Chapter 387: If That Lich Were An Enemy
Chapter 387: If That Lich Were An Enemy
In the Court of the Silver Moon, within the verdant elven palace, the young elven king Alderien sat in his oak chair and stared at the magic mirror in front of him.
He had watched hundreds of meteors fall from the sky and casually annihilate a githark army. He was stupefied.
Was this all an illusion?
Everything he knew about this lich argued against it. Ambrose's lies were never laid out in the open. Everything he showed you and vouched for with confidence was real. The genuine deception was always the part you never noticed, before or after the fact.
If this was not deliberate misdirection, then the elves had been severely underestimating him.
Alderien looked around the hall. The entire senior leadership of the elven people was seated there—every significant figure within the Court of the Silver Moon.
"He showed us this intentionally," Alderien said. "What are your thoughts?"
Silence. The image of several hundred meteors falling in sequence was not something that left people with ready opinions. Elves lived long lives, but most of them had not been alive for the Dragon War, and spectacles on that scale were not part of their lived experience.
But the king had raised the question, and they had no choice but to answer.
"Perhaps we could increase the magical materials we send him each year. A stronger relationship wouldn't hurt."
Alderien located the speaker, an elf who looked middle-aged but was somewhere around eight or nine hundred years old. He was the Court's treasurer, who managed the ten million gold worth of materials sent to Ambrose annually. The first shipment was already partly on its way. There was room for more.
"Your first thought," Alderien said, "is to send more gold to bribe the lich. Have we fallen so far that the elves are currying favor this way?"
"Your Majesty," the old elf began carefully. "Most of our able-bodied people have had their magic sealed. We are at our weakest."
Alderien hmphed. "Do you think I don't know of that? On my first day as king, I read the list of those afflicted hundreds of times. I know who they are, how old they are, and where they are throughout the Court. Though their magic is sealed, they are not dead. They can live normally without it. Are you treating them all as bedridden invalids?"
He stood up. "I have been surveying every part of the Court since taking the throne, and I have found a serious problem. How exactly are you managing the afflicted? Is telling them to rest all you know how to do?
"Elves are melancholic by nature. Being stripped of magic is devastating. You've left them sitting at home with nothing to do, time to think, and every reason to believe they've become useless—and then you've confirmed their worst fears by treating them as useless. Does the Court of the Silver Moon have no work that doesn't require magic?"
The elves lowered their heads in shame. To think a lich's massacre all the way out in the ocean would earn them all a scolding from their king! What a vile, malevolent lich!
And yet the gathered elves could offer no rebuke. Their new king was young and his tenure short, but the authority he had built was his own—earned through what he had accomplished, not inherited through seniority. The older generation had no grounds to look down on him, and they knew it.
Elves, to their credit, were generally not the type to nurse resentment. They didn't hold Alderien's anger against him. They began to think, genuinely, about his point.
Before long, someone offered, "We could assign work that doesn't require magic to those who are sealed. The magical forges are off-limits, but ordinary forges can still produce results. And alchemy, and the cultivation of magical materials—most of that is hands-on, not magic-dependent."
"That's right. It takes longer, but it's better than letting them believe they're finished. And elven warriors don't need any skill in magic, either."
Once someone laid out the first suggestion, more followed.
Alderien let them talk without cutting in, though more than a few ideas struck him as impractical wishful thinking. Still, the energy in the room was far better than the silence it had replaced.
Elves had never feared difficulty. The elven gods were the most powerful divine backing any people on the continent could claim. No situation was truly hopeless as long as the elves preserved their identity. The one genuine danger would be the elves giving up on themselves and thereby drawing down divine punishment.
When the conversation had run its course, Alderien turned back to the original question. "Take these suggestions and work through them properly later. Now, this lich showed us what he can do deliberately. How do we respond to that?"
This time, no one hesitated. "Your Majesty, we shouldn't be too alarmed. Several hundred meteors falling is impressive, but the Court of the Silver Moon's own large-scale magical arrays are in the same tier."
"Those arrays took decades to build," Alderien said. "The lich has been at sea for but a few days."
"Our offensive capability is lacking, but our defense is another matter. As long as the Court stands, we have time to rectify the situation."
"Good," Alderien said, and meant it. "That is how we elves should speak. But don't lose sight of this detail: however powerful he might be, no one can produce magic on that scale through personal ability alone. And look at the accuracy of those meteors—the hit rate would be impossible without divination at work.
"Now, something is granting that lich an impossible quantity of output. What do you think it might be?"
The answer came quickly. "The Weft, Your Majesty?"
Elves had the deepest affinity for spellcasting of any race. They were born with natural access to at least one cantrip, and becoming a formal mage required less effort for elves than for anyone else. The people in this room were the cream of the crop, and they had all been watching the display.
Ambrose had tried to obscure the evidence, but during the Hundredfold Meteor Shower, the flow of magical energy at that scale had left obvious marks.
Something was controlling his reserves of magic and organizing them into a system with properties similar to the Weft.
The Weft itself was the Goddess of Magic's creation, built to tame wild magic and give spellcasters reliable access to it. What Ambrose appeared to have was a miniaturized version of his own.
This matched something the elves had already concluded by reverse-engineering the seals that the lich had sold them. The seals bore structural similarities to a small-scale Weft, using the same principle to balance and contain unstable magic rather than to empower casting.
But though the elves had ultimately figured out the concept, they were completely unable to reconstruct the mechanism.
Alderien said: "I'm confident this lich acquired some form of forbidden knowledge recently, likely from a deity. Knowing his character, he'd sell it to all interested buyers if they paid him enough gold. Prepare yourselves. War is coming to the continent in one form or another. Whatever form it comes, we must be ready to protect our people."
Every elf in the room rose to their feet.
Alderien waved them out and closed his eyes.
After a moment, an old man with white hair walked in: Hildas, his grandfather, the former elven king.
"Well done. You are better suited to this than either Catherine or I ever were."
Alderien did not open his eyes. He sighed heavily. "Being suited to it doesn't make it easy. Grandfather, we don't know what we're facing. The gods won't give me so much as a hint.
"I keep returning to a question I can't answer. If the lich has dealt with the githarks, the overseas dragons won't be a problem. So where lies the actual threat? We have a lich who keeps saving the world. What could possibly bring this world to the edge of collapse? Until I can identify the real cause, our people remain in danger."
Alderien was different from both predecessors. His grandfather had been a giant of the Dragon Tyrant's era, a hero who had fought alongside Arthur Lyon and whose credentials were beyond question. Catherine had been effectively designated by the elven gods themselves; there was no question about her succession.
Neither of them, Alderien had concluded, was actually suited to lead.
He would never say it out loud, but that was the truth as he saw it. The Court of the Silver Moon was old enough and wealthy enough to survive two mediocre monarchs. Alderien might not be able to match either of them in raw power, but he was a politician in the truest sense. He was someone who understood how to govern, not just how to rule.
He saw further than the others did.
The war was inevitable, that much he was certain of, but what shape would it take? Where would it start, and how would it spread? He had no answers to those questions.
"War comes," Hildas said, offering what comfort he could. "We can only prepare as best we can. You did well just now. Don't wear yourself down. You're our king, and you need to take care of your health."
Alderien opened his eyes and looked at his grandfather with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "In any other situation, I think I could manage. But Grandfather, have you considered the possibility that the lich might be the one to start this war?
"If that lich decided to destroy everything, how would we stop him?"
Hildas wanted to reply that the elves were still strong, that no enemy was beyond them, but this particular lich... Hildas couldn't make himself believe the elves could hold against him.
It wasn't because of the power Ambrose had shown, but rather his cunning. You couldn't see his plans coming.
The githarks, certainly, hadn't imagined they would encounter hundreds of meteors on a clear day, every single one precisely placed. An enemy you couldn't model with ordinary logic was an enemy you couldn't prepare for.
The only thing that gave Hildas any comfort at all was that Ambrose seemed to genuinely enjoy saving the world.