Lich for Hire

Shara's phantom pressed a finger against the center of Ambrose's brow and spoke an incantation.

The dark knowledge parasitizing his soul transformed into countless venomous creatures that threw themselves at his soul with frenzied hunger.

Within moments, his soul was in pieces.

Shara fared no better. The body she had assembled from black mist was simultaneously torn apart by an invisible force. From the phantom came a shriek of genuine agony.

It looked like mutual destruction, as if Shara had traded Aion's punishment for Ambrose's permanent erasure. But even before her phantom had fully dissipated, the shattered soul began to reassemble.

Fragment by fragment, the ruined soul recomposed itself through some unknown ability.

Ambrose took a long breath. He looked at what remained of Shara, barely a faint outline now, and said, "I didn't think you'd actually do it. But you moved first, which means you broke the contract. The Weft knowledge is mine, with no conditions attached."

Their original agreement had two provisions: Ambrose could not teach the Weft knowledge to anyone else, nor even write it down; and Shara could not use that knowledge as a direct weapon against him. The direct soul-to-soul transfer of the knowledge had created the need for that safeguard.

But Shara had just violated that provision.

What punishment she would receive from Aion, Ambrose couldn't estimate precisely. He wasn't Aion, and had no insight into how the Supreme God weighed these things, but it was clear the penalty would not be trivial. Shara had been hiding in the shadows for years, which suggested Aion's attention was not something she was eager to attract.

As for Ambrose himself, he had known he would be fine. He had already experienced having his soul shattered once before.

That first time had been after he engineered the destruction of Loss's chosen, causing the spider goddess to hemorrhage substantial divine power.

Loss had lost her composure and struck at him directly. Divine power at that level was not something mortal defenses could address. He had been reduced to nothing, body and soul alike.

But before that particular campaign, Poet, of Elegiac Society fame, had granted him thricebound magical protection similar to a death ward, though considerably more refined. After the battle, Ambrose had discovered that the two remaining uses of this effect had not expired.

They appeared to resist any attempt to dispel them, and persisted even through complete annihilation by divine force.

Loss had consumed the first, and Shara had just consumed the second.

And so, Ambrose successfully reconstituted.

He looked at Shara's fading outline and waved a hand. "Farewell. Go back to your divine realm and nurse your wounds. When you've recovered, we can do business again."

The ghost of her presence opened its mouth as if to curse him, but Ambrose could no longer hear her.

With a sudden lightness in his mind, divine knowledge began to pour in.

Everything Shara had accumulated about the dark Weft—every experiment, every discovery, every refinement across the centuries—was transmitted complete and unencumbered. There were no restrictions, no tethers, and no way for Shara to use it to locate him or affect him ever again.

This was unambiguously Aion's doing. Shara would never have honored such terms voluntarily, but she had sworn an oath to Aion, and Aion had enforced it.

Aion appeared, on this occasion, to have been unusually attentive to Ambrose's interests. Not only had his transgressing "daughter" been punished, but the entirety of the forfeited stake had been transferred to the injured party.

"Praise be to Aion, whose obedient child hearkens to your wisdom, whose grace is as vast as sky and earth and present in all things—"

Ambrose recited several verses of Aion's prayer he had pieced together from ancient texts over the years. They were not easy to find. Almost nothing about Aion had been written down in any useful form.

But no response came.

As expected, Aion had never concerned himself with mortal opinion. His only interest was whether the deities under his authority kept to the rules he had established.

Ambrose lowered the containment barrier with a mild sense of wasted effort, only to find Black Rose waiting with an expression of undisguised concern.

He smiled. "Everything is fine. The problem has been dealt with. I didn't identify all the parties behind it, which is mildly irritating, but..."

Black Rose exhaled. "You made a contract with Shara?"

She had been outside the barrier, with no way to know what was happening inside. Ambrose had done so deliberately: when threatening deities, there should be as small an audience as possible. In a private audience, a deity with a reputation to uphold would be able to make a graceful exit. Threaten the same deity in front of witnesses, and pride would force an escalation that served no one.

What he hadn't anticipated was Shara suddenly deciding to burn everything down, entirely out of character for a goddess who focused on scheming and indirect manipulation.

But the outcome was not unwelcome. A long-standing liability had been removed from his soul, and he had gained complete knowledge of the Weft as a bonus.

He gave a brief summary. Black Rose's mouth slowly fell open.

"You... you got another goddess punished by Aion? And yet you're standing here, perfectly fine!"

"What did she expect? If Shara had real power, she wouldn't have spent years hiding from Selene. Now she's going to be recovering for several centuries. We're not going to hear from her for a long time."

The one true disappointment was that Shara hadn't been stripped of her divine domains.

But there was a reason for that. As one of the primordial deities who had been present since the earliest days of the world, having contributed to its creation and bled in its defense, Shara carried a different kind of standing than a newer god. Her troubles had come from fighting her own siblings, and Aion, as a creator and father figure alike, couldn't take sides in family disputes.

A fight with a mortal was different. Aion could and would penalize her, but stripping her domain was not proportionate to this particular transgression. Several centuries of diminished capacity was more likely.

Certainly, none of this was a complaint about Aion's justice. Enforcement of the contract was already more than enough. Shara would not be surfacing again for a very long time.

And in the meantime, he had knowledge of the Weft in his hands. If he presented that to the Goddess of Magic, the goodwill it would generate was difficult for him to even estimate.

Back when he had been a mage's apprentice, he had entertained a certain fantasy more than once: encountering the Goddess of Magic in a dream, and then... But it had always remained a dream. Was it unreasonable to think that knowledge of this magnitude might at least earn him a night with her? Failing that, perhaps he could become her chosen. That would be a satisfying resolution to an old ambition.

He was so pleased he was nearly humming. Black Rose could only marvel at the extraordinary proportions of Ambrose's nerve.

She had encountered unbelievers before, people who had gradually abandoned faith after receiving no divine response and drifted into indifference. Most people still held at least some reverence for the gods, even if they stopped actively praying.

Ambrose was something different entirely. He genuinely felt no awe toward any deity whatsoever. He calculated against them, maneuvered them, and treated them as obstacles or resources. In the truest sense of the term, he was an unbeliever, not someone who had lost faith, but someone for whom the concept of divine authority had simply never taken hold.

Black Rose found herself thinking, not for the first time, that there was no one else quite like him. The world had many gods, but Ambrose might be more unusual than any of them.

Something stirred in her chest. She asked, "So what do we do now? The threat is neutered. Do we leave?"

Ambrose looked out at the open ocean and thought for a moment. "No. The stage is already set, and I still don't know who the other players are. I can run now, but what would happen next time?"

He was done dancing around the gods who kept reaching into his life. It was an ongoing drag on his ability to make money, and he was tired of it.

Loss, Shara—he had already tossed two goddesses out of the picture for the foreseeable future. "Who's next?!" he wanted to shout at the sky.

As if mortals were such easy prey!

He was going to make it clear to whoever was still hiding behind the scenes that they were not dealing with the hesitant, half-baked legend he had once been. He would face any of them head-on without flinching.

It was time they understood exactly who they had been underestimating!

But before that, his little island needed work.

He didn't know precisely how many enemies he had, but Fate would ensure every one of them received his message. However many came, this would not be a simple engagement.

He needed a secure base. He needed to convert this island into his mage's tower in the shortest possible time.

That had once been beyond him, but no longer. He could adjust the flow of time within his extradimensional space, manufacturing everything at accelerated rates within, then transferring the finished components out for assembly.

Beyond that, he now held the complete knowledge of the Weft, which had deepened his understanding of magical theory significantly. Given time to study it properly, he could advance further than he currently stood. As a starting point, it was exactly what he needed to construct a miniaturized Weft across the island.

He spent a day inside his personal space, then emerged carrying an enormous quantity of magical components: fragments of magical arrays, all metal, all precisely shaped. He handed them to Black Rose for assembly and then summoned the Golden Throne, rising into the air above the island.

Tens of thousands of dice of fate swirled around him, circling his form in a cloud, and then scattered outward like a meteor shower.

The dice streaked through the air, traveling dozens, then hundreds, of kilometers, settling into every corner of the surrounding ocean.

He was weaving a single, specific future into existence, a future that all his enemies would learn about.

Ambrose's declaration went out to the world: "I will be on this island for one month. Anyone who wants to kill me—come."

Whether they were demons and monsters dispatched by hostile deities, or people who had accumulated genuine grudges against him across his several centuries of existence, anyone still living would receive the message in a form they could not fail to understand.

One month. Over the course of that month, Ambrose intended to demonstrate to the world what it meant to be a legendary diviner, and what it meant to be part of the Elegiac Society.

When all this was over, he wanted every person alive to hear his name and straighten up, to think only of commerce, never of conflict. He wanted not a single minor deity with delusions of consequence to imagine, even briefly, that threatening him was worth the cost.

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