Chapter 2

“Among those superstitious, uncontacted people, it should come as no surprise that there is a religious worship of the eidolons that they encounter. Regardless of the eidolon’s clear malfeasance, the sheer power that they display, particularly on planets with little to no magical attainment of their own, cannot be overemphasized. To the average uncontacted individual, even the most impotent of niche eidolons of the lowest registered tiers must seem to be remarkable and otherworldly. On those planets where eidolon incursions have occurred but failed to escalate for whatever reason, we typically see one of two potential outcomes in terms of sociology.

The eidolon either becomes a god, worshiped by a massive central religion that comes to dominate all aspects of life on the planet or by obscure cults in secret or it becomes the antithesis to whatever religious practice already existed on the world. When the malevolence of the eidolon cannot be ignored, it becomes not a god but a devil.”

—On Eidolon Worship and Similar Stupidities, Galian Jurd, Part One

The dwarf laughed uproariously. “Aye, and my name’s Harkan Flintmettle. I need a bathtub full of vlashghar and three lithe elves to scrub my back.”

Kaya snorted, but Sylvas didn’t let his pleasant smile even flicker. “I’m assuming that you still have comms with the rest of your Consortium? Contact Ingir Hammerheart, Monk of the Cold Flame, and see what he says.”

Harkan opened and shut his mouth, though it was hard to tell under his thick whiskers, then he cut off the comms link.

“Well, that went about as well as expected.” Kaya chuckled. “Oh, hi, can I take your ship, please?”

Sylvas kept his smile in place. “Give them a moment.”

“Can’t say that I’ve ever heard of the Hammerheart Consortium freely giving over a ship. Even to pirates. Even when it’s that or die.” Rania was trying to be consolatory, but Sylvas did not need any consolation; he was still waiting for his reply.

Malachai sighed. “It is unlikely that any ships from my kingdom are in this sector of space, but I can take a look through the manifests, reveal myself and—”

Harkan sprang back into sight. “Do you need a pilot, or should we all just get out?”

Sylvas’ smile became a touch more genuine. “I’ll pilot.”

“We burned through most of our etherium—”

Sylvas cut off the warning. “Not a problem.”

Harkan looked more than a little bit nervous to be speaking to him, and even more nervous to be asking favors. “Can you give us five minutes to get our personal stuff from our cabins?”

“Of course. Take all the time you need.”

“Thanks, mate! I mean. Sir. I mean—” Harkan vanished once more.

Rania let out a whistle. “Okay, I stand corrected. You’ve got some pull.”

Sylvas shrugged. “Old friends pop up in unexpected places.”

Kaya chuckled. “Friends? That’s what you’re calling it now?”

“Oh”—Rania leaned in closer to Kaya and glanced around conspiratorially—“were they lovers?”

Malachai barked with laughter, startling all of them, before getting himself under control.

Kaya leaned in to whisper back as loudly as possible, “They tried to murder each other.”

Rania looked Sylvas up and down, judging him. “That wasn’t a no.”

Sylvas finally gave in and joined the conversation. “It’s a no.”

“Pity, it was just starting to get interesting.” Rania seemed entirely too amused for Sylvas’ liking.

“Oh, if you want his dating history, I’ve got you covered. All the dirt.” Kaya knocked a mechanical knuckle on the side of her head. “Right here.”

Not entirely true. I’m in here, not there.

“Perhaps this isn’t the best time to be having this conversation.” Malachai was quick to intervene on Sylvas’ behalf.

“You got something better to talk about?” Kaya eyed him suspiciously.

“Well, it does appear that the entire Empyrean is collapsing, and we are facing an apocalyptic influx of eidolons, but by all means, let’s braid one another’s hair and talk about boys.”

“We don’t know what’s happening,” Kaya snapped back. “But we do know who Sylvas has been smooching.”

Sylvas rubbed his temples. “Perhaps I should contact the ship’s crew and tell them that there is a hurry after all.”

Not wanting to be part of the conversation anymore, Sylvas made his way over to the nearest terminal and typed out a message for Hector to receive when he woke up. It was difficult to say too much without giving anything away, but he hoped that the few terse lines he did manage to jot down would be enough to assure the man that everything was alright. Or, at least, as alright as it could be.

From over by the airlock, he heard Rania’s musical laughter. She was still wheezing when she managed to squeeze out the words, “Pickled eggs?”

It seemed like it would be in Sylvas’ best interest not to return to the conversation just yet, so he began poring over all the information he could gather about the ship they were commandeering. It was not a nimble light freighter like the one that they’d been flitting around the galaxy in so far, but rather something a great deal bulkier. He had anticipated having to jettison its cargo once they were out of the system to reduce their weight, but it seemed like the cargo bays were empty. A quick glance at the crew manifest explained why. They had crammed every single civilian they could find into the ship when the eidolons broke through on Erattin 5. Their cargo bays had been filled with the wounded and the dying.

Harkan and his people came tumbling out of the airlock en masse, and he had the slate with all of the security codes for the ship pressed into his hands. “Boss wants you to call him in flight. Says he’ll fill you in as much as he can.”

Sylvas defaulted to his most formal mode of speech when he didn’t know what to say. “I’m much obliged to you and your crew.”

“Mate, if you’re trying to fix all this, I’d give you the clothes off my back if I thought it would help.”

“I’ll take the clothes off you!” Kaya called after him, to a chorus of hoots and whistles from the rest of the dwarvish crew as they disembarked.

Sylvas didn’t grab her by the scruff of the neck and drag her into the ship, but it was a close thing. “No time for fun.”

“That’s your motto for life, isn’t it, stanzbuhr?” Kaya pouted.

The ship was as dingy-looking on the inside as it had been on the outside. All of the creature comforts that they’d been accustomed to on the Folly were absent. There was bare metal, inscribed magic, and piping flowing alongside the walkway, and everything was coated in a thick layer of what looked like soot but was more likely the residue of lubricating oil heated up and left to disperse through the ship, which explained the smell.

“I don’t know, the stories you’ve been telling me seem fairly fun.” Rania laid a hand on Sylvas’ arm as she fell into step beside him. “You really out-drank a fiend?”

“We’ve already established that alcohol doesn’t affect me in the same way it does others.”

It makes other people into good company.

“Aye, now it doesn’t. But it did back then.” Kaya chortled. “You were hungover as all kragh when I saw you in the morning.”

Despite himself, Sylvas couldn’t help but smile. “I think that was the first time I’d ever been drunk.”

“And he enjoyed it so much he modified his body so that he could never experience it again,” Malachai was quick to point out, putting a pin right through the good mood.

“Well, I hope you haven’t evolved beyond all the other vices that make life worth living.” Rania squeezed his bicep, and for a brief moment, it felt like Sylvas’ brain had stopped working entirely.

Oh, hello. Mira was entirely too pleased with herself. I told you she liked you, darling. You’re going to make such beautiful babies together, and I shall be their beloved Aunt Mira, assuming that I correctly assembled all the plumbing downstairs when I was pushing through your embodiment.

Arriving at the bridge of the ship saved Sylvas from having to even start down that line of thought. He moved over to the control circle, let Mira transfer all the relevant credentials, and then reached out through the ship’s systems and spells, letting his mind connect.

What had felt natural on their old ship felt almost painful here. The ship’s systems and spells were metallic and jagged. They pressed into his mind with their sharp edges instead of being an extension of it. When he tried to push his consciousness out into the ship, it was like he was banging into a metal grate, and the only way to keep going was to push only a thinned pseudopod of his awareness out and into the systems. Perhaps if he’d learned to fly in any other ship than the Folly, none of this would have been so unpleasant a surprise, but as it stood, he was quietly horrified at what pilots had to put themselves through on a daily basis, and at how unresponsive everything on the ship was. “How old are these systems?”

Kaya had been tapping away at some of the consoles, pulling up information. “Couple of iterations old. Maybe five years?”

He gawked at her. He’d expected this ship to be of archaeological interest to Rania based on how well it was responding, and it was essentially new.

She caught sight of his expression and chuckled. “Did you think they were all like the Folly? When we told you it was cutting edge, did you think we were pulling your grongk?”

There was another word of dwarvish that he’d be sure to never translate.

Ignoring her, he forced his way back into the systems, resisting the urge to grumble and groan all the way.

I’m having even worse luck than you. There was multi-channel access on the Folly, so we could both use the systems simultaneously. This one is more limited.

“Do you want to take over?” he asked.

Absolutely not. It is horrid in there.

Sighing, Sylvas managed to get the ship’s engines activated, decouple them from the pylon, and pull them out. His attempts to directly shift the ship using his will and gravity mana were worse than unsuccessful. A simple tug should have moved them into the right position, but because of how limited and slow his access to everything was, one half of the ship tried to move before the other half, and he nearly tore them in half.

The ship lurched, and everyone looked at him as though it were his fault. Sylvas cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He’d pinged the control deck of the docking assembly for permission to depart and was waiting on their response and a designated course that would keep him from colliding with anyone.

Kaya had hopped up to sit on one of the consoles while he wasn’t looking. “Where are we taking this hunk of junk anyway?”

“The galactic core.” Sylvas hadn’t really known the plan himself until he spoke it out loud. “The farther in we get, the more likely we are to be able to establish contact with the council.”

“And then?” Malachai asked with a wry quirk of his eyebrow.

“Go where we are needed. Fight the eidolons. Save people.” That part, Sylvas was sure of.

“What if there isn’t anybody to tell you where to go?” Rania had been staying out of the way, back by the entrance to the ship. 

There were no windows in the bridge, no way to see what was outside. The pilot just had to rely on what the sensors told them. The result was a dimly lit room where his friends looked more like shadows than people. He supposed that might help with the headache he was already developing after a few minutes interacting with this ship’s systems. 

Even without being able to see her, he could hear her tone: inquisitive. Not like this was a simple question. More like she was still trying to get a handle on who he was and how he’d react.

“The second part of the plan is the important part of the plan.” Sylvas didn’t like the feeling of being tested. “If there’s nobody to guide us, we go alone. Find where we can help the most.”

Rania nodded, looking satisfied with the answer. But Sylvas certainly wasn’t. The universe was a vast and complex place, and without some guidance, he had essentially no idea where they’d be of the most help. They would help, regardless, but to maximize the impact of their help, they needed someone to point them in the right direction. Which meant the council. He plotted a course for the last place that they had seen them.

Throughout all of this, he’d been waiting patiently for a response from traffic control, and finally, he got it. An automated message saying that, due to the volume of inbound traffic, leaving the planet was not currently possible.

Malachai read the message as it arrived. “That presents a problem.”

Sylvas sighed, then poured a trickle of mana into the ship’s engines, pivoting it around in its glorified parking space until they were angled down towards the planetary surface, and then he began casting.

“Stanzbuhr…” Kaya caught on to what he was doing before the others, though Malachai pieced it together a moment later.

“The last time that you attempted something like this, our ship was destroyed.”

Rania caught on to the heightened tension, even if she couldn’t follow what he was attempting. “What is he doing?”

Kaya got distracted from trying to talk him out of it to argue with Malachai, as usual. “To be fair, it was pretty destroyed before he—”

Sylvas sent them flying down at as close to full speed as he could coax out of the spells woven into the ship, using the planet’s gravity to give it an extra bit of momentum. They plummeted towards the row of parked ships below as all of his companions’ complaints turned to shouts, then the ship punched through into null-space and left Gallius behind.