Chapter 12

“The eidolons grow stronger each day, and they adapt more and more to our defensive capabilities, but we can learn nothing of them because we dare not tolerate their existence for a moment longer than it takes us to destroy them. We are trapped in a never-ending cycle of violence by our outright refusal to offer even the most basic level of interest in our enemy. Our minds are the greatest advantage that we have in the battle against the eidolons, and they are being entirely squandered by the current policy.”

—Heresy: A Modest Proposal, Redacted, Part Three

“Don’t get all sappy on me now.” Kaya probably would have hit him in her usual way if either had a hand free to do violence. As it was, they were both pinned in place now.

“Just push,” he called out to her.

“Push? Why didn’t I think of that?” she grumbled but did as he said.

His own pushing did nothing at all. His body had no effect on the immovable object, but his magic was another matter. He drove up at the eidolon with all the weight of his will and focus, and for one glorious moment, it seemed as though it might be enough, but his joy was short-lived. The smith took only a moment to adjust to the new measures deployed against it and redoubled its efforts to crush them.

Mira still tore at the smith’s hooks in the ground, but everyone else was out of sight—and hopefully off the planet by now.

The eidolon pushed. Kaya pushed, and slowly, like it was molasses, the smooth chrome of the eidolon’s body began to melt down Kaya’s arms. Sylvas dove in, raking at it as it descended, trying to thin the smothering mass of liquid metal before it could encase her, but as fast as he struck and as powerful as his blows were, the eidolon was just so vast, there was just so much metal melting down onto Kaya that it was all in vain. 

Inch by inch, it covered her arms, creeping slowly out across her chest to her throat. At any moment, Sylvas expected it to harden, to constrict, to crush the life out of her, but it didn’t. It just went on melting down, trying to smother her when it couldn’t crush her. Casting Inversion on the gravity had no effect. It wasn’t trickling down because of its weight but because of the crushing force being applied. They had to stop this… and fast. “Kaya, I’m going to grab you and pull you free, but the whole thing is going to come down on us when I do. Can you throw up some sort of supports?”

“No.” Her voice rang out strange and cold through the helm encasing her head.

“I’m going to throw everything I have into the inversion then. Maybe it will buy us enough time to get clear.”

That isn’t going to work, and it would be suicidal to attempt it.

“I am not letting her die!” Sylvas snapped without thinking how it would sound to Kaya.

Kaya’s breath was ragged from the effort she was exerting to keep the smith up, but when she spoke, there was no fear. “I’ve got this, stanzbuhr.”

“Kaya, it’s going to swallow you whole.”

Her arms were shaking, but she was not letting the effort of holding back the impossible weight stop her. “Not… if I swallow it first…”

She was casting, even as he stood there, singing out words of Aion that he had never heard before. It was only as she reached the fourth or fifth repetition that he began to recognize fragments. The magic that Malachai had been trying to piece together after learning about covenants. The ritual that bound an eidolon and a mage together.

The slow melting of the metal of the eidolon wasn’t its doing. Just as she could reach out to any metal that she touched through her affinity and shape it, she was draining the eidolon’s body down into her. “Kaya… no.”

He could hear her grinning inside that stupid helmet. “Kaya, yes!”

The eidolon had reached some sort of tipping point in its resistance to her. It had been holding on to its natural shape and form all of this time on pure instinct, but instinct had no capacity to resist the inexorable will of Kaya Runemaul. She had a determination in her more powerful than anyone Sylvas had ever met, and she turned that determination into a more crushing weight than all the steel that the Blacksmith could muster. It was a titanic block of metal, aided and abetted by a vast and complex array of mechanical apparatus extruding from its surfaces, but all of it became liquid and collapsed in on the point of singularity that was Kaya. 

Inside the flowing metal, her hands had been shaping the spell forms to bind the covenant completely unseen by both Sylvas and all the rest of them. He couldn’t pretend to understand the entirety of the spell, and he had no idea how Kaya had pieced it together herself.

She didn’t, Darling. She was working with Malachai on his own attempt while you were distracted, and the opportunity presented itself to her first.

All of the Blacksmith god became a liquid now, flowing down not to drown Kaya but for her to drink down inside of her. Absorbed through her own armor and skin. Filling her up with all of its boundless power. She groaned now that the spell was complete and the sensations overtook her as the last of the vast beast that had dominated the chamber drained away out of sight. 

“Oh, kragh.” She toppled forward, less like a person falling and more like a domino. Sylvas was so stunned by everything that had unfolded, he didn’t move fast enough to catch her. Her face made a clanging sound as it hit the floor.

“Oh, kragh,” Sylvas repeated back, springing forward to hoist her back to her feet.

Her helm rippled back from her face, revealing eyes that were now perfectly chrome and reflective in the same warm and cheery face Sylvas had grown so accustomed to. “I don’t… feel so good.”

“It passes. Just hold on.” He was lying, of course. Sylvas’ own memories of the moments of his own covenant were absent. He had passed out from the shock almost immediately after the eidolon had nested in his core, and he had continued to feel disgusting for almost the full term of his imprisonment afterwards, but he hoped that with someone experienced to guide her, Kaya’s own ascension would be less agonizing.

“Wanna throw up.” She tugged free of his grasp to set her hands on her knees and hunch over. Sylvas had to reach up and slap away a massive chunk of the collapsing planet as the chamber came apart.

“You can throw up somewhere else. Come on.” He wrapped his arms around her and tried to take off, only to discover that she weighed about twenty times more than she had just a few moments before. He had to pause and cast a flying spell on her before they could take flight, and that pause cost them dearly. The massive fragments that the planet had broken down into were beginning to drift apart. Through the cracks up above them, Sylvas could make out the distant darkness of space.

They flew as fast as he could carry them, across the chamber, down into the pit beneath the altar that had been cracked open in the destruction. Down and down through tunnels upon tunnels, hoping desperately that the Great Tunnel Behind the Stars was something real and not a metaphor. He’d fully expected everyone else to already be off the planet and to safety by the time that they arrived, given just how long it had taken for Kaya to finish up her wrestling career, but all of the surviving Ardent were crammed together in the middle of a vast and echoing chamber with vaulted ceilings that seemed all too familiar to Sylvas. At the center of the room was the Great Tunnel. A hyperway gate, just like they had found under Strife.

A gate that required a gravity mage to operate. Dropping Kaya without ceremony, he rushed across to the gate and started casting. His gravity senses probed the barely contained singularity that the device was constructed around, feeling out the location that it was connected to. If it was just going to take them to some other part of the planet, they would die just as surely there as here, but luck was on their side. The other end of the gate was untethered. It wasn’t leading anywhere, or it certainly wasn’t anymore. But while for anyone else that would have made it a death sentence, Mira and Sylvas had devoted no small part of their time in captivity working out all the details of how to make a gateway work if they ever encountered one again. He pushed his mana down into the dangling loose end of the interspatial anomaly as it fluttered wildly around in search of somewhere to tether, and by feeling alone, he was able to link it up to a gate that he found familiar. 

Light burst out of the circular aperture of the gate at the very moment he made that connection, the remainder of his spell serving only to keep that exit pinned open as the Ardent charged through. Sylvas threw out his arms, encircling the whole chamber in the pull of his own gravity, straining to hold the fractured pieces of the planet together long enough for everyone to get through. Nobody gave a damn where he was sending them so long as it wasn’t here. They charged through, abandoning the shields which had been holding off the worst of the rubble in sequence, until finally, Malachai dragged Kaya through, and Sylvas was alone. 

His gravity was all that was left, holding the whole planet together. Its center shifted to place him in the middle of it all. The massive chunks of stone overhead moved in a slow orbit around him. The world was dead, but for one brief moment, he felt what it must have been like to be the soul of it. His natural cycling technique was just like breathing, the steady flow of magic in and out of his body, and now he could feel all the magic that would have come from the interplanetary flows to arrive here and nurture life, normally filling it up. The piece of world soul hidden under his shirt began singing.

There was a fraction of a second before he made his own final leap to safety. A moment that stretched out as long as a lifetime as all the mana flowed through him and into the shard. For the briefest of instants, he was connected to it all. All the power, all the information, flowed through him. Then he was leaping through the gateway into what he’d expected to be the rusty red sands of Strife.

Only to discover at the last possible moment that it wasn’t.