your friendly neighborhood eldritch horrors
I’m thinking that Lup and Barry’s souls are kinda wack after story and song. Lup ended up voring all the magic in the umbrastaff and Barry ate the boys’ pain during TSG. And they both are emotion driven magical entities who were alone without their anchors for a long ass time. That can’t be healthy.
Like there’s a lot there! There’s Lup’s severe claustrophobia and myriad of sensory issues that come from being a half formed ghost for so long. Barry was on the edge of going feral for a really long time and neither of them had any real outside contact for twelve years. Etc etc.
So…along with PTSD, their magic is just, not the same anymore. It’s wilder, it surges. When they’re upset red sparks of magic fly off them, even in their fleshbodies. One of the things that make liches so dangerous, a facet of their instability is that magic unrestrained by the limits of flesh and lifespans becomes obscenely powerful. They have to re-learn how to keep themselves in check and it’s pretty exhausting to take in along with the aftermath of everything else.
Yes, they were strong before but they were still bound by the constraints of the cycles, focused on survival. When Taako watched them climb out of their corpses on that hill their specters were simple, skeletal and dressed in their IPRE uniforms.
Twelve years pass and change them.
Lup is phantasmal, resplendent, made of ghostly flame. She flickers and crackles and (when necessary) rages and consumes. On the battlefield she practically dances as she scorches the ground.
Barry looks a bit more traditional, tattered red robes, withered and skeletal hands. But his cowl is an empty void, save for the flickering white light inside. For years he was a faceless manipulator, with no one to recognize him.
They aren’t traditional Reapers, the Raven Queen can’t take their souls and reform them in her image as she would traditionally because they’ve remade themselves already. Other lich souls can be severed from their magic but Lup and Barry wove themselves together tightly, with love, bond magic, with the kind of desperation born from a century of apocalypse.
Anyway they’re pretty terrifying and very in love.
