Excerpt: Swords against the Dark

A sound like a thousand whispers grew beneath the din, slowly overwhelming it. With the noise grew a bone-deep cold, horribly alien on this night so near midsummer. Abruptly, the clamor of battle was split by a resounding CRACK!
The living combatants froze, paralyzed by the dark spell. A word in some dead tongue caused the undead to pull back from their victims, though the near-mindless creatures still stared with hungry eagerness at their prey. They could not, perhaps, gain any benefit from consuming food, but some instincts were both deeply embedded in the soul and useful for one controlling a horde.
The shaman was the first to see Kalmar as he walked into the village. A head shorter than the orc, long limbed, clad in fine robes of black and purple. What flesh could be seen was dead and flaking, here and there a patch of rot. Where eyes should have been there seemed to be two burning coals. The lich stopped at the edge of the crowd, surveyed the scene before him.
Dead lips pulled into a smile. “Did you really think I would not learn of your little excursion,” he asked rhetorically, voice a quiet rasp. “Foolish mortals.” He started moving again, towards the hut's door. “I would be a poor conqueror if I did not gather secrets and tales.”
Kalmar had to duck slightly to get inside the hut. Within, several women were clustered around the young mother, her husband stood ahead of them, clutching a length of firewood. “Such noble sentiment! Protecting your firstborn and your beloved so boldly.” He gazed into the frozen man's eyes, saw defiance still within them. “You have spark, lad. I'll grant you that. And a swift death.” A hand clad in desiccated flesh closed around the peasant's bare arm. A sickly glow spread from the lich's touch, and the man began to whither away, seeming to age sixty years in perhaps a dozen seconds. Kalmar released the man's arm, and the spell upon him as well. The man dropped like a puppet with cut strings, moaning in pain on the dirt floor as his heart began to fail from the necromantic assault.
The lich took a moment to savor the sheer, nigh-elemental terror in the mother's eyes before he tugged the newborn out of her frozen grasp. Oh! Such power! Even newly born and held captive by his spell, the sheer holy power contained in the child was obvious. Kalmar felt something almost like a rash begin to spread on the flesh of his hands as he walked outside, absently releasing his spell on the child.
Under the light of the Tear of the Gods, the infant boy's birthmark glowed like a star. “Oh, you truly are touched by the gods, little one,” the lich said, holding the child up. “Destined for great things and all that rot. If this lot had their way, you probably would be a mighty danger to me some day.” The god-touched child seemed almost calm as it looked at him, its only sound a faint wimper. “I'll admit, part of me wants to let you live, and see just what you can do. By the time you grow up, I suspect I'll have conquered the world, or at least most of it. Things would be boring.” A wider smile. “Unlife can be so dull, you know. Unchanging, unageing.. one must find something to keep oneself occupied, else why bother to make myself like this in the first place?”
The feeling in his palms was almost painful now. Kalmar adjusted his grip upon the child. “Ah, but I'm woolgathering again. Nasty habit that. It will be best, I think, if I just killed you now. Please understand, little one, that this is nothing personal. Just business.”
The lich's fingers closed around the child's neck, snapping its spine and crushing its throat in a single motion. The energy blazing within the child seemed to flicker for a moment, then went out. The lich absently threw the infant's body to a nearby ghoul. “Eat up, my minions. We've little time to loiter.”