I walk down the wrong hallway two, maybe three times, I’m so distracted with the aftershock images of the sheer broadness of all that I’ve witnessed. It’s kind of a big change to go from wondering about my boss’s lack of body to his one hell of a body.
Eventually, I go back to my temporary desk and bury myself in paperwork. The handful of times I would have normally poked my head into Soven’s office to deliver messages and remind him of appointments, I chicken out and talk the intern into dropping the messages off.
I think I spend the next few hours repeatedly burying my face in my hands, on and off. Every so often, my mind sneaks back to what I saw, and more importantly, what I’m not quite sure I saw. I don’t know what I expected to be in an immortal Lich’s lack of pants, but it wasn’t multiple appendages.
I need therapy to bury the image of my boss’s junk deep into the unused parts of my brain. Maybe hypnotherapy. I take an hour or so flitting around the HR department, looking for information to see if the employee health plan covers that.
The end of the work day nears, eventually. People gather up their cloaks and head out into the miasma, saying their goodnights.
“Working late?” Randall from accounting asks as he passes my temporary desk on his way out.
“Just catching up on some things,” I lie. I’ve been watching the hallway to the Dark Sanctum from my position like a hawk. Randall says something encouraging sounding on his way out, I don’t really catch it.
If the Dark Lord’s not going to fire me, maybe I’ll apologize for not knocking, and hope that puts an end to it. I can’t get any work done if I’m all wrapped up in my own embarrassment.
Eventually I summon the courage to approach the door, and then a few minutes later, knock, wait, and open it.
My gaze inches carefully around the room, and for some reason, I’m surprised to see him back in his cloak, a normal-sized floating specter once more, pouring over his spell books.
“Did you get my note to clear tomorrow’s appointments?” he asks without looking up.
“I—yes, the intern brought it by. I’ve rescheduled most of them,” I confirm.
“Very good.”
There’s a note of tired dismissal in his voice. When I hear that I usually ask if that will be all for tonight, and leave him to his experiments. But I don’t move. I can’t. I can’t just ignore what happened this morning.
I try to apologize. Those aren’t the words that happen, though.
“I--I was just checking in to see if you needed anything for your rituals before I left for the day, shivers or sneezes or whatever,” I blabber on, and nearly kick myself for doing so. Somehow saying that seemed less embarrassing than ‘Sorry I saw your dick, er, dicks, sir’.
The head of his cloak turns to look at me, as he straightens up. “…Well, nothing that’s set up for, currently. I’ve put all those rituals off until I can sort out this assassin issue.”
I nod. That makes sense.
At least things seem normal between us. Maybe nudity isn’t an issue when you’re undying. Maybe I can come into the office tomorrow and pretend it didn’t happen.
I’m on the precipice of leaving, when he turns his head back to his books, flipping through them.
“Actually, there is something that would be helpful,” he says, glancing back up. He lifts a heavy tome, flipping through pages of diagrams. “There is a spell that would help me locate how the assassins are getting in.”
I wait, fidgeting with my fingers behind my back as he scans page after page. I take a few steps further into the room, peering around. There’s broken glass on the floor by a window, newly boarded up.
He barely looks up as he says, “I need to trap the essence of a first kiss in this ritual field, so I can distill it down to the vulnerability of the act.”
A kiss. I’ve daydreamed a couple of times about standing on my toes and poking my face into that dark, seemingly empty cowl of his, to see if I could taste that darkness. I don’t know if that counts as thinking about kissing my boss, because I didn’t know he had a real, tangible mouth until this morning. And I wasn’t really preoccupied with the face part at all this morning, considering what else I saw.
“Well. I’ve never, uh, been first kissed, so,” I nod quickly, a touch too eagerly. Foot, mouth, thoroughly acquainted. I’m digging my own grave while standing in quicksand. I don’t think it matters at this point. “That works.”
Soven gestures with a wave of his black cloak to the shelves, and a number of vials float off the shelves to the ritual floor, starting the preparation.
Then I see his hands, his real hands, come out from within the cloak, moving to take it off. The hood turns to me, and I realize he wants me to turn around. I do so quickly, swallowing. If my heart rate picks up again at the thought of him out of that magic cloak again, well hopefully he can’t tell from across the room.
I wait, averting my eyes as he sheds the cloak again, and by the sound of it, finds some cloth to wrap around his lower half like a grand, draped towel. When I hear him prowling around the room freely, the weight of his footsteps approaching me, I take a deep breath and carefully lift my gaze.
A beast. A few years ago I never gave much thought to what a Lich was, but the powerful form before me begs as many new questions as it answers. The only one that presses on my tongue, however:does anyone else know?
His eyes are molten gold, and burning into me. I shiver with that feeling of slowly being exposed, layers of coverings peeled back until I’m nothing but my skin and my rapid pulse.