravely. “Then you’re evil.”

  Kenneth looked, with a questionable look, as frowning was no longer possible.

  She made the universal shhh sound.

  Mary turned around, walked back and sat next to Reralt.

  “Where do you draw the line exactly?” Mary was determined to find a loophole.

  “It’s on a situational basis,” Reralt said without looking up.

  “So finding it will not be an objection? Then you decide after what to do?” Mary was trying to not speak to Reralt as she did when asking Syril a favor, a high childish voice. Apparently she couldn’t help it. The similarities invoked a sort of reflective speak pattern.

  ***

  So it was decided: first, find the damned thing — literally — then decide how to deal with it.

  Inside Kenneth’s chambers, the hoard sprawled across every surface. It was the kind of clutter only possible from someone who’d been alive for two thousand years and had never heard of bin day.

  Reralt examined each object like a museum curator on a scavenger hunt.

  “What’s this?” he asked, holding up a small statue of two men fighting.

  “A statue of two men fighting,” Kenneth’s magical voice replied.

  The actual Kenneth, seated in the doorway, only managed a “hunnggg… nugnnn…” — the most his bony jaw could produce without help.

  “Can I throw it out?” Mary asked after every item. She was fairly certain some pieces had already made repeat appearances. She was equally certain they had acquired entirely new meanings each time.

  “No. I sometimes look at it,” Kenneth’s voice said, clipped with mild annoyance.

  “When was the last time you looked at it?”

  “Time… has a different meaning at a certain age.”

  “But it’s broken,” Mary said, after giving it a test bounce on the floor.

  “You just broke it,” Kenneth replied, voice tinged with sudden sadness. “Now that’s the new memory of it. Definitely keep it.”

  “You have an issue, you know,” Mary said, gesturing at the room-sized hoard.

  “Me wanting to die?” Kenneth asked.

  “You have two issues,” Mary replied, sharper now.

  “How do you smell?” Reralt asked out of nowhere, clearly bored.

  “Multiple issues,” Mary said without missing a beat.

  Then, somehow, a fire started. Mary accidentally dropped a candle onto a pile of extremely flammable-looking things.

  Reralt, assuming it was intentional, tossed in his candle too.

  Mary smiled.

  Kenneth always smiled. His lips had receded fifteen hundred years ago.

  They stepped out of the room, which was blazing now, and looked at the lich who could cease to exist any moment.

  “How does this not count as an evil act?” Mary asked, annoyed.

  “Situational basis,” Reralt offered.

  “You were bored.”

  “That was the situation, yes.”

  Thirty minutes later, the whole room had burned out. Kenneth still sat on his throne.

  “Well, poop,” the voice said. “Apparently it wasn’t there.”

  The room to the left opened — an equal amount of boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling.

  Mary sighed. Reralt threw in a chandelier.

  “That was no accident,” Kenneth said, annoyed.

  “Oh, should it look like an accident?” Reralt asked Mary, who stood with one hand covering her eyes.

  That room burned out in equal time. Kenneth still sat on his throne.

  “Huh. Really misplaced it this time,” the voice said.

  Reralt picked up a glass ball from the ground. “What’s this? It didn’t burn.”

  “An eyeball. An older type. It’s set on finding plot holes.” Kenneth said with a throw away gesture.

  Reralt shook it.

  “If the lich is friendly, why doesn’t it give Syril’s location in the first place?” it said.

  Reralt and Mary looked at Kenneth.

  “Fine,” he said. “Before you burn down my other three rooms.”

  ***

  “Nice man,” Reralt said, waving goodbye to Kenneth the lich, who was debating whether to burn down the rest of his belongings in the hope his phylactery was among them.

  Kenneth waved back. His arm fell off. He immediately let out a deep, existentially tired sigh as flames began licking through the rooms.

  Mary looked at him, tipped her proverbial hat, and said something to Kenneth in a strange, old language.

  “No!” Reralt yelped.

  “What?”

  “That’s Parcel-speak,” he said, glancing nervously around. “Those lawyers will find you, no matter what realm you’re in.”

  “Oh, that’s right — we should call it Snake Speak or something.”

  “She takes all the best names.”

  “Except ‘Horse Crutches.’ That one was awful.”

  “Phylactery was taken, I think.”

  Reralt shook the plot hole ball again. “Once more for fun”, he proclaimed.

  “Where is the cat?” the ball said.

  “Meow!” The void just woke up on Reralts horse, completely unforgotten.

  Reralt threw away the ball, “useless thing”

  ***

  Kenneth looked at the charred remains of his stash.

  Two thousand years of collecting the realm’s most valuable or amusing objects — all reduced to ash.

  “Hmm. Apparently they do not spark joy,” he muttered, prodding the soot.

  “Still no trace of that damned thing.”

  No phylactery.

  He sighed an undead sigh. It made no sound, but several ribs rattled in sympathy.

  “I wanna go home.”

  A glow pulsed from the next chamber. Bright red, touched with blue.

  Music drifted through the mausoleum — first a whisper, as though the wind were humming to itself.

  Then louder. Clearer.

  ‘Closing time.

  You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…’

  Warmth flickered through Kenneth’s bones.

  “Finally.”

  He picked up his staff, pulled on his cape, and stepped outside.

  Behind him, the mausoleum door creaked shut for the last time.