Lich for Hire

Before Ambrose had left for the open ocean, the Lady of Mists had warned him that the goddesses he had crossed were coordinating against him again.

The moment he confirmed the ixiray were specifically tracking him, Shara was the first name that came to mind. At minimum, she was surely one of the parties involved.

When Ambrose had accepted Shara's gift of knowledge about the dark Weft, she had become able to permanently locate him. That was the price of forbidden knowledge—which was also why, after maneuvering against her the last time, he had kept the divine dagger she had given him rather than returning it. Since she could already find him regardless, there was no need to give up the artifact.

As he watched Shara's self-satisfied expression, he realized he felt less anxiety than the situation might have warranted. These goddesses talked with considerable menace, but their track record of actually achieving anything against him was poor.

The core problem was structural: chaos and evil could not coordinate the way order and good could.

One side could act in genuine concert. The other was always calculating against itself, and any cooperation was tied to the background worry of being outmaneuvered by allies. Divine alliances built on mutual suspicion had the structural integrity of wet paper.

Still, he wanted to make sure who was involved this time.

"Dark Goddess," he began, "our previous collaboration was productive for both sides. I don't imagine you want the details of that arrangement becoming widely known."

"Is that a threat?" Shara's face, composed of shifting black mist, pressed close to his, her tone amused rather than offended. "You've grown increasingly disrespectful toward the divine, little skeleton. I hope you know exactly where the line is. Step just a smidge past it, and my associates would be more than pleased to deliver divine punishment."

Ambrose didn't flinch. Mortals had been cursing at gods since the beginning of time, and the gods had never managed to fully suppress it. During Lyon's most extreme periods, they had even smashed the statues of Valarun, the god of liches, to rubble in public squares. Even then, Valarun had not descended to take personal revenge on the general population.

"A shame," Ambrose said. "I thought we had a good thing going. If you're not inclined to give me answers, I suppose this is goodbye."

"I'd like to see what you think you can do." Shara's amusement didn't waver. "The knowledge I gave you can't be written down or transmitted to anyone else. It's a prohibition bound to your soul with my divine imprint. It's part of you now."

The original arrangement had included this restriction: the knowledge was his alone. The sealing technique he had later provided to the elven kingdom was technically unrelated to the Weft itself.

In essence, Shara had given him a mathematical formula, and he had used it to derive a specific calculation, producing an elegant result, then shared the result without sharing the derivation.

The elves could reproduce the sealing scroll from that result, but they couldn't reconstruct the underlying process. The knowledge remained Ambrose's exclusively, and as long as it did, Shara could locate him at any time.

She was still looking pleased with herself when Ambrose reached up, inserted his hand into his own skull, and began pulling out a thread of his soul.

"You're insane," Shara exclaimed. For the first time, the amusement was gone from her face.

Ambrose kept his voice even. "You may not have been aware, Lady Shara, but my understanding of souls is considerably more developed than you assumed. You believe this knowledge has merged with my soul completely. In fact, it's more like a tumor. I can excise it. The cost is but some pain."

He was understating the pain considerably. The sensation was somewhere between flaying and having living nerve fibers pulled out one by one and plucked like strings. Every additional segment of thread he extracted caused the agony to multiply. His body began to tremble. His legs gave way, and he went to one knee.

But his hand kept moving.

This was the worst pain Ambrose had experienced since his lich transformation. But threatening a deity required leverage, and leverage required a demonstration.

At that moment he seemed to have again become the man he had been in his darkest years: though broken and bleeding, he would still smile through a negotiation, putting his life on the line.

Shara had not anticipated this. She understood the pain of fragmenting one's soul with perfect clarity, which meant she understood exactly what she was witnessing. This lich would genuinely tear his own soul apart. He would do it right now, to cut the thread she had woven into him.

It shouldn't have mattered to her. She would simply lose the ability to track him, nothing more.

But his behavior caused alarm bells to ring in her mind. This was no idle threat.

If she pushed him to the point of tearing apart his soul, and if he were to survive it, he would spend whatever remained of his existence dismantling every piece of her presence in the mortal world.

He didn't need to voice the threat. Everything he had done since her first encounter with him was sufficient evidence that the threat was credible.

She had miscalculated. The lich who had become an undead specifically to avoid death was apparently willing to shred his own soul when sufficiently motivated.

"Very well," she said after a long pause. "It changes nothing for me. Even if you killed every last one of my faithful in the mortal world, I remain the Dark Goddess. Wherever light exists, so too does darkness. I am eternal, and you will eventually answer for this recklessness."

Ambrose pulled another length of thread free. The trembling intensified. He couldn't stop his body from shaking, but his voice, though unsteady, held.

"Given the commitment I'm showing here, surely a goddess of your stature should recognize my courage, at least? Otherwise, I have no choice but to offer this forbidden knowledge of the dark Weft to the Goddess of Magic in exchange for her favor. I can't keep making losing trades. You understand that, I'm sure."

Shara's single deepest ambition was to claim the divine domain of the Goddess of Magic. She considered that domain rightfully hers—the first Goddess of Magic had been born from Shara's own wound, which meant, in Shara's view, that the Goddess of Magic had built her power on something stolen from her.

The dark Weft was one of Shara's primary tools for recovering that domain: a way to circumvent the Goddess of Magic's authority over spellcasting, allowing magic to be used without passing through her divine sanction.

Even Ambrose's partial knowledge of the Weft, placed in the hands of the Goddess of Magic, would be enough to unravel years of Shara's careful preparation and force her to start entirely from scratch.

"The Goddess of Magic doesn't respond to prayers from unknown mortals," Shara said. "You've never met her. You have no reason to believe she would even acknowledge you, let alone if you came bearing a fragment of my divine knowledge."

"That's where you may be mistaken," Ambrose said. "I happen to know someone who could make an introduction. A direct approach would normally be out of the question, but with this knowledge as a credential, perhaps the Goddess of Magic might be willing to receive a mortal visitor."

Leyla had been reborn and had joined Sylvanas's pantheon. That connection opened a path to Azoth, the Goddess of Magic's subordinate deity, through whom the Goddess of Magic herself could be reached.

Ambrose wouldn't claim absolute certainty in this plan, but ninety percent confidence was more than good enough.

And this was an outcome that Shara could not allow. "You're destroying your own soul," she cried out. For the first time, something beyond self-interest entered her voice. "You are an undead. If your soul dissipates, what would be left of you? You cannot guarantee your soul will survive this."

Ambrose trembled visibly. "No, I can't guarantee it. That's exactly why I have no desire to push things this far. I've always been genuinely grateful for the knowledge you gave me. A mage values wisdom above everything. You gave me extraordinary wisdom, and I've thought of you as something close to a master ever since. My own master is simply too possessive to allow me another.

"Can you really not let someone as insignificant as me go? There are far more promising candidates out there willing to devote themselves to darkness. Walk through Lyon right now and you'd probably find several chosen within the hour. My requests are modest. I only want to know which deities are behind this, and a permanent agreement that you'll stop tracking my location. Two small matters. Are you truly going to force me to carry this shattered soul fragment to the Goddess of Magic over two small things?"

Shara was silent for a long moment, fury and calculation running in parallel. She had encountered countless mortals across the centuries: the wise and the foolish, the desperate and the devoted, the monstrous and the sanctified. None of them had ever genuinely threatened a deity. They could embarrass a god, occasionally, but that was the extent of it.

This lich was different. He had already cost the spider goddess Loss half her divine domain through one of his interventions, reducing her to the weakest she had been in ages. He had disrupted Tiamat's plans more than once.

And yet the same qualities that made him so dangerous were the qualities that made the evil-aligned goddesses want him: a mortal with the capacity to reshape the continent, who had inexplicably chosen to spend that capacity on preserving the balance rather than breaking it.

A decision had to be made. Shara had to break with him entirely, or find a compromise.

Shara deliberated for a long time. Then she exhaled, a long, slow sound like a tide pulling back over a rocky shoal. "I genuinely admire you, little skeleton. You are the most interesting mortal I have met in a very long time. You are the most significant figure in this plane. You are everything I have ever wanted in a chosen—"

The longer Shara talked, the more Ambrose felt a cold certainty forming. The direction of this speech was becoming clear. A "but" was coming.

"But you remind me of what I used to be. I have spent so long in darkness that I have become nothing but schemes and contingencies, from one of the primordial deities to little more than a jester. I should not have to deliberate against a mortal." She paused. "Whatever your plan may be, a mortal has offended the dignity of a deity. That slight cannot go unanswered. You should die for it."

"Wait," Ambrose said. His voice carried real urgency. "Aion will punish you for this!"

"Perhaps." Shara was unmoved. "But I am the Dark Goddess, born from the darkness after Aion created the world. In some sense, I am his daughter. A father tends to punish his daughter but lightly. Go to your end, carrying whatever regrets you have. This is what it means to offend a god."

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