Overview
The Spell-Carry Lich is the lean, quick shape of the anchor-line — thin through the ribcage, long through the hand, the head a little high on the body, and the whole of it reading as one low line from crown to toe, built to move where the anchor-line runs and to spend one word the size of a promise. It is the second of the Liches a stranger meets in The Bone Ossuary, and the one the ossuary keeps for the part of the ossuary the Ossuary-Sense lich will not cross.
Habitat
The Spell-Carry Lich keeps the deep ground of The Bone Ossuary, the chambers below the anchor-wall where the soul-light runs old and the phosphorescence is thinnest. It needs three things: an ossuary old enough to hold the carry, an anchor-line long enough to spend the word, and a soul that is being kept by the Ossuary-Sense line. The young liches are set into the deep chambers, where the dark is oldest, and they learn to carry before they learn to stand, because the carry is the only mother the ossuary has.
Appearance
Males stand 1.78 m, lean through the ribcage, with the hand longer than the mortal ideal; females stand 1.65 m, quicker still, with a longer memory of the anchor. The hide is a pale bone-cream, the cream of the deep ossuary, with a faint sea-black wash along the spine that shows in the dark like a seam of old bone, and the distinguishing mark is the carry-mark, a wash of true black at the throat, the black being the spell made hide, and the depth of the black is the length of the carry.
Behaviour
The Spell-Carry Lich moves fast and certain, 8 m/s along the anchor-line, and it does not make a sound the dark cannot carry. It reads the ossuary before it moves in it: the shape of an anchor by the bone it stirs, the cold of a stranger by the air that goes wrong around them, the fall of a soul that has been spoken and not kept, all of it arriving before the step is made. It is patient in a different way from the Ossuary-Sense lich, patient in the way a held word is patient, and it will hold a spell in the ossuary for hours before spending the word, because a word spent in the ossuary is a word no one can see being spent.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The weapon is the spell, and the spell is the promise: the Spell-Carry lich carries one word, and the word does not come back until the carry is spent, and the word is the last word of the ossuary. The second weapon is the hand, because the spell is not always the word, and the hand that is a little too long for the body is the word the spell is too quiet for.
Magic Alignment
The Spell-Carry Lich stands in the service of Khorvane, the Endless Hunger, the god of the ripening as law, and its magic is the carrying of the spell — the power to make the spell into a thing the bone holds and the holding into a word. Spell-Carry is the primary gift: the spell carried across the ossuary, the word spent on the stranger, and the true black at the throat that is the spell made hide, because the black is the carry made visible, and a deep black is a long carry.
Society
A Spell-Carry Lich walks in a deep chamber of four to eight, and the chamber is led by the one who has carried the longest word, because the chamber is the only ground in the world where the carrying is the law. The hierarchy is by the length of the carry: the one whose word goes farthest eats the soul-debt first, and the one whose black is deepest keeps the spell-mouth. The young liches share the anchor-line and share the carry, and the carry is the only school the ossuary has, and the school is the ossuary, and the ossuary does not grade, the ossuary only carries.
Culture & Lore
The Spell-Carry Lich keeps its lore in the carry, and the carry keeps it better than the anchor does, because the carry is the only book in the world that gets longer when someone speaks. The old liches say the first Spell-Carry lich was a word that learned to stand, and the ossuary gave it a body because the ossuary had no other way to keep the carrying. They call the strays the carry takes "the ones who were worth the word," and they keep the best of the spell-mouths — the true black of the ones who were quiet enough to be a carry — in the ossuary, which is the finest teaching in the line.
Home
Its home is The Bone Ossuary, the part of it that is below the anchor-wall and older than the standing. The Spell-Carry Lich is the ossuary's second voice, and the voice is quiet in the way the deep is quiet, and the quiet is the one thing the ossuary cannot lose, because the anchor needs the carry the way the soul needs the word. The anchor-lines are kept quiet by the young, the deep chambers are kept old by the line, and the dead are kept where the word fell, which is the one law the deep does not break.
Relations
The Spell-Carry Lich keeps a quiet, word-kept peace with the Ossuary-Sense line of The Bone Ossuary, a peace of the carried spell and the kept anchor that has held since the first stranger fell. To Khorvane, the Endless Hunger, the Spell-Carry line is the first ripening made quick, and the line keeps a single true black scale at the spell-mouth for the god, which is the one offering the hunger has asked for and never taken, and the asking is the ripening.
In the Story
In the story of the six who arrived, the Spell-Carry Lich is the second pale test the ossuary offers, the carry that asks which of them the word will keep and which of them the word must spend. It is the figure that carries the spell while the oaths are made above the ground, and the figure whose carrying is the map the war is spoken by, because the ossuary has heard every word the warrens have made, and the ossuary has carried them, and the ossuary is the one page in the world the war cannot set down.