THE LICH
ON DEATH, DOMINION, AND THE REFUSAL TO DIE
What is a Lich? The answer begins not with the corpse, but with the will that remains within it.
There are deaths that conclude a life, and there are deaths employed merely as instruments. The wise learn early that the distinction matters.
Of all the beings that have trespassed upon the boundary between mortality and what lies beyond it, few have inspired such enduring fascination as the Lich. Not because it is dead. The world has never suffered a shortage of dead things that refuse to remain still.
The Lich is troubling for another reason entirely.
It remembers. It reasons. And, most often, it chose what it became.
I. Of the Dead Who Do Not Depart
I have encountered many descriptions of the undead across the centuries, and most are inadequate for the same reason… They begin with the corpse.
A corpse is merely evidence.
The true subject is the will that remains within it.
Across the traditions that speak of the lich, it is most often described as a sorcerer, mage, or other practitioner of formidable power who has escaped the ordinary finality of death while preserving intellect, memory, and magical ability. The flesh may deteriorate. The voice may become little more than breath dragged across ancient bone. Yet the mind persists.
And therein lies the distinction.
A revenant may rise, because hatred denies it rest. A ghost may linger, because something binds it to the world it has lost. A corpse may be animated by another’s command and possess no meaningful will of its own.
The Lich is something far more deliberate.
It does not merely survive death.
It has, in one fashion or another, made death subordinate to intention.
The surviving traditions disagree on the mechanism. Some speak of necromantic rites. Others of divided souls, forbidden vessels, sacrificial acts, or transformations so profound that the original body becomes almost incidental. No single doctrine governs every account, nor do the surviving sources entirely agree with one another.
Yet beneath these contradictions, one principle remains…
Undeath was not the punishment… It was the objective.
For what should one fear more—the dead thing wandering blindly through a crypt, or the dead thing that spent decades preparing the crypt for its arrival?
II. Concerning the Old Word Līċ
Words are themselves a form of archaeology. Dig deeply enough into one, and an entire dead world may begin to show through.
The word Lich is far older than the immortal sorcerer now associated with it.
Its ancestry lies in Old English līċ, a word for the physical body, and in many contexts the dead body, or corpse. The same Germanic ancestry survives elsewhere… compare modern German Leiche, still meaning a corpse, and Dutch lijk. The old word survived in terms associated with burial, most famously the lych-gate: the roofed entrance to a churchyard beneath which the bier might rest before the funeral procession continued.
That older meaning deserves attention because it contained none of the elaborate mythology later generations would fasten to the word. Before the lich became a master of death, the word named only what death left behind.
There is something severe about Lich. It is almost skeletal in its construction. It carries no romantic promise of resurrection. Even before modern fantasy transformed it, the word belonged unmistakably to mortality.
Then imagination committed a rather elegant act of desecration.
It took a word that once meant the remains of a person and made those remains a person once more.
Neither restored nor resurrected… merely continued.
There is, however, an important difference.
Resurrection implies return. The Lich, at its most unsettling, represents refusal. Refusal to yield knowledge; refusal to relinquish power; refusal to permit even death the authority granted to it over every other living thing.
And so, a forgotten word for the corpse became an extraordinarily suitable name for one of the most deliberate violations of the grave.
The Lich carried no suggestion of rebirth, salvation, or even haunting. It belonged to the physical fact of death itself. Earlier writers could still employ the word in its older sense—as a corpse, animate or otherwise—without implying the elaborate creature later traditions would make of it.
Then the meaning narrowed. But not suddenly. Words rarely obey such convenient histories.
The corpse acquired memory. Memory acquired magic. And magic, inevitably, acquired ambition.
By the twentieth century, fantastic literature had already imagined sorcerers who persisted beyond natural death, ancient magicians inhabiting ruined bodies, and intellects that refused the ordinary limits of mortality. What had not yet fully settled was the name by which such a creature would be known.
That would come later… and when it did, an old word for what death left behind became the name of something that had contrived, quite deliberately, not to leave at all.
III. When the Corpse Learned Sorcery
There is a temptation, especially among those fond of orderly histories, to search for the first Lich.
They will not find one.
Archetypes are seldom born whole. They simply accumulate.
A bone here. A superstition there. An immortal magician from one tale, a corpse that speaks in another, a necromancer who survives his own burial somewhere else. Centuries of imagination assemble the creature long before anyone thinks to give it a taxonomy.
The Lich is no exception.
The decisive change came, when the corpse ceased to be merely a condition and became a classification.
In 1975, the first Greyhawk supplement for Dungeons & Dragons introduced the lich as a specific creature: a skeletal being that had once been a tremendously powerful magic-user, or magic-user and cleric, and now persisted through great spells and force of will. Gary Gygax later identified Gardner Fox’s 1969 The Sword of the Sorcerer as an influence upon the creature’s conception.
That moment matters.
Not because every later lich belongs to Dungeons & Dragons—it does not—but because something previously diffuse was given a remarkably durable architecture:
the dead magician who remains intelligent, retains power, and refuses mortality by means unavailable to ordinary men.
Once codified, the idea escaped the game that had helped define it.
In some traditions, liches concealed or displaced their souls. Others tethered their continued existence to objects. Some became skeletal monarchs. Others preserved knowledge, guarded civilizations, commanded armies of the dead, or withdrew from the living world so completely that immortality ceased to resemble life at all.
The details changed because they were never the most important part.
The essential horror survived.
A vampire still participates, however corruptedly, in appetites we recognize. It hungers. It desires. It seduces, envies, possesses.
A ghost is frequently defined by attachment—to a person, a place, an injustice, a memory.
The Lich is often born from something colder… the conclusion that death is an unacceptable limitation.
Consider what sort of mind reaches that conclusion seriously.
Not in panic upon a deathbed. Not as a frightened plea for another year.
The true lich of dark fantasy is more disturbing when the transformation has been contemplated for decades. Researched. Refined. Prepared with the patience of a scholar approaching the culmination of a life’s work.
Such a being does not stumble into undeath. It arrives there.
And that distinction is why I have always considered the ritual less interesting than the years preceding it.
For somewhere before the grave was opened, before the final incantation was spoken, before flesh surrendered its claim upon the magician, there came a quieter moment in which a living person looked upon the natural order and decided:
I shall be the exception.
Everything that follows is merely procedure.
IV. Blood Magic — Of the Sovereignty of Blood
Blood is the oldest covenant the body possesses.
Long before sigils were carved into stone, before the first invocation was committed to vellum, blood already carried what sorcerers would spend centuries attempting to imitate: lineage, vitality, inheritance, and the unmistakable signature of the living thing from which it came.
This is why Blood Magic must never be confused with the crude spilling of life. Any fool with a knife can produce blood. This School of Magic concerns itself with something infinitely more dangerous: the invisible correspondences blood preserves after it has left the body.
To the trained practitioner, a drop is not merely matter. It is a key. Through it, one may reach the body that produced it, trace the ancestry that preceded it, disturb the bond between flesh and spirit, or fasten one living will to another with an intimacy that ordinary enchantment cannot achieve.
Blood remembers what the flesh would conceal.
There are consequently few branches of magic in which consent matters so little once the necessary substance has been obtained. Hair may be burned. Names may be forgotten. Faces may change. Blood is considerably less forgiving. It carries its allegiance within itself.
The lesser workings of this School concern identification, tracing, healing, inheritance, and sympathetic influence. These are the applications that cautious scholars describe first, perhaps because they permit the discipline to retain some appearance of respectability.
Its higher practices are not so easily civilized.
In these higher workings, blood may be used to compel the unwilling body, strengthen one life at the expense of another, transfer wounds, awaken dormant inheritances, bind an oath beyond the reach of ordinary magic, or open pathways that should remain closed to any hand but that of the creature to whom the blood belongs.
In Blood Magic, sacrifice is not payment. It is access.
The Lich values this School of Magic for precisely that reason. Transformation on such a scale requires more than power. It requires correspondence between the sorcerer who begins the rite, the body that must endure its transformation, and the identity intended to survive beyond ordinary mortality. Blood establishes that continuity.
It tells the ritual who must endure.
V. Necromancy — Of the Dominion of the Dead
Necromancy is spoken of carelessly by those who have never understood it.
They imagine graveyards, corpses, and the obedient dead. These things belong to that School of Magic, certainly, but they stand near its threshold. To mistake them for its purpose is to mistake the shadow cast by a cathedral for the cathedral itself.
Necromancy is the study of what death separates.
Body from spirit. Memory from flesh. Will from motion. Name from identity. Presence from absence.
Death is not emptiness. It is division.
The necromancer concerns himself with those divisions because whatever has been separated may, under sufficient knowledge and sufficient force, be addressed individually.
A corpse may be commanded because the body remains when the will has departed. A spirit may be summoned because consciousness may persist when the body has failed. Memory may cling to bone, place, weapon, or object long after the mind that formed it has ceased to breathe.
The School of Necromancy becomes truly dangerous when its practitioners cease merely to summon what has died and begin determining which consequences of death they are willing to permit.
This is the province in which the lich works.
The accomplished necromancer does not ask whether death can be prevented. Such a question belongs to healers and frightened kings. The more precise inquiry is whether death may occur while selected aspects of the self are deliberately withheld from it.
The Lich does not escape death. It edits the terms by which death is allowed to occur.
Flesh may decay. Breath may cease. Warmth may abandon the vessel. None of these is necessarily fatal to the design if intellect, memory, magical faculty, and will have been made to persist beyond them.
And therein lies the obscenity of the higher necromantic arts. Resurrection seeks to restore what death has broken. Necromancy, in its darkest form, asks whether the breaking itself may be made useful.
The distinction is not merely semantic.
One returns the dead to life; the other may teach the dead that life is no longer required.
VI. The Architecture of Undeath
Lichdom is frequently described as immortality. This is highly imprecise.
Immortality suggests that death has been prevented. The lich accomplishes something considerably more profane: it allows death to occur and then deprives death of its usual consequence.
The body may perish. Indeed, in many traditions it is expected to. Flesh blackens, organs fail, blood stills, and the ordinary machinery of life comes to an end. Yet something essential has already been made capable of surviving that collapse.
Here one encounters the principle upon which the higher forms of Lichdom depend… the self need not perish merely becayuse the body can no onger sustain life.
The body may die because survival no longer depends entirely upon it.
Precisely what must be preserved differs between magical traditions. Some speak of the soul. Others distinguish consciousness from spirit, memory from essence, or magical identity from the animating force of life. Such distinctions are not trivial. Scholars have filled entire libraries attempting to determine which portion of a person must persist before persistence may still truthfully be called survival.
The Lich, however, has little patience for such distinctions.
Whatever part of the self must remain, it is preserved. And preservation requires structure.
Blood Magic establishes correspondence between the sorcerer and the identity the transformation must preserve. Necromancy governs the divisions imposed by death and prevents them from completing their accustomed work. Enchantment may establish wards. Invocation may provide force. Other Schools of Magic may contribute according to the tradition, the practitioner, and the nature of the intended transformation.
But at the centre of the design lies the same terrible proposition: some essential component of the sorcerer is made capable of persisting beyond the ordinary failure of the mortal body.
Destroy the corpse, and one may have destroyed only the most visible part of the Lich.
Popular accounts often reduce this principle to the hiding of a soul within an object. It is a memorable image, but it should not be mistaken for a universal law of Lichdom. The external vessel familiar to much modern fantasy is merely one expression of a broader idea: continuity has been protected from ordinary bodily death by means more difficult to undo than the destruction of flesh alone.
In some traditions, that protection takes the form of an object: a relic, an enchanted construct, a fragment of the practitioner, a place of power, or some more abstract bond whose destruction demands knowledge rather than strength. In others, no external repository exists at all; the continuity is woven into the transformed being itself.
This is why killing a Lich and destroying a Lich are rarely synonymous acts.
One may shatter its bones, burn the remnants, scatter the ash, and leave the chamber believing the matter concluded.
Its first defence is not power… It is redundancy.
The first defence of lichdom is not power. It is structure.
VII. The Price of Continuance
Immortality is most seductive when contemplated by the mortal.
The living imagine continuation chiefly as addition: another year, another century, another age in which knowledge may be gathered, enemies outlived, mysteries solved, and unfinished designs brought at last to completion.
It is a remarkably optimistic calculation. What such calculations rarely account for is that duration does not merely add. It erodes.
A Lich may preserve memory, intellect, magical faculty, and will beyond the ordinary death of the body. None of these guarantees that what persists will remain unchanged. Preservation is not the same thing as stasis, and consciousness subjected to centuries is no less vulnerable to distortion merely because flesh has ceased to govern it.
To continue forever is not necessarily to remain oneself forever.
Consider memory.
The mortal mind survives partly by forgetting. Years soften detail. Grief loses its edges. Faces blur. Injuries that once governed entire seasons of a life diminish sufficiently for other things to take their place.
We regard this as imperfection. I am not certain that it is.
A mind incapable of meaningful forgetting would eventually become crowded with its own existence. Every humiliation retained; every betrayal preserved; every death remembered with the clarity of yesterday; every enemy catalogued; every triumph diminished by the thousand triumphs that followed it.
The problem is not that the Lich possesses too little memory. It may possess far too much.
Accounts of ancient undead beings frequently describe obsessive behaviour, ritual repetition, pathological suspicion, fixation upon objects or places, and an inability to relinquish grievances whose original causes have long since vanished from the world.
Such traits are often dismissed as madness. That diagnosis, though, may be convenient. It is not always sufficient.
What appears to us as insanity may, in some cases, be the consequence of a mind required to contain more history than a human consciousness was ever designed to bear.
The mortal mind was fashioned for a lifetime. The Lich asks it to endure an age.
Time also alters proportion.
To a creature that has existed for six hundred years—or even millennia—a mortal reign of thirty years may appear scarcely more consequential than weather. Generations become interchangeable. Dynasties rise and disappear within what the Lich experiences as a single extended design.
This produces a danger greater than cruelty. It produces abstraction.
A village becomes a population. A family becomes a lineage. A war becomes an adjustment of borders. A hundred deaths become an acceptable cost in a design whose purpose may not be realised for another fifty years.
The Lich need not hate the living in order to become monstrous… It need only cease to regard their scale of existence as significant.
This is perhaps the most profound corruption produced by extreme longevity: not bloodlust, not madness, not even hunger for power, but the gradual destruction of proportion between one life and another.
What the mortal calls a lifetime, the Lich may eventually call an interval.
Yet there is another consequence, and I have found it more reliable than madness… Obsession.
The Lich who endured because he feared death may eventually become consumed by the preservation of his own existence.
The scholar who sought centuries in which to understand magic may discover that knowledge itself has become an appetite incapable of satisfaction.
The ruler who refused death so that his kingdom might remain secure may, after five hundred years, preserve the throne long after the kingdom it was meant to protect has become unrecognisable.
Immortality does not necessarily remove purpose. It may calcify it.
This distinction deserves attention.
Mortals are forced to revise themselves because time denies them the luxury of infinite postponement. Age, failure, love, grief, and approaching death compel alteration. The Lich may remove precisely the pressure that once required such change.
Given enough centuries, conviction may cease to be conviction and become architecture. The original desire remains buried somewhere inside the structure, but everything else has been built around it.
Perhaps the true price of lichdom is not that the self is lost.
Perhaps it is that one part of it survives too well.
VIII. Concerning the Unmaking of the Lich
There are creatures that may be killed, and there are creatures for which killing is merely the beginning of the procedure.
The Lich belongs emphatically to the latter.
Steel may break its bones. Fire may consume what remains of its flesh. Spells of sufficient violence may reduce the vessel to ash.
None of these acts, though, necessarily answers the only question that matters:
What has becoWhat has become of that which allowed it to continue?me of the soul?
This is the error upon which many would-be destroyers of the death-bound have perished. They confuse the cessation of the body with the cessation of the being that once inhabited it.
A living man dies when the bond between flesh and animating essence fails according to nature. But the Lich has already tampered with that arrangement.
The body may be slain by force.
The principle that permits the Lich to return must be made incapable of doing so.
Here the surviving traditions become frustratingly contradictory. Some speak of severance: the deliberate separation of the surviving self from whatever structure sustains its unnatural continuance.
Some speak of severance: the deliberate separation of the surviving self from whatever structure sustains its unnatural continuance. Others describe dissolution, purification, dispersal, containment, or the destruction of those correspondences by which identity persists beyond ordinary bodily death. Still others insist that no such classification is reliable at all.
An alchemical medium—variously described as an elixir, consecrated poison, solvent of bindings, or sacramental draught—is brought against the Lich before the greater rite begins. Its purpose is not necessarily to wound the creature in any ordinary sense. It acts instead upon the unnatural correspondence between vessel and essence.
This disagreement should not be dismissed as scholarly incompetence.
Before the soul may be taken from the Lich, the architecture by which it clings to the corpse must first be made vulnerable. It may instead reveal something considerably more troublesome: there may be no universal method by which a Lich can be unmade.
What destroys one may prove useless against another.
A rite intended to sever one form of continuity may strengthen another. A relic thought essential may prove incidental. A corpse may be destroyed while the true architecture of persistence remains untouched. Conversely, what appears to be an insignificant fragment, bond, mark, memory, or correspondence may prove more important than the vessel itself.
This is why the study of a particular Lich must precede any serious attempt to destroy it.
One must determine what survived. One must determine what sustains it.
And, most importantly, one must determine what would have to fail before death could finally become final.
One cannot unmake what one does not understand.
The oldest accounts repeatedly warn against assuming that power alone is sufficient.
A warrior may possess strength enough to shatter the vessel and still accomplish nothing. A sorcerer may wield enough force to annihilate a chamber while leaving the principle of continuance untouched.
Even knowledge may prove dangerous when it is incomplete.
For the closer one comes to the mechanisms by which death has been denied its ordinary conclusion, the more likely one is to encounter structures never intended to be disturbed safely.
Some rites demand contact with the very corruption they seek to undo. Others require the destruction of bindings whose purpose is understood only after they begin to fail.
There are workings in which a single error may restore what was nearly destroyed—or carry the consequences of the attempt into those performing it. The precise methods differ so greatly between surviving accounts that I will not pretend to offer a single doctrine where none exists.
I offer instead the principle upon which every credible account appears to agree:
A Lich cannot be truly destroyed until the architecture of its continuance has been broken.
And this is why the most dangerous enemies of the death-bound are seldom those who carry the strongest weapons. They are those who understand what they are looking at.
For whatever was constructed to deny death its finality must still possess structure. And structure, however elaborate, may be dismantled.
Fragmentation removes unity. It does not necessarily remove corruption. The pieces remain charged with whatever force permitted the Lich to endure: memory, will, malice, magic, or some combination of all four.
Certain rites therefore require the fragments to be received by living practitioners.
This is the point at which scholarship ceases to be comfortable.
The living become vessels for the remnants of the dead. The corrupted fragments pass through them not because the practitioner desires possession, but because the living soul itself becomes the crucible in which the fragments may be altered.
The final weakness of the Lich is not that it can be killed.
It is that whatever was built to defeat death may, in principle, be unmade.
IX. The Lich in the Dark Imagination
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Lich is not that storytellers invented it. It is that they continue to need it.
Humanity has imagined innumerable forms of the returning dead. Corpses walk. Spirits linger. Revenants pursue unfinished vengeance. Vampires preserve themselves through hunger. Ghosts remain because something has prevented departure.
The Lich belongs to none of these categories comfortably.
Its horror arises from a more deliberate source. The ghost may not know how to leave. The revenant may have been denied peace. The vampire is frequently governed by appetite. The Lich, by contrast, usually understands exactly what it has become.
It is terrifying because its monstrosity is seldom an accident. It is a conclusion.
There is an irony in the figure that should not be overlooked.
The Lich is often born from learning. It studies what others fear to study. It asks questions whose answers wiser minds deliberately buried. It masters the laws of body, spirit, memory, sacrifice, and death until knowledge itself becomes insufficient.
Eventually the scholar encounters the one lesson no amount of scholarship can ordinarily overturn… the scholar must die.
And there, in many traditions, curiosity becomes rebellion.
The transition is subtle.
At first the desire may appear almost admirable. More years to study. More time to complete unfinished work. More centuries in which to preserve knowledge that lesser generations might squander.
One can construct noble arguments for immortality with considerable ease.
The difficulty begins when the preservation of knowledge becomes indistinguishable from the preservation of the one who possesses it.
It is equally useful to distinguish the Lich from the necromancer. A necromancer practices an art. A Lich has allowed that art to become an ontology.
One may command corpses without becoming one. One may question spirits without joining their number. One may study death and still accept its jurisdiction. The Lich crosses the boundary between investigation and self-application.
This is why the figure is so frequently associated with forbidden scholarship. Its greatest transgression is not simply the manipulation of death. It has turned itself into the experiment.
The Necromancer studies the grave.
The Lich places himself upon the table.
Beneath all its sorcery lies something far less exotic… Fear.
Fear of cessation. Fear that consciousness may simply stop. Fear that knowledge gathered across a lifetime will disappear with the mind that gathered it. Fear that ambition will remain unfinished. Fear that the world will continue perfectly well without us.
Mortals have always answered this fear through theology, philosophy, inheritance, monuments, bloodlines, books, children, kingdoms, and reputation.
It does not wish to be remembered. It wishes to remain present.
Therein lies much of its darkness. Immortality ceases to mean the survival of influence and becomes instead the refusal to surrender possession of the self.
Yet fear alone rarely sustains the oldest Liches. Once death has been deprived of its ordinary finality, another temptation emerges.
Dominion.
A mortal ruler knows that every throne eventually belongs to another. A mortal scholar knows another generation will revise his conclusions. A mortal sorcerer knows that younger hands may one day surpass his own.
Mortality enforces succession.
The ruler need never relinquish the throne. The master need never surrender authority. The keeper of knowledge need never entrust the archive to an inferior mind. Eternity becomes less a means of survival than a claim of permanent ownership.
The deepest fantasy of the Lich is not immortality.
It is that nothing should ever be permitted to continue without him.
X. Beyond the Veil
There is a temptation, after studying the Lich for sufficiently long, to regard it as an intellectual problem. A curiosity of necromancy. An aberration of magical philosophy. A theoretical answer to the oldest question ever asked by the living.
This is a mistake.
The Lich is not frightening merely because it has discovered that death may be resisted. It is frightening because somewhere in that discovery lies an argument—and under the correct circumstances, arguments persuade.
Forbidden knowledge is rarely dangerous because it is false.
It is dangerous because sometimes it works.
Every civilization has produced men and women unwilling to accept the limits assigned to them. Some challenged kings. Some challenged gods. Some challenged nature itself.
Most failed.
The Lich represents the far more troubling possibility… that one of them did not.
And so the study of Lichdom eventually returns us to the question with which it began. What is a Lich?
It is a corpse, certainly. It is a sorcerer. It is a practitioner of forbidden arts, an architect of unnatural continuance, and perhaps the most extreme expression of necromantic ambition. Yet none of these definitions is sufficient.
A Lich is what remains when the will to continue becomes greater than the willingness to remain human.
That is why the creature survives so readily in our darkest stories. Beneath the bone, ritual, sorcery, and grave-dust lies something immediately recognizable: the refusal to surrender.
Perhaps it begins nobly. Another year for the research. Another decade for the kingdom. Another lifetime for the people one cannot bear to leave behind. The first compromise may even resemble love.
But immortality has always possessed a peculiar appetite. Once tomorrow has been secured, the mind begins to consider the day after. And then the century beyond it. Once tomorrow has been secured, the mind begins to consider the day after. And then the century beyond it. Eventually survival is no longer something desired. It is something believed to be owed.
Thus ends my account of the death-bound.
Should these pages have taught you how the Lich is made, how it endures, and how it may be unmade, remember this above all:
The grave was never its greatest enemy.
Acceptance was.
THE ARCHIVE CONTINUES
Some horrors are studied from a distance.
Others eventually answer back.
DAWN OF THE LEGACIES · VOLUME I
THE LICH SORCERER
The forbidden principles recorded above do not remain matters of scholarship forever.
In Dawn of the Legacies — The Lich Sorcerer, five young inheritors of an ancient magical legacy are drawn into a conflict in which the boundary between death and continuance has already been violated.
What they face cannot be defeated by strength alone. Before the Lich can be unmade, they must first understand what has allowed him to endure.
ENTER THE STORY →Volume I is currently being prepared for republication.
Historical Sources
The historical observations concerning the word Lich and its development draw upon the following sources.
- Bosworth–Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary — Entry for Old English līc, referring to the body or corpse and providing the linguistic root from which the later word Lich developed.
- Merriam-Webster, “lych-gate” — Historical usage of lych-gate, from Old English līc, referring to the covered entrance to a churchyard where the bier could rest before burial.
- Gary Gygax & Robert J. Kuntz, Dungeons & Dragons Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975) — An early formal codification of the Lich as a distinct intelligent undead magic-user in modern fantasy gaming.
- Gardner Fox, The Sword of the Sorcerer (1969) — A work later acknowledged by Gary Gygax as an influence upon the development of the Lich archetype.