Lich was born in the parts of Thistlebrook most people pretended didn’t exist. Flood alleys. Collapsed tenements. Plague districts. Rot markets. The places where bodies disappeared faster than laws reached them. He grew up around death so constantly that eventually it stopped feeling exceptional.
Fear burned out early in him. That was the first thing that made Lich dangerous. Most people surviving Thistlebrook learned caution. Lich learned momentum. If the world was already broken, already violent, already rotting, why hesitate? That became his philosophy long before he could articulate it.
As a child he was loud, impulsive, impossible to fully control. He stole because it was fun, climbed places he shouldn’t, picked fights bigger than him, touched cursed objects after being warned not to. He developed a reputation early for surviving things that should have killed him. Not because he was invincible, but because he never stopped moving long enough for fear to settle properly.
That recklessness is how he met Hexxie. The two became inseparable in the chaotic way gutter kids often do: fighting together, stealing together, sleeping in abandoned structures, outrunning guards, nearly dying repeatedly. Hexxie smoothed situations over. Lich escalated them. They were brothers long before either would have admitted it aloud.
What separated Lich from most criminals was that he genuinely enjoyed danger. He loved crypts, forbidden places, cursed relics, occult rumors, haunted ruins, the jobs nobody sane accepted. Other people froze when the unnatural appeared. Lich laughed. Somewhere in childhood, panic and excitement had fused into the same response. The more dangerous things became, the more alive he felt.
When Hexxie brought Boots into their orbit, Lich first saw another soft noble pretending at hardship. That impression lasted maybe a week. Boots stayed, worked, bled, adapted, never talked down to them. Once Boots proved himself, Lich followed him with a loyalty that surprised even himself, not because Boots controlled him, but because Boots gave chaos direction.
Despite the recklessness, Lich is not emotionless. He loves the crew deeply and protects them violently, especially Spooks, whom he treated like an annoying younger sibling the moment she joined. Boots protects carefully. Hexxie protects emotionally. Lich protects instinctively, reacting before thought catches up.
Lich genuinely feels most alive standing closest to death.