Voted Best Lich In Show

You can figure out from records that they held the position for a while on their own, at least a few decades or more, but then they just drop off the map. And nobody looks for them. There is a bit of a scramble to manage the order of things in their absence, but it’s kept pretty hush-hush. So the pot slowly simmers, the whole culture being brought to a boil without ever noticing.

It’s unprecedented. And because you’re supposed to mind your own business, you do! But I didn’t have that kind of preoccupation- much to the chagrin of Widgelbar- and, admittedly, I was in a bit of a mood at the time. Maybe I still am! Ha ha.

I went nosing about. Most people don’t sift through public records unless they’re some stuffy official, and they’re usually looking for more useful information than building a personality profile on some forgotten royal. What little I did find painted only a vague portrait, of course, but had some interesting implications.

It seemed they had a drastic shift in character from pre to post-calamity. Maybe it was just from them being given too much power or freedom, but it was a rather sudden change. Records of extravagant dinner orgies, wine by the gallon, some telling notes from regulators left in frustration at having to manage most of the actual paper work- and especially frustration at constantly having to push for heirs.

As a ∎∎∎, I could brush this off. Some personal flaw, misplacement, maybe just the way they were wired. And I would be inclined to! There’s this way we’re meant to view the calamity from a historical standpoint- that is, not at all. It wasn’t hugely impactful, it was a blip, an error, and it’s in the past along with Earth. That world itself is never acknowledged anymore unless you’re REALLY in deep. It’s not entirely taboo to discuss, you won’t get in trouble by some ‘data-scrubber’ like some off-world conspiracists would believe, but it’s considered so irrelevant that bringing it up at all makes YOU look like the conspiracy nut.

It was just some meaningless mistake that everyone has forgotten about. But in learning of this sole survivor, I had this spark in my head. Evidence to the contrary.

Of course, I had other motives. I was selfish, having identity issues, you know the drill. Maybe I latched on to Kellman- the idea of them, at least- and felt moved by kinship, separated by centuries.

So I made up my mind to see it for myself. 

There’s no reason to get into the details of my first walk on Earth, so pay no mind to my skipping around. The only important parts are what I’m already telling you.

It’s a beautiful, ruined place. It’s vast, scarred, colorful, sick, so very sick. It’s alive, but in a patchwork form. There are deep wounds in the land, sky, even deep in the oceans. And there’s humans! They’re unimaginable!

They are born without purpose- what and who they are is incidental. They die without reason constantly, randomly, and so often unfairly, hated or loved as they were. An entire other world of people, struggling yet surviving, so different from us! It was so shocking for me at the time, when I finally came back ‘home’ I became wracked with fever and mania. The whole thing was both devastating and breathtakingly wonderful.

And I wondered to myself, watching this world pass me by, how could we forget something like this? How could we do something so terrible and then leave it behind just as callously? It’s not like us to abandon anything of this magnitude, is it?

Then, I started to notice them. I thought at first the transfer between worlds had taken a much harder toll on- at the time, you should know, just at the time- my frail body and clearly unwell mind.

But, no, there they were.

They weren’t hiding, none of them tried to shrink away from human contact. In fact, they were all out in the open- multiple different kinds, many covered in bright and flashy plumage, chattering amongst each other and occasionally getting into scuffles with lone humans for their food.

Now, you should know, there weren’t any ∎∎∎ armies. Not during the calamity, not even before or after. There’s no such thing as a ∎∎∎ “soldier”- the conflict between humanity and ∎∎∎ during the calamity was fought on a personal basis, a small group of individuals taking it upon themselves to deliver… discipline upon the people of Earth. 

Nobody would have been “left behind” to repopulate or colonize the place. That wasn’t the point of the conflict at all, and from what I could tell something that was never even considered. So who the fuck were these clowns? Why were there so many of them?

Why did so many of them look identical?

The longer I watched, the more apparent their strangeness became. They would gather in flocks comprised of near indistinguishable individuals, never interacting with ∎∎∎ outside of their specific form- save for myself, but I’ll get to it. These groups each had unique and pointless habits they would perform throughout the day like ritual, and when not conversing or acting they would make bizarre sounds to, perhaps, call out to one another.

Then there were their bodies. At a glance they seemed quite standard, but then they would fold out- they stood exclusively on two legs, switching between a squat and compressed posture that flattened the limbs against the torso to a straight and humanoid form. They even emoted in human ways, speaking their languages with the same affectations and accents. 

When I felt bold enough to approach one of them, I tried several common greetings from the original world. They understood none of them, but even when I finally tried a local human greeting they only expressed further confusion. They weren’t angry or hateful, but genuinely baffled that I would approach them at all. 

… Damn, what was their name again? Think it was Crowley, or something similar. Wasn’t a crow. Actually, wasn’t a “they” either, but that can wait. Really hate going on tangents, you know? Ha, it’s a bad habit.

Anyway, Crowley, they were nice enough. They could get about as good a read on me as I could on them, but things turned out alright. I was rude at the time, so I just asked flat out why them and their buddies all looked the same. They said they were a cormorant morph, I said I didn’t know what that meant, and they said they didn’t know either but it was the way things were. We actually laughed about that. 

They asked me why I came up and spoke to them. I explained I was from the other place and I wasn’t expecting to see any other ∎∎∎ here, to which they said they don’t know what that means either but it also wasn’t what they were trying to ask me. What Crowley had actually meant was ‘Why are you, completely different from me, suddenly barging into my little bubble?’. I wasn’t a cormorant morph, so I shouldn’t have felt inclined to reach out to them- and they shouldn’t have felt inclined to respond. 

So neither of us knew what the other was doing or how, and we didn’t know how to navigate from there. And again, I was rude, I was nosy, I didn’t like not understanding things. Find me someone who does. I took a closer look at them and hoped they would be too distracted to notice.

Turned out, I didn’t need to even try being discreet about it. I realized pretty fast that not only were they unable to register my magic, they couldn’t even use it themselves.

Which was interesting, seeing how they were under a constantly burning spell. It wasn’t even hard to see once I looked out of frame- it was like a living cage they had grown into.

Do you know what recursion is?

Essentially, when you’re designing the outcome of another living thing- say, a child that is yet to be born- you can instate specific instructions through spell-casting. This can be used to influence personality inclinations, physical or mental specialization, cosmetic features- with some skilled enough magic, you can get right down into the nitty-gritty of altering genetic information. It’s basically how all ∎∎∎ are born.

I said basically, not literally. Yeah, I know, I know.

Now, that’s a lot of freedom of choice. But there’s a few caveats, and the most major one is this: whatever child you make, when they mature? They also get that freedom. You cannot instate instructions that make it so the child copies its exact code to pass to the next one, which retains the same instructions and does the same thing, and so on and so forth. That’s the basics of recursion, an immensely serious offense in the ∎∎∎ monoculture.

Every single Earth ∎∎∎ is recursive. It’s not by accident, it wasn’t a simple mistake that was copied across the differing morph spells. It has multiple safeguards specifically to protect the recursion process. Crowley only interacting with other cormorants? That’s because of the safeguards to prevent dilution of code in offspring- being made oblivious to other morphs entirely.

On its own, it’s already absurd. But what made it even more ridiculous? Just how advanced these spells are. They’re also insanely messy. A terrific combination, as I’m sure you can guess. 

These people live tangled in bundles of strangling wire without ever even knowing. They can’t see that there’s something squeezing their brains like a fucking mold press, the spell suppresses magic usage or perception so they can’t meddle with their own code! They’re all moving around like happy idiots, nothing but shapes with mouths, and they were never allowed to know better.

… No, I thought the same thing at one point. Ahhh, it’s nothing. It’s just half an existence, at least from out here. But it’s the same for Earth as a whole. I’m going on too long about just one thing, I might sound like Widge! You should have heard them the other day, it’s like they-

Aha. Anyway, anyway, what I mean is I lingered a bit on that one. Let me pick up the pace here.

A while later I was able to figure out that the different ‘morphs’ of ∎∎∎- called “Lesser Demon” by locals of the area I was looking for documentation in- were also strangely similar to something other than each other. Pre-calamity Earth had much more native wildlife, though multiple extinction events had wiped the majority of them. The conflict was just what sealed the fate for what little diversity it had left- did you know they used to have big watery things called whales?

Well, turns out, one of those decimated branches of life were the “birds”- creatures with beak-mouths and wings, covered in plumage. Only a few species seemed to have persevered through the calamity, mostly domesticated species I think. But looking into what once was, wouldn’t you know it- these ∎∎∎ were perfect matches in description to these extinct animals!

How damn peculiar! A cormorant, it was a kind of, ah, semi-aquatic flying bird? They would hunt for “fish” by diving, and would sun themselves on beach dock posts.

Well, Crowley tried diving and catching fish. But they weren’t a good swimmer, and there weren’t any fish for miles around. So they’d just randomly fall into the water, come up with a bit of trash, and go back to whatever they were doing- which was usually nothing at all. 

What I’m getting at is that someone made these ∎∎∎ to imitate pre-calamity life. Maybe as a bitter mockery of the humans that had taken something so important to their way of life, or to attempt making up for the damage caused by their greater power in the conflict. I never found enough on Kellman to say definitively which it is, but neither one is pleasant to consider.

Yes. I’m sure. The timelines match up pretty cleanly; Kellman vanished from the official records, and around the same time was the first documented sightings of Lesser Demons. It’s a terrible enough crime to be committed by someone in that position of power, let alone the kind of person Kellman was, so it makes sense the ones handling affairs would just want them to disappear entirely. And if all the recursive children are confined to Earth while that’s dealt with, then you just take the easy way out and act like Earth isn’t worth yours or anyone’s time.

But that’s where I take real issue, right? I think it is worth their time. I think there’s a lot of responsibility not being taken, no accountability. And maybe I sound crazy for it, but I think things are only going to get worse the longer nobody fucking does anything.

… See, I don’t want to talk to them about it. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it, truthfully, but you’re at least… you’re not a part of it. You know? As in, I mean- as in you aren’t part of some larger campaign of ignorance or all that. There’s 🝑 out there too, but I don’t think they’re involved in anything.