Chapter 6

“If the eidolon is mindless, how does it function? If it lacks all will of its own, why does it move? There are more questions about the eidolon than there are answers, and at this point, philosophical navel-gazing seems to dominate the academic spaces surrounding them. They are treated as an abstract conundrum, as opposed to a very real thing that can be observed in the universe. All of which is to say, we should be observing them. This is not an incitement to summon eidolons through to our plane of existence, nor a suggestion that eidolons that are a danger should not be dispatched with all due haste back to their plane of origin. Rather, it is my belief that the immediate and total destruction of eidolons should not be our primary and exclusive goal whenever we come into contact with them. There will be scenarios where an eidolon is doing no harm, and it could be left alone in the wild to be observed and learned from. Equally, there will be scenarios where intervening with the eidolon is not liable to prevent any further loss of life, so it becomes pointless to pursue.”

—Heresy: A Modest Proposal, Redacted, Part One

With Rania still curled up on herself, Sylvas had essentially balled her up and tucked her under an arm before he took flight. They cleared the tempest of souls without any interference beyond a shrike that he cut down with a backhanded slash of his claws.

“Never going to get used to that,” Rania grumbled into his collarbone.

Sylvas spoke as softly as he could while still being heard over the whipping wind. “The killing?”

“The motion sickness. Every time you cast gravity magic, I feel it in my guts.” She groaned. “Like I’m doing a flip.”

“I’m sure Kaya would have some joke about me making your stomach feel funny.” Sylvas took them in a slow arc back towards the beachhead, rising up to get the clearest view of the battlefield where they’d touched down, mentally marking the position of the other pods.

“You can make jokes, too, you know.” Rania did look a little queasy, but she was still trying to hold out. “You don’t have to delegate having a sense of humor.”

“I don’t like to deny her the opportunity.” He took them into a sharp dive to avoid a flock of shrikes swooping through, touching them down amidst the Ardent.

Kaya was lost amidst the clashing metal. Ten-foot walls had been drawn up out of the ground by some diligent earth mage, driving the attacking eidolons around towards her and the firestorm surrounding her.

“Hold tight for a minute. I’m going to gather the troops.” Sylvas did his best to ignore Rania’s attempts to not throw up the moment she was back on solid ground. She was doubled over with her hands on her knees, taking deep breaths to try and steady herself, but in spite of that, she raised a thumbs-up in his general direction.

Oh, darling, she’s a trooper. If you’d made me nauseous every time you came close to me, I certainly wouldn’t have been fluttering my eyelashes at you.

Sylvas focused on the task at hand. The drop-pods that had landed the farthest out were top priority. The ones closer in could rely on the beachhead and the other pods to split the incoming flow of eidolons, but the ones out at the edges were all alone against the tide. He picked the farthest he could see and headed right for it. Shrikes swept in at him every second or so, but his claws, combined with the speed he was traveling, made light work of them. He cast another orrery of gravity shears to surround him as he went so that he didn’t have to devote so much focus to dealing with them, but it was, honestly, a fairly small amount of attention required anyway. His body moved as if on its own through the motions of slaughter, without him needing to give it a second thought. He didn’t know if it was muscle memory or the eidolon embedded in his body, but either way, killing came easy these days.

The pod on the outer limit of his perception had been shredded by the eidolons. The razor tusks and the bladed wings had split it open, and whoever had been inside was now a bloody mess. He had known that there were risks involved in coming to this world, but he’d assumed he’d be the one to shoulder that burden, not the others. He’d been too slow to save everyone. 

He darted to the next pod, not letting himself think about whoever had died. Trying not to second-guess himself or curse himself for not arguing that he should have been deployed down here with just his team. The Ardent would never have let them come alone. They were too sure of themselves as the Empyrean’s primary eidolon fighting force. The next pod had not been breached, but whoever was inside had failed to escape it either. It was being knocked back and forth by a pair of gorers, like it was a game to them.

Two blades of war and gravity lashed out from his orbit, slicing through them as he descended. With his claws, he raked the door off the pod and found a bruised, battered, and confused-looking Kerbo inside. “Took you long enough.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You thought you were getting all the glory?” Kerbo dragged himself out of the pod and almost immediately fell over. He spat out a jagged tooth. “Hell, no.”

A quick healing spell had him back on his feet, even if he was still unsteady, then Sylvas reached to pick him up. Flames licked out of his body, driving his savior back. “I can walk.”

Sylvas rolled his eyes at the bravado. “As fast as I can fly?”

The fiend grinned. “Faster.”

He took off for the beachhead, taking a couple of staggering steps before he found his rhythm and then shooting off so fast it let out a sonic boom. Burning footprints were left in his wake. Apparently, he was actually faster.

The rest of the pods were an even mix of corpses and Ardent more willing to hitch a ride. By the time he got back to the beachhead, Sylvas had a half-dozen people dangling off his arms and legs and two clinging to his back. The orrery of blades had come in handy while he was occupied with them all and unable to cast or fight, but they’d used him as a mobile platform to fight from themselves. It was easy to forget how competent all the mages of the Ardent actually were in the face of the chaos of an all-out assault by eidolons.

With everyone together, Sylvas was expecting them to turn to him for orders, and while he didn’t relish the thought, he had been preparing a plan as he soared around. Kerbo was already in the midst of things, barking commands, shoring up defenses, and directing the actual fight, and Malachai had arrived shortly before Sylvas’ latest return to the gathering and was now tending to the defense of all three of the walled approaches. His magic passed through the stone without seeming to touch it, but the creatures beyond were felled by his spells as easily as if they could see one another eye to eye. Kaya was still out there in the maelstrom of steel, still cutting through the eidolons as fast as they came, but she had never been a big contributor to their strategies even at the best of times. The one who was actually making plans was the one who didn’t have any fighting to do.

Rania flashed him a smile. “We need a structure if we want to learn anything, and the surface is trashed, so I’m thinking we head underground. There’s a good chance that there will be some sort of structure around the world soul like you found on Strife.”

“This world doesn’t have a soul,” Sylvas said automatically, even though he hadn’t reached that conclusion through any logic. He just knew it to be true from the feel of the place. Even the most desolate and wretched places they’d been before had felt more alive than this world.

She shrugged. “The central positioning would make it the most likely place for the Aions to place the most significant structures anyway.”

That was enough to stop his train of thought. “You think this was an Aion world?”

“You know anyone else with magic advanced enough to throw a planet into another dimension?”

“But why would they—”

She cut him off with a wave. “It’s a working hypothesis, which is better than the nothing we’ve got right now. So now we just need to contact your ship in orbit and get a deep scry of the planet to find the nearest point of entry to the underground superstructures, assuming that there are any, and then make our way there.”

A shrike swung down towards them, slipping through the interlocking shields and crossfire to head straight for Sylvas. He backhanded it into pieces. “And if there aren’t?”

“Then it’s an empty world with no answers, and we’ve wasted the trip here, because whatever might have been up here on the surface before it was shunted through dimensions and left in the tender loving care of a bunch of eidolons is long gone.”

Kerbo was close enough to butt into the conversation. “The Basquiat is long gone, and I’m not going to signal her back into this mess unless we’re guaranteed results.”

Rania didn’t scowl, but the smile that Sylvas hadn’t even noticed only seemed to linger on her lips when she was talking to him faded when she turned to the fiend. “You don’t want to know what’s under the planet’s surface?”

Kerbo was unabashed. “Not if it costs us the ship.”

Sylvas held up his hands before an argument could get started. “I might have a solution.”

Closing his eyes, he extended his gravity sense. When he’d first acquired it, it had only extended as far out of his body as the ambient field of mana that surrounded any mage, but the more powerful he’d become, the wider it should have spread. Of course, with the way that Sylvas constantly drew mana in towards himself, that field of view had never gotten any bigger. His power was caught in the gravity of its source. But he could shift his personal gravity to become as heavy or light as he desired, and now he pushed it all the way through lightness and out the other side, radiating anti-gravity in every direction. 

It sent his senses haywire, like he’d switched the contrast on all of his senses to be reversed, and without his Lockmind and Mira bearing some of the burden, he had no doubt it would have been an overwhelming experience. As it was, the bubble of his consciousness abruptly exploded outwards, alongside everyone else in the beachhead. He may not have fully considered the effect when he switched out his gravity.

As everyone staggered back to their feet to face eidolons that had all been blasted back by six feet, Sylvas let his awareness spread out, farther and farther. He could not encompass the whole planet, but that was only because as he allowed his personal mana to dissipate, his awareness of what it passed through became less clear.

“Three miles southeast is the closest entrance, but the superstructure does not look like the one on Strife, I’ve got to tell you.”

Kerbo glowered at him. “What did you just do?”

“I took a look.” Sylvas shrugged, then cupped his hands around his mouth to yell out to the rest of the Ardent. “We’re heading southeast. Three miles. Get ready to move!”

Another flock of shrikes had managed to make it through the shields thanks to Sylvas jostling everyone around, and once again, they all locked onto him and plunged, reaching terminal velocity in fractions of a second. He threw up the last few curved shears that had been in his defenses to intercept them. Six of the seven were caught, but one made it through, dropping like a harpoon aimed right at his heart. He overpowered his natural instinct to claw it to pieces, knowing that those razor-sharp pieces were liable to rain on Kerbo and Rania beside him. He opted instead to launch his orbitals up into the eidolon, knocking it spinning off course, then finishing it off with a rake of his claws once it was safely down.

Kerbo was staring at him as if he’d grown a second head, but everyone else went about their business without a second thought. It was only when it was obvious that Sylvas wasn’t going to comment that he piped up. “You’re different than I remember.”

“A lot has happened.” Sylvas shrugged as he walked away from the conversation.

“Any idea why the eidolons only want you?” That did make Sylvas pause. All of the shrikes that made it through went for him. The attacks on the beachhead seemed to have redoubled when he regrouped with everyone. 

It was a fair question, and he suspected that he had the answer. “I’ve got a world soul shard in my pocket.”

“What?” came the fiend’s flat reply.

Sylvas took flight. “I’ll tell you the whole story later, but if we can use it to keep the focus on me and away from everyone else, I’m calling it a win.”