Chapter 14

“As the Empyrean scrambles to cover up every world that is lost to them and deploys their vaunted Ardent to go and intervene every time there is a world suffering an incursion, they continue to ignore the fact that there are answers to the questions that these events pose. There is a reason behind everything that is happening, if we just have the courage to go and look for it. If you are tired of being kept blind by your rulers. If you are tired of being lied to by your leaders. If you are tired of turning away from reality every time you see something that makes you uncomfortable, then you belong with us. We are the Seekers of Truth. All that we desire is the truth. The Empyrean fears us because they have built their house on the unstable foundations of lies and denial. If something can be destroyed by exposure to the truth, then shouldn’t it be destroyed?”

—The Seekers of Truth, Recruitment Pamphlet, Part Two

Death mana erupted from Malachai, washing over Sylvas, shriveling those parts of him that were still mortal and human. He readied his scythe, glaring at Mira where she still stood between him and his next victims. “Stand aside.”

“We both want the same thing, darling.” It was still so bizarre to hear Mira’s voice coming from the wolf’s gory jaws.

“You want to surpass me, to supplant me, to become more than I am. I shall not allow it. I will be the one above all.”

The wolf’s head cocked to one side. “Dear boy, I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about. Do you think Sylvas sought power because he enjoys it? Because he wants it?”

“Mira, that’s enough.” Sylvas didn’t want to know where this conversation was headed. “Come back now.”

“No, darling. It is not enough!” she snapped, stalking in towards Malachai, into the aura of death that surrounded him, without flinching. “This boy thinks that you’re like him, playing games for the joy of winning. Seeking to be the stronger like it’s a crown to be worn.”

“He has sought power at the cost of everything. His humanity. His peace.” Malachai strode forward to meet Mira, glaring into the eidolon’s burning eyes. “Do not pretend that it is because he is some poor tortured soul who has had greatness thrust upon him.”

The power of the eidolon and the necromancer unleashed was flooding the whole section of the ship with overwhelming waves of mana. War, death, and gravity intermingled and spread. Where the silvery panels of the ship met, blood began to flow, and inevitable decay began to warp the metal.

“He was weak, and his world died. The love of his life… died. Everyone he had ever known, wiped away because he lacked the strength to stop it. You think he is seeking power because he wants it? He is seeking power because he needs it.” Mira’s teeth snapped shut mere inches from Malachai’s face. “Without it, he is subject to the whims of chaos. Only power holds it back. Only power lets him keep all of us alive. Does he look proud of his power? Does he look like some self-satisfied courtier, like you?! He isn’t you. He is trying to save you!”

In an instant, Malachai’s power collapsed back in on itself. The blossom of death folded back up inside of him. His head bowed. For a long and awful moment, the silence persisted, as Mira’s body faded back into Sylvas, and then the sound of alarms began ringing out again. Malachai turned to face him. “I owe you an apology.”

Sylvas shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything. I understand.”

“I took your humility for enforced politeness. It did not even cross my mind that you… I knew that your heart was wounded, but it never even crossed my mind that your suffering…”

Sylvas stepped in closer and laid a hand on his shoulder. “We don’t need to talk about it. We both… we both understand each other now.”

“Back to the violence then?”

“Please,” Sylvas replied with a thin smile. “Anything is better than talking about our feelings.”

Malachai let out a surprised bleat of laughter before he could restore his composure and call up his magic once more.

They moved together in perfect harmony. Malachai on the offensive, Sylvas by his side, throwing out protections, raking his claws through anyone who escaped the reanimated corpses. It was no longer a wild sprint through the ship. It was a methodical advance. Sylvas’ gravity magic crumpled the doors that reinforcements could have entered through. Simple gravity spikes, enough to warp metal, but not enough to disrupt the ship’s own artificial gravity. 

Once they emerged onto the bridge, it became apparent just how different this ship was from the ones that Sylvas had been on in the past. It was a vast space, like one of the lecture halls back on Strife, populated with dozens upon dozens of mages, each operating a different part of the ship’s systems. Some were scrying ahead, and others were empowering the dozens of different mechanisms that kept the thing operational, all of them bathed in the bright orange light burning beyond the window that occupied one whole curved side of the chamber. A glance, followed by a confirmation with his senses, told him that they were in orbit around a system’s star, rather close at that, too.

There was a circle set into the floor of the chamber, tying all of the various systems together, and it was not home to a captain or pilot’s chair as Sylvas would have expected, but to some strange apparatus that looked more like a medieval torture device. A cage shaped like a body, to contain whoever piloted the ship and keep them trapped in place. Everything else was smooth curves and shimmering chrome, but that device was entirely out of place. Something brutal and efficient in the middle of all the concessions to aesthetics. The cage was unoccupied, which explained the gentle cruising speed they were moving at. No other station was unoccupied, though, and while they’d encountered what passed for the ship’s security personnel until now, these mages glowed with power in an entirely different way.

Malachai’s wave of death was stopped almost immediately, not by a shield of life magic like the Seekers had used before, but by more arcane means. He staggered forward a step and tried to cast another lethal spell, only to have it fizzle and falter. Sylvas knew exactly what this was. His gaze tore around the room until it settled on the elf he was looking for. “Bael.”

Baeldrothan looked no different from when they had parted ways with two small exceptions. He was no longer wearing the uniform of the Ardent; instead, he was garbed in simple dark clothes that would have allowed him to blend into any crowd of civilians, and his arm, which had been severed during his rapid exit from Strife, had been replaced with a mechanical prosthetic much like the ones that Kaya used, albeit of a far more refined design. The fingers looked like porcelain, and they traced out the shapes of his counterspells with as much dexterity as his original limb had managed.

The anger that Sylvas thought he had managed to bring under control now that his eidolon had been integrated into him flared back to life. If it wasn’t for Bael, he wouldn’t have a monster stuck inside him to begin with. If it weren’t for Bael, none of their friends would have been dead.

There was no thought in Sylvas’ head, no malice. His body moved as if on its own, firing across the bridge like a bullet from a gun. A couple of mages tried to cast shields, to intercept him, but he moved too fast for their eyes to follow. 

His fingers locked around Bael’s throat before the elf had the opportunity to even react. He hoisted the elf off his feet. “You.”

Bael hung limp as a rag doll in his grasp, but before his airway was clamped shut, he managed to shout out, “Stand down!”

Sylvas’ teeth lengthened in his mouth into jagged points. His voice came thick and furious, blood trickling from his lips. “You think you can order me around, after what you did?!”

But the command was not directed at him. The other Seekers who had been leaping to battle positions were now immobile, frozen in place by the contradiction of their orders and their instincts. They wanted to save their leader, but Bael had told them not to fight. Sylvas wasn’t going to waste his time pondering that dichotomy. Glowing claws of gravity and war began to grow from his fingers, pricking into Bael’s neck as the elf swung helplessly in his grasp.

Sylvas, Mira’s started voice warned from within his head, only to be abruptly quieted by Strife’s guttural roar from within.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I was going to do to you if I ever caught up to you,” he said, all while tightening his grip. “All the pain I was going to inflict, so you’d know a fraction of what you’d caused.”

Bael’s eyes bulged in his head. “You… are my friend…” 

The words prompted Sylvas to slam the elf down into the deck with enough force to cause it to buckle. “Friends don’t betray each other. Friends don’t kill each other.”

Bael gasped and writhed from the impact, his replacement hand coming up to grasp Sylvas’. “You have always been my friend, from the beginning—”

Sylvas’ fist brutally smashed into the side of the elf’s face, yet only arrived with enough force to daze and injure, rather than crush it completely. “You turned on us!”

“I turned on the Ardent. The Empyrean. Not you. Never you.” There was something deeply unsettling in the way he said that. An awe for the man who had just carved a bloody path through his ship and beaten him bloody. “I had no opportunity to get you alone. To tell you the truth about all of this. Somewhere we weren’t being constantly observed by the eyes of the Ardent. I tried to take you with me on Strife.”

“What could you possibly tell me that would make any, let alone all, of this alright?!” Sylvas shouted back.

“The Ardent… the Empyrean… they aren’t the heroes you seem to think they are. They’re one faction among hundreds, all vying for power. All of them ignoring the truth.”

Sylvas wanted to hit him again. Wanted to keep hitting him until his teeth fell out and his mouth filled with so much blood that he started to drown. In fact, he saw himself doing it as visions of the future started to play across his mind, each and every one of them looking more appealing than the last. 

Save one.

Sylvas, Mira whispered as her presence returned, and with it caused all of the other futures to vanish. What if he knows something? Something about what is happening to the galaxy?

It was the only thing that could have stopped Sylvas and his vengeance. The need to know, to understand what was going on, was overpowering even his bloodlust. Even so, he gritted his teeth as he growled the words out: “What truth?”