Chapter 17

“Honor is considered by most to be an outdated concept rooted in medieval practices and moralities which assigned greater value to a person’s character than to the result of their actions. If an evil act was committed with good intent, then the perpetrator’s honor would be impugned. If an act that resulted in the greater good was brought to pass but was resultant from a promise being broken, then it is considered, under the system of honor, to have been an evil act. Typically, there is a short list of taboo actions or activities that can be considered dishonorable, which will result in the destruction of one’s reputation, and there is a far longer list of things that honor chooses not to concern itself with, which manage to account for a substantial portion of the worst atrocities imaginable. Yet in spite of oaths being rooted in the concept of honor, which has been essentially abandoned by society at large, we find that they do persist all the same. A promise and a contract are essentially the same thing, and an oath is simply a more grandiose way of communicating a promise.”

—On Oaths, Galian Jurd, Part One

If he had a moment to think, maybe he could have pulled some miracle out of thin air, but once again, he lost his connection to the ship as a gravity wave rolled through the bridge and launched both him and everyone else out of position. As he tried to reassert control over his own gravity, he overcompensated, flinging himself too far and cracking into the massive screens that had now turned their focus to the pursuing Dominion ships. He could see the spells that would spell certain death already being cast, mana flowing into the glowing weapons focus systems at the front of the Shrikes.

The enemy gravity mage hit the whole room with a vicious spike that would have crushed him and the rest of them to the ground if it wasn’t for Bael intercepting and countering the spell so that it became little more than a brief tug. Sylvas landed on his feet, looked out through the screen at the ships about to destroy them, and déjà vu hit him. He had seen this before. He had done this before. In his premonitions back on Strife, when he’d first completed his final Paradigm, he had seen this exact scene, this exact positioning of enemy ships. Like he was in a dream, he followed through the motions that he’d made then, raising his hand to the image.

His mana stretched out from him, not towards the enemy ships, but towards the star. He cast no spell, and he spoke no words; he just reached into the star’s corona with will and power, and he pulled out a solar flare.

The sudden blinding white arc filled the screen, overcoming even the protections that the Seekers had layered in place over the scrying spells that gave them this full range of visibility. It had been as easy as calling an item to his hand. As easy as moving one of his orbitals into position. Gravity was his to command, and he had told it to loosen its hold on the stellar matter that was now erupting out.

It washed out into space silently, and each Dominion ship that it touched wasn’t just melted, it was disintegrated out of existence. All their pursuers were gone in an instant. They were going to live.

An arrow of life magic struck Sylvas in the chest, poison gushing out from the point of entry and finding a biological system so alien to anything it had been designed to destroy that it was completely ineffective. He raised a hand in time to stop the next spell aimed for him—a vicious spike of molten steel that some industrious fire mage had created from scrap and launched his way. It had mass, so he could control it, halt it in mid-air, and send it flying back along its own course to kill the fool who’d cast it. Sylvas couldn’t hold back his contempt. He fought gods. These mages just weren’t in the same league anymore.

Darling, as much as this newfound arrogance suits you, and as much as I hate to interrupt, there was a certain project that I’ve been working on that I believe has just come to fruition.

He lashed out with claws suddenly grown to near comical proportions, slapping projectiles and floating Seekers out of the sky. “Be specific.”

Well, while I have been pursuing the various new spells that your resident eidolon has granted us access to, I have also been quietly pursuing the third and final stage of its use and absorption that was described to us as the completion of the Covenant.

“Be specific and be concise?” Sylvas corrected his earlier request, while diving aside to avoid the next influx of spells being thrown his way.

Instant casting is now available. The eidolon’s form is entirely protean and subject to your will and can now replace the usual methods of spellcasting with it. You’ll require my assistance, of course. Concise enough for you, darling.

For a long moment, it was as though Sylvas’ brain had shorted out with the importance of this new information, then he finally managed to muster some words. “I love you, Mira.”

That is more like it.

Teleporting across the room to Rania and Kaya happened instantaneously. As fast as he could think of the spell he wanted cast, it was cast. With his nigh-infinite reserves of mana, the only limitations were the spells that he knew and his imagination. Two things that he’d been actively expanding on with vigor since the possibility of instant casting came to his attention. “We’re getting off this ship. It’s wrecked.”

“Great.” Rania nodded her beleaguered agreement. “How?”

“I’m working on that.” Sylvas vanished back into null-space. 

He emerged behind Kerbo and sliced one of the Seekers in half with a quick swing of his claws. “We need to get back to the gate.”

“What? Why?” Flames lapped out of the fiend’s mouth as he spoke. “We’re winning?”

“The ship is falling to pieces and about to dive into a star. Nobody is winning.”

That was enough to cause Kerbo’s mouth to snap shut in shock, before opening. “The gate sounds like a great idea.”

That only then left one last thing to do as Sylvas turned in the direction of Bael, indecision wracking him.

We could try and take him, Mira suggested as visions started to float past Sylvas’ vision. Images where the elf was crushed to paste, set ablaze, pummeled to death, and more. Other images were there, too, carrying half-broken conversations, arguments, and more. But I don’t see anything that has him coming peacefully. Nor…any peace if you…well, you know.

I do, Sylvas replied simply, not needing to hear anything more to know how hollow each of the visions would leave him if he followed through on them. He couldn’t help but think of Ironeyes one more time, felt his heart break, and made his decision. I won’t kill him. But I won’t save him either.

Good, Mira answered, a not insubstantial sense of relief flooding out from her. Now, let’s get the hell out of here! 

Gravity spikes began to launch themselves from his hooked hands as fast as he could move them. Each one shot out to hit one of the Seekers where they’d attached themselves to a surface around the room. All of the new force that had come charging in to seize control back suddenly found themselves suffering from internal organs that had been twisted and compacted into new and interesting shapes. Screams sounded out, loud enough to drown out even the incessant alarms and sounds of spells colliding.

Sylvas cast one final gravity spike once the positioned snipers were all out of the fight, bringing everyone else back down to the floor. The enemy gravity mage tried to intervene, casting an inversion, but they were too slow now, and the spell was all too familiar to Sylvas. He’d watched the way that Bael had taken his own magic apart before it could complete, and while he lacked the know-how to do that himself, he could at least recognize the principles of it. As the inversion came close to completion, he cast his own, pushing in the exact opposite direction with the exact same amount of force. He couldn’t neutralize enemy spells by unravelling their magic, but he could certainly counter them directly.

“We’re leaving! We never meant to come here! We are getting off your ship!” he bellowed over the fighting. The Seekers went on fighting as if he hadn’t said a word. It was hardly a surprise, but it was certainly a disappointment. In a battle of this size against massed eidolons, he would simply have flung out spells that dealt death and slaughter over a wide area, but with the Ardent mixed through, he couldn’t afford to be so slapdash. 

Once more, he unleashed his magic, lashing out whips of war to strike at the enemy mages, shattering their shields and driving them to their knees with each snap of motion. He hadn’t intended for the intervention to be lethal, but as their defenses broke, the Ardent that they were facing overwhelmed them. Sylvas was less than happy about that, but there was only so much that he could do. Maybe one day the Seekers would be his allies, just like Bael hoped, but it wasn’t going to be today. The war-whips rang out as fast as he could cast them, which was now essentially instantly. The battle that had been raging on the bridge of the ship since the arrival of the Ardent was done in a matter of moments. Some cheers went up, but Sylvas had no time to celebrate slaughter right now. “We need to move.”

Heading for the door, he’d fully expected to encounter no more resistance, but standing there in the middle of the hallway, shielded by a trio of life mages, he found Kalisdrothan waiting, using a fifth mage as a human shield. 

She was a mage, Sylvas could feel the power radiating off her, but beyond that, any details of who she was were obscured. She was garbed in rags, her head locked in a cage that it took him only a moment to realize was a perfect match for the apparatus that had been in the control circle on the bridge. His senses washed over her, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, and he realized that the metal cage was secured to her head with spikes burrowing through her flesh, and they didn’t stop where he’d expected to see them rooted in bone. They went right on through into the brain. Enchantments had been woven into the crown-cage of the gravity mage, and it was that magic that Kalisdrothan was manipulating as he hid behind her, not any spell of his own. 

“Now, my boy, this is where things come to a stop,” the wizened old elf drawled from behind the mage, her motions jerky and awkward. But with the elf behind her pulling the strings, she was guided through casting. A gravity shear rose up between the bridge and Kalisdrothan’s team. “I’m afraid that—”

A quick scythe-blade of death erupted from Malachai, launched in the direction of the Seekers’ leader, but the life mages that the elf had deliberately held back to serve as his protectors managed to intercept it with their own shields, even as it passed through the shear.

“—won’t work,” the once professor finished, clearly having changed tracks from whatever he was going to say earlier. “You should have learned that after the last time we met.”

“Oh, but I did, Professor,” Sylvas replied, cutting in before anyone could get a word in edgewise. The whole situation would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic. Here before them was another gravity mage, one of the most powerful affinity users in the universe, and the seekers had hobbled her. They’d driven spikes into her brain and enchanted her so that she couldn’t function on her own. Whether it was because she had resisted serving them or because she was some enemy that they had captured, Sylvas couldn’t say. All that he knew with certainty was that they had burned through whatever meager goodwill Bael’s information had bought them. That when someone said that their goal justified any means, this was the end result. 

Mutilation and slavery in the name of some nebulous greater good.

“Now, let me show you what I’ve learned.”

Sylvas stepped forward and cast. Tearing holes through to null-space, teleportation spells, or portals writ small, so small that nothing bigger than a projectile could have passed through them. He fired off a litany of spells in the moment it took to think.

Kalisdrothan and his slave, along with the life mages, had managed to assemble an almost insurmountable barrier between the Ardent and the rest of the ship, but it did nothing to protect them from the focused gravity spikes that shot out to hit them from behind. Launched through the void of null-space and then back into reality to hammer home. The life mages fell in a chorus of agony. Kalisdrothan’s own leg was snapped in two and torn off his body by the near miss of one of the spikes, prompting him to scream in agony. It was a stark comparison to when one hit the Seeker’s gravity mage in the back, twisting its way through her intestines on its way through, that there was no response. She did not scream, and she did not flinch; she was not in there. Her mind was absent. The device attached to her had seen to that. 

Yet even in what must have been horrific agony, the mage-puppet worked now to serve Kalisdrothan loyally and obediently, casting a teleportation spell to haul the two of them out of the line of fire now that it had become apparent that their little barricade wasn’t going to succeed. They vanished in a blink, and Sylvas let them. He had no ill will towards the gravity mage. It would have been pointless. Like being angry at a chair. That was how much choice she had about her actions. As for the professor, on the other hand, Sylvas was more than satisfied with the limb, and who knew what other damage his grazing hit had inflicted.

All the better to let the man suffer for the crimes that he’d committed.

The thought was enough to let him carry on through the rest of the ship, tearing through each and every one of the Seekers they encountered without remorse or hesitation. None of them mounted a sufficient defense for him to even bother casting again.

Behind him, the Ardent followed. Kaya had been coaxed off the deck of the bridge like an unwilling mollusk, and both Malachai and Kerbo were now carrying her hoisted overhead to keep her from making contact with any more metal and latching on once more. Rania was in a full run, trying to keep up with the enhanced bodies of the Ardent, but the vast majority of them seemed to be present, even if a few had injuries bad enough that they, too, were being carried.

The gateway bay was still as desolate and empty as when they’d first arrived, decorated only with the corpses of those who’d foolishly made an attempt to face down Malachai. This time, Sylvas only had to contend with the amount of rushing associated with being on a ship that was about to come apart at the seams or crash into a sun instead of the stress of a planet dissolving around him. So he was able to take an extra few moments to focus on the chaotic magic that surrounded the gate. It was still just as bad as before, barely having changed in their aborted attempt to claim the ship. But at the same time, what had changed was his understanding of magic.

With the third and final piece of his covenant complete, it felt like the simplest thing in the universe for him to wipe away the discordant resonance that still echoed through the stone. To calm the vibrating substrings of the reality that it had been connected to, turning them from whiplashing threads that would have unraveled any traveler across their path, into calm and peaceful bands as they’d been earlier.

It was then, and only then, when he was certain that all was in place, that he reopened the gate, this time ensuring that the destination that they were connecting to was actually indeed upon Strife before ripping open a portal across the cosmos for all of the Ardent to flood through.