Chapter 43

“Premonition is, at its core, a flawed form of magic that can never be successful. There are simply too many factors for it to ever work as intended. Time is not linear but branching, with every decision that we make, and every electron splitting off from an atom creating an alternate future that your foresight might glimpse. Abandon it for folly. Or you’ll walk the path of the Aions into willing self-annihilation all because you believe that someday what you hope the truth to be will come to pass.”

—Omens and Oracles, Albrecht Magnus

At the bottom of the slope, Sylvas cast a few lights to drift along and guide them, now that they were sure the shikari weren’t all camped out just around the corner, waiting for the dinner bell to ring. The structure was simple in its geometry. The initial entrance was the slope leading to a stark, empty cube of a room, then the possibilities opened up. Each wall of the cube had an exit. Sylvas extended his senses as far as they would go, but there was no clear sign of which way was the right way, and all three were equally infested with shikari.

Left.

Sylvas paused, looking at all of the sensory information and the map that was under construction, and finding no indication of why Mira had said that.

I’m sifting through pasts and futures. Just trust me.

He’d explicitly stated that he didn’t trust Rania, but she was here, so it would have been extremely rude to ignore Mira’s suggestion, all things considered. “This way.”

There were some glances cast between the archaeologists, but his own people had no doubts about his judgment, and he was surprised to find Rania coming along without a second thought, too. He kept his senses extended out in front of him, ready for the inevitable ambush, but what attention wasn’t there, he locked onto her. “How far in did you get the first time?” 

“We went straight down the middle, hit some storage space, came back up, and the shikari were crawling up the sides. Never run so fast in my life.”

Kaya chuckled, earning her a brief dirty look from Rania before she continued her story. “We didn’t realize then that the shield was one way. Thought we were out safe, but we ended up losing half the team.”

It was unsurprising that the archaeologists were just as grumpy-looking as Rania, given that fact. Continuing on down the left passage, it soon took a downward slant as steep as the entranceway had been, and even without his senses at their peak, Sylvas would have known what was waiting for them down there in the dark. “Okay, I’ll take point, Kaya, guard the civilians, and, Malachai, if you get a clean shot, take it.”

“And what about us?” Viv asked.

Lass agreed, “We aren’t dead weight.”

“If you can get a clean shot to take one down, then do it, nobody will stop you, but if you hit me, I’m going to be at least a little mad about it.” Sylvas tried to keep the mood light but nevertheless felt like he’d miss the mark.

As they’d proceeded through the building so far, in between the chatter, Sylvas had been loading spells, ready to fire off, and now he unleashed the first: a combination of Gravity Spike and Inversion that made the incline that they’d been facing into a dead drop. He poured on more weight and then jumped.

The shikari had been unprepared for gravity to pivot, and it bought Sylvas all the time he needed to plunge down into the mass of them, just as he had outside the compound walls. The first one he hit, he went straight through and out the other side. Then he was rebounding off the rear wall, flying back to catch an overextended rear leg of one shikari that had been foolish enough to try and ignore him and go after his friends. His hand closed around fur, but it came away slick with blood, claws manifested fully around his own hooked fingers, gravity shear, and primal rage combined. It let out a pained yelp and spun to bite him with a vertically slit mouth that held far more teeth than any living thing needed. He caught both sides of the jaws as it tried to bite, testing its strength against his fury, and finding it less. He tasted its blood as he tore the jaws apart. Rich and creamy with a phosphorus taste that lingered on his tongue. To the others, it would have been poison, but his new body absorbed the nutrients it had been lacking from that blood before it had made it down his throat.

His strange visitor had talked about convergent evolution. After a discussion with Mira, they’d concluded that the changes he’d made to his body and his mind were bringing him closer to being like the Aions had been. In turn, this new revelation, that his body craved the poisons in the shikari, made him wonder if there wasn’t some fourth explanation for the relationship between Aions and shikari. If they hadn’t been bred as guard dogs, or created in some grand ritual gone awry, but if they’d actually been their livestock. If so, how terrifying must the lions have been to keep these things for food?

He could spare the time for such thoughts because his body moved by instinct now. He had cleaved two shikari in half, and now that the others were beginning their bombardment, the rest were being driven back from their mad charge up the ramp against gravity’s pull and back down towards him. Towards the inevitable.

Claws dug into shikari flesh and rent scale and skin apart. The fur was clotted thick with their blood before he ever had cause to touch it. One by one, the others drove the shikari back down into the deep, dark hole where Sylvas lay waiting, and he relished each and every one of them as they came apart in his hands. He would never know this joy again. There would never be another enemy that he could fight like this, strong enough to present a challenge but devoid of the power to strike him with spells. Perhaps this was what they were to the Aions. Entertainment.

Some of the shikari made it a distance up the now-vertical shaft, but Malachai had no difficulty in picking them off. The change in rotation had slowed them enough to make it possible for every shot to hit home. It was only when the last of the blood had finished raining down around him that Sylvas released the Inversion and let the rest of them approach.

They’d all seen him fight before, and hopefully, they’d all been too focused on the fighting now to give it too much mind. The passage continued from the bottom of the ramp, and Sylvas was set to head straight down before he caught the look on Rania’s face. She didn’t look scared the way that he had expected, or reluctantly accepting the way that Kaya and Malachai were. She looked intrigued, like he’d just become a lot more interesting than she’d initially imagined. “Oh, so you’re crazy.”

He tried to look contemptuous about the question, but blood was dripping off the end of his nose. “Excuse me?”

“I knew you were a bit crazy, or you wouldn’t have come here, but you’re crazy-crazy, aren’t you?” She was smiling as she said it, even though Sylvas smelled like a charnel house on an alien world.

Her pupils are dilated. She already liked you, but now she thinks you’re exciting, too. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but you may actually have a chance of kissing a girl.

Sylvas pushed it out of his mind. Now was not the time for this sort of interpersonal… nonsense.

Along from the incline there was a sharp turn, and then another equally sharp incline followed. His gravity sense was picking up something biological feeling down there, but it was distinct enough from the shikari that he didn’t know for certain. He took a few tenuous steps closer, then caught the whiff on the air of that same phosphorous aroma that had overwhelmed him with a mouthful of blood. Whatever was down there was something shikari, even if it wasn’t the shikari themselves.

“Malachai.” Sylvas gestured down the slope. “Would you mind…?”

“Not at all, just a moment,” the man said as he stepped forward and unleashed a sickle of darkness from his scythe that skittered and crackled all the way down the slope until it bit into the meaty sacs suspended from the walls and ceilings. In places, they were leathery, in others, solid and calcified, but worst of all were the parts of the egg sacs that were entirely transparent and showed the shikari embryo developing inside. If they had the time, Sylvas would have loved to study all of this further, learn about the lifecycle of the shikari and how the queen could produce so many eggs that they were hatching en masse every few hours. But they did not have time. They had a mission to complete.

At the next level, as the others complained of their ears popping from the change in air pressure, Sylvas considered the two ramps leading deeper down. One to the left, one to the right.

Kaya strolled up next to him. “You doing that thing where you act confident so we don’t worry?”

“Not at the moment.” Sylvas smiled.

“Oh, so you actually do know which way to go?” She nudged him with her elbow.

“Mira does.” 

Kaya stopped elbowing him abruptly.

“Ah, okay then. Whatever she says is fine by me.” She sauntered away, trying to act casual. “Better than fine, even. Glad there’s a woman in charge of this whole venture.”

Left once more, darling.

There were more shikari after the initial ambush, but not in any great numbers. At the very periphery of his senses, Sylvas could sense massive movement down beneath them, which was surely where all of the shikari that were unaccounted for could be found. But there were more eggs, so many more eggs that it soon came to boggle Sylvas’ mind. He refused to leave any of them behind him, in case they were to hatch and block their escape route later. Before, he’d wondered how the queen could be hatching dozens of shikari at a time, and now, seeing the extent of the laying that she’d done over however long she’d been down here, he wondered how the whole planet hadn’t already been overrun with them.

His slate had little information about shikari queens, beyond the idea that they were much more physically imposing than what the textbooks described as the ‘drones.’ There was no indication that they couldn’t be killed, just that few people could fight through a whole hive of these murderous creatures to get to the queen and then take her down in addition to that journey.

They had struck out first thing in the morning, just after the dawn attack, to maximize their chances of getting to the queen before the next wave of shikari attacked, but they had not accounted for how deep this tomb had been dug. They heard them and felt the vibrations coming long before the shikari themselves came into sight, and through those vibrations, backtracked through the gravity map of the place, Sylvas was able to trace the route all the way down to wherever this fresh batch had just hatched from. Where it was safe to assume the queen had situated herself. He was grinning over this success when he noticed Rania staring at him. “You know the shikari are coming, right?”

He nodded tersely, trying to lose the smile.

She shook her head, smiling to herself now. “Crazy.”

There was plenty of warning before the tide of shikari came. The sound of their approach was deafening, even if they weren’t letting loose their customary battle cries just yet. There was no roaring, hissing, or snarling, only the steady beat of feet on stone. They rounded a corner straight into Sylvas’ gravity well. It didn’t seem appropriate to call the miniature black holes that he conjured now simple gravity spikes; they were deeper, their draw so much more. The archaeologists and Malachai had to cling to Kaya to resist its pull, and in turn, she had to dig spikes of steel deep into the stone beneath to keep herself in place.

The first rank plowed headfirst into it, and they were torn apart by the forces of gravity at work, skin sheared from muscle, blood spraying the walls. It was the ones that rounded the corner next, with some forewarning, that were of interest to Sylvas. They dug in their claws, they scrabbled and fought the pull of the inevitable, and they slipped and skidded in their kin’s blood. But still, inexorably, they were drawn in. All of them were drawn in, and Malachai unleashed a single sickle blade to dispatch every one of them.

Normally, Sylvas would have just allowed a spike like that to dissipate, but this time, he took more care, easing gravity back to normal, feeling the walls and ceiling inch back closer to their usual positions. Repeating that trick would be a mistake if they wanted to keep this structure from collapsing, and he’d known he was pushing his luck trying to do it even this one time.

The real fighting would come down at the bottom of the spiral of ramps. When they reached the lowest chamber, where the queen and vault surely resided. Sylvas wanted to say that he was dreading it, that the idea of it made him anxious or at least concerned for the safety of the others, but there was no room in his heart for both fear and Strife. It was all that he could do to stop himself running alone to get a head start on them.

“Stanzbuhr.” Kaya nudged him. He blinked and then turned to look at her. She was exactly the same as the first day he’d met her, apart from some new scars. The very same person, unchanged by everything that they’d been through. He didn’t know if that meant she was stronger than him or just slower to adapt.

He pushed those thoughts out of his mind, too. “Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

He glanced back at the rest of their group, “Are they?”

She chuckled at that. “Is anyone?” 

He looked down at his hands and saw that the claws were already there, enveloping his hands, warping gravity around them. Strife was ready. Mira was ready. It was time to do what they’d come here to do.

“Stick together,” he called back to everyone. “And if you can’t keep fighting, fall back to the door.”

Rania racked her rifle. “Let’s finish this.”