Lich for Hire

Sephris didn't know much about Ambrose. His knowledge of the lich amounted to a few impressions: diviner, lich, member of the Elegiac Society, and apparently also an alchemist.

By the standards of an ancient dragon's judgment, Ambrose was someone who knew a little about everything and excelled at none of it.

As for the banishment of the Unholy Kingdom, the version of that tale that had reached Sephris was that the architect of that feat had sacrificed himself, and Ambrose had merely been a fast-talking intermediary who had negotiated something out of an archduke of Hell.

Moreover, this lich had once been so poor as to take in his son-in-law and charge him rent.

Sephris genuinely wondered, at times, whether the president of the Elegiac Society had simply been half-asleep when he admitted this particular lich to their ranks.

The only thing that prevented him from dismissing Ambrose entirely was the weight the Society carried.

So when Ambrose suggested there might be a solution that served everyone, Sephris's first instinct was a silent, "You alone?"

But the dragon clans were not what they had once been, and antagonizing an organization as formidable as the Elegiac Society was not something he could afford. Beyond that, they had come here for his daughter's sake. Turning friends into enemies over a matter of pride would be both petty and foolish.

Sephris exhaled at length. His enormous skeleton dissolved and reformed as a white-robed old man. He looked at Ambrose with something approximating resignation. "Follow me. I'll tell you everything."

Sephris had no idea just what he was inviting into the Dragon Graveyard.

Behind Sephris's back, Gareth gave Ambrose a quiet thumbs-up. Ambrose really was extraordinary. He had made up a pretext like avenging Alabastra out of nowhere, and it was even air-tight enough that this stubborn old dragon had no choice but to accept it.

Ambrose gave Gareth a smile, then followed after Aige and Milena. The old man was already walking at a pace that suggested he had no interest in waiting for anyone.

It took roughly twenty kilometers to go from the shoreline to the Dragon Graveyard.

That explained the pace, at least.

The island itself wasn't particularly large; rather, the distance was an artifact of the layered spatial arrays that covered the land. Every two steps forward required one step back. Passages that seemed to lead up would deposit you below where you had started. Following Sephris was the only way through. Anyone who deviated would simply become lost in the maze indefinitely.

After a while, Milena reached out through their soul-link. "Father, do the dragons have to go through all this just to get home?"

"Not quite, little one. The old dragon is putting on a display for us. Beyond the spatial maze, there are powerful magical traps threaded throughout this path. The message is: don't underestimate the dragon clans. He's hoping to give us second thoughts about causing trouble."

"That seems like a lot of effort," Milena conveyed. "Considering we wouldn't move against him anyway, out of respect for Uncle Gareth and Aunt Alabastra."

"Because it's not just himself he's trying to protect. This old man is thinking about the other dragon clans too. He wants us to understand that provoking them would come at a cost."

Ambrose turned the thought over. "Interesting, actually. Dragons are solitary by nature—one dragon per city, even at the height of their rule. Blood ties aside, they don't generally form attachments. What happened to this one? Why does he care so much about other dragons, enough to keep guarding them even after death?"

Whether it had something to do with the old covenant, Ambrose couldn't say yet. But the fact that Sephris cared was useful information. The worst outcome would have been an ancient dragon who sealed himself in his graveyard and slept through everything. As long as he had something he wanted to protect, there was a weakness Ambrose could exploit.

Ambrose was still thinking about this when he noticed a dragonbone vine growing at the side of the path. It cost several thousand gold as an alchemical reagent; leaving it behind would be a waste. He pocketed it, then a mushroom that resembled a dragon egg, and then a fragment of broken dragon tooth. By the time Sephris stopped and turned around, Ambrose had collected fifteen distinct specimens.

"Do you have any understanding of how to conduct yourself as a guest?" Sephris said, his voice flat with barely controlled irritation. "Taking a vine or two might have been forgivable, but you've been filling your pockets the entire way. Have you no shame?"

Ambrose gasped in surprise. "Oh? Have we arrived already? I do apologize, Lord Sephris. We've been walking for so long, I assumed we were still on the way. I thought these were just things growing along the roadside that no one wanted. I had no idea we were already inside your home."

He sounded sincerely apologetic, but he made no move whatsoever to return anything.

Sephris radiated a palpable aura of fury. He had intended to lead them on another circuit or two—the full tour, to make an impression of the Graveyard's magical arrays—but this lich was clearly going to keep "accidentally" collecting things as long as the tour continued.

The Dragon Graveyard was more than wealthy enough to overlook what Ambrose was doing, but it offended Sephris' sensibilities.

That insufferable lich!

He waved a hand. The twisting spatial passages collapsed and straightened, and a clear path opened before them.

For the first time, Ambrose saw the Dragon Graveyard as it actually was.

It was, in the most literal sense, a mass grave.

Dragon bones stretched across every surface as far as the eye could reach in an endless field of enormous skeletal remains. Dark energy hung in the air so thickly it was almost tangible. Even without any conscious manipulation, the place had become a zone of natural dread simply by existing long enough in an area of such concentrated energy.

What was stranger was what the dark energy did when Ambrose reached out to it: it moved away from him.

He tried to draw it in, to exert even the lightest thread of control, but it evaded his awareness like smoke curling around a hand.

Aige and Milena felt the same thing. Both of them shifted slightly, visibly unsettled.

For an undead, it was like sitting down to a feast and watching every dish slide off the table and walk away. It was deeply unpleasant.

"Fascinating," Ambrose said. "No outsider seems to be able to access the dark energy here."

Sephris chuckled. "We dragon clans do have a few methods of our own. How else could we establish ourselves out here in the middle of the ocean?"

"Would you object to my looking around?"

"Be my guest. Though if you intend to unravel the Graveyard's secrets, I'd suggest saving your energy. It isn't knowledge a mortal can access."

Ambrose paused at that.

Not knowledge a mortal can access?

His soulfire flickered. He extended his perception again. This time, instead of trying to draw the dark energy in, he simply tried to follow it, to understand what it was doing rather than commanding it to stop.

This time, it worked.

A thread of the dark energy allowed itself to be touched. It flowed into his palm at his invitation, and resolved into a soft green luminescence in his hand.

"Necrotic spiritlight?!"

Now it was Sephris' turn to stare. He had sensed the entire process. This lich had actually exerted control over the Dragon Graveyard's dark energy. How could he even...

"What an elegant design," Ambrose said, more to himself than to Sephris. "You're drawing on geothermal energy to sustain the magical arrays. The deaths of various dragons seeded the island, but they weren't the source of all this energy, not primarily. You've been aggregating the death of countless creatures across the entire ocean and channeling it here. You're drawing power directly from the concept of death itself." He looked up. "That's bold. Aren't you worried about drawing the attention of any death-aligned deity?"

"How did you know?!" Sephris said. The composure he had been projecting had cracked open. "That is not knowledge accessible to a mortal."

Ambrose smiled. "I'm acquainted with a number of deities."

It was a fortunate accident of timing, really. Without the knowledge Leyla had shared with him, he would never have been able to intuit the Graveyard's structure at all. But knowing what he did, the shape of what had been built here was unmistakable.

If he had to characterize it, then the Dragon Graveyard was akin to a conceptual god, a very weak one, barely qualifying even for the lowest tier of divine power, and without any consciousness of its own. But even the lowliest of conceptual gods could draw power from the concepts they embodied, not from faith or worship.

In practice, this wasn't entirely different from the magical array in Alkhemia that had been built to transform Gary Watts into something approaching the divine, allowing him to cast Wish an unlimited number of times.

The Dragon Graveyard was a working example of the same principle, built more carefully: it was stripped of any emergent divine will and reduced to a tool that produced a steady supply of enhanced dark energy.

That, though, raised an obvious question.

"I'm curious," Ambrose said. "What exactly were you trying to accomplish by tapping into power at this scale? Poaching faith is enough to make a deity hold a grudge. It's like a slap across the face. Directly extracting power from a divine concept is considerably worse."

Death as a concept... Which deity currently held that domain?

Was it Milcor, Lord of Bones? Ba'al, God of Murder? Cymric, Prince of Lies? Several names surfaced in his mind, but the specific deity responsible for the domain of death itself was suddenly, oddly difficult to recall.

It had been a long time since he had last reviewed those references. He had probably gotten something mixed up.

But that wasn't the primary concern. Just what were these bone dragons trying to achieve?

If a deity caught mortals extracting power from their conceptual domain, Aion would look the other way and let them do whatever they wanted in response.

The same principle that protected Alkhemia's alchemical array was that it was carefully built to have nothing to do with alchemy as a concept. Otherwise, his master would have reduced everyone involved to ash without hesitation.

So why hadn't the deity who bore dominion over death already destroyed the Dragon Graveyard?

Sephris's manner had shifted entirely. His condescension was gone.

No member of the Elegiac Society was a lightweight. He had simply been dead long enough that his thinking had grown rigid.

For a brief moment, he considered the possibility of silencing Ambrose.

He dismissed it almost immediately. A lich wasn't silenced easily, and if he tried, his son-in-law wouldn't necessarily side with him. Gareth restraining him was all it would take to ensure Ambrose survived, regardless of whether Sephris committed the entire Graveyard's power to the attempt. And that was even before accounting for the mistress of the Silent Sea and that mysterious undead girl.

Silence was not an option, which meant there was only one possible solution left. "I should not have brought you in here," Sephris said. "But perhaps that, too, was fate. There is much to discuss now: the covenant the dragon clans signed in the old era, the choice the githarks are offering, and the secrets of the Dragon Graveyard. Where would you like to begin?"

"Business first," Ambrose said. "Tell me about the covenant."

"The terms were simple. Every surviving dragon was to leave the continent and never return within their lifetime. Any who attempted to return would find themselves weakening until they died. And the only way to dissolve the covenant was to receive the forgiveness of every kingdom on the continent."

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