Chapter 5

“As one knows, the elves were the first of all people after the Aions vanished, ruling empires that stretched from one end of the galaxy to the other. Empires that were not born out of weakness, nor that were held onto through kindness. No, they were both forged and kept chained by the Varaelfin, the mage-warped caste of heartless warriors that every Ponadar kept and bred as if they were prized cattle. For more millennia than even the most ancient records reach back, they were responsible for maintaining the order of their master’s domain until, one day, as one, all across the galaxy, they decided otherwise.”

—Classified Manuscript #1564, Part Two, Author Redacted

Sylvas felt inexplicably weary when he started moving off along the corridor once more. 

Not from his exertions or the mana he was still thirstily gulping down from the world around him, but from the constant pressure of all the things that he had to contend with. Some people spoke of carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, but a world would have weighed less than the memory of the one that he’d killed. If the pressure had just been living up to that memory, it would have been unbearable. If the pressure of that and carrying the spirit of his dead best friend forward into the future as a reminder of his greatest failure had been all that there was, it would have crushed anyone. The addition to Strife lurking inside him to all that he had to contend with was just one thing too many.

The echoes of his voice in the tunnel died down, and he composed himself. “I do not want this thing inside my body, I do not want it in my mind, and I do not want whatever power it has to give me. I want it gone. I want it out of me, but nobody can even explain how it got into me to start with.”

Well, darling, you haven’t exactly had the brain trust to consult with, have you? The dwarf, the old soldier, the necromancer, they aren’t exactly academically inclined, are they? They’re hardly going to be researching eidolonic possession in their spare time? You had one person in your social circle who wasn’t a complete meathead, and he—

“I know.” Sylvas cut her off, anger flaring up inside him again, bringing the eidolon’s prickling interest back to the fore. He forced himself to be calm. “I know. Bael is gone.”

I suppose that makes you the smart one in the group now… Oh, no wait, I’m still here. It’s me. I’m the smart one, and you’re a buffoon.

He looked down at himself, coated in dust and streaked with blood, and chuckled despite himself. The passageway opened out once more into a broad chamber, but the endless depths of the last one was absent. It was larger than the usual cube, but in every direction, not just down.

For an instant, Sylvas felt a measure of relief that there wasn’t yet another ambush waiting for him when he was still so low on mana, but that relief evaporated as the spider-legged construct dominating the chamber shimmered into view as the veils and illusions fell away. It had the full eight legs one might have expected of an arachnid, each leg terminating in a crystalline spike, and already the aura of multiple spells was gathering around it. 

An artificial mage or an artificial eidolon, perhaps?

Sylvas had only a couple of spells still trapped in fragments, waiting to be triggered, but he launched a focused gravity spike directly at the center of the construct before even thinking. It should have hit into the core of the thing, broken whatever enchantment powered it, ended the fight before it began, but the construct reacted faster than anything living could have. 

One of its legs snapped up and then seemed to snap cleanly in half, the crystalline section cracking off to swing in and intercept the spell. The magic suffused the crystal, lighting up the room with a sudden and unexpected glow, and then it exploded apart, filling the whole chamber with tiny shards of still-glowing crystal and peppering both the construct and Sylvas with jagged little fragments. It was made of stone, and he was made of magically reinforced flesh, but both ended up with the same net result as jagged shards of the exploded crystal embedded themselves in them.

The construct, unlike Sylvas, didn’t flinch when it was peppered with shards. Quite the opposite, in fact; it seemed to bound forward with renewed energy now that it had serrated spikes protruding all over its body.

Sylvas reached for mana, readying a Gravity Shear to protect himself from the spells that would now have their chance to trigger, but when he tried to touch the waiting energy inside him, he felt the concept of slick, blood soaked fur rub across his consciousness, and pulled away.

A delay that allowed the construct to launch a barrage of attacks. 

A half-dozen arching beams of light shot from the crystalline limb tips in a slow wave; each leg lifted in turn to unleash its spell, with the exception of two. One that Sylvas’ spell had shattered, and another that it seemed to embed in the stone below for stability. It forced him to dart and loop around the outer edge of the cubic chamber, always just barely ahead of the next beam curving in towards him. By the time that the first had lost enough momentum to collide with the wall, washing it with a rime of ice, the sixth was launched, and the construct had started casting all over again. He couldn’t keep dancing around in circles forever; eventually, he would make a mistake, and one of the beams would hit home and ice him up, but the continual assault also meant that he didn’t have a moment to think of a counter.

Close the distance. It’ll ice itself up if it tries to keep on casting.

“Easier said than done,” he said, ducking one of the sweeping beams as it arched in towards him. The resultant explosion of cold washed over him, but with his reinforced body, it didn’t do any real harm, just set him shivering. 

Every time he tried to move in closer to the construct, another beam intersected his path. The aim wasn’t getting better exactly, it was still missing him so long as he kept in motion, but now he was having to dart back and forth as it would sometimes lead his trajectory with the next shot.

The gravity shear sprang to life at last, bouncing the encroaching beams away from him. They curved around him to smash into the walls because of the nature of the shielding spell, instead of rebounding back towards the enemy like Sylvas would have really wanted, but it bought him the time he needed to dive in close and neutralize this constant barrage.

He drove the shield into the legs of the construct as they swept around towards him, and like before, when a spell came too close to it, the crystalline tips of its legs crooked in to catch the impact, charging off the mana of his spell and exploding once more. A normal shield rather than his shear would have doomed him, but the fragmentation of the crystals was caught up in the gravity and swept away this time around. His many puncture wounds from the first leg’s explosion would remain the only extra holes in his body for now. 

In a wide circle, they slammed back into the iced-up wall, embedding in stone and frost, drawing a perfect halo around Sylvas.

He tried something then that he’d never been permitted to before. He changed the spell as he was maintaining it. The actual words of the spell remained the same, the repetition to keep it in place unchanged, but where before it had flowed through all of his body, he narrowed its point of release now, crooking in his fingers to make it into a Focused Gravity Shear instead of the usual wide spread. It wasn’t breaking any of the Ardent’s rules about altering spells, technically, but there was definitely a degree of danger in twisting the spell form that was already flooded with mana into a new configuration. 

It worked, in no small part thanks to Mira’s subtle adjustments to the flows of mana coming out from him. What had been a shield became a narrow curvature, then a blade of gravity that he swung into the construct with all the strength he could muster with no leverage. When it bit into the stone, the stone gave way. When it bit into the enchantment within, it broke whatever spell had been keeping the construct animated.

The legs gave one last convulsive heave before they went limp, and then the whole thing collapsed into a heap on the floor. Sylvas dodged away so that he wouldn’t get caught in the tumble.

Well, good to know that works.

“I think I’d have been happier testing it in better circumstances,” Sylvas quipped back, already searching for the next exit. It was directly across from the last, but he took care in slowly easing this stone out in case of any more trickery. There didn’t seem to be any, but that didn’t preclude any more traps at the other end.

As he drifted over to the next passage, tinkling sounds rang out from beneath him. He glanced down and realized that the shards of crystal that had been embedded in his flesh had been pushed out, and his wounds were closing. The cuts and scratches from earlier had vanished without him even realizing. He had cast no spell—certainly no healing spell.

He opened his mouth to query what was happening, then snapped it shut again. He already knew what had changed. He already knew what within him was protean, ever shifting, ever healing. He didn’t need to talk it through. His body was not his own. Not anymore.

Mana had begun to refill his empty core, bathing the creature bound within in fresh power. Sylvas had half hoped that the weight of all the gravity mana might have crushed Strife, but it seemed to thrive in the pressure. If anything, it seemed healthier now than when it had been accidentally set loose. He ignored it. He had been ignoring it as much as possible since it first became a resident inside his core, and he’d go on ignoring it until the stars burned out if given the choice. It was evil incarnate, and the fact that it was inside him made him feel sick every time he was reminded of it.

With perhaps a little more force than was necessary, he pushed the block out that opened the way to the next chamber, enjoying the crunching sound as it impacted with one of the endless automatons that they’d been dealing with.

Sadly, it was not the only construct in the next chamber. Just as the last one had been a cube twice the size of those previous, this one had redoubled in size again, leaving a chamber as broad as the one that had dumped him down into this level of the labyrinth. It was far from empty. One of the grand eight-legged constructs meant to simulate an eidolon lay crushed beneath the stone block he’d just launched into the room, but there were two more, plus a veritable swarm of the small dagger-legged ones that had populated the spike pit chamber. 

They moved like flocking birds the moment Sylvas came into sight, the eight-legged monstrosities casting but also lifting legs up to provide the small ones launch platforms to leap from. Sylvas cast the last spell still held in his personality fragments, an Inversion that he angled to shift gravity in the opposite direction to him. It bought him a moment to think, plan, and cast as all the leaping swarms suddenly fell away to clatter off each other and the distant wall. 

He could maintain that Inversion until his mana ran dry, but it would do nothing to help with the bigger constructs. They had imbedded one leg into the ground beneath for stability before they even started casting, and it anchored them, even as gravity twisted around the chamber.

Sylvas was tired. His body could keep on going more or less forever at this point, and his mana reserves held so much that he had to be pushed from one crisis to the next to even make it dip below its maximum levels, yet in spite of that, he could feel exhaustion setting in. He had been doing this all day to no noticeable effect. He fought his way through one chamber after another, solving puzzles, avoiding traps, and navigating even though all his senses were being blinded. There was no end to it, just escalation. For all that he knew, there was no way out of this labyrinth at all. Maybe this was his prison, where he’d be bound for the rest of time, facing one mindless construct after another until his will broke and he let them kill him.

This isn’t a very constructive line of thinking, darling.

“I’ve had enough.” The words came out in a growl. Less human than he’d sounded just a moment before. He felt the bloody fur against the inside of his skin as his anger rose. Felt the closed wounds across his body re-open and leak as the wrath he’d been trying to contain ever since the first betrayal finally found its outlet. “Find me an exit, Mira. I am done with this place.”