Lich for Hire

War was coming. Every tifling in the Unholy Kingdom knew it.

It wasn't only because of the chain of events on Lyon's side.

The fearsome Leonine General was dead. No one knew who had done it, but Lyon had laid the blame squarely on the Unholy Kingdom, claiming the tiflings had sent assassins.

It was a serious accusation, and the tiflings found it difficult to refute—because over the years, more than a few of them actually had sent assassins after Roger Ángelo. Those attempts had mostly ended with the would-be killers cut down by patrols before they even reached Lavarun.

A legendary paladin, surrounded by an entire army, was not an easy target.

So when word came that the Leonine General had actually been killed, the tiflings were struck dumb for a long moment before the celebrations began.

Then came the obvious question: just who had done it? At least let them know the name of the hero they were taking the blame for.

But no one came forward. Eventually, the general consensus settled on the assassin having died alongside his target.

Either way, the charge was real enough. Most tiflings accepted it.

But accepting that blame meant bracing for Lyon's response.

Even with the border lined with Hellgates, the Unholy Kingdom continued to mobilize heavily and move forces toward the frontier.

What several of the more observant tiflings noticed, however, was that these deployments seemed to be driven by local commanders acting on their own initiative. The Unholy Council had issued no orders throughout any of it.

No, that wasn't entirely true—they had recently conducted a rather forceful collection of gold for the "war efforts."

It was rather tyrannical of them, but with the enemy at the gates, most tiflings had been willing to contribute.

Still, weren't they going to do anything with all that gold? The Unholy Council needed to act. Lyon was nearly upon them. Shouldn't someone be activating the Hellgates, at the very least?

Speculation spread through the civilian population, particularly in the city of Blackgate on the front lines, where the garrison had assembled fully but its morale already partially depleted.

That was a problem that started at the top.

Word had filtered down through the officer class that the Unholy Kingdom had been sold to the lords of Hell by the thirteen Impure.

There were two possible futures before them, neither appealing: they could die on the battlefield and descend to Hell, or they could survive the war and descend to Hell along with the entire kingdom afterward.

It was hopeless either way. Mr. Misfortune had promised to do everything in his power to change that future, but most of the senior officers couldn't bring themselves to believe it.

What no one outside the military knew was that a number of them had already deserted. They were leaving the Unholy Kingdom entirely, reasoning that putting enough distance between themselves and the kingdom might let them avoid the fate that awaited it.

With the commanders thinking this way, it was only a matter of time before the hopelessness seeped down to the rank and file.

The common soldiers didn't know any details, only that something was wrong with the officers. They held on to what confidence they could, which was primarily the sight of dozens of Hellgates standing outside Blackgate.

If Lyon really invaded, those gates would give the invaders a taste of hellfire.

The entire kingdom's resolve had come to rest on those gates.

That was why it was all the more troubling that the Impure still hadn't transferred operational control to the front-line commanders. What were they waiting for?

Despite all the preparation, when the first engagement came, it caught everyone off guard.

Lyon moved, but not with an army. They sent but one person: the emperor.

The young emperor stood atop the walls of Lavarun, gazing toward the distant Hellgates, and closed his hand around the magical necklace at his chest.

Its rose motif was a traditional Lyon design, but rather than the familiar large, silvery-white blooms, this necklace bore a cluster of smaller crimson roses, perhaps a dozen of them, wrought with exquisite craftsmanship.

As his fingers closed around it, a silvery-white radiance began to pour over him.

His slight frame swelled and stretched skyward. By the time he had risen a hundred meters into the air, the transformation was complete. Where the emperor had been, there was now a dragon of staggering size—the largest, by any measure, that had ever flown over this continent.

From snout to tail it exceeded a hundred meters. The creature cast a vast shadow as it hung in the air, and its roar rolled across the land like distant thunder.

The silver dragon banked toward the nearest Hellgate. It covered dozens of kilometers within minutes.

The Hellgates flickered in and out of visibility against the sky. Before activation, a Hellgate existed in a liminal state: technically not present in the physical world, and in principle invisible.

The Unholy Kingdom had chosen to project their outlines deliberately as a deterrent, a warning to Lyon that this was not a kingdom to be trifled with. But the projections were only illusions. No attack could reach the actual gates through them.

The dragon opened its jaws. What came out was not a roar, but a human voice, amplified to reach the city at large.

"Sinners who have made your pact with Hell, the Holy Light will cleanse your transgressions. Those who surrender now still have the chance to live. Spend what remains of your lives in atonement. Those who resist will face the wrath of the Lord of Dawn. In the name of the Emperor of Lyon, acting under divine mandate, I call forth a miracle. Sinners, repent before this power!"

The words rolled across the plain and into Blackgate. Every tifling heard the emperor's speech.

The speech itself was formulaic, barely worthy of an emperor's dignity. But the threat behind it was not.

The dragon had already begun to act.

An invisible force began to spread outward. Time itself warped the world with its power.

The flickering Hellgates began to distort. The ground churned. An unseen wind stirred. Where the gates had stood, the terrain began to rewind. Flat earth bulged back into massive sacrificial altars; then, the altars dissolved into raw rubble, until their very foundations were gone and the projections of each gate simply ceased to be, as though they had never existed.

This happened thirty times over.

Of the seventy-odd Hellgates, nearly half of them vanished in a matter of minutes.

His miracle concluded, the silver dragon roared again, "You have three days to consider. If you do not surrender, I will erase the Unholy Kingdom as though it never existed."

Then, the great dragon turned and flew back toward Lavarun.

Blackgate dispatched scouts immediately. They confirmed what the city had already seen. The Hellgates were gone.

The time dragon's power had wound them back to before their construction. Not only that, the ground itself had been restored.

When the scouts' report reached the city, the tiflings came close to open mutiny.

The Hellgates had been the Unholy Kingdom's single greatest strategic asset. But half of them had been destroyed even before they were unleashed!

Panic spread through the ranks. How were they supposed to hold back Lyon's army now? What could the border cities alone do?

Every military deployment in the kingdom had been built around the Hellgates. With those gone, there was no fallback plan. No alternative had ever needed to exist.

High above the battlefield, concealed by an illusion, Ambrose and Mr. Misfortune watched it all happen.

Mr. Misfortune let out a long breath. "The Draconic Armaments are genuinely terrifying. Thirty Hellgates were dismantled within minutes. If that power were turned on us..."

"We'd be a few hundred years younger," Ambrose said.

Mr. Misfortune gave him a withering look. "More likely, we'd regress to embryos and get blown away by the wind."

"Relax. It's just temporal energy, nothing we haven't seen before. And the young emperor's control is poor. There's nothing to worry about."

"How can you tell his control is poor?"

"It's too scattered. Temporal energy can be extraordinarily precise in the right hands."

Ambrose had seen it firsthand with Naomi, who had reversed time in a tiny, isolated space to restore smudged ink from James Watson's correspondence without disturbing the surrounding text, or rewinding a pocket of air to recover Sariel's voice.

That didn't even constitute true precision. According to the texts he had read, a true master of temporal energy could turn a single strand of white hair back to black without affecting any other strands in the vicinity.

"The emperor can't constrain the power tightly enough. Look at the areas he restored. Most of them overshot the foundations of the Hellgates by a significant margin. What a waste."

Mr. Misfortune scrutinized their surroundings more carefully and had to agree. The reversed zones were inconsistent in size and irregular in shape, hallmarks of imprecise control.

"And there's clearly a limit on how long he can sustain it," Ambrose continued. "If he could keep going, he'd have taken all seventy gates. A puppet emperor who's been performing for an audience his whole life is now finally on the front lines. He's got something to prove. A man like that wouldn't stop halfway if he could help it.

"But he did stop at halfway. He left half the gates intact, so either his reserves were depleted, or the armament has a hard limit. Possibly both. Isn't he worried the tiflings might activate the rest of the Hellgates right away?"

Mr. Misfortune couldn't argue with that reasoning, but his expression remained troubled. "Even so, that power is beyond anything I can imagine countering directly."

"We're not planning to counter it directly. That's the point. And if it did come to a direct confrontation, I could hold my ground. I might even take the young emperor out of the picture in the process."

Mr. Misfortune nodded. Their plan had never relied on facing the Draconic Armaments head-on.

Ambrose looked at the sky, gauging the movement of the sun. "It's almost time. Lyon attacks in three days. The astral passage opens in three days.

"Sariel and Tiamat have certainly guessed that we intend to use the astral passage to blunt Lyon's invasion, but they've made no move to stop us from locking in the coordinates. That means they have something else prepared. The future we divined was murky, and neither side's victory was clear. Be careful, Senior."

Mr. Misfortune smiled. "I will. Everything is in place. May the Goddess of Fate guide us to our desired future."