Lich for Hire

Sephris had gone silent, and then a githark army had shown up. The conclusion was obvious.

Gareth had enjoyed looting the Dragon Graveyard with Ambrose, but he was genuinely concerned about his father-in-law's safety—a side effect of caring deeply about Alabastra. Alabastra herself was barely holding together, her thoughts fixed entirely on her father.

Gareth didn't hesitate. He turned to her and said, "Don't worry. We'll deal with the githarks first, then make them tell us where he is."

Then, to Ambrose, "I'll be counting on you to read their memories."

"Consider it done," Ambrose said.

Any githark he could get a complete soul from would be an open book. He could disassemble their memories at leisure.

Gareth gave a short nod. Then, he and Alabastra took to the air.

That very instant, Ambrose felt an uneasy premonition.

"Something's wrong! Come back!"

He called out as loud as he could, but Alabastra was already high above them, driven upward by the urgency of her father's fate.

Aige looked at him. "What's wrong?"

"That reckless fool," Ambrose said, with more resignation than anger. "I have a feeling they're going to get hurt."

Aige started to say that getting the better of Gareth seemed unlikely, then stopped herself. The intuition of legendary diviners wasn't to be dismissed.

"Can we still help them out in time?" she asked. "Should I contact the president?"

Ambrose paused. Did Aige have a way to reach the Society's mysterious president? Or was she suggesting another full Elegiac Society deployment?

He shook his head. "We don't need to escalate. It won't be catastrophic, just painful. Come on. We have our own work to do. This is our stage now."

"Where are we going?"

"To the true core of the Dragon Graveyard. We need to take control of it if we're going to deal with the githarks. I'm not flying up there and facing them as a lone mage."

Aige stared at him. "You can take control of the Dragon Graveyard?"

"Not if the owner were home. But the owner left me unsupervised on the premises, and that isn't a wise thing to do with someone of my particular background. You might not believe this, but back in my adventuring days, I was better at picking locks and disarming traps than most dedicated rogues, and magical traps especially."

He set off at a brisk pace in a specific direction through the Graveyard. The dice of fate, invisible to everyone else, spun constantly ahead of him, clearing the way. To others' eyes, it looked as though an unobstructed path opened up wherever he walked, as if the place had already accepted him as its master.

Aige made a quiet sound of amazement and fell in behind him alongside Milena.

Up above them, at roughly the same moment, Gareth, riding on Alabastra's back, was confronting the githark formation.

The githark force of perhaps three thousand troops wasn't enormous, but was clearly elite. Somehow, they had acquired a large number of ixiray, enormous deep-sea creatures that the githarks had tamed as mounts. The githark cavalry rode the rays in slow revolutions around the Isle of Dragons.

Ten red dragons circled overhead, each carrying several githark dragon-riders on its back.

Gareth had intended to open with a question about Sephris to gauge their intentions. The githarks didn't extend him that courtesy. The moment he came into view, spells shot toward him.

That was enough for Gareth. He had spared the majority of the githarks during their first confrontation. If this was their response, he had no intention of holding back any longer.

He slapped a hand against Alabastra's neck. She immediately activated her concealment ability.

In the darkness of night, the two of them became a shadowy blip that registered on no senses, visual or magical, as they shot up toward the circling red dragons.

Gareth was able to bisect a dragon at a range of forty meters. Neither dragon scales nor magical shielding would matter.

It had been many years since any mortal defense could block Gareth's blade.

An undetectable approach and an unstoppable strike—this was precisely how Gareth had cut through a dozen such astral dragons last time. The surviving githarks had fled in genuine terror.

What he had not anticipated was that, the moment he and Alabastra began their charge, every single red dragon scattered.

It wasn't a feint—they had chosen a full retreat without any hesitation. The ixiray cavalry simultaneously dove into the sea and vanished into the depths. The githarks apparently had the lung capacity for sustained diving. None of them surfaced.

Stranger still, the red dragons had all clearly been buffed beforehand with Haste, Flight, Featherfall, and the works. The suite of supporting spells pushed their speed well beyond what Alabastra could match in pursuit.

She could disappear, but invisibility didn't translate into speed.

What were the githarks doing? Why had they come looking for a fight, only to immediately run off?

He was still processing this when the dragon-riders above began to chant.

Long-form incantation casting was used for powerful, sustained magic. Gareth was no mage, and neither was Alabastra. All they could detect was the accumulation of enormous magical energy somewhere nearby, building steadily.

That was when Gareth made the mistake that cost him. He picked the slowest red dragon and went after it. Most of them were moving at roughly comparable speeds, but individual variation existed. One particular red dragon was slightly less physically capable than the rest, and flying just a fraction slower.

It wasn't much, but Gareth's instincts suggested he might be able to catch up. The dragon didn't know where he was, so it couldn't evade him. If it slowed for even a moment to catch its breath, he might close the distance.

It was the right tactical logic in almost any other situation: identify the weakest point and press it. But it just so happened to be wrong in this situation.

He had barely shot a hundred meters forward when Alabastra said, in a puzzled voice: "Gareth, there's something ahead of us. I just felt it."

Alabastra's concealment worked by blocking magical perception and erasing her visible presence. It wasn't the same as her father's ability to phase into another plane entirely. Physical contact still registered.

She had felt a brief graze for a moment, too faint to identify with certainty.

Gareth frowned. "Something's wrong. Turn around."

Alabastra agreed and swung toward open water. Then, she felt another impact again. It was the same sensation, but considerably stronger.

This time, Gareth felt it too.

"Spiderwebs!"

He reached out and found sticky, clinging filaments across his body that his senses simply hadn't registered.

It had to be a web spell, but one engineered in a way that completely evaded undead perception.

Normally, undead didn't rely on physical sight. They sensed through their souls, and even transparent objects had presence within that perception. These webs had none.

He couldn't even tell where the webs were coming from. Within moments, a huge mass of invisible webs had accumulated around him.

He looked up and worked it out: the dragon-riders overhead were casting Web spells continuously behind them as they flew, laying a field of unseen webbing across the sky.

They hadn't needed to know where he was. They had just needed him to fly into the webs.

The first contact had given the casters a rough fix on Alabastra's position. After that, they had blanketed the surrounding space with more webs coming from every direction. Their hit rate was poor in isolation, but the sheer number of spells being thrown their way solved that problem efficiently enough.

Both Gareth and Alabastra were thoroughly enmeshed. The webs were physical entities, not pure magical effects, so magical resistance did nothing against them.

The concealment failed. The two of them, wrapped up in an unwieldy mass, began dropping toward the ocean surface.

Still, things weren't all that problematic. Gareth ignited the dark flames that wreathed him. Purple-black fire began to burn through the invisible webbing. A few seconds was all he needed.

Unfortunately, a few seconds was all the githarks needed, too.

Spells rained down on Gareth from every angle, their impact flashing against his armor in bursts of light. The githarks were careful to use nothing that might sever or burn the webs. What they chose instead were control effects: Charm, Petrify, Banish, Slow, and the like.

Gareth's magical equipment began activating in sequence. Layers of protection triggering one after another, blocking, nullifying, and granting resistance to the spells. They were consumed one by one.

Then, a beam of violet-red magical light struck him directly, passing through his enchanted armor as though it weren't there. Gareth dissolved into a translucent pink shimmer.

This was Banishment. It dealt no damage, but could displace the target to another plane for the duration of the spell, rendering it unable to affect or be affected by anything in the material plane.

Banishment was a powerful effect, but it should have been nearly impossible to land against someone like Gareth. The stronger a being's presence, and the more deeply their existence was woven into the fabric of the world, the harder it was to displace them into another plane. And Gareth's presence was immense.

But the githarks had thrown enough control effects at him that eventually one found its mark.

The moment Gareth went translucent and still, one of the githarks riding the red dragons let out a triumphant shout. "Got him! Move out!"

The scattered red dragons turned back and converged on Alabastra.

From the beginning, Gareth had never been the real target. The githarks knew what he was capable of: he wasn't an opponent they could kill in a short engagement. They had known, going in, that a direct fight was a losing proposition no matter how many of them showed up. So they had planned around him rather than for him.

Their target was Alabastra.

They had learned that she was Gareth's one consistent vulnerability. Control her, and Gareth would have no leverage. And now that her concealment was broken, she was exposed, and they had numbers on their side.

The red dragons descended on her from every direction.

But just as they were about to nab Alabastra, a frightening, gargantuan figure appeared in the sky above the Island of Eternal Rest.

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