Chapter 4

“There are some things in our past that invoke true horror. Some things that we are truly, and I mean truly, not meant to preserve. Things that by just knowing about makes us…somehow worse than we were before. One of these things is the sealed histories of the Ponadar and the elves of the Empyrean Alliance. Yes, references to them exist in modern texts, identifying them as mages beyond measure. Powerful. Dangerous. All things that were true… are true. Yet any reader who has found this tome should know that the truth is never so simple or so clean. So know this truth, the Ponadar were monsters, demons beyond measure, their souls bound to the darkest of eidolons torn from the void, and their hands stained in an ocean of blood so vast, it may have well blotted out the stars.”

—Classified Manuscript #1564, Part One, Author Redacted

Focusing his mind, Sylvas’ next act was to push out with his mana instead of pulling in, shoving the next stone block before him out into the next room. It hit something before it had travelled far, and Sylvas darted around the broken remains of the fairly substantial-looking construct that he’d just shattered as he made his way through.

It had even more legs than the last ones, and most of them ended not in the squared-off feet that he’d become accustomed to but rather spikes like the ones protruding from the last room. It looked as if the plan was to go on increasing the lethality of the enemies he faced the farther he progressed. That made sense, he supposed. Though they probably hadn’t expected him to destroy it by accident without a fight.

On the opposite side of the chamber, the passage that he’d entered by continued. The same solid square of stone was missing from the wall, leading into an essentially identical passage. The roughness of the stone seemed to be giving way now to a plain smoothness that Sylvas didn’t particularly trust. The previous areas could have been mistaken for the rustic backrooms of an elaborate construction project like this place, but now it was clear that the simplicity was a design choice, not an oversight.

Light shone in from the other end of the passage, making him slow his progress ever so slightly as his suspicions began to mount that another ambush awaited him, but none of his senses gave even the slightest hint of danger ahead, not even the sporadically sparking precognition that typically gave him a dozen false positives on danger a second.

He had to trust in his senses and his instincts, even when logic was telling him that there was danger ahead, because there was always going to be danger ahead somewhere along the line. Creeping along, flooded with anxiety, was only going to ensure that he lost whatever advantage of surprise he might be able to wrest from his ambushers.

He surged along the passage, out into the next room, and then hung over a pit. Where the previous chambers had floors, this one had a vast and endless void underfoot. Presumably, there was some bottom to it, but wherever it was, it was so far down that he couldn’t catch a hint of it.

If you couldn’t fly, that would have been a genuinely hilarious end to your little adventure, darling.

Sylvas chose not to respond because, while the recruits of the Ardent had been helping him to expand his vocabulary of swearwords, he didn’t think he had quite the right ones to convey his feelings about Mira in that moment.

Beyond the nothingness below, the chamber seemed, if anything, even more drab and consistent with the previous ones. Plain grey stone in every direction, barring the square hole he’d entered by. It would be quite an undertaking, searching the walls of this room. The height of them would mean going up and down them, likely for hours on end, with no guarantee that there even was anything beyond the stone at most depths. He would start where he was, at the level where he knew construction had been done, and delve deeper if it turned out to be a dead end.

Drifting across the void to the far wall, he situated himself approximately level with the last passage, reached out with his magic, and pulled. 

Nothing gave.

But the sensation of it not giving was different from when he was attempting to haul on a blank slab of wall. Something was there, a block just like all the others he’d dislodged, but it felt so much heavier than the ones he had dealt with before. He tried pushing instead to a similar effect. It was as though they’d somehow made the stone far denser than it should have been. 

Focusing, he brought more and more of his magic to bear, pulling with the raw strength of his power over gravity. Dust fell from the wall in a square around the passage he was trying to open; the stone had begun to move. Redoubling his efforts, Sylvas brought his focus to bear on that one stone, pulling again with all his strength. All around him, dust began to fall. The solid cube of stone was slowly drawn out of the wall, but up above him on the wall to his left, another stone was also emerging. Down below, he could see more, like stepping stones down into the dark, a dozen or more blocks being drawn out in concert with this one. Somehow, they were all tied together. It had to be gravity affinity magic, given the way that the different stones all shared a single weight, but if so, it was a type of magic he’d never encountered before in his research on every available gravity affinity spell across every library he’d encountered.

No wonder he was struggling so much to move a single rock; he was moving all of them.

It may behoove you to pause for just one moment and consider the consequences of—

With one last tug, the rock came free and went tumbling down into the pit. Six others in Sylvas line of sight did exactly the same, tumbling down into the pit. He realized almost immediately that he’d need to dodge one of them as its trajectory happened to pass through where he was hanging in the air. What he had not accounted for was what was coming tumbling up to smash against the falling stones at the same moment. While half of the stones had fallen straight down once they were plucked free from the wall, spinning out into space, the other half were under an Inversion effect. They fell up, towards him. As the stones collided down below, some shattered apart with the impact, while others managed to miss one another entirely. He had one block from above that he’d dodged easily, and dozens, if not hundreds, of other blocks flying up towards him at terminal velocity, along with a cloud of shrapnel and detritus.

There was no time to cast his own Inversion, no time to think. He flung out his power to hold all the stone back and discovered all at once just how much of a difference momentum made to his ability to do so. Before what had happened on Strife, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. His mana would have been drained away to nothing. Even now, it drained down until the barest dregs, and he couldn’t hold it back for long. He flung himself aside, heading with all haste for the hole in the wall that he’d originally made by plucking the block and setting off the domino cascade of destruction. 

Skidding to a halt in the new passage, he let the chaos unfold behind him. All the connected stones fell up and collided with the ceiling, piling up in so massive a heap against it that it looked like some sort of volcanic formation in the brief glimpse that he had before the passage was blocked by the pile-up. A wash of dust chased him along the passage, blinding and choking him for a moment until it passed. Only then, with all the falling rocks finally still, did he hear it.

Stone scraping on stone. A whistling of displaced air. His ears popped, and given they’d been reinforced along with the rest of his body, that meant he was experiencing at least three atmospheres of pressure. Something was condensing the air in the passage rapidly. There was no light in this passage now that the way back was completely blocked off, so he had to rely on his other senses to tell him about the other massive cube of stone, just like all the others that he’d dislodged, that was now thundering along the passage towards him. Its gravity inverted at a ninety-degree angle, so that he was down, and it was falling towards him.

His own inversion spell would have been enough to reverse its course, but it would take more time to cast than he had. Blood had already begun to run from his ears as the rock continued its relentless approach.

Flinging up both hands again, he pushed. If it had been just one stone of that size, even moving at terminal velocity, he could have stopped it with ease, but this one had been tied into all of the others, just like the rest of this trap. When he was pushing back against it, he was pushing against all of the stone that had fallen, both up and down, in the last chamber. An impossible tonnage for him to stop, even at the best of times, when his mana reserves hadn’t been depleted to practically nothing. He stopped it in its tracks before it could get any closer and crush him to death with the weight of the air around him, but he could not push it back, only hold it for so long as his mana reserves lasted.

They weren’t going to last. He had already thrown so much of it away, all too casually, assuming that he’d be able to replenish himself before the next test of his power arrived, and now the test was here, and he had nothing. He stumbled forward along the passage to where the block formed a solid wall, setting his hands on the stone and trying to let his body take some of the strain away from his magic. There was just too much weight. His voice came out in a growl when he spoke to Mira, “Tell me something good.”

Whatever spell was cast to link the blocks and invert the direction of the gravity is well shielded and masked under illusions we can’t get through.

“Something good.” He grunted as more of the weight shifted onto his arms. They began to shake, and his legs began to shake, too. He started sliding back along the passage, inch by painful inch.

At least we’ll die together this time?

He made a grunt that could have been mistaken for a laugh, then one of his knees gave out, and he had to scramble and push even harder to hold back the block.

It wasn’t fair. After everything that he’d suffered. Everything that he’d been through. It should not have ended like this. He had been tricked into killing everyone he knew. He had watched his world die. He had fought the things that killed it. He had seen friends and enemies fall in his wake as he climbed to new heights of power, and now it was all going to end in some stupid test?

“No.”

The Ardent had betrayed him. The Veilbohr Institute had betrayed him. Bael had betrayed him. And after all that he’d done and suffered for them, the Empyrean had cast him aside. Abandoned him or banished him to this fresh hell.

In the dark hollow at the heart of him, where nothing had ever been, he felt rage. 

His many betrayals had always hurt him, saddened him, made him want to shy away from the world, but now he felt something else. Something new. Something burning.

Darling?

“No. We are not dying. Not like this.” It should have felt silly to say it out loud, in such obvious denial of all evidence, but Sylvas felt only certainty. He had spoken the words like the words of a spell. He would bring it into existence through force of will if he had to. Reality would be the one to bend and break before him this time. 

Like a heat, the anger spread out through his body, flushing his skin to red, setting all the sigils carved into his flesh alight from within. The muscles that had been straining to hold back the weight now bulged and flexed of their own accord. Sylvas’ teeth clattered together in a snarl as the fresh strength suffused him.

Drawing back one hand from the unstoppable stone, he clenched his fist and swung.

Gravity pushing against gravity, will against the inevitable, those were all just solvable calculations, but what flowed through him now was not so easily quantified. War sung in his veins. War swelled his muscles. War broke through his enemy.

The solid stone block was released from the hold of the gravity he was exerting on it in the same moment that he swung. All of the power of his punch met all the force of the falling block. It didn’t shatter with the impact. It exploded. Shrapnel rained in every direction, sharp fragments of it embedding themselves in Sylvas’ flesh, scraping raw lines across his skin, but he didn’t care. The pain didn’t matter. The damage didn’t matter. All that mattered was winning. Killing his enemy. Emerging victorious no matter what the cost.

The eidolon of war lurking inside of him had found its foothold in his mind, their shared singularity of purpose. Their shared ambition and willingness to pay whatever cost was required to win. More importantly, it had latched onto his anger. He had been wronged, time and time again, and he had never sought vengeance, even though it was long overdue. He had quashed his anger, never letting it out, crushing it down into something dense and buried. For the eidolon, that dense and buried rage felt like home. He could feel it now, the presence of the creature inside him, touching against his mind.

Darling, it is already busy enough in here with just the two of us cohabiting. I don’t think adding a third to our relationship is a good idea.

“I want it out!” Sylvas snarled, his anger flinging open the gates and letting the eidolon encroach even farther into him.

But even as he did, the eidolon, the one that he had begun calling Strife within the privacy of his own mind, had nothing to say for itself. The great red wolf that they’d fought, that Sylvas had somehow drawn into himself, seemed to be sated now that it had gotten out to stretch its legs a little. It settled back down in the core of his mana and fell silent. But even as it did, it was not the silence of a sleeping dog, content to wait and slumber. 

Rather it was the watchful silence of a forest full of predators, just waiting for the next deer to stumble.