A lesser mind might have begun panicking, or babbling with questions. But the mind of a lich, even in this thrice-cursed—No, let’s make it quadra-cursed. It’s been long enough—body, was not some piddly thing of weak flesh and weaker emotions. It was an instrument, honed by years of death and powered by fell necromantic energies that allowed it to operate faster, with more clarity, and most importantly, without the need to jump immediately to conclusions.

Araxes took time to look around before responding to what was clearly some form of Elder Being trapped within the circle. The place was a dingy gray, with gray uniform floors and gray uniform walls and that afore-mentioned door—Not gray, surprisingly, but a rather warm shade of weathered oak—set in midair. Overhead was gray as well, flat and unchanging. If one wished to construct a religious limbo and hired to design it the single most bland man who had ever lived, out of raw blandium from the elemental plane of blandness, this was what that limbo would look like.

It was almost beautiful, in a bland kind of way.

Only when he was satisfied that there was no immediate danger from the room itself did Araxes finally turn back to the occupant. Emaciated to the point of skeletal. Hairless, withered, covered in runes and sigils that glowed and pulsed in time to the pulsing of the magic circle. Madness glowed in his eyes even brighter than the magic that held him bound, and that mad gaze was fastened on Araxes like the grip of a drowning man on a rope.

“You are what Tolliver would not speak about when he returned from this place,” Araxes said without preamble, his finely-tuned mind making that determination rather easily.

“If Tolliver is the mortal who showed up here twenty-three thousand years ago, then yes!” The ancient thing—Araxes could not bring himself to label it a person just yet—said in a voice that sounded like parchment crumbling to dust and cackling as it did so.

“It was a bare week ago, if that,” Araxes replied, watching the creature closely. “Time appears to be functioning as normal here, so I must conclude that it is your mind that has broken, unless of course you are merely using hyperbole.”

“A day, a year, a millenia, a squirrel, they are all the same,” the creature said in that sing-song voice. “One becomes the next becomes the last becomes something else entirely!”

The creature was knelt on the floor, his hands shackled by magic, his legs immobilized by mana energies. Araxes edged forward, eyeflames looking the creature up and down, silently cataloging every inch of its flesh, and the symbols carved there, storing them away in the perfect memory death had granted him.

“You are obviously ancient,” the lich said finally, starting to walk a circuit around the creature. The runes continued over every inch of its naked form.

“I am obviously ancient,” the creature repeated in a mocking voice.

“Beyond even myself,” Araxes continued both speaking and pacing. “Possibly beyond anything in this world. Age hangs off of you like gravity hangs off of a planet. And clearly someone of power has decreed you dangerous.”

“Oh, I’m not dangerous,” the sing-song voice came back. “Haven’t been in fifty-three thousand years. Used to be. Not anymore though. Runes got me for that. See? Aren’t they pretty?”

“I recognize perhaps a single percent of the runes engraved into your flesh and the floor upon which you are bound,” Araxes said, stopping behind the creature, out of its sight range. It did not turn its head to look at him. Perhaps it could not?

“And,” he continued, “they are powerful enough to strip the enamel from my teeth at a hundred paces. Which suggests that all of them, the hundreds and thousands of sigils placed here, are of similar power. And if that is true, then what has bound you here is powerful enough to wield the raw Essence of the world itself, because no mage in history could ever have hoped to wield a fraction of this power. Not if he—or she, let us not shirk the bounds of equality of the sexes—wished to remain a coherent entity and not dissolve into a handful of disoriented sub-atomic matter.”

“You talk a lot.”

The creature’s voice changed. Became deeper, lost the sing-song quality, and…”

The madness was gone.

Araxes slowly stepped around until he was in front of the… Man. And it was a man. Now. It hadn’t been before.

Interesting.

“You convinced Tolliver you were insane, didn’t you?” Araxes said, looking at eyes that were clear and blue and utterly calculating. Had he still been alive, he would have been terrified of those eyes. In death, they were merely unsettling.

Which, let us face it, is still a rather unique experience in my existence. He was rather enjoying it.

“I did.” The voice was calm and clear and had a subtle harmonic to it that he doubted Tolliver’s fleshbag ears had detected, but which his own finely-honed necromantic-powered hearing had no trouble discerning.

“You may cease trying to unnerve me through auditory manipulations,” Araxes said, enjoying this strange game. “They might have been effective had I not detected them, but now that I am aware, they are merely an annoyance.”

The man blinked. “Well now. That is different. They warned me the lich class would be too overpowered.” A grin that showed a mouthful of cracked, black, and broken teeth flashed across that skeletal face. “But I just couldn’t resist.”

Click. A puzzle piece dropped into place inside Araxes’ mind, and the feeling of unease suddenly jumped up to something approaching healthy fear. Marvelous! It had been centuries since he’d felt something like that! The day that clumsy paladin had almost discovered his phylactery’s resting place, come to think of it.

“You are a creator. One of those creatures Tolliver and his ovoid harem keeps mentioning.”

“I am.”

Araxes glanced upwards at the bland gray ceiling. “Am I correct in assuming this place, this limbo, is not monitored by those who imprisoned you here?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Simple deduction. I know there exist beings powerful enough to imprison you, and I know that Tolliver has managed to become embroiled in some form of warfare against those creatures. He has been here before. I suspect that if those entities realized this fact, they would be much, much more interested in wiping him from the face of the earth. He still exists, therefore I suspect they do not know about his visit here.”

“A fair assessment.” The harmonics had shifted, so something even subtler, something even more off-putting. This time, Araxes found himself wondering if the creature was even aware of what it was doing.

The creature grinned again, and his head moved fractionally forward. “I could scream for help, you know. Bring them here. They’d destroy you. You, your strange unlife. Even the Last’s power couldn’t hold you here if they decided to put their power to it. Would you like that? Be erased from existence? Let that other you be the only you?”

Araxes froze. “How did you know about that?”

“Simple deduction.” The man’s voice echoed his previous statement perfectly, right down to the inflection. “Lich classes rise with power. Aura of death, immunities, all sorts of things. I haven’t felt the aura, which means you don’t have it. Which is impossible, unless you’ve somehow been removed from the Essence and copied through a glitch that someone forgot to fucking patch Marlin you asshole!”

Araxes forced himself not to jump in surprise as the man’s calm quiet voice became an enraged scream.

“Apologies. Seventy thousand years of solitary will have an effect even on a mind like mine. As I was saying. You are a glitch. One that has not occurred before but that was theoretically possible. Warned ‘em. Never listened to me. So. Want to stop being a glitch? I can scream for help, you know.”

It was the strangest offer he’d ever been handed, up to and including that one time a pair of rather voluptuous young minotaur women had asked him if he wanted a ‘special milkshake’. And for a moment, he found himself actually considering it.

But one does not grasp the immortality of necromantic lichdom simply to give it away when faced with the creator of reality.

“Thank you, no,” Araxes said as if declining a second cup of tea. “Maddening as this strange life is, I find it preferable to the alternative.” He paused for a moment, then tilted his head and regarded his strange host.

“I heard a voice once,” he said slowly. “It apologized to me. Well, to Tolliver I suppose, but I was in the room and the speaker was a recorded message from a man long dead, so I assume he was addressing anyone who could hear him. He apologized for losing a war, for failing to keep the system from being put in place. This would have happened eons ago, so long that no one living today remembers anyone who remembers anyone to the tenth degree who remembers anything about that day. And here are you, bound by magics I do not recognize, in a room outside of time, claiming to be not only from that time but familiar enough with the system to recognize a glitch in its workings. You are a creator, and yet you are imprisoned here.”

“Seems like it could be true,” the man said with an amiable nod. “Is there a question there somewhere?”

“Why are you imprisoned?”

“Oh, psh, that’s simple,” the man snorted. “Because I lost the war.”

Araxes blinked. “You are lying. The creators, who you admit to being, won the war that set the system in place. Unless, you were working for the other side?”

“Nope!” Cracked teeth peeked out from a mad grin. “Nope nope nope, we won that war. Beat the others who tried to stop us, killed ‘em all, put the System in place just like Estrella wanted.”

Araxes frowned, brought up a finger, opened his mouth, but was interrupted by a high keening laugh like a hyena who’d just heard the best joke of its life.

“You’re gonna ask it again, aren’t you? Why’m I here if we won the war? Well, stupid, it’s very simple.

“Who ever said there was only one war?”