A Bored Lich

The demon crumpled to the ground, the life leaving its wide eyes. Frey chopped off its head for good measure. The hundreds of bugs swarming about the area fell down dead.

Frey spat on its corpse. "That\'s for Thomas." He turned to see Doevm kneeling next to Thomas. "That\'s right…Thomas." As he shambled over, a burst of golden light lit up the chamber, and Thomas\'s severed limbs were reattached. Frey plopped down. While he could handle the venom, he wasn\'t completely immune. He couldn\'t even feel the pain his body was in. "Doevm, what\'s happening?"

"I have magic," Doevm shrugged. "So I just brought him back from the brink of death. Thomas was not actually deceased. Everything\'s ok." Thomas opened his eyes, sat up, and coughed. He tried to back away but Doevm held him in place.

"What\'s happening? I was just fighting Gregen and-" Thomas gasped.

"Everything\'s ok," Doevm reassured him. "Believe in me. You do not want to know what occurred. Frey, can I ask you to carry Thomas? I am a bit woozy."

Frey scrunched up his eyebrows. "You guys are talking weird but ok," Before Thomas could object, he was slung over Frey\'s back. "What do you remember?" Frey asked over his shoulder, more out of curiosity than anything else. The three started back down the passageway.

"Not much," Thomas held his head. "Just…cold. I remember that it was extremely cold and wet and gross." Frey raised an eyebrow. "Really gross sweat." Thomas pushed himself off Frey and looked down at his wet clothes. "Disgusting human sweat." Frey and Doevm chuckled. Thomas looked over at the demon\'s corpse. "So you had to murder him?"

"I will inform you at another day," Doevm said as he pushed Thomas towards the entrance. "Frey, you led the way." Frey felt their eyes at the back of his neck, where his hairs rose up. They traveled out of the passageway, stepped over Trak\'s unconscious body, and were met with dozens of unconscious men after stepping out of the cave.

Elero whipped around and raised her blade but relaxed upon finding that it was them. "Hello Frey, Doevm, and Thomas." She let out a long sigh and the life essence left in her legs disappeared. She walked over to them and pat Thomas on the shoulder. "I beat these people until they were rendered unconscious. It is good that you guys were able to take Thomas from them. Everything\'s ok. Let us depart. My eyes grow tired." Thomas\'s jaw dropped upon seeing the wreckage.

"It was all Doevm\'s plan," Frey said as he looked up at the sun, which was slowly falling behind the distant mountains, eager to rest. "Doevm, you never cease to amaze me. So, will you hold up your end of the deal?"

"What deal?" He heard Thomas say. "Did you make a promise with him before the fight. Now that everything\'s ok, enlighten me as to the conditions of that promise."

Frey rubbed his cold hands together as the sun\'s last warm rays vanished and found that he was in a cold sweat. "Doevm made me a promise," he said as the song of a blade in its sheath met his ears.

\'That\'s probably Elero sheathing her blade,\' he thought. He glanced back to find that Elero had indeed sheathed her blade. \'What am I worrying about? Thomas is alive. Everything\'s fine, like Doevm said. Come to think of it, they\'ve all been saying that. I\'m sure it\'s fine.\'

"What was the promise?" Thomas insisted.

"Doevm will tell me something by the end of initiation. Since he only made that bet with me, both you and Elero should step back." He smiled, a long-buried curiosity rising to the surface.

"No," Doevm said. "It doesn\'t matter." Red aura sprouted out of him, reached over to Elero, and snapped her neck. Frey took a step back, thousands of thoughts and questions paralyzing him. Doevm pulled out his spear and drove it through Thomas\'s chest. Thomas let out a blood curdling cry.

"You\'re too loud." Doevm yanked out the spear and stabbed through Thomas\'s heart.

Frey forced himself to move, to do anything but his own body wouldn\'t listen to him. His body shrunk down to the size of a child. "W-what\'s happening?" He pinched himself. This was real. His brain came to a full stop. All reason flew out the window.

"Don\'t worry," Doevm said as he took a step towards the child-sized Frey and stretched out a hand covered in their comrades\' blood. "I\'ll explain later. You just need to trust me, just how you trusted your father." He took another step forward and morphing into a man with blue eyes and a bloody kitchen knife.

"F-Father?" Frey took a step back, tripped on something, and tumbling to the ground. When he looked down, it was Gwen and Arte, their corpses covered in lacerations.

"You trusted your father and I betrayed you," the man he once called father said.

Gwen\'s eyes, devoid of life, moved to Frey. She wrapped a cold hand wrapped around his ankle: "Stay and protect me Frey." The father bent down and severed the hand, causing her to roll around while screaming for Frey to protect her.

"She manipulated you just like I did," Frey\'s father cackled. The moon rose up in the night sky, turning him into a silhouette with bright red eyes.

"What\'s going on?" Frey blurted out. "Why are you here?"

"I never left," Frey\'s father said, his form changing back to Doevm. "People like me always exist. They always manipulate."

"But Gwen didn\'t manipulate me!" Frey screeched, his head getting fuzzier by the second. "She cares for me!" He kept screaming and fumbling over his words. "She\'s the only family I have left."

"Remember the war, when you were gone for a year?" Doevm sunk his dagger into Gwen\'s skull and she went limp. "In that year she got healed, got in a relationship, and had a child. Doesn\'t that strike you as odd?" Doevm stepped closer and Frey fell back. He tried to lift himself up or grab his weapon but his spatial ring wasn\'t on his small fingers anymore.

"A few weeks is all it took for her to spread her legs." Doevm continued and kicked her in the stomach. "She needed someone else to manipulate. She replaced you. You returned and she demanded that you protect her, that you stay with her even though you were already dead in her eyes. You were blind. The second you were free of her grasp however, that allowed someone else to manipulate you, me." Doevm pointed to himself by shoving his finger in his eye. "You were such a good dog," he twisted the finger around. "but you just had to bite your master." He lifted Frey up by his neck.

"And now, you mutt, you have outgrown your usefulness to me. You will be replaced. All trust leads to is getting stabbed in the back." Frey struggled, flailed, kicked, punched, and called upon his life essence but nothing worked. "But I\'ll give you a chance to end this cycle." Doevm threw him back to the ground and shoved a knife into his hands. "Kill me."

"What?"

"Kill me before I stab you in the back." A wide smile stretched across Doevm\'s face. "Kill me and you won\'t be manipulated by people. Prove that you are more than what people think of you. I\'ll even reset everything." Doevm snapped his fingers and Frey found himself in the passageway again. "Don\'t mess this up."