Chapter 6

“It is impossible for two objects to occupy the same space at the same time without destroying themselves, and the same is true for affinities. You get edge cases where someone manifests two different affinities as they develop their fourth circle, but for the majority of people, this results in crippled advancement. A horse can’t have two riders, and trying to specialize in either one of the affinities leaves the other grossly underpowered. Worse yet is trying to select embodiments and paradigms that align with both affinities. Most have been developed with only a single affinity in mind, and the few that aren’t tend to be so generalized as to be useless, or so niche as to be useless.”

—Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Part One, Curgal Groenen

Sylvas could sense their motion the moment that Hector was back in the circle, counting down the moments until they were on the warship’s blindside. Counting down the moments until the cloaking spell failed under the intrusion of the enemy’s scrying. Those two moments seemed likely to coincide.

With a thump, Mira unloaded a fresh library of spells into his head, staggering him with the sudden weight of knowledge. The others cast him worried glances, except for Hector, whose face was still locked in a grin as he vanished into the controls of the ship.

Far from a complete rework of the system, but enough to be carrying on with, darling. It would help to have access to more Aion spellbooks, or literally any records of how they managed magic, but tragically, I’m forced to invent spells from your youthful experimentation and no small amount of hope.

The spells she’d managed to come up with numbered in the hundreds, and the reason for the variety became apparent almost as soon as Sylvas considered any one of them. They weren’t just combinations of elemental affinities but focused combinations of affinities that didn’t even exist, cobbled together from bits and pieces on the periphery of other affinities’ spellbooks, the way that his manipulation of time had come from the outer edge of gravity magic. 

Even the spells he had at his disposal before were altered and overwritten. The spell that he’d used to slow time now incorporated fringe elements of ice affinity, light affinity, and a half dozen more, and the strangest thing was how well all of those fragments seemed to fit together. Almost as if she’d looked at the language of the Aions, and how it would form the shapes of a spell instead of starting from the end result of what they wanted the spell to do and then working back to cobble it together. It was the complete opposite of the way that Empyrean mages made spells.

They reached the blind spot, and he didn’t hesitate. The cloaking spell burned away as every weapon array on the front of the ship ignited, with a different spell loaded into each one instantaneously. All of them fired as fast as he could think of the spell. All the effort it usually took to force the eidolon Strife into the shapes he needed was gone, because these spells were the natural shapes for eidolons to take.

Blinding beams of light erupted from the Folly, darting across space faster than the eye could follow to strike home. The distant warship had its shields raised up, dozens of them overlapping to protect it from any kind of attack. But not from every kind of attack. They stripped away fractions of the spells that Sylvas had cast, but all of the rest made it through. The full spectrum of magic outside of the taught affinities that no modern mage even touched blasted right into the enemy ship, and the specific spells buried in those already lethal beams detonated. 

Concussions rippled across the warship’s hull as the spells went off. Some shattered the surface and set it drifting off like frozen dust into space, and some lunged down into its guts like a wild animal to hunt the mages and systems within—magic that seemed almost alive and sentient with how specific it had become. 

Sylvas’ core had been emptied by that first shot, giving everything that he had, and with the interruption of the new eidolon diverting the usual flood of mana into him, there was a moment where he was just frozen and helpless watching the chaos unfold.

The warships spun around to face them as they became visible. Hector launched them into motion, so that the more distant of the two remained unable to fire on them without having to shoot right through their companion.

At the periphery of his awareness, Sylvas felt the last of his spells coming to their grand crescendo. Fragments of magic that had been buried in the different spells collided together in the middle of the crescent superstructure to form a gravity spike in their etherium supplies, using the ship’s fuel to empower its own exponential growth.

The warship collapsed in on itself like a can being stomped flat. The sudden, brief spike of gravity was more than sufficient to destroy it and kill everyone on board, if all the other spells hadn’t already done the same. He’d been so willing to crush the other ship to death with a flex of his hand, but now that events were unfolding at a distance, he felt strangely sorrowful about it. 

They may have been his enemy, but the people on the Dominion ship were still people, and he’d just blotted them out of existence with scarcely a second thought. Just another thing for his paradigm to filter out of his awareness until he had the time to deal with it.

“Blockade is still up,” Rania called out to their communal dismay.

“Then let us hope that it is the closer ship that holds it in place,” Malachai said with remarkable calm. “I am ready to be deployed when you are ready to send me, Sylvas.”

Sylvas glanced to Hector, who was still lost in the ship’s systems, piloting them.

The closest enemy ship was still too far away. With access to null-space, Sylvas could have teleported Malachai across, though even that would have been dangerous, with the risk of movement and variance dumping him out of null-space and into the vacuum. Luckily, Sylvas wasn’t without his resources.

He held out an arm to Malachai, and the necromancer took a grip around his wrist with a nod. There was scarcely any of the near-infinite mana usually available to Sylvas to work with, but strangely, he didn’t need much for this next spell. Just a little air affinity, a little lightning, and the memory of a dead dwarf he’d called friend.

“Back in a moment.” He smiled at Rania as she twisted around to see what they were up to.

When he cast the spell, both he and Malachai became lightning. Firing down through the console, through the channels reserved for destructive spells, and out through the weapon’s array to lance through space. They turned back to flesh a moment before they hit the enemy shields, a bubble of air exploding out to encompass them for a moment, to keep Malachai alive as Sylvas manifested claws of gravity and war to carve his way through.

A jagged rip in the enemy shields would heal the next time they were recast, but for now, there was enough space for the two of them to squeeze through and launch themselves forward again.

They hit the warship’s hull at its thickest point, where it protected the bridge—an oddly bulbous structure just above the weapon’s array stretching around the inner curve. Sylvas’ claws made as quick work of the metal as they had the shield, and then they were inside.

Dropping right in the midst of the screaming Dominion bridge crew, Sylvas nodded to Malachai. Air was thin in there, so much of it having been expelled through the hole they just made, but there was enough for the man to cast. Enough for him to use his specialty to its fullest. The spell looked like a glowing sphere of crackling green-black death as it formed between the necromancer’s hands, like the bombs that he’d made back when Sylvas first fought him. 

Yet he was hesitating, holding the lethal spell in his hands even as they withered and refusing to cast it. Sylvas looked up to meet his eyes, only realizing in the last moment why the fool wasn’t unleashing it. Because Sylvas was still in the room. He’d be hit, too.

He could have laughed, could have tried to explain, but instead, he cast a shield of glowing life energy around himself, vanishing from sight, and then he braced himself for impact.

The explosion could not penetrate the sphere of life around him, but when he let the shield fall away, he could see its effects. Malachai was standing there, still and silent. Spent after that casting. Nobody else was in sight. There wasn’t even dust. Just absolute obliteration of any living creature. Anything that had the potential to die had died. The interior of the bridge looked like it had aged centuries; rust and decay were spread throughout it all.

Sylvas stepped in to catch Malachai as he fell, pouring life mana directly into him as it flowed through the world soul. His body was as cold as ice, but where Sylvas touched began to warm, and then that warmth spread out until he was alive again. Unconscious, but alive.

“Two in three.” Those odds were better. Hoisting the necromancer over his shoulder, he cast the spell and teleported them back to the Folly. The disruption to faster-than-light travel was over, again.

Kaya caught them as they appeared back in the galley, clearly expecting them. She bodily flung Malachai onto the table, then shoved Sylvas back towards the cockpit without a word. He could take a hint and took off running. His core was slowly refilling with mana. Flooding with it, really, as he fed all the war that he’d just created into Strife, and it dumped out far more of the strange admixture of mana that now made up his affinity. 

It would only get stranger with the integration of the new eidolon, he supposed, and after all the slaughter, chaos, and destruction that he’d just caused, that integration was proceeding at what was probably a record pace—if anyone was keeping records on the fastest completion of secret and forbidden soul-bonding rituals.

On the displays, he could see the closest Dominion ship drifting listlessly through space with nobody controlling it. He was sure that there were some survivors of Malachai’s death bomb beyond the central structure who could rush in and take command, but they had plenty of time for now, provided that Hector kept them in the dead ship’s shadow and out of the other’s line of fire. 

Hector met his eyes and grinned. “Just wanted to make sure you were back on board before—”

They made the jump to null-space at the same moment he powered the engines to full, vanishing from that accursed system once and for all. Sylvas took one more step into the room, only for Rania and Saizen to have to rush in and catch him when his legs gave out beneath him. It felt as though he was moving in slow motion as he turned his head between the two of them, Rania overwhelmed and joyous. 

They’d made it.