Lich for Hire-Chapter 48: The Dice of Fate

The glyphs of the magic circle flared to life. On the altar, the mound of gold coins began to melt away in streams of light.

Countless flickering visions surfaced, scenes from every corner of Alkhemia mingling and collapsing into each other. Within the shifting glow, half-formed silhouettes emerged and dissolved like specters.

"We did it!" Harvey exclaimed, trembling with excitement. "I've attuned to the fate of Alkhemia!"

And while Harvey had improved immensely, controlling a ritual of this scale was still somewhat beyond his limit.

The moment the visions stabilized, an invisible weight crashed down upon him, crushing his chest and making his heart race. His entire body began to shake.

"Don't resist!" Ambrose's voice cut through the hum of magic. "You're reaching for fragments of the future, not fighting fate itself. You believe in destiny, don't you? Then what does it matter if death comes now or later?"

Harvey managed a wry smile. It wasn't quite so easy to face death with calm acceptance.

He forced himself to focus, to dig meaning out of the flood of overlapping images.

"The secret of the sewers..." he murmured.

The words served as an anchor. The countless images slowed. Visions of the city faded away, replaced by damp tunnels glistening with mildew and shadow.

"Good," Ambrose said approvingly.

Ambrose couldn't help but wonder who his teacher had been. To have such a talented apprentice waste away as a petty lord's adviser was criminal negligence.

Under Harvey's concentration, the shifting visions slowed and solidified, compressing into a shard of blue light.

"I've got it!" Harvey cried. "This is the desired fate!"

The shard looked like a stolen piece of the river of time. A single scene replayed endlessly from it.

A blurred figure stood within the sewers, clutching a glowing relic. Divine power descended from the firmament and struck the figure. Countless divine apparitions appeared, blessing and cursing the figure in unison as the figure ascended to godhood before their eyes.

The scene was vivid—almost too vivid. Only the figure's face remained indistinct, as though veiled on purpose.

Harvey began to relax. He was preparing to terminate the ritual when Ambrose interrupted, "Don't. This is a false fate."

"A false fate?" Harvey blinked in confusion.

Ambrose nodded. "The lunatics of Alkhemia must have created it to deceive diviners en masse. When I was in the sewers, I met a group of druids and an old hag. They'd all been lured down there by the same vision."

He continued, his tone turning analytical. "Prophecy is only ever a glimpse through the keyhole of destiny. If two diviners see the exact same thing, that's all but a guarantee that it was staged."

Harvey's blood ran cold. Forging a false fate that could hoodwink all diviners—what kind of power could do that? Surely it had to be something beyond even the realm of legend.

"So what do we do?" he asked helplessly. Harvey had been fooled. How was he meant to uncover the hidden truth?

"Use your strength," Ambrose said dryly. "You're a diviner, aren't you? Don't tell me you haven't been preparing alternate futures these past few days, whether to escape or to kill me."

Harvey's face burned. So the lich had noticed everything.

"Preparing futures" sounded abstract, but it was a very real part of a diviner's toolkit.

Diviners could shape fate through meditation. For instance, they might resolve foreseeable futures into the faces of a twenty-sided die.

Then, before the future came to pass, they would roll the die and fix the result of the roll.

Subsequently, this "fixed" fate could be used to replace the future to come. With a high roll, a grim future could be traded for a fortunate one. With a low roll, even good fortune could be twisted into tragedy.

And these dice of fate could even affect others.

Ambrose himself had once used this very trick against the sewer hag, replacing her random teleportation with a looped one that forever trapped her in the same few tunnels.

That was the true power of divination: to alter outcomes. It was almost godlike in scope.

Whether such manipulation was in defiance of fate, or simply part of fate's design, was a question no one had ever managed to answer.

Ambrose had tried to figure it out countless times, but every trial and experiment only left him even more confused.

Now, he meant for Harvey to use his own fates to replace this future.

If this were truly a false fate, Harvey's dice would be able to shatter it.

Harvey drew in a deep breath.

Starlit motes of power began to form around him: five dice, gleaming with cosmic light, spinning gently in orbit.

Ambrose's soulfire flickered irritably. "Only five dice?" he thought to himself. "I expect that at least seven will be needed to reliably shatter this fate."

Harvey didn't notice Ambrose's lowered estimation of his abilities. He focused all his will into the dice and hurled one toward the glowing shard.

It struck, sending ripples across the illusion, but the scene remained the same. The blurred figure still ascended to godhood, untouched. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Harvey gritted his teeth and threw the rest of the dice. The remaining four plunged into the shard.

This time, the false prophecy cracked. Fractures spiderwebbed across the image. With a soundless explosion, it shattered.

Ambrose sighed. Around him, dozens of his own dice of fate appeared in a spiral of blue light, colliding with the debris and pulverizing it into a storm of glittering dust.

A rain of starlight fell across the laboratory. When it settled, seven tiny crystal fragments coalesced in the air, each showing a different future.

Ambrose exhaled, weary. So much for staying detached.

Having rejected the diviner's path, every time he continued taking advantage of its powers, it would become harder for him to master a new school of magic. Perhaps he really was destined to remain a half-baked legend forever.

Still, there was no use brooding. He turned his attention to the futures.

The first shard showed a mountain of gold—millions of coins piled high in his lab.

"Excellent," Ambrose murmured. "The heavens reward the diligent."

Though, admittedly... What did that have to do with the sewers?

The second shard depicted a pale, unnervingly beautiful woman cradling his severed head in her arms.

Ambrose went still. His greatest fear had just appeared before him.

If favorable futures were part of divine will, then what of the unfavorable ones? Would he have to defy fate, after all?