Chapter 10
“But through the transubstantiation of the smith’s touch, these minerals can become tools and treasures. Even now that they have long passed by their own industrial revolutions, the dwarven people still consider items of metalwork that have been crafted by hand, rather than by machine or magic, to be superior. Two identical objects will be weighed and judged based on the method of their creation, even if there is no discernible difference between them, and the smithed item will invariably be found the superior. None of this speaks to a culture of luddite technological rejection, as mass production is accepted across dwarven societies, but to an admiration for both the craftsmanship of the smith, and the figure of the smith itself. All of which suggests that the smith worship of the dwarves may in fact predate our modern notions about the craftsman. As though there was some ur-smith of which all contemporary smiths are merely a reflection, whom worship was originally reserved for.”
—Myth of the Dwarven Smith, Eleyna Starweaver, Part Two
“They hollowed it out and made the floors their holy book,” Rania continued as excitement took her. “All the back-and-forth tunnels, those were passages of initiation. It was meant to take worshipers time to make the pilgrimage. To study what was inscribed there before they got to this.”
“I didn’t even know the dwarves had gods.”
“They don’t. Well, they don’t anymore. They still have some superstitions, but organized religion? This is the first indicator they ever had anything like that.”
“So what were they worshiping?”
“I might be reading this wrong but…” Rania pointed up at the eidolon looming over them all.
“Eidolons?”
“That Eidolon. That particular eidolon. The uh… bringer of worked metals and tools forged of night… nhirgakka haraku… khaz… The Smith of the Black? The Voidsmith? Dwarvish doesn’t translate well anyway, and this is such an archaic branch language that—”
“The Blacksmith.” Sylvas stared up at the eidolon and saw a quiver in all of its extended limbs. “Great work, Rania. Keep it up.”
Without the rift but with the artificial gravity, the center of the planet would always have had that same dead spot in the middle where an eidolon could be suspended helplessly, unable to wreak havoc. They’d made a church to this monster and then trapped it inside.
Sylvas blinked again as he looked up into the eidolon. The arms that had been pinioned out seemed longer than they had a moment before. The brittle clicking of the metallic joints seemed louder, more like a whine of steel under terrible pressure than the settling of mechanical parts. The Blacksmith in all of its glory was reaching out its hundred limbs in every direction, and with an awful and sudden clunk, they all came apart. The many joints in its many limbs proved not to be the solid connections that they had appeared but chains. The limbs burst out to hammer into the stone in every direction. It had traction again, and the huge smooth chrome body was suddenly in motion, lurching out of the gravity well that had held it in place.
The battle wasn’t over. It had been only a brief pause while the Smith gathered its strength and became all the more lethal. Sylvas threw up a gravity shear as the blades, now mounted on the ends of chains, all seemed to come swinging in towards him and Rania. They launched at him from all directions, sweeping in like lethal pendulums, firing straight out from the Smith like harpoons. All of them struck at the shear at the same time, rebounding off in random directions, chains tangling. He was back in his body again, in full control of all his faculties, with Mira standing at the ready to handle the rest. There would never be a better time to fight this thing than right now.
Beyond the chaotic deflection that he’d managed, the other Ardent had managed to get shields up for the most part. Kerbo had tried to fight fire with fire, or rather, steel with fire, and blasted the blades heading in his direction back in the way that they’d come. The others had intercepted and deflected as best they could, but even now, Sylvas could smell the blood in the air. Not everyone had been ready for the surprise attack.
It was a horrible thing that these brave Ardent had died, but it was also fuel for the fires of Sylvas’ magic. Blood was in the air now, and with it he could hear the beat of the war drums. The hammering of every heart in the vast echoing chamber. A cacophony of living people, fighting to stay alive. It was war. Malachai might have fed off death, but this was the sustenance for Strife, and now for Sylvas that it was bonded to. Not death but life shining brightest in its final desperate moments as it tried to continue.
He took it all in, and he flung it up at the Blacksmith, striking into the heart of its chrome mass with a lash of war, shearing gravity, and will that knocked it back, knocked it clean through the dead-zone in the middle of the planet, and had it crashing into the wall on the far side.
“Pin it down!” Kerbo shouted over the chaos, and Sylvas sprang into the air to do just that. Launching a gravity spike at the far wall that should have flattened anything standing. But steel was resilient, and it resisted the pull of gravity. The Smith was swayed, but on its spindly chain-link legs, it rose again. Switching tactics, Sylvas launched a barrage of pure war spells. Blazing streaks of bloody red flowed from his hands in a torrent and washed over the eidolon to no effect at all. Steel cared about war considerably less than it cared about gravity. The magics just didn’t interact enough for Sylvas’ spells to gain traction.
Kerbo’s own rising pillar of flame did more to hold the eidolon against the far wall, the thinner metal of the chains glowing red hot after only a few moments of exposure, but it had the unfortunate side effect that when the eidolon did manage to break free, a simple touch from any part of it would be enough to melt away skin and flesh.
Working rapidly, Sylvas deployed his orbitals to deflect the blows that the Smith was trying to rain down on them and cast something substantial enough that the inevitable return to all-out battle could be avoided. Dumping mana wildly into his casting, he launched another gravity spike right into the center of the sooty body of the Smith.
This took hold the way war never could. It trapped the smith against the wall, stilled its motions, and dragged the farthest flung blades from where they’d found purchase. But even pinned in one place, the Blacksmith god of the dwarves was lethal.
Those same blades that had been wedged in the walls to give it motion had been pulled loose and now swept around freely, the chains that bound them twisting like serpents as they were flung around the room. Shields were cast, but not all of them quickly enough. Another of the Ardent was sliced cleanly in half by a retreating blade, and Sylvas couldn’t even consider stopping to cast healing magic in his direction. The moment he stopped pouring magic into the gravity spike, this nightmare would have freedom of motion again, and with that would come so many more deaths. He doubled down, throwing more and more mana into the spike, pushing it until it was as dense as a star, and then pushing further, edging dangerously close to creating a black hole to hold the thing in place. But even under the forces that he was exerting on it, the damned thing was still moving. The chains it had reached out should have been reeled back in, the blades stuck to the body, but they weren’t.
An eidolon this powerful was manifesting its own version of reality around it. The Twilight Prophet had been the same. It had been an eidolon of pure destruction, and just being close to it had made everything come apart and turn to dust. This eidolon had the opposite effect. It was making a universe where steel was eternal and unbreaking. A universe where metal was more relentless than the gravity trying to pull on it. This wasn’t some spell to be countered. The eidolon was made of steel mana, its body shaped into the words of power. It had no choice in doing what it was doing. It was its nature.
He had to overcome that nature. He had to overcome the rules of the universe that it was establishing around itself, overwhelming it with the weight of his own reality. Luckily, breaking the rules of reality was exactly what magic was for. He poured more mana into the spike, shuddering as it inverted into a black hole and started dragging everything in. As the eidolon tried to strike out at the Ardent, its blades became heavy and fell back towards it. The chains that had been straight as arrows now sagged against the pull. Everything began falling in towards the eidolon—its weapons, its limbs, and the Ardent. Even Sylvas’ own orbitals were yanked from his mental grasp and fell into the sudden tangled scrapheap of the eidolon.
But it still wasn’t enough. He had slowed the monster, but he hadn’t stopped it. Even as he watched, the chains were forging new links, binding together and strengthening one another. The blades melted together like mercury to become more solid, more unbreakable, more relentless. If he let go of his grip on the thing now, it would explode out and tear through all of them before anyone could get another spell in place to lock it down.
Bombardment rained on it from every angle—fire and ice, lightning and raw magic—but none of it was breaking the chrome surface. At best, it was buffering away the layers of soot and water left behind by the previous spell. If it had been real metal, it would have been reduced to a vapor by now, but this blacksmith god was unstoppable.
All of its limbs extended straight up from it, out towards Sylvas, where he lay out of reach on the opposite side of the spherical chamber. Before, he’d assumed it was attacking him because he’d positioned himself in its way to protect the others, but now, the reality began to set in. Just like every other eidolon on this planet, it wanted him. It wanted the fragment of a world soul that he carried with him.
The extended blades, hooks, chains, and worse could not reach him, and at the moment that they reached their zenith, showing that they couldn’t, they were all jerked back by the gravity that Sylvas was generating. They whipped back along the same path that they’d come and smashed into the floor around the Blacksmith, launching its body up and out, tearing it free of the spike he’d hammered into it.
It hadn’t been reaching for him. What he’d just borne witness to wasn’t a desperate stretch for a prize beyond its grasp. It had been readying a jump. It flew towards him now, like the largest bullet ever cast, and he had no option other than to turn and flee. He threw his will up against it, pushing with all the gravity he could brute force out of his body, but it wasn’t going to be enough. It was still flying at him, and he either stopped trying to fight it and flew away or he let it crush him.
The right answer was obvious, but the right answer also meant leaving Rania behind, right next to ground zero, where it was going to come smashing into this side of the chamber. He threw himself towards her, moving as fast as he could move, and it still wasn’t going to be fast enough.
