Lich for Hire

Becoming an undead was not a simple matter of finding a place thick with dark energy, running a blade through yourself, and waiting to see what emerged.

That approach carried a seventy percent chance of producing nothing but rotting flesh and bone, raw material absorbed into the ambient dark energy, while the soul itself might be swallowed by the death-saturated environment, leaving nothing behind at all.

The real difficulty of undead transformation lay in preserving the integrity of the soul. The body was ultimately incidental.

Ambrose's own lich ritual had consumed a significant portion of his accumulated wealth, and even then the success rate had been far from guaranteed. He had spent some of his remaining dice of fate to tip the odds in his favor.

The bone dragon transformation was harder still. A dragon's soul was more powerful than almost any other creature's, and converting one cleanly into a bone dragon while keeping it fully intact was a process with a pitifully low success rate.

Sephris' answer gave him a sense of the scale of the problem: after a thousand years, the dragons had only managed five bone dragons with independent consciousness. These five were treated with extraordinary care. In combat, a few dozen bone constructs would be temporarily assembled from loose remains to present a show of force, and to avoid risking any of the real bone dragons.

Before Alabastra's transformation, only Sephris himself, an iridescent dragon with exceptionally powerful magic, had managed to survive the process cleanly.

And even Sephris hadn't chosen to do so willingly. The surviving dragon clans had desperately needed someone capable of holding things together and raising hundreds of juvenile dragons. Sephris, gravely wounded, had taken the risk because there simply wasn't anyone else.

Fate had shown a rare flicker of mercy: the transformation succeeded, and the dragon clans maintained just enough of a foundation to survive.

Over the centuries that followed, other dragons died one by one. Their remains covered the Graveyard floor. Of all of them, only five had made the crossing into undead dragonhood. The rest were simply bones.

Ambrose listened to all of this and then said, chin in hand, "Something doesn't add up. The dark energy here is practically on the verge of developing its own consciousness. In an environment like this, the success rate for bone dragon transformation should be considerably higher than what you're describing."

"Most dragons don't want to become undead," Sephris said. For the first time, he sounded genuinely tired rather than defensive. "They preferred to pass into the dragon god's realm after death. What they don't understand is that this war isn't over. We can't reach that realm."

Ambrose went still.

The war wasn't over. That was not information many people had access to.

Ambrose himself had worked it out through a chain of inference: bringing Arthur Lyon's heroic spirit to the Court of the Silver Moon, gathering fragments of information from the old elven king who had fought in that war, and reasoning backward from what he told him.

The Lord of Dawn and the dragon gods had reached an agreement before the conflict: neither side's deities would intervene directly in what was a mortal war, and no explicit divine guidance would be given either way. That agreement still held. The Lord of Dawn could only watch as the Lyon imperial line descended into corruption. Beyond withholding his blessing, he couldn't even explain the situation to his faithful.

The dragon gods were equally constrained. They could only watch the exiled juveniles struggle to survive in the open ocean. After all this time, the total population of the dragon clans had barely crossed a hundred.

"How do you know the war hasn't ended?" Ambrose asked. "Which of the dragon gods broke the rules? How did you know to await the day the clans could return?"

Sephris shook his head. "I worked it out on my own, because I have never once seen a dragon receive any guidance after death. Their souls simply shatter and dissolve into the Graveyard. I have told them this—told them all—and not a single one of them believes me. They think I made it all up as a pretext to recruit more bone dragons."

He paused, then looked at Ambrose directly. "I have misjudged you repeatedly. You now know every secret of the dragons. What do you intend to do with that? To help us return to the continent, or to use the Elegiac Society's name against us?"

After Ambrose had seen through the Graveyard's design, Sephris decided he had nothing else to hide.

Borrowing divine power to extract dark energy was the dragons' most significant secret. The young dragons knew nothing of it. They were simply children who had been told nothing and asked nothing.

Sephris had also worked something else out: whatever had actually brought Ambrose here, it was not revenge on Alabastra's behalf.

He had been slow to see it, but that much was clear. And he understood equally that trying to outmaneuver this lich in a game of hidden intentions was a lost cause. The lich knew far more than Sephris had imagined possible.

What Sephris privately hoped was that Ambrose would help. If the Elegiac Society could be made an ally to the dragons, returning to the mainland would become far more achievable.

His own daughter and son-in-law were both members. That connection had to count for something.

He was still formulating how to raise this when Ambrose smiled pleasantly and said, "Lord Sephris, you've noticed that the heroic spirit of Arthur Lyon is currently under my stewardship. I think you can probably infer my position from that. Wouldn't you agree?"

Sephris frowned. "You're a lich. I'm well aware of how the continent operates: the Lyon Empire has always been the most hostile power toward the undead. But Arthur Lyon himself said he was willing to accept the dragon clans' return."

Ambrose raised one finger and wagged it gently, his voice taking on an edge of contempt. "Lord Sephris, what you just said is a little shameless, if I'm being honest. I held my tongue while Arthur Lyon's spirit was present out of courtesy to you, but now you're invoking his name for your own purposes. Arthur Lyon is my closest companion, my brother in every meaningful sense. And you're telling me he supports the dragon clans' return?"

Sephris cocked his head. "You heard what he said yourself. He gave the dragon clans a path back precisely because he wanted to allow for the possibility—" He turned to Gareth. "Is your friend actually all right? Is something wrong with his soul?"

Gareth said nothing. He had gone very still, because in his experience, when Ambrose put on this particular expression, someone was about to have a very bad time—and in this case, that someone was his father-in-law.

He was not especially upset about this.

Since the marriage, the old dragon had found fault with him at every opportunity. He was a creature from the era of dragon supremacy, with all the attendant assumptions that implied. It wasn't hard to imagine the constant friction he would have with his human-turned-undead son-in-law.

If not for that stubborn, prejudiced old man, Gareth's reputation wouldn't be that of a kept husband. He had the ability to take the Dragon Graveyard apart single-handedly. The only reason he hadn't was that he loved his wife.

Now Ambrose was about to make the old dragon's life very difficult indeed, and Gareth had to work hard not to applaud.

Instead, he pretended to compose himself and turned to Ambrose. "Sephris is my father-in-law, after all, Lord of the Dragon Graveyard, and a figure of real consequence among the elder dragon clans. Think of everything we went through together in Alkhemia for my sake, old friend."

Ambrose looked at him. That phrasing was familiar.

Fighting side-by-side in Alkhemia? That was clearly referring to the operation where they had jointly dismantled the Knights Penitent. Gareth was asking him to go easy while also clearly hoping he wouldn't.

Ambrose understood perfectly. He let out a sigh of apparent reluctance. "Very well. Out of respect for Gareth, I'll put this differently. Lord Sephris. Arthur did leave the dragon clans a path back. But what were the actual terms? What did the path require?"

"The recognition of the kingdoms on the mainland," Sephris said.

Ambrose shook his head. "That's where the misunderstanding is. What Arthur was truly asking for was atonement. Recognition follows from atonement—it's the result, not the condition in itself. So let me ask you directly: in the seventeen centuries since your exile, what has the dragon clans done to atone? Anything at all. Name one thing."

Sephris was silent.

He had no answer to proffer.

"I wasn't alive for the great war," Ambrose continued, "but I did read about it. Since the dragon clans were driven out, the only accounts I've encountered are of sailors and explorers being killed when they crossed paths with dragons at sea. Not once have I come across a record of dragons helping people in danger. Your clans have spent seventeen centuries hating the races that overthrew you.

"Lord Sephris, if the dragon clans had genuinely understood what they did wrong, they would not have spent seventeen centuries without making a single gesture of atonement."

Sephris had no response to that. He hadn't thought about atonement, not once. In his mind, the framework of war had always been about victory and defeat. He had assumed, before today, that the clause was simply Arthur Lyon's way of twisting the knife, a condition deliberately designed to humiliate. Only hearing the heroic spirit explain it in his own words had changed his mind.

Ambrose had meant what he said, too. He wasn't merely trying to trick the old dragon.

Arthur Lyon's actions were consistent with everything his faith taught. Building in a return clause that required forgiveness was not unreasonable given those values. But he had overestimated the dragons—no, all intelligent races at large.

All intelligent beings were more or less the same in this respect. Almost none were willing to admit fault. They merely watched history repeat the same patterns in the same cycles without learning anything from them.

To be lenient with yourself and demanding of others was simply the nature of all intelligent beings. To genuinely hold yourself to the same standard you applied to others was the action of a saint.

One had appeared over a thousand years ago by the name of Arthur Lyon. Over seventeen centuries later, there was no sign of a second.

Ambrose admired Arthur Lyon sincerely. He also thought the latter hopelessly naïve.

And because he understood the standard of a saint, Ambrose had no illusions about being one himself. He had never had any intention of performing the sort of principled grandstanding that some idealists seemed to think the situation called for—fairness, fairness, always fairness.

And if he couldn't live up to a principle himself, it would be somewhat presumptuous to wave it in other people's faces.

It was simpler to operate on the basis of what was practical.

He was maneuvering Sephris without a trace of guilt. The old dragon had been rattled enough that his thoughts were now muddled with remorse and resentment, tangled by the fate of the dragon clans, which was clearly the core of his undead obsession. He was no longer thinking clearly.

It was time for the killing blow.

"Lord Sephris, if the dragon clans were to return to the continent and resume their old ways, do you genuinely believe that would be good for them? We have no Arthur Lyon in our time. If the dragon clans are defeated again, there will be no exile, only extermination.

"Have you ever considered what the dragon clans actually need?"

Sephris looked up, something uncertain in his expression for the first time. "What do they need?"

Ambrose smiled. "I don't know either, honestly. But why not ask the dragons who are still alive? Introduce me to them. We can sit down together and talk it through. The truth tends to become clearer the more it's examined. Wouldn't you agree?"

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