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It isn’t easy, becoming undead, undying. Some texts speak of sacrifice, of death and blood and ritual blades. Some call for breaking a soul, or tying two together, to forge a new entity. Some whisper of anchors, of a belief or feeling so strong that it can tie a soul to earth, like a kite string pulling it from the astral plane. All agree that it’s nearly impossible to take that first step, to become a lich.
But no one ever talks about how hard it is to stay one. Magic wants to dissipate. It wants to be free, to be part of enchantments and transmutations and jump between focuses like electrical sparks. Contrary to common belief, magic isn’t infinite. It cycles, it goes where it’s needed, an endless loop through every atom of the plane, so seamlessly that you’d never even know.
It does not like being pulled out of that cycle. Barry Bluejeans knows that all too well, now.
Becoming a lich was a desperate plan. They needed a leg up, a way to beat this constant cycle of death and terror. Lup and Barry had done the research, they knew the risks. But they also knew about bonds, and love, and anchors. People had done this before. They could do it again.
So on a quiet plane, after a very good day, they took the leap. They left their bodies behind, rose up as magic and light and pure energy. And they felt the pull, that inescapable drag toward the Raven Queen, but another feeling as well. A feeling of dissolving, of dissipating like dust in the wind. Because there’s two parts of becoming a lich. You have to avoid the pull of true death, stay tied to the material plane. But none of that matters if you can’t stay tied to what makes you you. Liches are magical energy, a force that does not want to be concentrated like this, pulled from its cycle and made stagnant. Without that knowledge, that complete and utter awareness of who you are, it will scatter to the winds, bring your soul back into the cycle and fragmented beyond recovery.
But Barry and Lup know who they are. The brilliant rays radiating from their currently amorphous forms anchor them to the world, to people and to emotions and to life, but are also inextricably tied to what makes them them. So as rays of light solidify into glowing, woven cords - five silver for Barry and five gold for Lup, and one of both colors intertwined - so do they solidify from clouds of energy to minds and hearts and forms.
Lup burns bright and fiery as the sun, reds and golds and hints of blue that should hurt to even glance at, but somehow warm instead of burn. Barry is quieter, more subtle. His body seems to emit shadows, a black smoke hiding glints of silver underneath. They defy physics and magic and the laws of life and death themselves, and it’s as easy as holding hands, of falling back and knowing you’ll be caught by six of your dearest friends.
The bonds stretch and wear and grow at times, with stress and anger and love and fear. They may fade, but their core is iron, is spiderweb, is the softest yarn and the hardest cable. They cannot be broken by any power imaginable.
But they can be taken.
Barry and Lup can only see their bonds when they’re in lich form, but they can feel them when alive. Slender ties reaching out from their hearts feel like warmth, like a hug, like safety.
And one day Barry wakes up cold. Something is horribly, horribly wrong - there’s a hole in his chest, an aching void. A bond hasn’t been broken - he’d know that, would feel it snap like a bone. Instead, one is just gone. And that’s when he finds the note.
He searches endlessly, full of worry and fear and terrified love. But there’s only so much he and Taako can do, and with the bond seemingly gone he just can’t find her, can’t follow the link that should be the strongest one he has. There’s nothing.
And then Lucretia makes her choice, and Barry makes a desperate call.
He rises from the field where he fell, a swirling storm of black grief and silver thunderbolts of terror. He loses himself to his emotions, until he feels that tug, that pull of nothingness and everything. And so he grabs his bonds and yanks, grips as tight as he can to pull himself back together. He desperately gathers all his love, his fear, his desire to keep his family safe, and solidifies into a red cloak and smoky form. And he looks at the six strands of silver light, the bonds he relies on to stay alive, stay himself.
Four bonds are there, faint but solid. They stretch off into the distance, pale as moonlight and thin as a whisper, but there. One bond is clear as it ever was, but shot through with hairline fractures, threatening to shatter with the slightest breath.
And one, one made of silver and gold intertwined, stretches out a few feet and fades to nothingness. It’s not broken, and yet no one is there at the other end. He knows she’s not dead, not gone. But that’s all he knows.
He spends years watching, waiting, doing all he can to fix things. He screams and cries and grabs on to those fractured bonds with gritted teeth and white knuckles, doing everything he can to stay here, to stay himself. As a lich, he watches the bonds move, keeps an eye on his wandering family as best he can. As a human, he doesn’t know what heartache keeps pulling his focus up to the moon.
And then Phandalin happens. And as he rises from the still burning black glass, three of his bonds shimmer brighter and pull up toward the moon. Magnus, Merle, and Taako may not know who he was to them, but they know who he is. It’s a little thing, but with bonds as weak as Barry’s every bit helps. And just the knowledge that his friends are together now helps on his side, too. He’s a little more solid, in form and in footing.
He can’t follow them up to the moon, but he can watch the bonds and know they’re together. And whenever they come down to earth, he can follow the bonds and watch and hope and love.
It’s a few months in when watching turns to action. When Captain Bane, a man they should have been able to trust, betrays them. He doesn’t have time, he can’t fix this subtly, he has to act and damn the consequences. He rushes into Bane, knocks the poisoned cups from two of his friends’ hands and drinks the third. And Bane collapses, and Barry is there, seen by his family for only the second time in a decade.
For a moment, he watches the three bonds stretching before him grow brighter, stronger, powered by his joy at seeing his family and knowing who they are this time. And then Magnus tries to hit him with an axe.
He’s fucking baffled. “ARE YOU AFRAID?” he asks, barely remembering to disguise his voice and frantically trying to figure out how to convince them to trust him. He knows they won’t recognize him, but wow, the axe is a bit much.
Or maybe not - he did just possess and kill a man in front of them.
They stare, and he reconsiders the fake voice. Maybe he should tone it down.
“Are you afraid of the dark?” Wait, shit, that’s worse. They’re still confused, but fuck, he can’t explain anything the Voidfish could block.
At least after the axe thing they don’t seem to scared of him, so that’s nice. He can feel the three bonds strengthening between them, giving him a little more energy, a little more focus. He projects the faces of the relic’s victims before them, scrambling for an explanation that won’t be staticked out.
“This is the true nature of man. The want, the Hunger-“ well, okay, they won’t get the capitalization, but whatever- ”it consumes everything it touches, it can’t be stopped or changed. It’s the end of everything. This is your first lesson.”
And he books it out of there to regroup, to figure out where to go from here. He’s smiling, though, and trailed by three brilliantly glowing silver cords.
The next time he sees them, it’s in a barren waste of pink crystal, an utter failure of scientific ethics that personally offends him. But at least he can use this to leave his friends more clues, give them another nudge along the path to figuring the whole thing out. So in the middle of Lucas’s lecture, he freezes time.
”What’s bigger than this?” He mentally slaps himself. They were all genius interplanar physicists, for Istus’s sake, and now they’re reduced to such childish phrasing.
And then Magnus tries to attack him again, and if he had a body it would be sighing. So instead he just waits, lets Magnus get it out of his system. In a minute, he tries again.
“Okay, excuse me. Uh… Sup?” Real smooth, Barry.
He stumbles through his speech, trying so hard to reach his friends, his family. He tells them about the Hunger, about the Light, as clearly as he can, which of course is not clear at all. But it’s going well, he’s getting through to them.
And then he sees the umbrella.
His voice cracks, breaking from its carefully maintained tone. ”Wha- What? Where di-? What did you? You FOUND HER?”
The air around him crackles with electricity. He’s fracturing, losing his hold on himself, more a storm of magical energy than a soul at the moment. They have Lup’s umbrella. They don’t have Lup. He’s terrified for her, terrified that Taako doesn’t even remember her, that she may be more lost than he thought. He’s going to lose himself, staying here and seeing that blankness in Taako’s eyes. He can feel the magic slipping away from him, inexorably being dragged back into the cycle, some even into Lup’s umbrella. So with the last energy he has, he gets out. He blinks away, back to his cave, to regroup again.
His bonds are solid, he’s secured to this plane. But a fundamental shock to his core like that? He’s going to need some time to pull himself together, get a grasp of who he is, or he’s going to disintegrate before he can find her.
He has to find her.
He doesn’t have much time to spend in Refuge. He knows what is coming up, where the last Relic is hidden away. And he has a plan to protect his friends, but it’s going to take everything he has. But he again finds his oldest friends, this time at the edge of a town that uncomfortably mirrors their century together. And they’re safe, they’re okay and unharmed and most importantly, they didn’t use the Chalice. Barry sighs in relief.
”I’m really proud of you. I thought there was a chance that maybe this would be the one to end your adventure.” And he is, he’s so proud of them.
But Magnus looks more confused than anything. “Wait- you're proud of- hold on. You're the Red Robe, right? You're one of the bad guys.”
Barry stills. ”What? Who told you that?” They can’t really - they don’t think he’s - what? No…
Taako and Merle shrug. “Everyone?”
Magnus looks almost apologetic. “Yeah, the whole Bureau, the Director…”
And Barry starts to fall apart.
Barry knows, on some level, that he must be scaring them. He’s ripping apart before their eyes, losing what ties him together, and all his focus is on the bonds before him. One is unchanging, faint but there. One still fades off into nothingness. But three bonds, the three he’s relied on so much this past year, are nearly shriveled into spiderweb. He loves them, he’s done everything he can to keep them safe, and they think he’s evil, a monster, a villain. Those three bonds are seconds from snapping, and he can feel the pull of the Astral Plane.
But worst of all is the last bond. It was always fractured, after what she’d done. Now it’s barely hanging together by a splinter. She told his family that he was evil, that they should fear him. Their bond is seconds from shattering, and Barry doesn’t even want to try to keep it together.
Barry screams. He’s losing pieces of himself, his soul being siphoned away to the Astral plane. He has so little tying himself to here, now, and internally - he thinks - he apologizes to Lup. This might be the end, and he never even got close to finding her.
With the last of his sanity, he latches onto that one last intact bond, the other one leading up to the moon. His friend, his family. One of the greatest reasons he cannot let himself fail. He has to fix things, he will not let it end like this.
Weak, frail, but alive, he begs his family to trust him. And then he leaves again for the complicated process of pulling himself back together.
He sends a message to Magnus. It’s not time yet for him to know who he is yet, and this will make things more difficult.
He looks anyway, because he’s Magnus, but at least Barry tried.
It’s the final stretch now, one Relic left. And this one is a bit more personal than the rest. Wonderland is his fault, his Relic what gives it power. And the twins that run it are a terrifying reminder of what he could have been. What he still could become.
This is going to be the hardest fight of Barry’s life. But if he had a face, there would be a vindictive smile crossing it now, because they’re on his home turf. Because no one knows the ins and outs of necromancy, magical energy manipulation, and the Animus Bell like Barry goddamn Bluejeans.
He shadows his friends, hopes with all his heart that they can stay safe long enough for him to save them. Wonderland is a nightmare of twisted magic, power pulled out of the cycle for so long that it’s stagnated, turned sour and rotten. But these liches need it to survive.
Edward and Lydia aren’t like Lup and Barry. They’re volatile, powerful yet brittle. Because there’s two components to becoming a lich: staying undead and staying yourself. Barry and Lup have six strong anchors to the living world, six frequent reminders of who they are at their core. Lydia and Edward had part of that, once- they had Keats. He was the reason they became liches, the anchor that kept them there.
But then he died. And Edward and Lydia had severed many of their bonds in the rituals and sacrifices they used to get this far. All they have left are their ties to each other, a toxic snarl of codependency. It’s barely enough to keep them sane, and not enough to anchor them to this plane. So that’s where the Animus Bell comes in.
Bonds are magical energy given shape and form. It stands to reason that with more energy, bonds can become stronger. So Edward and Lydia use the Bell to steal magic, hoard it and tangle it into their meager bonds. Enough sheer power flowing through them and they can compensate for their lack of true attachments. But it isn’t sustainable - they have to keep finding energy, dragging it from the wayward souls who find their way to this land of horrors and wrapping it around what threads they have left of themselves.
Edward and Lydia are immeasurably powerful, and incredibly fragile. And Barry knows power and weaknesses better than they do.
So he watches his friends, and slowly siphons energy out of Wonderland. It’s like putty to him, sickly energy that he can breathe life into and shape into what he needs. If anyone tried this on him, he’d know immediately, his bonds so closely connected to him. But Edward and Lydia don’t even remember the feeling of healthy bonds, and don’t notice that someone’s chipping away at the edges of their power.
And as they go through, Barry gets stronger. It’s not just from the stolen energy, that’s a temporary high. It’s because one of his bonds is growing brighter, stronger than he’s seen in years.
It’s because Magnus Burnsides has decided to trust him.
He watches and waits and shapes the world around him, wrestling this poisoned energy into what he needs. His fury at watching his family suffer fuels his bonds, helps him engineer these liches’ downfall.
When it comes to the final fight, he’s ready. Finally, he’s fighting side by side with his family again, and his heart could sing with the joy of it. There’s danger, and there’s heartbreak, and there’s pain. They nearly lose Magnus - Barry watches the bond start to fade away as Merle and Taako reach out in a desperate and brilliant plan.
But then Magnus’s body is knocked to the ground, and Edward is chewed up and spit out in the most fittingly undignified manner he can imagine. Sure, Barry would’ve liked to be the one to take him down, but there’s something hilarious about one of the world’s most powerful magical beings getting taken out like this. Barry might be singing Fantasy Rihanna in his head, but no one can ever prove that.
Lydia stares in shock, and gives a little sad chuckle. “I guess… I guess we still needed each other after all.” And then she screams, a high, keening sound like nails on a chalkboard, like glass shattering.
And Lydia explodes. With the breaking of the one bond she had left, all the energy she’d stolen is released in a single burst like a inky sandstorm. Barry pulls on all his love, his fear, his hope, and pulls up a shield of silver energy to shelter his friends from the shockwave of oily blackness. The world around them crumbles and burns, but they stay strong, stay together.
As they leave, he watches his bonds grow and gleam nearly as bright as that first day, all those years and cycles ago. And then they make it to the cave, and then he can’t see them anymore, but he can feel them. He can feel three of them grow as Taako, Merle, and Magnus make that final connection. Then they’re on the moon, and he feels a fractured bond - not heal, maybe never heal. But there’s still love under the pain and heartbreak, and the potential to grow.
He slips Davenport some ichor, and the bond that never broke comes back in full force. And with their memories, the five now grow and brighten and gleam, and he’s nearly there, he’s nearly who he used to be.
And then, Taako snaps the Umbra Staff. There’s an explosion of flame, of pure love and joy and laughter and the feeling of a family being reunited for the first time in twelve years. And Barry feels that last missing piece in his heart slot into place. He sees Lup, phantasmal and resplendent, and for the first time in years he has no fear of losing who he is or who he loves.