Every candle stub in the drowned chapel at Ewell Mere is burned down on one side only, the wax slumped toward the north wall as if the flames had been pulled by a draft that was never there. On the stone desk beside them lies a folded paper squared to the edge, and next to it a single copper penny. Neither has been moved since the first frost. Both have been straightened every night.
The lich is seen in autumn, and then only at the margins. A stooped, wedge-shaped figure, six feet two, narrowing to small feet, stands at the iron candelabra in a gray mourning robe gone to lace at the shoulders, its saffron hem frayed to threads. The skull is the color of old vellum. The jaw hangs from one hinge, pinned with twisted copper wire, and two emerald lights the size of lentils sit in the sockets. The hands are twice too large and knuckled like roots, with rings on every finger but one. A brass key hangs at the chest. In October it feeds on candle warmth alone, leaning over a flame until the flame leans back, and it leaves the wick cold and the wax unmelted but dull. Its one routine is petty and bloodless. Each night, before anything else, it squares the paper and sets the penny parallel to the desk's edge, and it will not begin feeding until both are right.
Deep winter changes its habits. Candles in the chapel are not enough, and the fields around Vane Hollow take the loss. Cattle in the lower byres stand with their heads low and will not chew. Milk yields drop by a third, and the cows' breath shows thin in the cold. Frost on the pasture lies in a pale strip from the chapel road to the byre doors, as though something had been dragged along it, though no feet marked it. The dairy families keep a household habit against this. At dusk they rub each cow's flank with cold hearth ash, so the animal smells already burned out, and they snuff every lamp with a wet thumb and forefinger instead of breath. Gideon Pask, who keeps eleven cows at Vane Hollow, hangs his byre latch a finger's width out of true on purpose, and says the lich spends half the night standing there correcting it.
The thaw sends it back down. By March the flooded stair under the low brick vault is running with meltwater, and the lich retreats to the black landing at its foot, where no cattle graze and no candles are carried. The cows recover within a fortnight. The ash goes back in the hearth. At Ewell Mere the stubs are relit by the first person brave enough, and they burn evenly for a few weeks, until the nights lengthen again. "It's tidy," a Vane Hollow milkmaid says, shutting a crooked gate. "I'll give it that."
- Classification
- Undead spellcaster
- Habitat
- Sealed vaults and drowned chapels
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 6 ft 2 in, stooped
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Calder Fens and Vane Hollow
- Binomial
- Sepulchrus cerivorus
- Diet
- Candle warmth and cattle vigor
- Temperament
- Patient, fussy, exacting