Chapter 21

“Throughout history, there have been multiple occasions when a planet was purged of eidolon influence after an incursion. Of those, the majority occurred within the first three days of the incursion, with the latest recorded notice of a complete purge having been filed in relation to the Galdod System, where it took a full three years for an Ardent response to be deployed. See the related case file for details on the delay. In almost every case, the planet had suffered a minor incursion that was kept contained by geographical conditions until such time as an Ardent response could be mustered. 

There have been exactly four cases where a planet was successfully purged of an eidolon incursion when it was allowed full access to the entire planetary surface—two on dwarven worlds where there were subsurface fortifications that allowed them to retain control of the majority of the actual living space on the world, and two where the local response had been sufficient to close any breach ahead of the Ardent arrival, and their task became primarily the hunting down of strays.”

—Restoration Projects, Remo Aurea, Part One

Tunnel by tunnel, layer by layer, he peeled the eidolon off Strife. They were a rot that had penetrated to the core of the planet, all the way to the soul, and he was burning them out, one by one. Cut by cut.

Millenia ago, the eidolons had come and wiped away all sentient life on Strife. The Ardent had come and laid claim to this world, but it had never been theirs. They had been tenants to the monsters, clinging to their little emplacements and trying to hold back the tide. They had never been able to do what Sylvas could do.

He exploded through walls, through wards, through magic and stone so ancient that nobody could ever hope to recreate it, showering history into dust as he rose through the layers. The eidolons came charging on from every direction, and now those claws which he had fashioned from void and war, gravity and hate, they curved out on their own, snapping free of the hooked fingers with which he’d dragged them through the air. They leapt loose of his grip, lashing out like the vast, arching spells of destruction that he’d once spent minutes at a time piecing together and casting. 

It was all so easy now. Like second nature. When he had absorbed the eidolon Strife, he had feared what it meant, what he would become. He had feared that he would no longer be human, in a more fundamental way than the various relentless improvements he’d already inflicted on himself in his pursuit of greatness. This was what he had become. A creature that used magic and violence so seamlessly it no longer required casting or thought. 

He had become like they were. Like the eidolons. Instinct and power and wrath.

They were almost to the sky when he heard the voice behind him. Nobody else would have. They would have been deafened by the screeching of eidolons, the tearing and rending. The low bass hum of gravity magic twisted down into a single sickle blade and unleashed, but he heard her. His senses were enhanced, and Vaelith’s lecturing voice was more familiar to him now than his own mother’s had ever been. “We need to talk.”

Sylvas had been waiting for the opportunity to do exactly that, and he nodded back to her as he made a moment of silence in the midst of the chaos. Twisting gravity around himself and then letting the bubble of his last Paradigm expand out with that extra fuel, he pulled them out of time. It wasn’t by much, just a fraction of a second or so from the usual flow of events, but enough that it distorted all the sounds beyond the bubble to a dull thrum. Not unlike a spell hitting his gravity shear. On those few times that he’d had his visitor from the past, the hooded Aion woman who kept checking in on him, it had felt like this. Another minor mystery ticked off the list. He glanced back at Vaelith. “So you agreed to keep your memories?”

The woman nodded. “I did. Though they had me swear an oath that I wouldn’t give away the secret. It made…sense after I was apprised of what it all meant. And what I had done before in the past.”

Sylvas couldn’t help but make a thoughtful noise, which sounded strangely loud, echoing and metallic in this contortion of space and time. “What changed your mind this time? I mean…after three mind wipes…”

There had been a moment, just a moment, before the eidolons plunged headlong into the bubble of distorted time that Sylvas had created, but already, that moment was gone. Flexing both hands in front of him, he unleashed a fresh barrage of void-blades to carve through the encroaching monsters.

Vaelith’s voice was soft when the spattering of blood and shell was over. “You did.”

He tore his eyes away from the enemy long enough to see the uncertainty on her face. “I did? How?”

“You had every chance to give up. To surrender. To die. Yet you didn’t.” She pushed forward into the bubble, closer to him than she really should have been in the midst of a fight, but she obviously trusted him to keep her safe. “You had a chance to become something terrible, unimaginable, and yet…”

Sylvas instantly felt uncomfortable as the woman trailed off. “I’m still trying.”

It was purely coincidental that at that moment there was an aggressive wave of eidolons breaking through the crumbling walls of the tunnel, and he had to unleash a furious wave of attacks in every direction at once. One made it all the way into reach, and leeching tendrils of gore red stretched for Sylvas’ flesh. They slid off skin too thick to be penetrated and then dangled limp and useless as he brought a fist around and exploded it into its component chunks, spattering blood all over them both.

Vaelith wiped the remains from her face and went on talking as if there had been no interruption. “Good. Don’t ever stop trying.”

That shut him up. For a moment, he had no idea how to respond, so he cast, a swirling nexus of gravity and war, like a drill but slower, unleashed to dig straight up to the surface at just gentle enough an angle that those who followed would be able to walk it. He’d tired of the passages, and it was clear that wherever he went, the eidolons would follow. Why waste time clearing them level by level when they’d just come trailing after him all the same? When the casting was done and the magic was in motion, he climbed after it. “The truth is going to be hard to hide the longer this all goes on. What I am. What the Aions did. What the council hid from us. Everything that we’ve been told, taught to think…it’s been a lie.”

“And that’s what broke me every time I found out,” Vaelith answered as they ascended. “There were records…times when I saw myself react each time I discovered the covenant. Every time it shattered me. My purpose. My reason for being. I needed that hate to keep going. Without it…I was nothing. Felt nothing. Back then, wiping my memories was the only way that they could keep me alive.

“But,” she added after a moment’s pause, “maybe that is what needs to happen. That we all need to break. This disaster… All of it is uncharted territory. There’s no telling what we will find, or what’s going to happen. The truth isn’t meant to be a shackle; it’s supposed to be a landmark. It’s solid ground for us to all stand on in a universe that’s shifting, and make no mistake, it is shifting right now.”

The ceiling collapsed as his spell broke the surface, and sand came pouring in. A tidal wave of red sand that should have drowned them all as the desert surface of the planet came pouring in. But the red sand of Strife was blood, and he was an eidolon of war. Where it touched him, it flowed inside, filling him up with war mana that he poured right down into the eidolon within. The whole desert seemed to come rushing down, and he poured all that blood right down into the eidolon Strife without hesitation, even as it swelled and blossomed with more power than it had ever had.

His voice came ragged when it was over, his body filled with energy and power. “Shifting into what? The Empyrean… I don’t even know if it will still exist by the time the mass incursion is over. What if there’s—”

Vaelith’s hand caught him on the shoulder mid-speech and pulled him towards her. “Just swear to me that you’ll do the right thing if that happens.”

Sylvas’ reply came out in a laugh, “The right thing? How will I even know what that is?”

“It doesn’t matter. You will. Just swear it to me. Right here. Right now.”

Sylvas felt the weight on his shoulders intensify at the thought, at the responsibility that those words entailed, but only for an instant. The surety, the belief that he saw in Vaelith’s eyes, gave him a strength that he didn’t know he needed. “I am going to do the right thing.”

She nodded and let him go. “That’s all I need to hear.”

The rest of the Ardent came pouring up onto the surface. Malachai took his place by Vaelith’s side, ready for their mission, and in the mass of bodies, the woman was torn out of Sylvas’ sight before they could say anything else. 

“We need to clear a landing strip for whoever they call up, and since we have no idea how big our rescue ship is going to be, we need a lot of space.” Rania had somehow found herself in the midst of all the tactical planning, and now she was the one issuing orders. Sylvas supposed it was a good way for the Ardent to sidestep any questions of superiority to abdicate the giving of orders to an outsider. Rania nudged some hapless Ardent recruit, and he hastily cast an illusion. It expanded out to encompass all of them. A perimeter that they’d need to clear and reinforce. Rania finished up her speech with an awkward thumbs-up. “Good luck, everybody.”

Sylvas was still dealing with his confusion from speaking with Vaelith, and he wasn’t really up to the task of offering any moral support, but he returned Rania’s thumbs-up with enough gusto that it made her burst out laughing despite everything. Kaya looked between the two of them, grinning like fools, and shook her head hopelessly.

Out of the tunnels, Sylvas could move away from the rest of the Ardent. He could feel the magic flowing through him freely, no longer constrained by close quarters and all the millennia of accumulated war piling up and filling every crevasse. Everything was in motion: all the worlds, all the stars, and all the mana, running through him.

With all that power flowing from everywhere all around towards him, on came the eidolons. The towering plovers with their bizarre chattering, the blood-slicked skeletons, and the giant sets of teeth on legs. All the usual fauna of a world the eidolons had stolen. He had feared them once. Had feared what they would do to him when his power ran dry, and he couldn’t fight them anymore. Now, the well would never be empty.

The rest of the Ardent set to work assembling their battlelines and raising their groundworks. Kaya would lead them if their actual leaders couldn’t. She was still fresh to her covenant, unlikely to give herself away by doing anything silly like channeling an aspect of mana that nobody but eidolons could channel. Sylvas needed some distance to work to his full potential.

He rose up and up. The outline of the landing zone was still traced out over the landscape, not by an illusion, but by the memory of it overlaying his vision, courtesy of Mira.

Ready to take the latest, new and improved version of us out for a spin?

“More than ready.” Sylvas grinned.

The army of the eidolons arrived just a moment later.