Chapter 30

“Aions were cowards. They saw the eidolons were going to come back, and they abandoned us. Left us to fend for ourselves. Took the easy way out. Now the problems created are our problems. Makes sense. They never cared about us. We were like cattle to them. But now they’ve gone, taken all their power with them, and left us to face the end of everything with nothing. Folks act like they’re the saviors of the universe, but all they did was leave. Leaving is easy. Staying put and dealing with the consequences of what you’ve done, that’s something different. I reckon that if we had some Aions still kicking around, kids wouldn’t be going hungry and houses wouldn’t be losing their roof every time an eidolon comes to town. If they’d done what was right and stood by us instead of running away, maybe we’d stand a chance against the eidolons. Maybe we’d all be together in one big, happy family, with old grandad Aion watching over us all and keeping us safe. Instead of warring and scrapping and pushing each other around.”

—On Seeking Truth, Anonymous, Part One

As the blood wolf manifested into the chamber, he could hear the uproar, but Malachai stepped forward, putting his body between Sylvas and the gathered Ardent. It wasn’t often that he was heard using the imperious command that his voice was capable of, but he used it now. “Hold.”

For a moment, the eidolon paced, back and forth, mindless, without Sylvas or Mira possessing its body, but Sylvas did not know how sensitive the vault might be, and whether it might be able to read the presence of a conscious mind where there was only meant to be fury and instinct. With a jerk of his chin, he directed the blood wolf Strife towards the monolith, and just as swiftly, it obeyed, leaping into the stone.

This time, he was not called away into some hidden void beyond time and space to bandy words around with the Aions. He was not distracted at all. Instead, he got to stand there and watch as the ancient magic of the vault took hold, splitting it cleanly in half down the center and spreading it open, though no external force could have made a crack in it. That ancient magic died as the vault was opened. The protections that had kept it pristine since time immemorial were gone, leaving only stone and the contents behind. 

Without any hesitation or second thoughts about the dangers, Rania rushed in. There were papers, actual paper rather than some clever enchantment or slate, in a tidy pile atop the pedestal at the center of the vault, and she snatched them up and began rifling through them as quickly as she could. 

There were fragments of other languages amongst the Aion markings that were so familiar. Ancient versions of the modern languages that the people of the universe still spoke today. Sylvas recognized elvish script, dwarven runes, even the jagged scratch marks of the Najash tongue amongst the familiar circular shapes of Aion. She read through the papers as fast as she could, handing them off to Sylvas as soon as she had so that he could record every detail of them with his eidetic memory and cast scrying magic over them to discern if there were any other details hidden from sight. From him, they passed to Malachai, who did the same, albeit without the eidetic memory.

“It has the locations of all the other vaults with information relating to the Starbreaker, but they’re all cracked. We’ve seen the information from every one of them.” She kept reading but with a furious edge to her progress now. “We’ve seen all of this. We know all these parts. Where is what is missing?”

“Perhaps we have reached the limit of the Aion’s knowledge?” Malachai looked pale in any circumstance, but here in the dim light, looking down at the possibility that everything that they’d been working for had come to fruition, delivering nothing of use, he looked paler.

“This can’t be it.” Sylvas turned the pages over, as if expecting the backs of the pages to hold the remaining information that they were missing, as if they hadn’t searched through it all. “I don’t understand. Why would they bring us this far just to leave us at a dead end?”

Rania threw the last of the papers at Sylvas before snatching the first back from Malachai. “There’s something we’re missing. There has to be something.”

Mira was processing every word that was written, assembling every star chart that was mentioned or related to the planets where the other vaults could be found, searching fruitlessly for a pattern in it all.

“The bits… the parts that aren’t…” Rania began tossing aside sheets of the ancient paper, searching for the parts written in other languages. They were little more than fragments, and they seemed to have nothing to do with anything. She laid them all out on the ground, forming them into a circle, as the curvature of each of the fragments of text seemed to suggest they should be. “It still doesn’t say anything, even if we shuffle it all around. Even if we… It makes no sense.”

Sylvas turned back to the Ardent. “I need an elf, a dwarf, and a najash.”

“I can read all of the languages, Sylvas.” It was the closest that Rania had come to being angry at him so far. The first time he’d said or done anything to question her capability. “They’re nonsensical. Rhymes. Fairy tales.”

“If you’ve got thousands of years that your message has to last… you can’t really rely on languages to stay the same. What survives?”

One of the earth affinity mages approached, looking as uncomfortable as a dwarf could look while still trying to puff out his chest and act tough in front of his friends. “What is it?”

Sylvas showed him the dwarvish text, and he nodded. “Aye, the Ballad of the Scroogy Fhatna. What about it?”

Rania asked him. “Where is it from?”

The dwarf cocked his head. “Where’s what from?”

“The Scroogy ballad of whatever!” Sylvas snapped.

“My mum?” The dwarf shrugged. “It’s an old song for kids…”

Malachai looked like he had a headache coming on. “Yes, but where did it originate?”

“It’s… I don’t know,” the dwarf bumbled on. “The homeworld, I guess?”

I have the most probable location of the dwarvish homeworld locked in.

The elvish lightning mage was more useful in identifying the rhyming couplets of that language as coming from one of the forest moons of Laeshwyren, on the distant limit of where the elvish empire once extended. The najash, meanwhile, was able to pinpoint the story about the little lizard that cried bloodfly to being located on the swamp world of Galesh.

As each element of the ancient texts in their various languages was translated and their sources identified, Mira added them onto a star map, until finally, all of them were logged, and at the central point between all of them she had identified, she found absolutely nothing. Just a dead black spot in the middle of space.

Rania dropped the papers again. “Damn it.”

Malachai shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps we travel to the location regardless?”

“No. There’s something we’re missing.” Sylvas stopped in his tracks. “It isn’t the vault missing information, it’s us.”

They all looked askance to him. “There are planets that we don’t have on our star charts. Planets that would have been around when the Aions were building their vaults.”

Rania caught on to what he was saying. “Where do you hide information about the Starbreaker so that nobody can reach it until the incursion is happening?”

Malachai’s eyes widened. “The temple worlds.”

“The temple worlds, stuck outside of our reality until the time when the Starbreaker would be needed.” All of Sylvas’ anxiety had melted away, and he was as excitable as Rania again. “If we could just connect with the Empyrean network, get a star chart of this region, updated since the incursion, I’ll bet—”

It is in the Dominion.

Sylvas came up short. “Ah.”

“Ah?” Rania stopped dead in her scrabbling with the papers. “Ah, what? What are we ah-ing about?”

Sylvas let out a heavy breath. “The midpoint is in Dominion space.”

She wilted a little, but Malachai looked unconcerned. “In the current state of chaos, I can see no reason to respect any border.”

It would be an act of war, invading Dominion space.

“Congratulations.” Bael’s voice echoed through the chamber as he and his lackeys made their entrance. “You have done what we could not.”

With a sudden pulse of gravity, Sylvas pulled together all the papers and then flung them into Rania’s hands. “Get them back in the vault, all of them. Then get clear, fast.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue, but after everything she’d seen play out with Vaelith’s insubordination, she decided that it was better to obey now and talk later. She took off running while Sylvas and Malachai stepped out to block the Seeker’s path to the vault. Sylvas called out, “It was not difficult when someone so kindly gave me directions.”

“Even so, opening any of the Starbreaker vaults is an achievement all the same.” Bael and his company moved forward through the bristling Ardent. He came to a halt, facing Malachai and Sylvas. His mechanical arm had been freshly replaced after their last clash and now had a strangely familiar look. It looked like one of Sylvas’ own limbs, part biological, part mechanical, and entirely identical to the flesh of the Aions. It seemed that their old friend had continued his own path to advancement through similarly unorthodox means. “And with the answers contained within, we will be able to put an end to all of this. An end to the eidolon threat, once and for all.”

“There are answers in there, but not that,” Sylvas told him honestly. “What is in there, you don’t need to know.”

For the first time since they’d met, Bael seemed flustered. “I do not understand. I thought that you understood. That sharing all information so that we can work together to solve this incursion—”

“And then I met your gravity mage,” Sylvas interrupted what was sure to be an eloquent speech. “That told me all I want to see about how the Seekers treat their allies. So no. I am not giving you everything you want. I am giving you what I want to give you.”

He did not look back at the vault. He didn’t need to use his eyes to know that Rania was well clear of it now. He raised a hand above his head, and he clenched it into a fist.

The gravity spike collapsed the vault in on itself, the papers, the stone, the lines of prophecy, all of it was crushed into dust, into a sphere of solid darkness that he then allowed to crumble away. Several of the Seekers cried out, but Bael raised his hand to stop them from attacking.

“The contents of the vault exist now in my mind only.” Sylvas spoke up to be heard over the sudden tension in the air and the sounds of disintegration, loud enough that everyone present could hear. “I cannot be broken by torture, and I cannot have my thoughts extracted through magic. The only way that you find out what the Aions said is through me.”

Bael was staring at Sylvas like he had never seen him before. “What is the purpose of this?”

“I’m no man’s puppet, Bael.” He could hear the growl in his voice when he spoke the traitor’s name, but he couldn’t hide his anger. “Our…arrangement is going to work like this. You are going to go away. If you find out something you think will help me save the universe, you can contact me. Otherwise, you are going to wait until I call on you, and then you’re going to get to wherever I want you to be and do whatever I want you to do, because I know how to save the universe from the eidolons, and you do not and never will.”

Bael was shaken. His confident demeanor withered in the face of Sylvas’ cold demands. “You are laying claim to the title of Starbreaker, then?”

“Yes,” Sylvas stated, his heart quivering as he spoke the word. “Yes, I am.”