Liliana Vess Defiant Necromancer

She still lived.

She felt exultant. She had known delight many times before. The day she had regained her youth. When she killed the demon lords Kothophed and Griselbrand, hearing their death screams. Each of those moments had felt like cheating; the best kind of cheating, where you get away with it and still win at the end.

( But this moment was even sweeter )

A noise from her bed drew her attention away from the window. There was Ignis, not a bat, but something Chandra had called a 'foxicorn.' Which was accurate enough she supposed. He was standing on her bed, making cranky noises at her. Liliana wasn't sure if he was upset about how long she'd been standing, or if he had sensed the direction of her thoughts and didn't approve.

Well, one of those was easily remedied, and putting in terms of 'calming Ignis' tendency to fuss' was much more palatable than acknowledging that she was still too weak to stand unaided for long. She crossed her chamber and climbed back into bed; Ignis immediately scampered to her and laid down, cuddling by her side with his head resting on her chest. She began scritching behind his floppy ears. "Perhaps it's time I did some rethinking on Jace's offer, hmm?" she asked. "Perhaps my eyes have been opened to the power of friendship after all."

[NFB. Mostly establishy but open for calls or texts, much of the text taken from "The Promised End" by Ken Troop]

Rain hammered against the windows. A flash of lightning illuminated bare stone walls and a couple of shambling corpses. A boom of thunder followed half a breath later. Getting closer, then. Good. She needed the lightning, and the storm matched her mood. She sat on a high-backed stone chair, brooding.

How did it come to this?

Every path she sought toward freedom only seemed to lead her to more closed doors, more dead ends to escape. She'd made demonic pacts to make herself ageless, undying, at the paltry cost of a soul she was hardly using anyway.

Her breath no longer steamed, even on cold nights like this one.

But demons were harsh masters, and soon she found herself working to subvert her pacts, to kill her demons - to have immortality and freedom both. And so...the Chain Veil.

It whispered to her, even now, from the hidden pocket where she kept it. With it, she had killed two demons, lords among their kind. With it, she had once more commanded armies of the undead to nearly rival the hordes she had controlled with a thought before the Mending, had kicked a hole in the walls of heaven to spite angels that would damn an innocent soul to the Abyss.

But the Veil...

She could no longer bring herself to wear the thing on her face, to feel its silken-soft links against her skin. She hated touching it. But when she tried to get rid of it, it stubbornly clung to her skin and the pain for attempting was unbearable. Too many hours in Innistrad, working with Olivia's geistmage, in an attempt to suborn the Onakke spirits within the Veil, to turn them to her will. Too many hours that ended with her gasping on the floor, whimpering in agony as their laughs echoed inside her head.

But using it was worse.

( A familiar voice )

[Cut up and taped back together again from "Liliana's Indignation," by Kelly Digges. NFB, NFI, nine million thanks to chef_chocobro whose awesomeness cannot be codified by mere words. Comes after this, comes before this.]

So, Liliana had had a delightful time trolling Ignis yesterday with her gremlin behavior, and while she stood by every delightful moment of it, she did think that perhaps some extra sweetness wouldn't go amiss today. If for no other reason than to keep him on his toes and guessing.

She'd hate to get predictable, after all.

With Ignis running out to the store briefly, Liliana had taken advantage of his absence to do a little 'walking of her own, appearing in manor on Innistrad to grab a bottle of wine from her cellar, a delicious red she remembered combining tartness with some savory notes. It had reminded her of a walk across a forest floor in late autumn, a bit austere with a little smoke, almost hints of something like tobacco and even a little mushroom. She figured even if he didn't like it, it would probably unlike anything he'd tasted recently and that was worthwhile by itself. It had been a very small batch from they heyday of vintner who had died almost fifty years ago, and if there were any bottles besides this one, they were probably tucked away in some vampire's cellar. If this didn't show Ignis she was willing to play nice, she didn't know what would.

Wine bottle in hand, she prepared to 'walk back to Earth when she heard something shatter upstairs.

Eyes narrowed, she slid the wine bottle into one of the deep pockets of her gown, and exited out of her wine cellar, striding past her dungeon and the conveniently close work rooms, and climbed up the steps to the main floor. What in Grixis were those blasted zombies doing? They were usually so careful--

It was only when she was opening the door into the kitchen did she remember that she had sent all of her zombie guards and servants away from the manor to look for Griselbrand. Which meant that no one should be in her home.

( And certainly not a shirtless vampire )

Liliana knew what that rude and petty bitch had done, but couldn't bear to look until the black vapour that heralded her Planeswalking had delivered her right into her bathing chamber. Before doing anything else, she turned on the taps, the water hot as possible, and only then stripped off her gown. As she feared, it was reeking and sodden, red liquid staining the fabric and her leg, too. "That was the last bottle, you miserable cow," she groaned, wadding it all up into a bundle of wet fabric and glass shards and kicking it into the corner of the room for her steward to deal with. The gouges on her arm got a cursory cleaning, the bandaging could come after her bath, and then, the water finally high enough, she climbed into her truly ridiculous tub and sank in it as far as she could go.

She definitely still needed to kill Griselbrand, no question there. But she was absolutely and without a doubt adding Henrika Domnathi to that list, too.

And she had yet more renovations to oversee.

A necromancer's work was never done.

[Technically establishy, unless that guy with the opinions wants to pop in and have OPINIONS. Everything before and inside the cut NFB for off-islandness, everything after the cut is OKFB. Descriptions of the angel summoned by Liliana blatantly stolen from Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell, because there was no way I was gonna do a whole canon thing about Jace, but her cool-ass Crypt Angel deserved to see the light of day. Warning beneath the cut for violence, death of an innocent bystander, and violence against already undead animals.]