Chapter 34

“The first one was absolutely thick with history. Dwarves carve everything that they can into the rock, convinced that it’s going to outlast all of them, so nothing will be forgotten. But some of the other species are more egotistical. Humans like me are probably the worst. We don’t write anything down because we’re so sure that we will remember how important what we currently consider to be important is going to be in the future. We don’t take our own mortality into account and preserve information. By comparison, most dwarves have seen multiple mining disasters throughout their childhoods. They are accustomed to the concept of death and how to avoid it causing problems. Humans act as though all information belongs to us personally, and we’d rather never share it than see it spread. The planetary surface was a forest which was weird enough in itself for an exoplanet, but what we found underneath was infinitely more confusing.”

—Temple World Observations, Rania Clarendon

Once they were past the fleet, Sylvas had composed himself enough to rejoin everyone else in the cockpit, even if they were all standing too stiffly to talk to him. The ship had slipped back down into null-space and would stay there for the rest of the journey. It seemed that, despite how heavily militarized the Dominion was, their focus was more on having a reputation for being dangerous to dissuade anyone from attempting an incursion like this, rather than working to actively prevent it with anything more than their little patrol ships.

The remainder of the journey was in that same uncomfortable silence. Everyone was quietly horrified by the decision that Sylvas had made, and none of them was more horrified than Sylvas himself. He had to actively use his paradigms to block lines of thinking, to keep him from tumbling down into a spiral of guilt over what he’d done.

Well, I think you did the right thing, darling. But then again, I don’t trust the Empyrean any more than I trust the Dominion, so I suppose my vote doesn’t count for much.

Sylvas hadn’t known what to expect of the new temple world. Another blighted rock, hanging dead in space and crawling with eidolons, probably. What he saw when they dropped back into real-space and drifted into orbit couldn’t have been further from it. The planet looked lush with forests and oceans. By all logic, no exoplanet could possibly have supported either, yet here it was. Whatever stasis the Aions had used to preserve it and launch it out into another plane of existence had managed to hold it like pressed flowers between the pages of a book: still beautiful.

There were no convenient drop-pods to get them down to the surface this time around, and the presence of eidolons and the portal that was allowing them ingress meant that teleportation would be a risky thing to attempt. The smuggler’s freighter rumbled as it came into contact with the atmosphere—something else that the planet really shouldn’t have had—and they were soon bucking and rolling through the clouds on their descent. Sylvas surrounded them with a gravity shear, which held off the eidolons for now. They were strange creatures in the brief glimpses they got of them battering off the shields, pallid, bat-like, and leathery, but strangely familiar, too, with chitinous plates that reminded Sylvas of the war-aligned creatures on Strife.

Down they plunged through the swarms of eidolons until they reached the surface and made the closest thing to a crash landing that Sylvas had ever experienced with a whole ship intact. It seemed that this sort of entrance wasn’t Saizen’s typical approach. With a heave of will and gravity, he hauled the ship back into a more solid position on the moor where they’d touched down, the reek of peat and burning fuel blending into something foul as they stepped out. The Saizen clones would not be accompanying them. “We’ll wait two hours.”

The other Saizen piped up, “If it doesn’t get dangerous.”

“Yeah, if it doesn’t get dangerous. We’ll wait two hours.”

“Good luck, kid.”

“Or not.” The other clone scowled at the back of the first’s bald, sweaty head. “Two hours either way.”

Sylvas managed a smile for them before setting off. There wasn’t much moor between them and the forest, but he cast a flight spell on the others to prevent the loss of any boots anyway, and they took off. His prediction had been that the Saizen’s ship would go unmolested so long as he wasn’t on it. The world soul in the center of him would draw the attention of the planet’s eidolons, and he could serve as a distraction from their escape plan. 

It was good in theory, but they may have underestimated just how rapid the response of the eidolons was going to be. The coniferous forests should have slowed the approach of the flying eidolons, it should have made it much harder for them to build up speed and swoop down, but instead, it provided them with cover to make their approach unseen.

In the chaos of their descent, there had been no real chance to assess the threat down here on the surface, and now that they were in the forest with visibility limited to just a few feet ahead of them, they were almost entirely reliant on the extra senses of Malachai and Sylvas to even know that they were under attack. Stopping to have a poke and prod at the corpses afterwards would have been inviting disaster, so they pressed on. “Bats. Mostly,” was all that Kaya had said after intercepting one, and Sylvas had no reason to doubt her word.

Pulsing gravity, it didn’t take long to locate the nearest entrance to the underground superstructure. The world’s surface might have looked completely different to the last temple world, but it seemed that once you got under the planet’s skin, things were a lot more familiar.

Sylvas had fully intended to find the nearest point to the surface and start digging, but there seemed to already be an entrance not far into the woods. The trees vanished in a great circle up ahead in what could have been a massive clearing if not for the fact that Sylvas could already sense the hole. It was a massive pit plunging straight down towards the heart of the planet. Judging by the way that wind was howling up out of it, it wasn’t the only one of these pits either. 

While the dwarven temple world had been layered with strata of tunnels, this one seemed to be built in far more straightforward terms. Some industrious trees had taken root in the dirt leading down to the bedrock and below, but beyond them, the vertical shaft was marked only by the stains of sand and surface dirt having fallen down them in a slow trickle over the millennia. “Well, that makes things easier.”

“Said the man who can fly,” Rania grumbled.

“You must admit, it is the most direct route,” Malachai observed while trying to peer down and see how deep the literally bottomless pit went without sliding in.

Above them, a spiral of flocking eidolons had gathered and was building to critical mass before making its assault, and in the back of Sylvas’ head, Mira was doing calculations. 

You’d reach terminal velocity and then be traveling at…

“I think the fastest option is to jump.” Sylvas cut ahead of her more precise planning with the general idea. “And then I’ll catch us at the bottom.”

Rania looked a bit queasy. “How fast is fast?”

Sylvas floated out over the abyss, launching a few gravity pulses up into the massed eidolons above to cluster them together, making it all the easier for Malachai’s death-bolts to slaughter them en masse. He glanced down and immediately regretted it. Even if he was no longer capable of falling without it being deliberate, that didn’t mean that the prospect of being at such a height was a pleasant one. He let out a heavy breath, feeling the world’s natural gravity tugging at him. “We will be falling for about half an hour.”

Rania’s queasiness had advanced to her holding on to a tree for stability. “I don’t love that.”

“At terminal velocity, which I think I can increase with a gravity shear around us, removing air-resistance to about double the usual rate.”

She definitely looked like she wanted to throw up. “The word terminal is in there, so I definitely don’t love that.”

“Could be worse.” Kaya chuckled. “Could be doing it without the stanzbuhr ready to catch you.”

“That would be worse, yes.” Rania was holding onto the tree like it was her best friend in the world. “But that doesn’t mean that this isn’t going to be bad.”

“We can run you back to the ship, if you’d prefer.” Sylvas was genuinely concerned and got treated to a full-on scowl of contempt for his trouble.

“Yeah, no way you might need an archaeologist in an ancient ruin.”

Malachai sighed. “If we intend to fall, we should do so as soon as possible. The eidolons are massing.”

“Ready?” Sylvas held out a hand in invitation towards Rania.

“I’m not going to be able to jump. You’re going to have to…” With a tug of gravity and will, Sylvas hauled all three of his companions out to the center of the pit and then let go of his hold on his personal gravity. For one brief moment, the others were arrayed around him, their mouths hanging open in shock, and then the drop began.

Kaya whooped with delight, Rania screamed, and Malachai was doing his best to look as bored as usual despite plummeting, but he was not doing his best work. There was a definite flush to his features, and his eyes were extremely wide. Sylvas himself was too focused on creating and then manipulating that gravity shear that would let them cut past air-resistance, adjusting the shape and angles of the warped space to try and maximize gravity’s pull on them.

Once they were falling as fast as they could fall, everyone seemed to calm down a little. Like they were accepting the inevitable. Malachai looked across at Sylvas curiously and shouted over the roaring wind. “You could make this faster. I’ve seen you move faster.”

“Not if you want to survive the fall,” Sylvas called back.

“Hold up,” Rania said, struggling to maintain her upright position without anything to hold onto. “I thought you were going to catch us?”

“The landing isn’t what would kill you. It’s the fall.” Sylvas tried to smile reassuringly as the passing wind tried to flap his lips and he fought it. “Any faster and air can’t catch up.”

Kaya nodded sagely. “And all your blood gets mooshed up in one bit of your body.”

Malachai nodded along with them. “A truly unpleasant experience.”

The eidolons from the surface had all plunged down into the chasm up above them and were giving loud and flappy chase, but there was no way that they could get themselves up to the speed Sylvas had them falling at. It didn’t take long before they seemed to tire and head back up top. 

What concerned Sylvas more were any eidolons that were ahead of them. If they emerged from the tunnel walls and hit the party during their downward passage at these speeds… well, it could be catastrophic for everyone. Hypothetically, his gravity shear would allow them to pass through without a hard impact, with the mass of the eidolons being displaced to the sides, but in practice, he was almost certain that if they hit an eidolon, they’d lose a lot of momentum, which at these speeds would probably feel something like slamming into a wall at full speed. Or at least it would to him. The others might not even survive the forces involved.

He tried to distract the others while also trying to scry ahead. “Anything interesting on the walls, archaeologist?”

“A big blur?” Rania quipped back.

“Doesn’t look like nothing to me either.” Kaya was grinning, which was always cause for concern for Sylvas. A glance to Malachai revealed a similar shake of the head.

“Guess we are going in blind then.” Sylvas tried not to show his discomfort at such an idea.

“We have our senses and our wits,” Malachai replied, formally. “I think that should be enough to see us safely to the depths of this pit.”

“And once we’re down there?” Sylvas asked.

Malachai chortled. “At that point, I suspect we shall have greater concerns to contend with.”

Despite the depths that they were plummeting into and how long it took, there were no bats just waiting to spread their wings and swoop out to intercept them. It seemed that particular type of eidolon liked to stay out of the underground, which was probably for the best, given the problems it would cause them if they collided but also mildly concerning. Different sub-types of eidolon could work together absolutely fine and showed no issues of territoriality. The absence of any eidolons down below was starting to make Sylvas feel like there was nothing down there at all. As they fell, Sylvas got the growing feeling that he was actually dropping down into the waiting maw of some vast but invisible creature.

“Did you stare the problem away yet?” Kaya had drifted a bit closer as they descended, and some quirk of their respective bodies and mass had resulted in her hanging ever so slightly higher than everyone else and thriving on being the tallest person in the group, albeit temporarily.

“No eidolons,” Sylvas replied.

“Oh no. How terrible,” she said, entirely flatly despite having to shout.

They continued their descent, and Sylvas found more and more of his concentration being taken up by adjustments to the gravity shear. At the heart of this world, there was a tear through to the plane of existence that the eidolons had been banished to, and that tear was throwing out chaotic pulses and ripples of gravity that he was constantly having to adjust for. Stringy twists of gravity seemed to lash out from it sporadically, raking through the stone of the planet with little more than a rumble, but hitting the shear with enough force to entirely disrupt it unless he maintained absolute focus.

There was no more conversation to lighten the mood, but thankfully, there was also no more time for him to rethink things. If he allowed his concentration to slip, if he allowed himself to think about all the dying people across the Empyrean, the invasion that was about to begin, or the eidolons that should have been down in this tunnel to the planet’s core, then it would spell death for all of them. It was the same as it had always been. He got to escape from the thoughts he didn’t want to be having.

Which is so healthy and not at all concerning, darling.

Despite his desire to get to the center of the world as fast as possible, Sylvas found himself slowing their descent as they closed in on the core, in part so that he had time to respond to the chaotic turbulence being thrown his way, but equally because he wanted to give them as much time as possible to adjust their plans to whatever was down there.

Where the previous temple had a spherical chamber at its center, when they dropped down into this one, it was oriented entirely differently. At some point in its history, perhaps it had been spherical, too, but now there was debris built up around the core. Some of it was little more than heaps of rubble and ash, but other parts were familiar.

They touched down on the surface of those ruins without incident. No eidolons came lurching out of the shadows, and no traps were triggered. Everything seemed perfectly safe and quiet. Which was presumably why all three of the people who had been trained by the Ardent were losing their minds, desperately searching for the threat. Rania was not so constrained by her history; she was set loose on the ruins with delight radiating off her. 

There was an odd mixture of architectural styles in the fragments of buildings heaped up around the rift. Some of it looked as ancient as anything they’d seen on the last temple, but other parts looked almost modern. There were even shimmering white fragments of what looked like the material that the Ardent used in their construction projects. None of them troubled Sylvas half as much as the plain, dull grey brick that he nudged over with his foot. His eidetic memory echoed it back to him from across the distance of what seemed like multiple lifetimes. “No.”

“No?” Malachai asked.

Sylvas could hardly bear to voice his insane thoughts, but he did it all the same. Better to get a couple of odd looks than for some horrible surprise to jump out at them. “Some of these ruins… they look like home.”

“Home?” Kaya asked over her shoulder. She hadn’t given up on patrolling around their tiny little planetoid at the center of the world, staring up the various shafts dug down to it.

“They’re certainly of human design. You can tell from the way they’ve been chiseled. Medieval human. Elves didn’t build with stone, and dwarves had much smoother ways of breaking apart.”

“I don’t just mean that they look like the architecture on Croesia. I mean, they are the same stones.” Sylvas recognized that this was an insane thought to have, let alone voice, but there was a whole section of wall from the tower he had studied in propped up against a monolith of jet black.

“I’m not sure how we could confirm that,” Rania said carefully.

“How would bits of your planet end up here?” Kaya scowled. “This planet wasn’t even here. It was in…”

“The eidolon dimension that I opened a portal to,” Sylvas finished her thought.

“But wouldn’t that have been… No… the dimensions overlap but don’t line up. It could have connected here.” Malachai was working through the theory too slowly for Mira’s liking.

The bat-eidolons came through during the incursion on Croesia. The Ardent were off fighting them.

“We should get out of here.” Sylvas’ mouth had been controlled by Mira to say that, but he couldn’t honestly disagree.

“We need to open the vault.” Rania looked at him in puzzlement. “To get what we came for.”

Fear lanced through Sylvas. The glimpses of the future that his Paradigm brought him mingled with his memories and his nightmares: Rania turning to dust before his eyes, and Malachai and Kaya cast aside with barely a thought. Trapped. Trapped in here with it. With the monster that had killed his world. That haunted his dreams. Nowhere to run. No Ardent descending from on high to save him. Mira tried to seize control of his body, to grab the rest of them with his gravity and haul ass back to the surface, but he fought back. He pushed her back out of control, into the back of his mind. His voice came ragged from the struggle. “No.”

“We came all this way. It would be foolish to depart when we are on the doorstep of discovery,” Malachai had replied, thinking Sylvas’ reply was a continuation of the conversation rather than part of his internal argument.

“You don’t understand.” Mira’s voice came through clearly this time, a wretched scream. “This is its lair. It is coming!”

The others looked askance to one another, and Sylvas forced his way back into control. “The eidolon that killed Mira and my world. This is where it came from. This is where we drove it back to.”

Kaya puffed out her chest. “Then this is where it’ll die, too.”

With a crash, the brickwork wall of the tower collapsed, bricks flying apart with the impact. The Vault was literally there, a simple circle the only lock. 

Malachai surreptitiously placed his own hand against the circle to no effect. “It would appear that I am not the mythical Starbreaker. Would either of you ladies like to make the attempt? I am unsure about the pronouns used in the prophecy.”

Rania held her hands up. “No magic.”

Kaya held her hands up. “No, thank you.”

That left only Sylvas, standing there on the brink of panic, knowing that the Crimson King had been here, and that it was coming back. He didn’t know if the terror was his own, or Mira’s, but the end result was the same. He had to get out of here before it came back. Fighting all of his instincts screaming at him to flee, he crossed the distance to the Vault, and he touched the stone circle that had been engraved into it.