They had prepared themselves for battle with the Lich.
They were under no illusions that it would be easy. To get to her, they had crossed deadly room after fatal area after doomed space.
She had surely spent centuries preparing for this.
They fought the suspended-animation Gargoyle.
They got past the Oil of Slipperiness.
They defeated the hereditary Hobgoblin garrison.
At last, they arrived, to the mighty, powerful regal Lich’s….closet.
They avoided the pit traps, the spike traps, the army of undead knights, the death ray, the death beam, the death spell, the death rune, and the container of milk which wasn’t technically death but which WAS st omething like 1500 years old. If it wasn’t actually fatal, it really ought to do for now.
It had taken three generations of Dwarven artisans to make a room the size of three gladiatorial coliseums and make the floor slope so very gently that you could walk across the room for a quarter hour before you began to realize that either you were getting taller or everything else was beginning to scrunch.
(Hint:
You’re not getting taller.)
This side irony is that almost none of the immortality of being a Lich is pleasant by the standards of normal Human immortality. No matter how they may market it, they really don’t feel Godlike; the skulls are a dead giveaway.
So if you are the one in a hundred, so one in four or five centuries, who makes it to actually enter the Chamber of the Lich…
…90% of the dead Adventurers get blasted to bits while trying to figure out why they’re in a closet.
It is…NOT…a palatial room.
You know how Vampires, despite spending little conscious time in their coffins, will often make them homey?
Liches don’t do that. For the first thousand years, they’re certain they’re far too serious, as sorcerers, to put up art or personal touches they enjoy. They’re not personal; they’re eternal wizards of death and doom!
They’re VERY bored.
They sit in closets and read books of Forbidden Lore in the hope of summoning Elder Gods, none of whom will EVERY show up in any place that small.
You finally enter the Lich’s closet, I mean quarters. You kill it. The door shuts.
What are you going to do for the next 7,000 years?
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