Chapter 20

“Yet while a contract is legally enforceable with consequences for its breach, promise or oath keeping has no advantage to speak of. No punishment beyond the social consequences, and the social consequences are often ignored too by simply avoiding interactions with whoever has been aggrieved. It is toothless in a society that does not run on honor and fealty. Yet on entry into any form of public service within the Empyrean, one typically undertakes an oath, not to the Council of the Empyrean but to the Empyrean itself, that they will serve and protect it, on their honor. Many ignore the specific wording, simply going through the motions, but there are cultures that still assign great meaning to the specifics of oaths. So we are faced with a wide spread of opinions on the usage of oaths in the formality of office and no clear guidance on whether their removal would have a detrimental effect on moral and composure or not.”

—On Oaths, Galian Jurd, Part Two

There was an interminable moment of fur and blood buzzing across all of Sylvas’ senses as the center of his soul everted and the eidolon burst out into the world. It gave Mira the moment of confusion that she needed to fully manifest the body for herself that she desired before he had a chance to intervene.

When he had last seen her, it had not been in the most favorable of circumstances, on her knees amidst the dust and ruin of a tower that was falling. The brief hallucinations that she’d manifested while he was creating his secondary brain had looked much like his memories of her in that moment, her hair wind-whipped and her clothes in tatters. Now that she had control over her appearance, things were markedly different. 

For starters, she had grown about a foot, standing almost as tall as Sylvas now did. She’d also taken on some of the traits of his enhanced body, with her skin shimmering with silica flakes beneath its otherwise smooth surface. Her appearance had gone from the pretty but somewhat lanky girl that he’d known to a full-figured beauty so stunning that she arrested his attention entirely, even when he had the opportunity to speak up. The fact that she’d boosted her bust size considerably was also going to be a subject of some equally substantial ribbing later, once she was safely back in his head.

“Aida, this is Mira. The ghost of my dead girlfriend. Mira, what the hell are you doing?”

“Stretching my legs, darling.” Her voice echoed in both his ears and mind in perfect harmony. “You have no idea how cramped it is in that little head of yours.”

He tried to get up and grab for her, but he had just undergone some fairly intensive surgery, and his body wasn’t responding the way it should have. “Get back inside me, right now.”

“Shan’t.” She stuck out her tongue, and what would have looked childish with her old appearance now looked vaguely obscene.

“Well, I’m over my threshold for strange.” Aida had leapt away from Mira as she manifested and was now edging her way away from both of them. “It’s good to, um, meet you, Mira, but I’ll leave you two to it for a moment.” 

In spite of her good sense, she paused in her retreat as professionalism took over. “I take it you don’t need to be stitched up?”

With the eidolon out of his body, the healing factor it had granted his flesh was weakened but not gone. The injuries that had been caused during the implantation were closing, just not instantaneously, the way that Sylvas would have liked. “I’ll be fine… I’m sorry about this.”

She snorted. “Pretty sure this is going to be more of a problem for your new girlfriend than it is for me.”

Sylvas winced, and it had nothing to do with the pain of muscles snarling back together where they’d been sliced. There was a dangerous glint in Mira’s eyes. “Oh, no fear there, Aida, my darling boy and his new beau are a match made in heaven. I should know, I matched them.”

Sylvas rolled his eyes at her theatrics. “I’m pretty sure I had some say in it.”

“Oh, please, you’re nothing but a big organ.”

Aida stopped her retreat at that, and one of her eyebrows shot up. “What.”

“My darling boy is a biochemical machine that I can tap at the keys of to produce the sweet music of love or fear or anything else. It’s all just hormones and enzymes.”

“Are you trying to say that you—”

Mira smiled sweetly at him. “How would you ever know the difference?”

Aida was already almost out of the side-cave where they’d set up for surgery. “Okay, so I really need to not be part of this conversation now.”

“Oh, it’s quite alright, dear, stay as long as you like, and I do apologize for the awkwardness you experienced with my dim darling trying out romance for himself. He’s clearly poorly equipped for such matters. All I really wanted was for him to move on and stop moping over me, but every time he got close, the women he was after had a habit of combusting.”

“Can we please stop having this conversation?”

“Oh, I see, you’d prefer for me to go back to being your subservient little mind-slave?”

“I have no problem with you maintaining your autonomy and occupying that body, just please stop… this.”

“Well, that is lucky, darling, as you have absolutely no say in it whatsoever.”

Aida looked like she was going to break into a run. “I feel like this might be above my pay grade.”

Sylvas pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to maintain his calm. “Mine, too.”

“Well, as delightful as it has been to meet you, Ms. Aida, I’m afraid that I am going to have to return to the cold, dark crevasse that is my darling boy’s mind once more.”

“Oh, now you’ll go back,” he grumbled mostly to himself. His skin finally smoothed over, and the surgery became just another absent scar.

“Well, of course, darling, as charming as your little naughty nurse here might be, I couldn’t rely on her to completely occupy your attention the way that I knew I could. Just as I couldn’t trust the eidolon inside you to remain inert when you introduced a nascent world soul into your body. Both of you would have been compelled to poke and prod at it when what it really needed was some time to settle into its place within the rather complex network of aetherium veins and enchantments that you’ve embedded in your body. Now it is settled. Now you are, essentially, a very small and oddly shaped planet.”

She burst apart into a wave of blood that hammered into Sylvas, seeping into his pores and every orifice it encountered in a drowning wash that was gone almost as immediately as it had arrived. 

There was no question that her distraction had been effective, or that it had been necessary. His attention immediately turned inward to the flows of magic inside him, and he could sense the eidolon Strife doing precisely the same thing, trying to burrow into the new nexus of arcane power nestled beside his core only to be rebuffed by the protective spells that were woven into his flesh.

Mana flowed throughout the universe. It flowed everywhere, from one point to another, generated by whatever was happening in a place, and then spreading out from there, following the connective ley-lines on each planet down into that planet’s soul. Then from that nexus point being shunted off to connect to every other world soul through a massive interconnected network that unified all of reality. Now, all the mana in this world flowed to Sylvas. All of it, naturally drawn to the world soul, as surely as the void of his gravity affinity had drawn that which was closest to him. 

Through his deepening covenant with the eidolon, he’d already created a near-infinite source of mana within the gravity and war affinities, but this world soul would offer him an almost equally bottomless supply of every other type of mana. Ever since he’d first learned about affinities, he’d hated their restriction. The way that it cut him off from so much of magic. He’d tried with his crystals and reinforced veins to try and circumvent that naturally occurring barricade between him and all of the magic that he knew he should be able to use. And now, finally, that work was done. The walls were down.

You’re welcome.

“Thank you, Mira,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Are you okay?” Aida had stopped her retreat at last. “Is she… gone?”

“No. She’s back inside me for now.” Sylvas sighed. “I’m sorry she did that. I’m sorry she… I’m just sorry.”

“You’ve done worse.” She managed a pained smile. “And now I’ve met your other half, you seem a lot saner by comparison.”

She is aware that I can still hear her?

Sylvas flashed Aida one last smile, then took off. “Running away now.”

He arrived at the gathered mass of the surviving Ardent’s leadership just in time to hear the arguments that had been raging trail off to nothing. It had not been six hours. They were all meant to be resting, not arguing, but it seemed that being something of a workaholic went hand in hand with survival in the Ardent. “Do we have a plan?”

“Small team insertion at the administrator’s offices. The rest secure a beachhead on the surface for our pickup.”

It rubbed him wrong to hand off a task to somebody else when he could do it, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. “Malachai is your insertion team. Kaya hasn’t got a handle on her latest upgrade, and I’m still too destructive. If we want the comms array to survive, the best bet is death magic.”

“Agreed.” Vaelith nodded. “I’ll go with him.”

Sylvas paused for a moment, “Is that—”

“Yes,” Vaelith abruptly cut him off. “With Aurea and all the upper ranks dead, command protocols give me master security access. No one else can say the same.”

Kerbo nodded while he crossed his arms. “That’s the plan then.”

Trying to enforce the rest period after that proved impossible. Everyone began making their preparations to fight, and even Kaya, who was the most desperately in need of rest after her unexpected Covenant, was scrambling about in the midst of them the same way that she always was.

They moved as a single unit until they hit the surface, Sylvas easily tearing his way through the collapse that they’d used to hold out the eidolons. It was impossible for him to muster any surprise that the passageways beyond were absolutely crammed full of eidolons. Perhaps if he hadn’t been there, then there would have been fewer. Perhaps if he’d teleported straight to the surface, he could have drawn them all off and given everyone else a cleaner run, but he had his orders, as handed down by Vaelith, and diverging from them was as likely to cause confusion and chaos as his presence.

He set to work.

Not so long ago, the eidolons of Strife had almost killed him. He’d fought them to his very last breath, struggling and scrabbling for any hint of advantage when the Ardent sent him out alone to face them. Now they weren’t even worthy of his attention. In the tightly packed corridors of the ancient superstructure beneath the planet’s surface, they couldn’t bring their full weight against him, and without the advantage of numbers, he didn’t even need his newfound ability to instantly cast. He needn’t have cast at all, if he were on his own. 

Most of the magic that he was flinging around was to protect the others, while his own rampage was red in tooth and claw. He raked through the packed eidolons with his claws, obliterating their remains with pulsing gravity waves generated by nothing more than his own body. With the world soul embedded in him, he could have woven together any kind of magic that he desired to cast any kind of spell, but none of it was required. Showing what he was capable of was no longer desirable. Showing off to the Ardent to prove his worth might have carried him forward for a while, but he didn’t need it. 

And they didn’t need to know anything about what he was becoming.