Chapter 9
“In ancient dwarven cultures, one of the most respected positions that any dwarf could lay claim to would be smith. Craftsmen were practically worshipped in many of the pre-contact dwarven civilizations and often attributed special powers both in the community and folklore. The touch of a smith’s anvil was required to forge a marriage bond or to sever a curse that had been set upon you. The smith himself was often attributed the ability to heal with just a touch. Fanciful and ridiculous, but a clear indication of the great value that early dwarves put upon their skilled workers. Yet the persistence and predominance of this smith-worship seems to extend far beyond mere respect for an artisan and touches upon something more primal in the dwarven psyche. Mining is the primary occupation of all dwarven settlements. The extraction of minerals from the ground.”
—Myth of the Dwarven Smith, Eleyna Starweaver, Part One
The eidolon Strife tore out of what was now Mira’s body with Sylvas occupying its mind.
A great crimson wolf, with blood dripping from every strand of fur on its body. Eidolons were mindless. They might have moved with some inherent animalistic cunning in line with whatever aspect of magic they were manifesting, but ultimately, there was no intelligence there, just instinct and emotion. Sylvas became its mind, but he didn’t need to be. Instinct drove him forward. Jagged teeth of fresh-forged war snapped shut on the spindly legs of the iron eidolon, and the mechanical parts shattered. There was no blood to taste here, but iron was not so different. And while there were no bones to shatter or muscles to tear, the oily hydraulics and the spindly legs that they drove were a good enough substitute to please the wolf.
The inevitable advance of the eidolon slowed. The panic spreading amongst the Ardent didn’t. They turned their firepower against Sylvas, with Kerbo in the lead. His flames washed over Sylvas, searing away the blood-soaked fur. Malachai looked on helplessly as all of the Ardent who couldn’t leave a scratch on the eidolon of steel turned their attentions to a softer target.
Sylvas leapt out of the flames, rolling around the side of the iron eidolon to use it as a shield. All the blood that usually soaked Strife’s form had dried to a rusted crust in the engulfing flame, and with its loss, all of his senses seemed to have been dampened. He couldn’t feel the position of everyone by the pressure in the air anymore. He couldn’t hear their hearts beating. The eidolon of steel may not have understood what was going on any better than the Ardent had, but it responded in exactly the same way. Here was something that might have done it harm, so it needed to be eliminated. A barrage of blades suddenly came shooting out at Sylvas, the loose wiggling motion of the spindly limbs discarded in an instant to make a perfect thrust with all that it didn’t need to stay upright.
Leaping back, out of the way, was the obvious solution, but down on the ground behind his hulking wolf-like form, were the Ardent, Kaya, Malachai, and Rania. He could dodge away, or he could protect them, but not both.
The blades pierced through his bloodied body as if they’d been thirsting for it their whole lives. The impact knocked him from his feet, and the piercing spikes of metal burrowed cleanly through him and into the ground below, pinning him in place. Pinning them both in place. The wolf within him writhed and screamed at this sudden awful pain in a dozen places, but Sylvas’ rational concerns were more prosaic. If it kept him embedded where he was, it would have to give up on mobility to avoid the Ardent. He had proven so much of a threat with a single hamstringing bite that he’d made the titan of steel focus its ire entirely on him. Idiotic.
Around the wounds, blood bubbled up, fresh and flowing, trying to close the holes that were still pinned open by blades. It was his blood, which meant he had mastery of it. He had let the wolf lead, let instinct and anger guide his motions, but no more. Now he was precise. Every movement calculated to maximum effect. The blood darted out, tendrils of it erupting from his ruptured flesh. One slapped Kerbo off course as he tried to bring a meteoric fireball down on Sylvas’ head, and another intercepted one of Kaya’s javelins, twisted it sideways, and then slammed it into the deepest depths between the tangled limbs of the eidolon of steel. The rest wrapped around the arms attached to the blades driven into him, slipping in the oil and blood as they tried to find purchase and pry him free.
Kerbo’s fireball went astray in the wrong direction, flying off to sear away some of the endless engraving that Rania probably would have been excited to study instead of the monster, where his focus should have been. Distantly, Sylvas could make out Malachai trying to call the Ardent off, trying to tell them to focus their fire on the eidolon of steel, but it seemed to be having little effect. He lacked the gravitas that Sylvas had carried with him, even with his partially cadaverous appearance. The Ardent were hardened against the undead by their training, and it seemed that extended to the people who had used some aspect of undeath to preserve their own lives.
Kaya had taken point in the fight against the eidolon of steel, her own metal-covered body little more than a blur as she launched herself from one position to the next, to fling a freshly manufactured javelin into the beast’s workings or to avoid the counter-strike being brought down by one of its bladed limbs. In the chaos that she was dealing with, she probably didn’t even realize that Sylvas was in the fight, let alone that he was being hounded by both sides of it.
Distantly, he could hear Mira, like an echo in the back of his mind. They were still connected, even now. Why are you biting things, you moron? Use your head!
He opened his mouth to answer back, only to realize that forming words through a wolf’s jaws was impossible. How was he meant to do anything other than bite when this was his shape? Except, this wasn’t his shape. The outside might have looked like a wolf, but on the inside, he was made up of words of magic, the ancient language of the Aions that composed every spell, just waiting for mana to be fed into them in the right sequence. He knew those words; he used those words every day. He’d never cast like this, but he could feel the possibility of it now. He poured mana into the internal shapes that made up the eidolon, and the spell-forms lit up. Not the native spells of war, but the ones that had been freshly written into its body by their covenant.
The gravity in the room inverted. Everyone fell up towards the center. The blades that pierced him and pinned him to the ground were now all that was keeping the great eidolon of steel from being flung back up into the aperture, back into its own plane, and slowly but surely, they were drawn out of the stone and his flesh. The steel eidolon flailed, trying to hammer more of its blades and claws down into the ground, trying to regain some measure of traction so that it couldn’t be banished, but now that he was unpinned, Sylvas was in motion. Snapping a brittle and spindly leg here, knocking a thrust off course, lashing out with tendrils of blood from the gaping injuries still covering his wolfen body to tear the eidolon’s grip on the stone loose. It began to fall upwards, towards his real body, towards the portal back to its own plane.
Everyone else fell up, too, but they weren’t lined up so perfectly with the tear. They’d fall all the way to the opposite interior surface of the planet, and the fall might hurt a little, but they were all trained and equipped to deal with situations like this. Sylvas just had to trust them. With one spell, he had turned the entire battle around. Banishing the enemy back to the hell that spawned them.
Except nothing was ever that easy. As the eidolon of steel fell up into the sky, tumbling end over end, the tear in the center of the world was drawn in tighter and tighter until it was just a single point of blinding white light. An event horizon, just like the ones down in the depths of a black hole. Shimmering and reflecting all light back out for just an instant before the inherent instability of it led to its collapse. It fell inside itself, sealing the tear in reality just a moment before the eidolon of steel would have reached it. The whole planet lurched with the rift’s sudden absence. The stonework, which had lasted millennia beyond count, cracked with the sudden change.
The eidolon hung in the air at the center of the hollow world, in the place where the rift had been, with the artificial gravity on all sides exerting an even draw, keeping it floating in place now that Sylvas’ own magic had faltered. It dangled there, still and useless, like a deep-sea crustacean plucked from the depths and exposed to the air. All the blades and limbs spreadeagled out, being drawn in every direction away from the center of its mass. Sylvas would have expected it to go berserk, to lash out helplessly and furiously. It was a creature of raw emotion after all. It should have been losing what little composure it had when denied its targets, but instead, it seemed almost content to be pinned like a butterfly.
With the steel eidolon rendered inert, all attention now fell on Sylvas. The Ardent began an artillery bombardment on his position that would have been enough to glass a small city. It was going to tear him apart, and while this body might have been able to regenerate back from just a few smears of blood, he didn’t think that the experience would be very enjoyable. He snapped back to his own body, and the eidolon that had manifested out of him into the world disappeared.
There was an uproar almost immediately after the torrent of spells stopped and the bloody wolf was no longer in sight. Scrying spells started pinging around the chamber. Waves of senses that Sylvas couldn’t even name washed over him, but the eidolon and his mind had both been cleanly integrated right back into his body where they belonged, for now.
Thank you for saving the universe from destruction, Mira. Oh, you’re quite welcome, darling. All in a day’s work.
Sylvas grimaced. “Thank you, Mira.”
Do you suppose they’re going to realize that you’re the eidolon and turn on you now, or will that be later?
“Later.” Sylvas dropped down to where the Ardent had secured themselves against the inner curve of the planet.
Malachai stepped up to greet him. “My apologies for the… misfiring.”
“Couldn’t be helped.” Sylvas did his best to shrug it off. He was the one betraying the Ardent by carrying around an eidolon, after all.
Kerbo was next in line, grabbing Sylvas by the forearm and dragging him in for a quick slap on the back. “Nice work. Knew you were Ardent material.”
“You literally bet me money that I wasn’t.”
The fiend was as shameless as ever. “Encouragement.”
Sylvas had expected Rania to be among his greeting party, but she was nowhere to be seen in the mass of Ardent. Kaya came staggering towards them, still clad entirely in steel from heel to crown. “That thing is hurting my head.”
“Resonance between your affinity and its?” Malachai suggested.
“It’s a Tier-7 eidolon.” Kerbo glanced up at it, hanging over them like a vulture. “They have all kinds of funky effects that you wouldn’t expect from six and up.”
Kaya managed to shed some of the metal covering her head, but not all of it; her face protruded from the slicked-back helm. “It sucks. Whatever it is.”
Now growing concerned that she still hadn’t made her presence known, Sylvas waded off into the Ardent to look for Rania. She could have been flung around by his inversion or injured in the fighting. Anything could have happened to her while he was distracted. As it turned out, what had happened while he was distracted was that she got distracted. While everyone else had their eyes locked on the eidolons, the rift between dimensions and the chaos, her eyes had been turned to the carvings all around them. She was next to one of the raised platforms that studded the interior of the planet, running her fingers along the grooves as if it was helping her read. “… khazakhrackan… vehstuhl… nhirgakka…”
“Anything interesting?” Sylvas tried to say as casually as he could.
“It’s a temple.” Her eyes blazed with excitement, and she spoke just a little too fast. “The whole planet was turned into a temple by the dwarves.”
