Lich for Hire-Chapter 49: The Skyborne City of Alkhemia

If Ambrose were still human, seeing the vision of his own head being severed would have been enough reason to start writing a will. But as an undead—and more specifically, as a lich—losing his head hardly counted as death. As long as the phylactery remained intact, decapitation was more of an inconvenience than a bad ending.

The real question was, who was that pale beauty in the vision?

Was she his murderer? Or perhaps... a future friend?

If possible, Ambrose would have loved to make Harvey perform another prophecy, pay a few extra gold coins, and see the rest of the story. But the Goddess of Fate was a flirt: she might lift her skirts just enough to tease you with a glimpse, but if you ever dared to reach for more, she would turn as cold as marble and slap you across the face.

And no diviner could survive the slap of fate.

Every seer in the world knew and obeyed one law: never try to divine the same thing twice. Not within the same span of time, not from another angle, not by changing minor detail. Fate tolerated no loopholes. To test her patience was to invite her wrath, and her hand never missed.

That was the rule: one glimpse was all you got.

Only the Supreme God could defy this restriction.

So, whether Ambrose liked it or not, all he could do was continue examining the six remaining fragments.

After witnessing one vision of sudden fortune and another of sudden decapitation, the third fragment was, thankfully, easy to make out at first glance.

It showed the Iron Slag tavern on South Cross Street in Alkhemia. But in this future, it was nothing but rubble, flattened as if some massive creature had stomped through, leaving behind a crater where the building once stood.

"Tsk. Guess that's what happens when you cheat on a bone dragon. Still, what's this got to do with the secret of the sewers?"

Ambrose frowned. Domestic drama among the undead shouldn't have anything to do with what lay beneath the city—unless the tavern wasn't destroyed by that bone dragon at all.

Another baffling fragment. He moved on.

The fourth vision showed Ambrose himself in the sewers beneath Alkhemia, performing what looked like some kind of magical ritual. But the image was fractured and hazy, and he hardly needed to be a diviner to figure out that he was going to return to the sewers at some point.

"What a waste. That fragment cost me thousands of gold pieces."

Grinding his teeth, Ambrose forced himself to check the next shard.

The fifth vision was murky, almost formless, but he recognized the figure depicted in it.

It was that young druid who'd once hired him for a rescue mission. What was her name again...? He thought for a moment. Naomi Watts.

Yes, that was it. A peculiar surname, one that sounded suspiciously similar to that of an ancient magical bloodline. But she was a druid, so it was probably just a coincidence.

Naomi's future, however, looked grim. She lay in a pool of blood, her body torn and still. Beside her stood her killer, a figure holding a long blade. From the back, the killer also looked like a druid.

A druid killing another druid... Was this an internal schism? Or perhaps the punishment for breaking some sort of druidic code?

Something about the setting bothered him, too. The place looked familiar.

"Wait a second... isn't that the Hall of Wisdom?!"

The Hall of Wisdom was where the Alchemists' Council met to rule over Alkhemia. What was a druid doing there? Even if druids were at each other's throats, they wouldn't choose the very heart of the city's government for a murder scene.

"Druids lured into the sewers... a murder in the Hall of Wisdom... This is getting messier by the minute. Just what are these lunatics scheming?"

Then came the final two fragments: linked together, and utterly shocking.

Alkhemia... was flying in the air.

The vision showed a city on the brink of ruin, being lifted into the skies by some colossal unseen force.

Half of Alkhemia was shattered, raining debris—and people—down upon the earth.

The final fragment showed someone standing atop the city's highest tower: a paladin of the Lyon Empire. Beside him were members of the Alchemists' Council, though their faces were blurred beyond recognition.

These two fragments contained the most information by far.

A city rising into the air was not impossible. In the distant past, when the Goddess of Magic still shared her gifts freely, mortal magicians often built floating citadels of their own. Later, however, in a terrible accident, those skyborne fortresses fell one by one. It was a disaster more severe than any rain of meteors.

Ambrose didn't know the exact cause—it had all happened long before he'd arrived in this world. But he knew the aftermath of it all: the Goddess withdrew her favor, and mortals were forever barred from her higher magic. Floating cities vanished from history.

Were these mad alchemists trying to turn Alkhemia into a floating city?

"No, that doesn't make sense," Ambrose muttered. "In the vision, the city's half in ruins. What'd be the point?"

He shook his head. Alkhemia's alchemists were mad, but there was a method to the madness. They craved novelty, discovery, and progress. To simply imitate the past was beneath them. A floating city wasn't invention; it was nostalgia.

Besides, Alkhemia was a city of scholars and craftsmen. Flight would be a serious detriment—the transportation costs for material imports and exports alone would be absurd.

A city that small couldn't possibly sustain its own alchemical industry. Instead, it relied on taxes and supplies from the surrounding lords. Those ties, like invisible cords of obligation, would firmly anchor Alkhemia to the ground.

"Unless... it had no other choice. If there were something it had to run from, for example." 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Ambrose froze. "What if it's the sewers? What if whatever they uncovered down there was so dangerous, the only way to survive was to lift the entire city into the sky?"

That thought clicked perfectly into place. Whatever the alchemists had been experimenting with beneath the streets, it had gone catastrophically wrong. They were forced to escape to avoid total annihilation.

"In other words, they'll fail."

Ambrose exhaled slowly. He could feel that he'd gotten to the heart of the matter.

He told Harvey to clean up the laboratory, then hurried to the castle library and began digging through old, dust-choked tomes.

Not long after, word arrived. The Alchemists' Council had decided to send one of their own to his castle to discuss what should be done about that paladin, Allen Watson.

Only then did Ambrose remember that Gareth, the Dullahan, had wanted to "spar" with Allen earlier. It had been hours since.

"...He's not dead, right? Or at least not crippled?"