Lich for Hire

It was time for Lyon to collapse. Everyone expected it to.

The battle of the Unholy Kingdom had been the first time in living memory that Lyon had been routed so completely on open ground. An empire that had lorded over the continent for more than a thousand years, even one that worshipped the Lord of Dawn, surely had to decay eventually.

That was the general consensus. Even Lyon's own couldn't help but think it.

The more proud and self-assured a nation, the worse it handled defeat. The battle hadn't truly broken Lyon, but it had shattered something more fragile and more essential: the citizens' confidence in themselves.

Whispers that Lyon was finished had spread through the common people like a slow fire, and while the empire hadn't descended into outright chaos, the damage was real. It showed in the way things moved—or stopped moving—across every level of imperial life.

Then, the one responsible for it all stepped forward.

The young emperor, eyes red, voice unsteady, delivered the most abject edict of self-condemnation anyone could remember a Lyon emperor producing. He deflected nothing. He said plainly that it had been his first time on a battlefield, that the sight of the red dragons descending from the astral plane had stripped him of his courage, that in his panic he had caused the rout, and that every last measure of blame belonged to him alone.

The apology disarmed a great many people.

When had a Lyon emperor ever humbled himself this completely? And he hadn't hedged a single word. He was not yet eighteen. For a boy facing his first real battle, losing his nerve at the sight of dragons from beyond the stars—could anyone honestly say they would have done better?

Even so, an apology alone would not have been enough for everyone. The emperor's fall hadn't only been a rout. He had crushed his own soldiers beneath him as he fled, killing more of them than the githarks and the red dragons combined. The families of the dead were not going to be moved by words.

But no one had anticipated what came next. The edict of self-condemnation was only the first announcement.

Percival Lyon's second announcement struck like a thunderclap: the entire imperial family was paying the price for this defeat. They had betrayed the legacy of King Arthur Lyon. They had sullied the name they carried. And therefore, Percival Lyon would be the last emperor of that name.

As proof that this was no hollow gesture, every member of the imperial family had already taken their own lives in shame. They had chosen death and damnation rather than to allow the name of Lyon to be stained any further.

The news was staggering.

The imperial family was enormous. Counting everyone who lived within the palace walls, the descendants of the direct bloodline alone numbered over ten thousand. The palace had been chock-full of them.

And that was even before accounting for the branch families that had developed out over the centuries.

Clearly, the announcement referred only to those within the palace. Everyone within the palace was dead. Of Arthur Lyon's direct descendants, only Percival remained...

The moment word spread, figures who had long since withdrawn from public life began to emerge. The great and the venerable converged on the imperial capital from across the empire, all of them needing to confirm this fact for themselves.

What they found was Percival Lyon, weeping openly as he confessed his failures before them, and declaring that he would father no heirs. The next ruler of Lyon would be chosen from the nobility.

The announcement landed like a blow to the head. No one knew quite how to handle it.

What the royal family had done was difficult to reconcile with Percival's shame. Though the emperor had done something terrible, even inexcusable, it hadn't warranted the deaths of the entire imperial family. Even more people had died here than on the battlefield.

And yet, for all the questions it raised, the sacrifice of the entire imperial line accomplished what nothing else could have: it extinguished the grievances completely. There were even those who urged Percival to reconsider his abdication, to hold onto the throne and produce an heir while he was still young.

Everyone knew where the empire's name came from. If a descendant of Arthur Lyon didn't claim the throne, who else would dare to? Who had the standing? Who could point to any achievement that approached Arthur Lyon's?

But none of those voices reached Percival. William Garrison, Lyon's Shield, had placed himself at the palace gates and was turning everyone away. The emperor, he said, had suffered an enormous blow and needed time. He would not be receiving visitors.

And when that old soldier spoke, people listened.

Fair enough, the gathered elders agreed. Events of staggering magnitude had occurred within the span of a few days. The emperor deserved space to breathe. They hadn't come to gawk. They had come for Lyon.

The figures assembling outside the palace were not men to take lightly. Former generals, provincial governors, one former High Inquisitor so advanced in age he could barely walk—their personal reserves of energy might have diminished with the years, but their reputations had not. Those reputations, in concert, could stabilize the entire empire faster than any military action.

And so Lyon's fractures slowly began to seal. The mood of the people began to settle.

After all, what did they have left to resent? The imperial family had laid down their lives willingly for the empire's honor.

Inside the palace, Percival kept to himself. A faint trace of blood still hung in the air, a specter of death that lingered despite the thorough cleaning that had followed.

He hadn't received a single visitor in days. But he wasn't suffering. There was a smile dancing on his lips that hadn't left his face since the slaughter.

"Remarkable," he said inwardly, addressing Atros the Eternal. "You truly are the sovereign who once ruled this entire continent. I wasn't surprised by how accurately you could rewind his memories, but rather by just how little you needed to do for that old man Garrison to end up standing on my side.

"If he hadn't been running interference for us, we would never have had time to keep a lid on everything these past few days."

Massacring the entire imperial family couldn't have been accomplished in merely half a day. And the Draconic Armaments couldn't reverse time across the capital indefinitely while Percival worked through ten thousand people.

The solution had been simpler and more unsettling: many members of the imperial family hadn't actually died when Percival announced their deaths. They died later, in the days that followed.

Time, in Atros the Eternal's hands, had become a toy. People who had died days afterward were remembered as having died earlier.

No one could verify the sequence of events. No one inside the palace could escape, or send word out, or even be certain in which moment they were living.

Some of them, in their final hours, had glimpsed their own corpses through temporal distortions, gone mad at the sight, and turned on one another in their confusion, dying violently in the resulting chaos rather than at Percival's hand.

The linchpin of the whole plan had been William Garrison. He was the one who kept the empire's heaviest hitters outside the palace walls. Those men were legends, and the weakest among them a high-tier paladin. They were far more capable than the members of the imperial family who had spent their lives inside the palace.

If any of them had barged in, the plan would have unraveled.

The power of time had made Garrison forget the moment on the battlefield when the young emperor had run from the battle at the cost of everyone around him.

What Garrison remembered was Percival surrounded by red dragons in the sky. Everything after that was a blur.

"Memory is the source of emotion," Atros said, with the calm of someone who had ruminated on this for a very long time. "That old man was always a royalist at heart. Remove the single most damning thing he witnessed, and his feelings will be different even if someone else were to describe it to him afterward. A story you're told never affects you quite the same way as something you see for yourself.

"Once he stopped being your most determined opponent, your confession and the imperial sacrifice together were more than enough to put him back in your corner. Self-righteous idealists like him, who genuinely believe in doing 'the right thing,' respond very well to exactly this kind of approach."

"But he'll notice something is wrong," Percival said. "The gap in his memories is ultimately a weakness for us."

"Not immediately. Right now, he's overwhelmed. He's an idealist, remember, which means stabilizing Lyon will consume him completely. He won't spare a thought for minor inconsistencies until the crisis has passed. And by the time he does, I'll feed the missing memories back to him gradually and carefully, so it feels like he's slowly remembering things on his own. He'll chalk it down to age."

Percival's expression darkened. "And when he remembers everything? Won't he just turn against me again?" He let the thought sharpen into something colder. "Should we find a way to get rid of him while we have the chance?"

Atros was silent for a long moment. "Do you have so little confidence in yourself? You'll have plenty of time before this becomes an issue. Are you telling me you can't win over an old man who was already inclined to support you? And even if you fail at that, by the time he remembers, you should have consolidated enough power in this empire that you have nothing to fear from a single legendary paladin."

"But killing him now would be simpler," Percival said. "We have this power. Why not use it?"

Something in Atros's voice shifted. "Time is formidable, but is not infallible. How do you think Arthur Lyon killed me? Even gods have been slain by mortals. If you intend to meet every problem with the assumption that your power can overcome it, then you should walk away now. You'll end up exactly where I did, with a paladin's blade taking your head.

Percival said nothing for a moment, jaw tight. Then: "What should I do?"

"Be the emperor of Lyon. The lives of your entire imperial family have bought you time. Use it. Earn back the trust of your people. Draw the strong to your side. Become the next Arthur Lyon. You don't need a Dragon Tyrant to teach you how to be a worthy king."

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