Chapter 1

“The circle is the fundamental shape of magic. All things contained within or without. An expression of the eternal nature of magic. It is from within the circle that we contain and draw our first mana. It is from the shape of the circle that we construct our paradigms and embodiments, to give magic a place to live within us. It is the perfect shape that all of nature defaults to. It is a reminder that our journey, no matter how far we may travel, always returns to the self-same spot that it began.”

—Fundamentals of Arcana, Albrecht Magnus

The world shook around them. The whole planet was rocked by the battle within its core.

Kaya had none of Sylvas’ finesse when it came to moving them. Her metal platform had enclosed them as they rose to protect them against the worst of the whipping air as they shot up towards the surface. They were inside a bullet, heading for the sky as fast as they could move. 

Malachai had folded in on himself, slumped on the ground, all of his power swallowed back down so that it couldn’t hurt them. Kaya herself was so focused on the strain of making their escape that she was immobile, too. The only one who still seemed alive at all was Rania. “He can beat that thing, right? This is his thing, fighting eidolons? You guys went through all the Ardent training, and he’s got his whole ‘defeat the eidolons’ Starbreaker destiny. He’s definitely going to beat that thing.”

In a cruel twist of fate, it fell to Malachai to give her comfort. “Seventh-tier eidolons have been defeated before. Typically, they are driven back to their own plane rather than destroyed, but they have most assuredly been defeated.” 

To most people, there would have been no sign in his carefully practiced speech that he was holding anything back, but the three of them had spent so much time in close quarters now that Rania was beginning to see through the pretty mask of civility that Malachai always kept in place. “What is the bit you aren’t saying?”

Malachai’s shoulders slumped. “The defeats were typically… by armies rather than individuals.”

She turned on Kaya. “Why did you leave him behind?”

The dwarf was bowed over with the strain of the magic she was working; translating her ability to make and move metal into this elevator was pushing the limits of her affinity, so when she did manage to force words out, they were in between grunts and gasps. “It needed killing.” Her whole body shuddered as she drove them on to greater speed. “He needed to kill it.”

“Then why couldn’t we all have…”

“Because it was killing us.” Malachai cut her off with surprising passion. “Just being in the room with it was enough to kill us all, and Sylvas would have spent more of his energy on trying to keep us alive than on fighting it. By removing ourselves from the equation, we gave him a better chance.”

Outside the steel shell that Kaya had raised to protect them, something passed by, some concussion set off deep in the world below. Rania froze in horror, clearly thinking it was a deathblow, then another concussion hit, then another. Then dozens all in rapid succession. She had seen Sylvas fighting before; she’d been in his arms as he protected her from Shikari, but she had never been close to a battle like this. 

Every battlefield she’d picked over and reconstructed as an archaeologist had been a clash between mortals, at the end of the day. And what was happening beneath them was something else entirely. It was all well and good knowing that Sylvas was powerful in the abstract sense, but she had never seen that power brought to bear. Nobody had, so far as she could tell. Even his closest friends seemed afraid to know what he was capable of.

Something hit the shell. Not some falling rock from the side or some eidolon transposing itself in the path of the bullet. An impact from below that burned away so much of the metal beneath them that their ascent abruptly halted, flinging them up into the air, as Kaya tried to replace it. “What in the…”

She devolved into some dwarvish dialect that even Rania didn’t know, and Malachai froze in place, halfway to his feet, halfway to calling his own magic to try and catch them.

Another wave of destruction chased up the chasm to buffet them. Whatever fears Rania might have been failing to hide over Sylvas’ survival were fading as the evidence that he was still down there and still fighting rocked and buoyed them as they tried to escape.

Kaya’s magic caught them, repairing their enclosure, even as it launched them upwards once more. The pressure of the acceleration dropped them all to their knees, and the ascent continued. Time was ticking away, and Rania didn’t need any extra senses to know that the planet they were on was going to be coming apart at the seams the moment that the fight at its center was over. The anchor point that the aions had set was all that kept these worlds intact, and with it torn free and the portal to it shut, the collapse of each temple world was inevitable.

She felt it in her gut when the anchor way was shut. The sudden snap as gravity on the planet shifted. Their bullet flew faster and rose higher, with nothing dragging it back down towards the core. Sylvas had shut the portal. The eidolon wouldn’t have done that. Maybe that meant that the fight was over. That he had won.

Yet no smiles were showing on the faces of the mages; Rania had to push herself up to her hands and knees and crawl to get close enough to Malachai to seek answers. She had scarcely opened her mouth before a fresh concussion rocked them, a shrill noise echoing out from the depths. How loud would a scream need to be to travel all this way from just below the surface? What was happening down there?

Malachai’s eyes widened at the sound of it, a tremor running through him. Eidolons didn’t scream, so far as Rania knew. Everything she’d read of them talked of the eerie silence with which they consumed worlds. “Can you scry down there? Can you see what is happening?”

He shook his head, not in disdain at her lack of knowledge, but with dismay. It seemed that he had already tried. “Sylvas has contained them. A circle. No magic can escape it or enter it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s still trying to protect us.” Malachai’s voice gave out. It was only then that Rania realized the man was hurt. Blood was pooling under his knees where he had fallen.

Another impact rocked them, but she dragged herself closer. “What happened? Where are you hurt?”

“Do not concern yourself. It is only”—he let out a soft chuckle at the sight of her scowl—“everywhere.”

Rummaging through her bag, which looked considerably more tattered than when they’d set out from the Saizen’s ship, Rania retrieved a healing potion, offering it to him, but he shook his head. Frustrated, she tried to shove it into his hands. “Take it!”

He opened his mouth to answer her, but the sound was lost. Another catastrophic concussion swept over them, but this time, it did not rebound in on them from the sides of the tunnel. It only roared up from beneath.

Kaya slowed and then stopped their ascent, peeling away the metal around them like petals to reveal the forest they’d already drifted above, spread out in every direction. They rose up into the air, momentum still carrying them on as the bullet unraveled around them. Kaya hit the elevator floor and toppled to her knees. 

As the metal covering her body melted away, the extent of the damage she’d suffered came into sight, too. Everywhere that had been silver was now red. The skin had been abraded right off her by the field of destruction that surrounded the eidolon. Everywhere that she wasn’t machine, she seemed to be bleeding. 

She slipped sideways as the platform lost the guiding hand steering it, and Rania had to lunge across and catch her before she could slide right over the edge. Kaya’s stare was blank and empty when Rania did catch her, but the jolt of pain from someone grabbing onto her skinned body seemed to shock her back to reality. She reasserted control over the platform, levelling it out, and beginning their descent towards the treetops.

If they had been left to their own devices, then they would have been alright. Rania was sure of it. They’d use the healing potions to get Kaya and Malachai back on their feet, and they’d run for the Saizen ship before the planet collapsed. Everything would have been alright if the eidolons hadn’t attacked.

Cutting in through the trees as they fell, every eidolon on the planet seemed to be descending on them. The time they’d spent beneath the surface had allowed all the monsters of the outer skies to come pouring in where their numbers had been depleted before, and now, instead of individual eidolons zipping in to strike and being rebuffed, the bat-winged creatures moved in a flock. Their simultaneous wingbeats like the thunder of war drums, making the needles of the conifers quiver.

The first wave of them came into sight from under the cover of the woods, then immediately dipped back down out of sight again. The eidolons hit the disc from below, flipping it like a coin in the air and sending Kaya, Malachai, and Rania flying off in every direction. The platform had begun its drop back down to ground level before the impact, but it was still going to be a lethal fall for Rania, at least.

She fell, flung from the platform and the safety of the mage’s protection, into the waiting arms of one of the swooping eidolons. Pallid hands scrabbled over her, seeking purchase, trying to pry her open like she was a shellfish with some delicious morsel inside. Her bag tore away from her, and the contents spilled out as it came apart at the seams. 

The healing potions she was going to use on Kaya and Malachai went tumbling only a few feet before another flitting, dark-winged shape zipped through beneath her and swallowed them whole. Twisting in the eidolon’s grasp, Rania realized the futility of fighting. She had no magic, no weapons, no tools. Nothing that might level the playing field with this nightmarish thing pawing at her. Its clawed fingers hooked under her chin and yanked up, trying to lift her head free of her body, but only succeeded in snapping her head back and launching her out of its grip.

It was faster than any human, hands darting out again to catch her before she’d even begun to fall, and it would have had her, too, if the eidolon that had snatched the potions hadn’t chosen that exact moment to explode. It was a brief, bright flare, more of a pop than a boom, and suddenly, Rania was in free-fall again, the eidolon that had been grasping her flung aside by the sudden concussion. She looked around frantically as she fell, searching for Kaya or Malachai, whoever had saved her, but they were lost in the massed swarms of eidolons surrounding them.

She hit a tree before she hit the ground, and that was probably what saved her life. The branches snapped like twigs as she plummeted through them, but it slowed her descent enough that when she did finally hit the marshy ground below, it felt as soft as a feather bed. Except for the tree roots. Her knee struck one of them, made a wet pop, and moved sideways in a way she was pretty sure knees were not meant to. The shock washed over her before the pain could arrive, but staring down at her twisted leg, she knew that it was coming.

She stared up into the black expanse of star-speckled space above her for a long moment, trying to get a breath. All the air had been knocked out of her by the fall, and if she needed to start crawling and screaming, which she did, then she’d need to be able to breathe first. It was like trying to suck a single breath in through a long rubber hose, but she managed, and then she moved, and the pain arrived. It felt like her leg shouldn’t even be attached anymore. The burning. The shooting electric agony firing out every time she so much as jostled it. But she had to, because the eidolons were still coming.

One hit the tree that had broken her fall with such force that it splintered the trunk in half but overshot where she lay. The next was not so unfortunate. It swooped down and caught hold of her by the hair, dragging her a few screaming feet off the ground before it tore loose from her scalp, and she fell back to earth again. Another impact. Her air gone again. The awful, slow-motion delay as she tried to get moving.

Courage had been great in theory, saying to her boyfriend that she would stand by his side even if he was facing monsters had felt great, but the reality was that she did not belong here. She had none of the power needed to face these things. The moment a fight started, she was a liability. Or worse, a victim.

The eidolon that had done its best to scalp her made another looping circuit around the trees overhead before taking the plunge once more. She couldn’t get out of the way. She didn’t have the strength to fight it. This was the same terror that people all over the universe felt when they were faced with an eidolon, with nothing and nobody at their side who might save them.

Its wings were tucked in tight against its body, its spindly fingers extended out to skewer her on impact. Even if she survived that, it would pry her bones apart. She was dead, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The eidolon turned to dust.

Before she had even a moment to process what had happened, Sylvas was crouched over her. Relief and gratitude flooded through her until she saw his eyes. There was something wrong with him. He moved his hands over her with a confidence and smoothness that he never quite managed in the bedroom, healing magic coiling out from his fingertips to set her broken leg and pull her kneecap back into place with an elastic tug. He did everything that he was meant to do, but it was as if he wasn’t there. “Sylvas?”

As he rose, she could see the change in him. His clothes were in tatters, which made it easier to notice. The tattoos or scars – she’d never been able to work out which they were – that had once covered his arm had spread, expanding out to cover his entire chest. 

As she watched, they were still crawling out further, spreading like a rash across his stomach and up the side of his neck. Sigils in the Aion language that she had never been able to translate, even as she lay there idle in bed with nothing else to read. Parts of some spell, Sylvas had said. But a spell wasn’t alive, and it didn’t burn more of itself into a person’s skin years after it had been cast.

“I’m going to clear the eidolons and gather the others. Shout if you run into trouble.” It sounded like his voice, if a little strained, but she knew that something wasn’t right. It was like he’d looked right through her. 

Faster than she could blink, he was gone. Teleported away instantly. The hissing sound that had been at the periphery of her awareness came louder now that she didn’t have Sylvas to focus on. All around her, the trees were dying, crumbling down to ashes and dust in the exact same way that the eidolon had. In the distance, the hissing became a torrential sound like a landslide, and one of the clusters of eidolons gathered around another victim simply ceased to be. 

Rania pushed herself up to sitting, glancing around nervously for any sign of more eidolons coming. There were none. Every eidolon on the planet seemed to have changed course. The bat-winged monsters that had been plaguing her every moment now headed directly for Sylvas, wherever he teleported to, like they could sense him. Like he was the only source of light in a world of darkness.

Like moths to a flame, they were drawn in, and like moths to a flame, they were destroyed.

As soon as an eidolon came within reach of whatever spell he’d cast, it would start coming apart. The skin closest to Sylvas tore away, and then the rest of the body disintegrated before it even got close to him. It was just like the eidolon’s power from down below. He’d found some way to copy it.

She might not have been a fighter, or at least not capable of fighting an arcane war with extra-dimensional nightmares, but that didn’t mean that Rania wasn’t good at what she did, and what she did was think. She could take clues and piece them together to create a full picture, either of a civilization that had long ago been destroyed or of her boyfriend, suddenly infused with the power of an ancient eidolon. He wasn’t copying the eidolon; he had consumed the eidolon.

It explained the new power. It explained the complete absence of anything human behind his eyes. She hadn’t seen him the first time he made a covenant, but she couldn’t imagine that merging your consciousness with what most mythologies she’d encountered called a demon could have been easy. It would explain why his emotions seemed to have been entirely shut down. How he could look down at her with complete clinical detachment when she was hurt, and he was fixing her like a broken tool instead of the person he was meant to care about?

Knowing for certain would mean spending more time in situations like this, face to face with nightmares and monsters, and for the first time in Rania’s life, curiosity was not getting the better of her.

As fast as the eidolons came, they were annihilated. The forest toppled all around them as the destruction bled out from Sylvas and spread. Snapping in the air sounded as he teleported from place to place, felling monsters, healing allies, until just a few short seconds after he had arrived, when he was back to standing over Rania, awash in a glowing aura of power that even she could see with her magic-blind eyes. 

She watched as he swallowed it back down, shrank back inside his own skin, and looked as close to human as he could—for her benefit. She had always known that there were some things he was holding back, but she had never realized that he was the only thing standing between all of them and a force of destruction burning brighter than a star.

He reached a hand down to her, and she took it, rising to her feet to find Kaya and Malachai already restored to their former glory. Their wounds had been stitched shut and the blood washed away. “How?”

Kaya chuckled. “This stanzbuhr needed healing so many times I reckon he’s memorized every spell.”

“No… I mean… how did you…” She met Sylvas’ gaze, and her questions fell away. 

She already knew he’d absorbed the eidolon that had killed his homeworld. She already knew how much it had disgusted him to have an eidolon, any eidolon, inside of him. How hard he’d worked to accept the necessity of it and stop rejecting the power that it had given him. Now, he didn’t just have some random eidolon inside him. He had the one that plagued his nightmares. She had no idea how he was going to deal with that, and she didn’t want to be the one to push him into it, not right now anyway. All her other questions could keep. “I’m just glad you’re alright.”

Leaning in closer, he planted a kiss on her forehead. “You, too.”