Lich for Hire

Fate was a curious thing. Those who knew nothing of it assumed that diviners wielded power rivaling the gods themselves.

From the outside, it might appear that way. But in truth, all diviners who manipulated fate were nothing more than mere butterflies.

When Ambrose had woven a fate of baldness, he hadn't flashed to Roger Ángelo's side and shaved him personally. Rather, he had amplified small events one after another, like a chain of dominoes falling in sequence.

The first domino he pushed might have been smaller than a fingernail. The second was slightly larger, and the third larger still. By the end, the accumulated force was enough to topple a city wall, or even unmake a world.

That was how his dice of fate worked: collapsing all low-probability events into one, weaving countless coincidences into a single thread, until the fate Ambrose had chosen was inevitable.

There was a constraint, however. Fate required time to nurture. Its effects took time to amplify, and that growth could not be rushed.

This was why, when Ambrose worked against the Leonine General, he had woven a fate of baldness rather than death. The difference in timescale was enormous.

Baldness could be achieved in days. A fate as consequential as death needed years or even decades to mature, and the process was not something Ambrose could reliably steer.

Mr. Misfortune's mastery of fate ran deeper.

Rather than create the possibility of an event, he annihilated it. The difference seemed subtle—after all, the dice of fate also collapsed possibilities—but it was in practice entirely different. A possibility nullified by Ambrose's dice could still be revised before the event occurred. A thread of fate that had been severed would remain severed until it healed, and could not occur under any circumstances before that happened.

Put simply, though the dice locked in a given future, that locked future could still be changed before it took place. Even just a ten-thousandth of a second before it was realized, it was still a future that could be altered.

A severed thread took effect the instant it was cut. The moment it broke, the result was irrevocable.

If the two of them were to replay the wager from their youth, Mr. Misfortune's family crest would never be found. Even if Ambrose knew where to find it, some accident would always occur before it could be retrieved.

This was the dominance of the more advanced practitioner over the lesser. In a pure contest of divination, Ambrose was simply not Mr. Misfortune's equal.

What Mr. Misfortune was doing now was playing a version of the domino game several levels above anything Ambrose could manage. Working together over the preceding days, the two of them had calculated twenty-seven thousand possible futures. Between them, they had used the power of fate to preemptively close off ten thousand of those futures.

But there simply hadn't been enough time. Mr. Misfortune now had to navigate the remaining seventeen thousand undesirable futures and arrive at the one that remained. Every thread he severed set off chain reactions: though some bad futures were eliminated, new ones emerged in their place.

Mr. Misfortune was attempting to solve a Rubik's Cube with seventeen thousand faces that was spinning in every direction at once. A face that had already been completed had to be scrambled again for the sake of the whole.

He had long since ceased to notice the pain of his body coming apart. All his attention was devoted to the threads that unraveled before him.

Tiamat watched the figure in the sky slowly disintegrate. She probed, "If I were to disrupt his ritual right now, the Unholy Kingdom would fall to me, wouldn't it?"

"You're welcome to try," Ambrose said, "if you're not worried about drawing Aion's attention."

Tiamat smiled coldly. "I don't need to act personally."

She raised one finger toward the astral passage, which was still disgorging githarks and dragons. A red dragon that had just pushed its head through ignored its rider's commands and wheeled toward Mr. Misfortune.

Tiamat watched Ambrose, certain he would move to stop it.

He didn't. He simply watched Mr. Misfortune, quietly, as though trying to fix this last image of his old friend in memory.

The red dragon lurched toward its target, but the githark rider had no way to share Tiamat's intent. Believing his mount had simply gone mad, the rider leapt clear and reached for the parachute pack. Perhaps the rider was panicking or the pack had malfunctioned, but it deployed the instant he left the saddle.

The parachute wrapped itself around one of the dragon's wings. Robbed of half its lift, the dragon lost stability immediately, began to spin, and plummeted.

Mr. Misfortune was untouched.

Ambrose offered the explanation afterward. "Before the plan began, we sealed off all external interference. Not even a god can alter the futures we've locked in place. Anyone who attempts to change what we have determined will only find misfortune waiting for them."

Tiamat's eyes narrowed. "So he's protected. What about you? I don't believe you have the reserves to cover both of you."

Ambrose paused, then looked at her. "That's rather unreasonable, isn't it? Even if you killed me right now, what would that change? The Unholy Kingdom would still escape from your clutches. You gain nothing by doing so."

There was no dignity in upending the board after losing. Destroying her opponent didn't undo her defeat.

"Watching you die would make me feel better," Tiamat said. "That's reason enough."

Sariel, who had been silent until now, clapped her hands once. "Well played, I must say. The power of fate is extraordinary. I find myself growing quite fond of this little skeleton. Tiamat, we represent the dignity of the Nine Hells. Our opponent played beautifully. There is no need to be a poor loser."

Ambrose allowed himself a quiet breath of relief. He wasn't personally afraid of being destroyed. At worst, he would have to sacrifice his phylactery and current body.

What concerned him was Tiamat's willingness to abandon the rules. When gods decided the rules no longer applied to them, mortals would face a serious problem. Overcoming a god required the protection of structure and precedent. A Tiamat who had fully committed to circumventing those obstacles could find a thousand ways to make his existence miserable, including sending cult assassins after him indefinitely. That, at the very least, would be tiresome.

Fortunately, Sariel had enough grace to intervene. Devils held their reputation seriously. They weren't the same as the chaotic demons of the Abyss.

Devils brokered deals. Devils could try to cheat, but when their opponents won legitimately, they had to be able to collect their winnings. Devils who refused to honor such an outcome wouldn't be able to find willing contractees.

Then Ambrose frowned.

Tiamat was an Archduchess of Hell with centuries of experience. She understood these conventions better than anyone. The sudden threat had been strange, slightly off in a way he couldn't immediately place.

But it didn't matter now. Mr. Misfortune was almost finished.

The churning darkness above had deepened beyond darkness entirely. The threads of fate had grown thin and sparse. Mr. Misfortune had long since ceased to have a human shape. What remained was a faint and fading light.

Ambrose recognized it as the last fragments of a scattered soul.

There were many methods of burning one's life force to amplify power. Ambrose himself had detonated his own body before, and the force rivaled a ninth-tier spell. Paladins could burn their remaining lifespan for a surge of spiritual power; the paladin Starfall had burned through his entire life in a single instant and touched the legendary rank for the breadth of a moment.

But sacrificing flesh and soul together simultaneously—that, Ambrose had never seen.

It was too extreme. No one would ever think to develop such a method, let alone research it.

Mr. Misfortune had done so himself. Even in youth, he had harbored what Ambrose could only term self-sacrificial tendencies.

It was surely how he had been raised: the relentless lessons that his family's history was one of dishonor, that its descendants owed a debt for the sins of its founders, that glory mattered more than life.

To Ambrose, none of that had ever made sense.

But in the end, he had agreed to Mr. Misfortune's plan. He didn't understand it, but he would respect it.

And now, that plan had succeeded.

Even with his soul fragmented past the point of coherence, Mr. Misfortune had severed the last remaining thread.

The Unholy Kingdom was forevermore splintered from the world.

With its final connection cut, the land became something alien to the material plane, an intruder, a foreign body. The world reacted as it always did to such intrusions.

Normally, the response would be annihilation: storms, lightning, earthquakes, and every natural force would be brought to bear on the alien matter until nothing remained.

But this time, the world chose to expel the alien mass rather than destroy it. That was the sole outcome Mr. Misfortune had left behind.

Causing the material plane to excise the Unholy Kingdom alone wasn't too difficult. Perhaps half of Mr. Misfortune's body might be left behind in that case. But to additionally preserve the Unholy Kingdom as it was, without destroying it, required a far more substantial sacrifice. His sacrifice.

Fissures opened along the borders of the Unholy Kingdom. Something beneath the earth began to push it toward the darkness of the chaos realm that had opened wide above like a waiting maw.

The ground shook. The battle between Lyon and the githarks had already stopped. Both armies stood and stared at the enormous landmass rising into the air. The full scope of the Unholy Kingdom was beyond what any eye could take in from the ground. They could only see that the horizon in every direction was being lifted away, as though some god had taken a lever to the shell of the world.

This was unquestionably a miracle. It dwarfed even the exile of Alkhemia.

The rising land gestated storms in its wake. Air rushed in to fill the space the kingdom left behind.

Githarks, Lyon's soldiers, even the red dragons in the sky—everything was caught in the pull and drawn toward the vast chasm the departing land left behind.

Then came the sea.

The Unholy Kingdom had been bordered on three sides by the sea. The water rushed in like a waterfall, a continuous roaring cascade pouring down into the void to fill it.

The departure of an entire kingdom would leave scars for a long time to come. The continent's climate would shift. The storms and disasters that followed would reach far beyond any border. Countless people who had nothing to do with any of this would feel the consequences.

Even within the Unholy Kingdom itself, an ascent this violent would not be without casualties. There was no helping that.

This was already the best outcome available.

As the last of the Unholy Kingdom disappeared into the chaos realm, Ambrose flew upward and closed his hand around the faint fragment of light that remained.

He examined it carefully. The soul was in pieces, its memories almost entirely gone, its deepest conviction already resolved and released. It had gone into the chaos realm alongside the kingdom it had saved. What Ambrose held was something close to a template of a soul, whose contents had been wiped away.

He was quiet for a long moment.

"You have washed away your ancestor's stain. You have saved your homeland. From this day, you and your family are no longer the Impure who seized what was not theirs. You are the heroes of your kingdom.

"May you rest in peace, Vladimir Rostov."