Chapter 16

“If there is weakness inside of you, you must find it. If there is weakness in your character, in your paradigms, in your embodiments, in any aspect of you, then you must hunt it down. Find the weakness inside you and kill it. Destroy that which poisons you from within. Let the old version of you die with a smile on its face, knowing that it is making the new version of you strong enough to survive. Kill yourself so that you might live.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

The seeker ship was not built for war, like the Folly had been. There was no ablative armor protecting it when its crew could not. No special systems or last-minute defenses designed to do anything more than try and trap atmosphere from leaking out from the wounds the vessel had just suffered.

With another slap at the console, Bael turned the screens outward again. Showing what was beyond the ship. Three smaller craft in formation were closing in on them. Smaller, only because the ship that they happened to be on was obscenely huge in comparison to everything except the massive cruisers that Sylvas had only ever ridden along on instead of piloting. Yet for the disparity in size, they were bristling with weaponry and magic, and this vast ship seemed surprisingly underprepared in that regard.

Nobody was steering the ship, and with the fight only momentarily paused, nobody seemed terribly inclined to pilot it either. They were drifting, getting knocked in every direction, slowly having their hull punched away one shot at a time. Sylvas strode across the room before the firestorm could kick up again, tore the hideous contraption meant to hold the pilot from its place with a flex of gravity, and then took his place in the circle. The ship was vast and intricate, with dozens of systems he’d never encountered before in any of the ships he’d piloted, but he knew how to steer it, if nothing else, and his mana flooded out into the spells that would allow him control over the whole craft. 

The moment that the saturation of his power was high enough, the ship became his body, and he could move it with will and gravity alone. The next streaking red shots dancing across the starry night missed, as did the next. The ships in pursuit tightened up their formation, moving into pursuit now that the ship was in motion. 

The ship’s scrying identified them as Obsidian Dominion Shrikes, and from the predatory, front curving wings, Sylvas could see how they’d earned that name, like birds of prey swooping down on their targets. With a twist of his will, he sent the Seeker ship into a spin and fired up the engines, blasting them forward into a barrel roll that took them through the storm of their pursuers’ shots unharmed. 

He had to push mana through some blockages to access the shield spells woven into the ship, but he managed it by sheer force of volume and got a screen of the basic shielding all ships had before clever piloting became insufficient to avoid the assault. When the next glancing blow struck the ship, it was deflected instead of tearing another strip off the ship’s outer surface.

While his attention was turned outside, the battle inside the ship had resumed to its full intensity. Having been thrown all together, the fighting became considerably less arcane and more brutal. Weapons had been pulled from cold storage and were being swung around with abandon. The Ardent were overwhelming the bridge crew with their considerably more substantial combat experience, and both sides seemed intent on leaving Sylvas alone since he was protecting both sides of the conflict from the Dominion ships.

In the melee maelstrom, Malachai was considerably less capable than when he had nothing but foes to contend with. So much of his lethal magic was not discriminating about whose lives it snuffed out, so he had fallen into a more supporting role, casting out his spirits to intercept spells and protect the Ardent. As for Bael, he seemed to be paralyzed with indecision. Unsure if wading into the fight against the Ardent would rupture the tentative pact of non-aggression between him and Sylvas. Sylvas honestly wasn’t sure about that himself, but luckily, he had more pressing matters to concern himself with. Letting his mind slip back into the ship, he managed to narrowly avert the next barrage of shots fired after them, but it was clearly a losing battle. 

The first few attacks had dealt substantial damage to the Seeker ship, and while some internal protocols had kicked in to seal off those areas that had been exposed to space, he now realized the extent of the injuries that the ship had been dealt. The reason he had to force mana through so many of the systems was that mana was having to physically leap the gaps that had been left in existing lines of enchantments. The ship’s ability to make a jump to null-space had been disabled by those broken systems. Until they were repaired, they were stuck here with these Dominion aggressors.

Defenders, I believe. A glance at the star charts would show us to be quite deep into the territory of the Obsidian Dominion.

Which meant that even if they did manage to evade these ships without the capability of going to null-space, there would be more forthcoming, and soon. “What the hell are you doing in Dominion space?”

Bael looked a bit confused at the question. “Did you assume that the Aion vaults had been politely dispersed exclusively within one astrological region?”

“Are you really being sarcastic at me right now?” Sylvas snapped back, hating how familiar the man’s words, how their banter, felt.

Without even a hint of apology, the elf pressed on, “You need to get off this ship. Our Shrike escort will break off pursuit once they know the Seekers have regained control.”

Cold seemed to seize Sylvas by the throat. “You’re working with the Dominion?”

“They are one of the few powers that took the existential threat of the eidolons’ return seriously. We are independent of their structures of command, but they have provided us with access to vaults in their purview and offered substantial material support.”

Sylvas’ anger only grew from there. “It was one of the most common theories I found about the Seekers, when I was trying to hunt you down. That you all worked for the Dominion. Doing their dirty work to seed uncontacted worlds with what they needed to cause eidolon incursions.”

Bael threw up a shield to catch a deflected bolt of lightning before it could strike Sylvas. “It is not an activity I believe that the Seekers have ever undertaken.”

“And would you tell me if it was?” Sylvas spat back as he and Mira both split the efforts of piloting. “If your precious Seekers had been the ones to poison my world?”

“Now that we are no longer laboring under the watchful eye of the Empyrean, I will speak only the truth to you.” Bael seemed to deflate, just a little. “Which is why I must reiterate that the wisest course is for you to depart from this ship with all haste. My cousin will be readying a counter-offensive against you, and it will arrive sooner than either of us expects.”

The ship rocked with more impacts from the Dominion ships, and Sylvas had to turn his full attention back to flying. With a twist of his mind, he changed their course through almost a full 90 degrees, setting them on a course to plunge towards the star that they’d been orbiting, hoping the Dominion wouldn’t be stupid enough to follow. Of course, it was equally stupid for him to bring their damaged ship so close with its shields hanging on by a thread, but ultimately, it wasn’t his ship, and he didn’t care that much about the damage he did to it.

If they didn’t want their ship aflame, they shouldn’t have fought you for control of it, Mira stated. Or parked themselves so close to a star in the first place.

The alarms that had been sounding all over the ship after they’d boarded it were easy enough to cut off now that he had a fraction of a moment to think, but the alarms that began sounding as the hull temperatures began to climb were a little trickier. The enchantments that made the ship work held them as a vital component, and keeping the ship’s shields up more or less required him to keep that alarm sounding, unless he had time to go and physically alter the spell-scripts carved into the metalwork.

We don’t really have the time to rewire the entire ship at this exact moment, darling.

He was in the middle of adjusting the ship to a slightly less suicidal course, curving around the star, when he abruptly lost control. His mind and mana were ripped back out of it as he lost contact with the command circle, snapping him back into his own body and its awareness.

The first assumption that he’d made was that Bael had betrayed him and pulled him out of the circle. The second was that Bael hadn’t betrayed him but had simply failed to block one of the incoming spells from the fighting. The thought that the artificial gravity on the bridge might have been shut off didn’t even appear on his list of plausible reasons until he noticed himself floating. “What?”

Bael had attempted to hold onto something and maintain his grip on the ground, with the unfortunate result that he was now drifting sideways. “I tried to warn you the counterattack was coming.”

The elf’s prediction was coming to pass. From the ruined entryway to the bridge, the single point of ingress, Seekers were now flooding in, prepared to fight in zero gravity. They launched themselves on direct courses to what Sylvas now recognized as places around the walls and roof of the vast bridge where they could find cover and hook themselves in place. Bael’s cousin, Kalisdrothan, was not visible among this first wave, but that did not mean that he wasn’t the mind directing it.

Sylvas reasserted his own gravity, stopping his drifting and reaching out with his will to shove Bael back down to the deck as well. The chaos of the fighting that had been raging between the Seekers and the Ardent had reached a fever pitch as they all lost their footing, and spells now flew in every direction. Sylvas had a gravity spike prepared, and he just had to make a few adjustments on the fly to make it a broad area of effect spell, dropping everyone back onto the floor, but even as he cast it, he could feel other gravity mana distorting through the area, setting his own senses singing. Even as he cast his spike, an inversion was layered over it. The Seekers and Ardent, who hadn’t secured themselves to some shiny metal outcropping around the bridge, dropped towards the deck to land heavily, then they were almost immediately flung back up towards the ceiling. The detritus of combat, the destroyed doors and shattered panels, all fell upwards as well, bombarding anyone who had the misfortune of taking shelter with their sudden motion. 

Kaya and Rania looked considerably worse for wear. If it weren’t for Kaya’s vise-like grip on Rania’s arm, the other woman would probably have been flung around the chamber like a rag doll in the chaos of the shifting gravity, but they remained anchored to their spot on the deck. The dwarf was fully armored once more, but there was no seam between the metalwork covering her and the shiny deck. She was fused with it. One less thing to worry about, at least.

The inversion of gravity meant that they weren’t just dealing with someone messing around with the ship’s systems. For the first time in his life, Sylvas was about to meet someone else with a gravity affinity. A mage who had a lifetime of experience using the magic Sylvas had only learned that he had a year or so before.

Despite the power that had now been infused in him, Sylvas expected that a fight with another gravity mage was liable to be grueling if not impossible to surmount, so he was surprised to find no spells being flung his way, and no influence being exerted over his personal gravity beyond that of his own will and the soft pull of the star beyond the ship that they were now plummeting towards. He couldn’t understand what kind of tactical sense it made for this other mage not to target him, both as he was the one who had literally seized control of the ship and he was the one who could bring his own gravity magic to bear.

Casting out his arcane senses, Sylvas couldn’t even see the gravity mage amongst the latest wave of Seekers. They must have still been out in the hall with Kalisdrothan, working from afar, behind the scenes. It was honestly probably the smartest place to position them, out of the direct fighting, so that their massive battlefield shifting strength didn’t make them a target.

The lights on board the ship went out. Sylvas flung himself back down towards the control ring, trying to switch the system back on in the same instant that it happened, but even before he could get his mind plugged back into the ship, he already knew that this wasn’t just a distraction being staged by the Seekers as they tried to make their big push onto the bridge. The sounds of destruction, tearing metal, and shrieking air escaping echoed through the ship. The Dominion had hit them again in the brief moments since Sylvas had lost control of the ship, and this time around, they weren’t making little swats to try and knock control of the ship back into an ally’s hands; they were closing in for the kill, certain that the asset had been lost.

Sylvas’ mind flooded back into the ship’s system, and he flung it into another spin to avoid the next barrage of spells, or he would have, but the ship didn’t respond. The damage from the last hit had compromised both the shields and the enchantments that allowed the ship its full range of motion. Turning would be by degrees, not through cunning spins, and now that they were caught in the gravity of the nearby star, their options were limited to riding out the curve of their orbit around it, as even hauling with all his will, he couldn’t spread his mana through enough of the ship to resist the forces in action.

 The next barrage of spells hit, tearing into the engines and destroying most of the ship’s etherium supply, not to mention whoever had the misfortune of being stationed back there. This ship, the Seeker’s flagship, was in a death spiral. It wouldn’t fall into the star they were now passing by, thanks to Sylvas throwing everything he had into adjusting its course, but there was no way for them to avoid any more incoming fire or to intercept it with shielding. 

They would be dead as soon as the Dominion willed it.