Chapter 38

“To seek power is to empty oneself. To seek ultimate power is to empty oneself completely. Welcome him into your heart, make your heart hollow so that he might find his way inside. All power flows from him. All is a reflection of his majesty. We exist to worship him. There shall be no god you set above him, for all are his lesser. Your heart shall stop beating at the sight of him, but you shall live if you have emptied it and made way for him. He is the prophet of all our fates; he is a king above all kings, garbed in the crimson of the heart-blood we offer up to him gladly. Know him and know eternity. No weapon forged might prosper against him. No enemy might raise a hand against him lest it wither. “

—The Hollow Heart, Documents recovered from Croesia

The eidolon didn’t die, but it was hurt badly enough that it finally seemed to realize that its life was in danger. The Crimson King, the towering nightmare that had haunted Sylvas’ dreams, turned and ran.

It made for the rift, turning away from Sylvas even as it slunk backwards. He didn’t let it. Reaching out with his will, he grappled with the eidolon. He tried to drag it back from the brink of escape, only to find that the fragmented husk that formed its body was no longer so easy to grasp as when it had been whole. Pieces of chitin started snapping away as he pulled at it, whole sections of its blood-red shell cracking clean away to float between them. 

Scowling, he reached past the eidolon to the rift itself. Closing it was child’s play at this point in his life. The first serious spell that he’d ever undertaken, read back in reverse. He didn’t have a massive magic circle with all of the Aion symbols scribbled in chalk, but he held every shape of the spell in his memory and projected it into his eidolon fully formed.

A gravity spike caught all the tattered edges of the whole in reality and hauled them back together, while the spell itself sealed the rupture between dimensions. The hole was closed. The only way for the eidolon to escape back to its own dimension was sealed. It lived or died here. Now.

By his hand.

With that route of escape closed off, the Crimson King flung itself in the other direction, launching itself towards one of the holes it had bored out from the planet’s core to its surface. With the titanic size of the monster, it should have moved like a slug, the way it had been drifting around up until now, but with fear it had found haste, and it flew across the chamber so swiftly that it took Sylvas entirely by surprise. He had to launch himself aside or be crushed against it. Crushed between it and the invisible barrier that still hung there.

The halo of golden light still encircled the chamber, closing them off to the outside world. The orbitals dissolved away into nothing at the Crimson King’s approach, but the band of mana that they had been dumping out remained, even after the tower-smashing spell had been completed. It glowed golden and warm in the face of the red-shelled monster, and it allowed no passage.

They were inside a magic circle, even now. Just as Sylvas wanted them to be. His friends were still on this world, after all. And if there wasn’t a circle keeping the forces inside of it contained, he wouldn’t be able to unleash his full strength.

The Crimson King did not turn to face him; it didn’t really have a face to speak of, but the arms sprouting out from the dark gaps between the plates of its shattered armor turned and unleashed a fresh torrential downpour of white-hot beams that made him launch himself into motion once more to stay ahead of them. Things were not so simple anymore. The Crimson King moved with him, trying to match his trajectory and speed, closing in with its relentless assault. He unleashed Arcane Arrow after Arcane Arrow in response, amping up the mana in each one until it was at the brink of unravelling the spell’s structure. Each one of them hit a conjured shield. 

The concussive blast from each impact rocked through the chamber. If it wasn’t for the circle containing them, Sylvas felt certain the stone around them would have been cracking with each impact. As it was, the chitin coating the Crimson King seemed to shatter away to dust more and more with every hit. He kept waiting for any one of the cracks and wounds to grow deep enough that there was something like living flesh, something that could bleed, that his eidolon could use as a foothold to help drag the whole thing apart, but it seemed that, despite its color, the Crimson King was bloodless.

The field of destruction that surrounded the eidolon seemed to retreat as it gathered its power. No longer was Sylvas’ skin sizzling away just being confined in this space with it. The two of them circled one another, both launching spell after almost identical spell back and forth between them. 

Shields were being summoned to protect the eidolon each and every time as Sylvas had to dance and dive to avoid the returned fire. If the torrent of spell fire from Sylvas slowed, it freed up more hands to cast against him. If he turned his attention to his defenses, he had no opportunity to press the Crimson King. They were at an impasse once more. And then the field of destruction returned, redoubled. It shredded the skin off Sylvas’ body in one bloody wave, and in the moment it took him to regrow his flesh, it had closed half the distance between them and unleashed blinding beams from every one of its lotus palms.

The spells hit him, piercing through into his flesh before he had a chance to raise a shield. He bled, and it was only that bleeding which saved him. He flung it out as he had back on Alvarhain, lethal red threads that tore through the eidolon’s fleshy parts, and that he then whipped around to sever limbs. He regrew his flesh and raised a shield as the eidolon’s arms folded back into darkness. The brief moment of victory spoiled for the both of them.

Queueing them up carefully, Sylvas readied his next barrage. The Arcane Arrows shot out in a sequential flurry, aimed for the gaps in the eidolon’s armor. It whipped out new limbs, cast shields with each of its new hands, and held them ready to intercept. Which was when Sylvas screamed.

A thank you to Miss Veltrain?

He had not used sonic magic before, but he knew the pain it caused to be on the receiving end of the awful vibrations. Every shield that the eidolon raised was shattered by his screech. The arrows they were meant to intercept swept cleanly past them and struck into the dark heart of the Crimson King.

For one glorious moment, Sylvas thought the fight was over. A glow lit up inside of the eidolon, where his spells had struck home. It shuddered so hard that the few places where its shell hadn’t already started to flake away came off in a plume of dust. But even striking home with all those arrows at once had not been enough to kill the Crimson King. It was a Tier-8 Planetary Annihilator, a step just shy of becoming a Starkiller, and he was just one mage swinging at it with magic so basic that the Empyrean didn’t even bother to teach it.

The Crimson King moved before he did. It launched itself forwards, heading right for him, and all the hands that had been holding shattered shields now cast forth beams of destruction aimed right for his heart. He flung up a panicked gravity shear to turn them aside, but he had nowhere to run to from the crushing weight of the eidolon itself. 

The intensity of its field of destruction had not been reduced since it had redoubled its efforts to wipe him out of existence, and as it drew closer, his skin was shredded away once more. As it came in close enough to touch, the raw, destructive power radiating off of it began eating into him. All it had to do was stay close and let its mere presence devour him. Skin and muscles peeled away into dust. His reinforced flesh was the only reason that he wasn’t already nothing but ashes himself.

It meant to crush the life out of him. Its hands still unleashed spells his way, blasting at him from all sides, only for the gravity shears he’d raised to turn them aside and send them skittering over the pocked surface of the eidolon’s armor, but nothing he was doing was going to be enough to protect him for long. It crushed against him, pushing its pocked red chitin into the raw flesh it had exposed. Every crack in its shell was now a cutting edge, driving into him. Everywhere a claw had scratched it or an Arcane Arrow had struck into it, there was a rough edge that it was using to scrape his exposed nerves. To rub him out of existence.

He had found his courage and his purpose since he left home. He had stood up to this thing one-to-one, even knowing how powerful it was, because he had honestly believed that he was more powerful now. Everything he had done, everything he had learned, every way that he had changed himself into something meant for killing. He had thought that it was going to be enough. But it was killing him. His first instinct when he learned it was here was to flee, and that instinct had been right. It was going to kill him, right here, dissolving his body away until there was nothing left. Not even bones for his friends to bury. Not even a ghost for Malachai to conjure. 

Throughout everything, he had been underestimated, time and time again, but this time, he had been the one to underestimate his opponent, and now he was going to pay for it with his life.

He turned his mind to Mira, almost pleading with her, but the work that he’d set her to was nowhere close to being done. She had nothing to save him. He was alone. Alone, down in the deepest darkness, with the monster.

“No!” He roared the word in the face of the eidolon. A cacophony of sonic magic poured out in that single word to shatter its armor and knock it away. “I am not dying alone.”

The Crimson King bore down on him again, all its pallid limbs outstretched. The terrible towering nightmare closed in on him. Sylvas’ mouth twisted into a feral grin. “I’m taking you with me.”

Fire washed over his body, searing a black mark into the chitin where it pressed against him, and lightning leapt from the tips of the exposed bones of his skeleton to dance through the eidolon. He unleashed a fresh torrent of Arcane Arrows out to both sides, sending them on curving parabolas to sweep back in and bury themselves in the darkness at the eidolon’s core. 

It raised up shields to protect itself, but he ignored them entirely, summoning portals in front of each one, so when the eidolon tried to block an arrow, it just changed its course so it was sweeping in at it from behind instead. He opened more portals in front of the eidolon’s other hands, intercepting each beam of destruction as it fired and redirecting it to join his own arrows, firing down into the heart of darkness.

Everything that the eidolon threw at him, he threw right back, plunging it all down into the monster’s core. He felt it falter and weaken. He felt the field of destruction that had burned its way through his flesh weaken. He felt his eyeballs regrow, so that he could see the exact moment that the eidolon knew it wasn’t going to survive either.

The Crimson King was an eidolon of destruction. He had not understood what that meant until now. Until he was face-to-face with the one thing in all of existence that he hated more than anything else. The thing that he would do anything to destroy. To unmake. 

He had built a bomb of death magic as the other spells were unleashed, sapping off all that mana from his world soul into a single black-green sphere that he now launched through another portal in null-space to detonate right inside of the center of the hollow at the heart of the Crimson King. He felt that death wash over him as it detonated, and for the first time in his life since his planet died, he felt satisfaction.

He was going to destroy the destroyer. It was trying with all of its might to kill him, and maybe it was going to succeed, but he didn’t care anymore. So long as he could destroy it, he would be content. He forgot about his friends, his lover, his history, and his future. All of time closed off until there was just this one moment of perfect destruction unleashed by his hands.

One perfect moment, when he wanted exactly the same thing as The Crimson King. It collapsed in on the point where it was touching his chest. It poured down into his body as it lost its solid form and became protean. All of the destruction and chaos that had been unleashed in this chamber suddenly fell to silence, and the great blood wolf of Strife retreated to a tiny hidden corner in his soul where it felt safe.

The Crimson King had destroyed everything that he knew and loved. It had set him on the path to become a destroyer himself. Now the circle was closed. It had become him. The covenant was formed. They were one.