Steve had been rearranging popcorn buckets for the past hour. He wasn't even responsible for them, but the crooked logos staring back at him gnawed at his sanity.
He aligned one bucket, then another. Perfect. Almost. His right eye twitched. That one on the end—slightly off. Unacceptable.
Steve wasn't the supervisor of this cinema because he was talented or clever. He was the supervisor because his OCD left him incapable of leaving a task unfinished. He would die before letting a shelf stay crooked.
Apparently, today would test that.
A teenager snatched a candy bar from the shelf and bolted for the door. Steve's head snapped toward the gap in the display. His stomach clenched. Empty space. Misaligned rows. Chaos.
His OCD screamed louder than common sense.
"Hey!" Steve lurched forward, chasing the boy. His run was ridiculous to any onlooker—high knees, stiff steps, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement as if they might bite him.
He didn't see the truck.
The impact threw him forward, and the world went black. His last thought was not about life, or regrets, or heaven. It was: "I didn't finish the popcorn buckets."
---
Light returned.
The first thing Steve saw wasn't popcorn or pavement, but a battlefield ripped from a fantasy novel. A dark-skinned half-elf staggered nearby, sword flashing as he cut into something unseen, his armor smeared with blood and ash.
Steve blinked, dazed. "What—where—?"
He lifted his right hand instinctively, but froze. There was no hand. From the elbow down, only white bone remained, faintly glowing, knitting itself together with tendrils of pale energy.
A bone arm.
Steve's stomach turned. He wasn't breathing. He wasn't alive.
And yet—he was standing.
Steve blinked rapidly, trying to steady himself. The battlefield was gone. Now he stood in a laboratory—dusty shelves, glass containers, scattered scrolls. It was a place he had never set foot in, yet some part of him insisted it was familiar.
His soul fire flickered, twitching like an eyelid he couldn't stop.
Then the memories struck. Not his memories. Fragments burned into his mind like ink spilled across paper.
Sum'gial, the Lich of Death.
Phylactery under attack.
A backup ritual, simple in design: summon a random soul to take the damage instead.
Steve staggered, gripping the table beside him. He could see it—the ritual circle, the desperate safeguards, the logic behind it all.
Only it hadn't gone the way Sum'gial intended.
The phylactery had already been shattered beyond repair when Steve's soul was yanked from the void. Instead of protecting the lich, the spell collapsed, fusing what remained of Sum'gial's essence into him. His own battered soul had been stitched together with scraps of lich-soul like a badly patched quilt.
Steve clenched his jaw. His thoughts were no longer just his own. Pages of necromantic theory and memories of endless death magic fluttered inside his mind like a library thrown into a hurricane. None of it was ordered. None of it was clean.
He wanted to scream. Or sort. Preferably short.
Slowly, he straightened, his bony fingers brushing dust from the nearest table. He looked around the ruined laboratory, heart—no, soul fire—twitching harder.
"How long," he muttered to himself, "would it take me to put all of this… in order?"
The soul fire flickered again, as if laughing at him.
Jacob.
Born of Sum'gial's folly—an "experiment" with an unfortunate adventurer. The lich hadn't had the heart to kill him, but he hadn't let him live in peace either. Every time Jacob built a life, Sum'gial's shadow tore it down.
His mother, gone.
His wife, gone.
The town that once accepted him, burned.
Friends, family, chance at peace—all sacrificed to the lich's endless games.
Steve's soul fire twitched violently. Bless his rotten bones, Sum'gial left me with a walking tragedy to deal with. He wanted to slap the old lich to death all over again.
Rummaging through the foreign memories, he made a quick decision. Best to wear the mask. The gods in this world were real, and they wouldn't look kindly on some alien soul wandering around in a lich's skin.
"Fine," Steve muttered. "I'll be Sum'gial. For now."
The real problem, though, wasn't Jacob or even the gods. It was alignment. The original Sum'gial had been chaotic to his core, and now the soul fire inside Steve twitched nonstop, like an itch he couldn't scratch. He decided to blame it on the botched summoning magic that had dragged him here.
Clapping his newly regenerated hands, he summoned two skeleton soldiers from the lower levels of the tower. They shambled in, bowed, and immediately began walking in clumsy, uneven steps.
Steve's eye twitched with his soul fire. "Straight lines. Left foot, right foot. For the love of undeath…" He pinched his bony nose. "Take Jacob to the dungeon. And keep him alive. He's… family, I guess."
With that handled, Steve turned to the true horror of the room: the laboratory. Cluttered jars, mislabeled specimens, books stacked like drunken towers, scrolls thrown at random—utter chaos. His fingers flexed.
"This won't do."
He began putting things in order, muttering under his breath. A lich's knowledge of necromancy sat heavy in his mind, yet what truly burned was the mess.
Somewhere below, the Underdeep stirred with the hatred of drow, duergar, and brain flayers. But up here in his tower, Steve—Sum'gial—started humming tunelessly as he sorted jars by size.
The soul fire flickered.
And twitched.
And twitched.
Jacob POV
Oh, Death.
The song drifted through the cold stone. Jacob opened his eyes, half-conscious, half-resigned. His father was singing again.
Another failure. Another defeat. A half century of them, stacked like corpses in his memory.
Oh, Death.
It had been Jacob himself who pushed his father toward lichdom, who had once sought him out, thinking knowledge was power. If he had known what would come of it, he would have walked away.
His mother had died long ago. His lovers—cut down, one by one, by the lich's hand. The town that accepted his half-drow blood? Burned. His only son—hidden away in the Northern Rose, far from this cursed entanglement.
He was 127 years old, and he had nothing left but his sword and his hatred. Both had failed him again.
Won't you spare me over another year?
But there would be no sparing. Not from his father. Not from death.
Jacob closed his eyes and listened to the song, deciding—at last—to let go.
Sum'gial POV
Steve—no, Sum'gial—placed the final jar on the shelf. Alphabetical. Symmetrical. Perfect. His soul fire still twitched, but at least the specimens were in order.
Next would be the library. That would take half a year, maybe more. Thousands of books, most of them crammed haphazardly onto shelves by the old lich's chaotic whims.
The lands themselves were no better. Perfectly placed—wedged between the underdeep and the surface world—but cursed with enemies on every side. Drow assassins came once a decade, Guerdar miners sabotaged his tunnels, and surface merchants avoided his territory like plague.
A mess. Everything was a mess.
Still, before any of that, he had to deal with household problems. His eyes narrowed, soul fire flickering as he thought of Jacob.
"Stupid son," he muttered, arranging scrolls by length. "And even stupider if he thinks he acted alone."
Note: "O death" verses famously sung by Jen Titus is from a folk song, I used these verses to set the mood of Jacob.