Lich for Hire

Sephris was missing. The githarks were running some kind of sacrificial scheme. Lyon was fracturing. There were many significant problems in the world demanding Ambrose's attention.

But right now, he had something more pressing to think about.

He turned the black ring over and over in his fingers, examining it from every angle, but still couldn't fully work out what it did.

It was unquestionably an artifact. It had been the focal point of the Dragon Graveyard's conceptual god framework. It was responsible for channeling that power to accumulate dark energy in vast quantities, and imbuing that energy with properties it shouldn't naturally possess.

The problem was that, no matter how Ambrose approached it, he could only access a single function.

Dark energy conversion... but that was precisely what liches could already do. He was a professionally trained lich. Converting dark energy, for him, required no external tool.

The ring might make the process marginally faster, but not by any meaningful degree.

And the divinity embedded in the accumulated energy was so diffuse that reproducing what had happened above the Dragon Graveyard would take centuries of accumulation. He had spent a millennium of stored power in one activation. That was hardly an efficient exchange rate.

He had quietly tried to reach the President of the Society through the Necromantic Codex to ask about the ring, but to no avail.

The President, apparently, had a habit of sleeping for decades at a stretch. From Ambrose's transformation to the present, the man had appeared exactly once. Short of the world ending or a new member being inducted, there was little reason to expect him to wake up any time soon.

This meant that Ambrose was on his own. He would have to work out the other functions of the ring by trial and error.

"I refuse to accept this."

He could feel the power inside the ring. He could sense it clearly, like valuables protected by a glass case. The problem was that he had no way to open the case. An entire vault was sitting in front of him, and somehow—somehow!—he had arrived without the appropriate tools.

This was intolerable.

He kept pushing, sending threads of his own magic into the ring, testing for gaps, looking for any point of entry."Probing" was perhaps the more accurate word, though "seducing" might have been closer to the truth. His magic circled the ring's resistance like water around a blocked drain, looking for any weakness in the seal. There was nothing. The ring sat inert.

He wasn't in a hurry. He tucked it inside his chest cavity and decided to mull over it slowly.

Once Alabastra had relocated the Graveyard's smaller bone dragons to a secure chamber beneath the island, everyone boarded Aige and set out for the living dragon clans' islands.

The open ocean provided very few islands large enough to support the one hundred and two dragons that remained. What had once been a species of solitary predators whose members each ruled over one city had been compressed by necessity into three shared islands, with the Dragon Graveyard's Island of Eternal Rest serving as a fourth.

Adapting to communal existence had taken them more than a thousand years, and even now the process was incomplete. Dragons who had grown up together still found each other intolerable after reaching maturity. Unrestrained fights broke out regularly.

Some individuals had eventually given up on the shared islands entirely and flown out to isolated rocks in the open ocean, only to be recovered as bones within a few months.

The deep ocean was full of things that could kill a dragon, from sea monsters to legendary-rank creatures to the presence of the ocean gods themselves. Without a powerful sovereign to protect them, the dragon clans were far more vulnerable than they had once been.

The threat of death was what kept them together despite everything. But seventeen centuries of crowded coexistence on a few small islands was a long time to endure something that went against everything in your nature.

They all wanted to go back. Back to a continent with more prey than any dragon could ever eat, instead of an endless diet of fish. Back to golden deserts hiding actual gold beneath the surface. Back to a world full of intelligent races that could be made to work for them, providing resources and tribute and everything a dragon considered its due. Back to the age when dragons ruled.

This was one of the primary reasons Ambrose considered Arthur Lyon's covenant naïvely optimistic.

The psychology of intelligent beings was remarkably consistent across species. Every race remembered its golden age with longing and rarely examined what it had done during that age to other people. When genuine resolution of conflict between groups was needed, history suggested exactly two approaches that actually worked.

The first was complete elimination: if one side were to die, so too would the problem. The second was complete integration: once communities had intermingled and intermarried across enough generations, the original distinction between them would become meaningless.

Everything else was mere deferral, superficial arrangements that postponed the same conflict until a different pretext emerged, after which things would return to bloodshed.

The underlying driving force was almost always competition for resources. Scarcity was what pushed groups into conflict in the first place.

A thousand years ago, the war had been given a moral bent simply because of the involvement of Arthur Lyon. Without him, it would likely have been remembered as one more regime change among many.

And if this was ultimately about resources rather than justice, then it was negotiable.

The dragon islands were simply too small. Terraform was exactly the right tool for reshaping terrain: give them enough land, and most of the problem solved itself. As long as the dragons had something worth trading, Ambrose had something worth selling.

The key variable was Sephris.

Sephris had been the one who raised most of these dragons from hatchlings, and was a patriarch in the most literal sense. Even dragons with poor judgment should understand that working with outsiders to remove him was ridiculous in more ways than one.

But if they had truly done so, if Sephris had come to harm, there would be no restraining Gareth and Alabastra. Ambrose would have no good options in that scenario—only the mildly consoling option of collecting some dragon remains as a modest service fee.

He wasn't going to damage his relationship with Gareth over a group of ungrateful dragons. The arithmetic didn't work out from any angle.

He could only hope the living dragons had enough functioning intelligence to have avoided the worst choices. If they hadn't, they had earned whatever came next.

Aige was moving steadily toward the largest of the dragon islands. They had just passed through an underwater range of volcanoes when she slowed.

"There's something ahead," she said. "Something that makes me feel disgusted."

Ambrose extended his perception and caught the distinctive, nauseating odor immediately: the odor of demons.

"Ixiray, and a lot of them. How? Is this Demogorgon's territory?"

Demogorgon, the demon prince of the Abyss, was a creature with two heads and an abundance of tentacles, in the rough shape of a baboon. He had devotees in the deep ocean in the ixiray. These were massive mutated creatures, large enough to be used as mounts, with blood so saturated with abyssal toxin that it could be fermented into spirits potent enough to intoxicate the undead.

Ixiray lived in Demogorgon's territory, naturally. Ambrose had assumed Aige was taking a direct route to save time and had inadvertently crossed into it.

This was a real problem. Demonic blood was toxic to undead souls. Small exposure produced something akin to drunkenness, but significant absorption would cause serious soul damage.Specifically, it meant Aige couldn't use her absorption ability. Swallowing demons whole was off the table.

"Let's go around," Ambrose said. "It's not worth the detour."

Aige shook her head. "We can't. We're surrounded. This is an ambush."

The ixiray closed in from every direction.

At a casual glance, the ixiray looked like oversized rays, just dramatically larger. Look more carefully and the differences became apparent: they had multiple rows of sharp teeth in the mouth, and a cluster of heavy barbed tentacles growing from their backs.

Demogorgon's aesthetic preferences were consistently applied. A demon without tentacles was like a human without a nose. There was something obviously wrong about the whole picture.

There were a shocking number of ixiray.

As they converged, the surrounding water began to rotate. A vast whirlpool formed around Aige's hull, the current building toward something that might have shredded an ordinary vessel.

Aige didn't move. Her phased state could be maintained indefinitely, and simple water pressure had no more effect on her than it had on a ghost.

But Ambrose said immediately, "Something is wrong. We need to leave, now."

"Why?" Aige asked. "Shouldn't we find out who's behind this first?"

The githarks had arrived riding ixiray. Now there was a coordinated ixiray ambush in what should have been an empty stretch of ocean. This wasn't something the dragon clans could have arranged. Someone was specifically targeting the Elegiac Society's members.

Aige was curious. What could ixiray actually do to her?

"Staying within this ambush is a gamble," Ambrose said. "You said it yourself: there's a hidden hand behind this. Whatever they're planning, they need us to stay here for it to work."

Aige accepted the reasoning. "But how do we break out? Go deep and navigate under them?"

Her phased travel required water. She could pass through any stretch of the ocean in her incorporeal state.

Ambrose shook his head. "Up."

Aige looked at him. "Ixiray can breach the surface. I don't fly. Staying submerged is the better tactical position by any reasonable measure."

As a ship, she needed an aquatic medium to traverse. There was no getting around that.

"I know," Ambrose said. "But that's what my instincts are telling me."

Aige hesitated for a moment. "Alright. I trust you. Brace yourselves: I'm going to accelerate."

The hull shuddered. The ghost ship tilted sharply upward, bow rising and stern dropping, as it shot toward the surface.

They were more than a thousand meters down. Reaching the surface would take time, and the ixiray were densely packed above them, layer upon layer of the creatures between them and open air.

It was not the obvious choice, but it was the right one.

As Aige surged upward, the ocean floor beneath them erupted—not with lava or rock, but thick, corrupted, foul-smelling blood that shot up from the seabed in a pressurized column, the accumulated discharge of something that had been building up for a very long time. It rose behind them in a churning black-red torrent, chasing the ghost ship toward the surface.

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