Chapter 14

“While there’s plenty of evidence pointing to completely contradictory things about the aions, there are a few specific details about them that we have been able to narrow down. They were most likely bipedal with vertical symmetry and a height range similar to most contemporaneous sapient species still alive today. There is significant evidence that their biology was altered at some point in their history to create a hardier species, with some notation even suggesting that they were capable of surviving for long periods of time in the vacuum of space, along with various other hostile environments. So much of what made the aions themselves was not about their biology, but about their culture and their relationship with magic. 

While other species may make use of magic, I would argue that the aion relationship with it was much more akin to what we observe with the eidolons. There was a direct interaction between aion biology and magic itself. This seems to have manifested in the physical assembly of their bodies. They may have had organs that drew sustenance directly from magic, and they may have been physically protean in the manner of eidolons, with bodies that were shaped according to their desires and will to fulfil whatever function they desired of them at any given point in time. My personal belief is that these bipedal creatures most likely had physical channels throughout their body, which mana could flow into and through—as has been mimicked by certain embodiments. 

How this interacts with the vast quantities of etherium found everywhere that one might have expected to find remains from the aions has yet to be discovered, but there can be no denying that there is some connection between the two. In terms of appearance, it is quite possible that the aions looked much like you or I, albeit with some degree of discoloration depending upon the extent to which non-biological materials were integrated into their bodies during the period in time where they made alterations to their biological systems.”

—Who Was Here? The Aion Odyssey, Rania Clarendon

“Well, that was embarrassing.” Kaya nudged Sylvas awake. He’d been dumped in a chair on the bridge while Ironfist and the other dwarves got on with the important business of making the ship stop leaking its atmosphere. He had heard some fragments of a plan to regroup, but exhaustion had carried him down into the darkness once more. He had woken up somewhere else entirely, what he had to assume was the sick-bay of the ship, given all the wounded dwarves on every other bed.

Sylvas groaned as his body reminded him that, enhanced or not, even it had limits. “The ass-kicking?”

“The ass-kicking. The asymmetrical ass-kicking,” Kaya grumbled on. “You know I don’t mind a good scrap. Don’t mind an asymmetrical ass kicking either, but I do like to be the one on the kicking side when it’s asymmetrical.”

Every muscle in his body seemed to be thrumming. “Can’t say I’m a big fan of being the ass either.”

Kaya rambled on as if he hadn’t made a sound. “All this time, I’ve been talking you up, saying you can knock old Blackstar’s teeth down his throat, and then he…”

“I mean, he did lose an arm.”

“Like one of his wee minions didn’t grow it back the minute we left.” Kaya shoved him so hard he nearly fell off the bed. “Besides, that was your bitch, not you.”

I am choosing not to take offense at that.

Sylvas had made it to an upright sitting position, but he regretted it entirely. “How long was I out?” 

“Long enough for this hunk of junk to stop leaking air.” Kaya seemed to be oddly cheerful, probably because she was surrounded by dwarves again. That always seemed to bring out the worst in her.

Seven hours. The worst of the damage caused by your… conversation with the emperor has been repaired, and they’ve made three separate jumps through null-space to evade pursuit, darling.

“I want to get out of here.” Sylvas turned to get his feet on the ground, only for Kaya’s hand to clamp down on his knee.

“Better to stay put, stanzbuhr,” Kaya told him. “Shouldn’t have even woke you.”

Sylvas glanced sideways at her. “Since when does Kaya Runemaul stay put?”

She leaned in closer. “Since she was technically a traitor to the Empyrean and doesn’t really want anyone seeing her and remembering that?”

Sylvas chuckled. “If they were going to arrest us, I’m pretty sure they’d have done it while we were unconscious.”

“I reckon they’ve forgot,” Kaya confided. “With the explosions and all.”

“I suspect it is probably less significant now that we’ve saved all their lives?”

“Nah, they’ve forgot.” Kaya shook her head. “They’ll remember at the worst possible moment. Just you watch.”

Sylvas spun around the other way to get his feet on the floor. “Well, in that case, I’m not going to stay put and let them catch me.”

“We’re on their ship, stanzbuhr,” Kaya grumbled, darkly. “Not like there’s anywhere to run.”

“Still going to try,” he called back over his shoulder on the way out.

He’d spent entirely too much time in sickbays and infirmaries since leaving home, and he had no intention of lying there with nothing but his thoughts. Not now that there were so many of them that he wanted to avoid. It had been bad enough thinking that fate had chosen him to be the Starbreaker, when the survival of the universe had fallen on his shoulders by happenstance, but the idea that his creation had been engineered. That his whole world had died according to someone’s design…

Thinking about it was just going to lead him down a spiral of thoughts and memories that he did not want to travel. He needed to focus on the future, not the past. He needed to think about something productive. Something he could do, so he wasn’t just standing around, treading water. They had to go to the Nexus. He had to stop the eidolons. He had to stop the Dominion, too. Even if he did somehow strip them of their eidolon allies, they were going to be a massive problem. 

Especially Blackstar. 

Blackstar, who had seeded worlds with fragmentary knowledge of magic and a scattering of etherium, so that they’d kill themselves, all in the hopes of creating someone like Sylvas. How many worlds had died to make him? When the Ardent had first arrived at Croesia, they’d told him it was a constant struggle, rushing to all the uncontacted worlds that were generating incursions, seemingly without any logic to it.

His feet carried him through the ship, not towards the bridge where all of the great decisions would be made and the fate of the future would be decided, but instead, off into the depths of the ship, following senses that he couldn’t even fully describe through the corridors and passages that led him to a blank door. He raised his hand to knock, and it slid open, revealing Rania inside, just about to step out.

“Oh!” She leapt back from the doorway in surprise, then sprang forward again to wrap her arms around him. “You’re alright.”

“I’m alright.” He managed a smile.

She saw right through him. “No. Of course you’re not. That was a stupid thing to say. With everything that has happened, how could anyone be alright—”

He interrupted her to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Are you alright?”

“Me? I’m fine! I just came along for the ride. Nobody tried to rip out my… anything.” She trailed off.

Sylvas moved to try and catch her eyes as she stared past him, speaking softly. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t difficult for you. Or frightening.”

She finally met his gaze and seemed to deflate slightly. “I was mostly worried about you.”

He didn’t do anything as intrusive as scrying her, but he did let his senses quietly play over her body, searching for anything untoward. “You aren’t hurt?”

She took hold of his hand and told him firmly. “I never want to do the lightning thing again.”

“It isn’t very pleasant or safe,” he conceded.

“But apart from that… I think I’m good?”

They both stood there in the doorway for a moment before Sylvas realized that there was an awkward silence brewing. “Sorry… I interrupted you. You were going somewhere.”

She rolled her eyes. “I was coming to see you. Idiot.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to come inside?” She stepped back, dragging him along.

He let her lead him in without complaint. “Please.”

There wasn’t much in the way of creature comforts in the dwarf-built ship. It might have been considerably larger than the Folly—Sylvas felt a pang of sadness realizing he’d lost it again—but the same general design was followed through. Many sharp angles and blocky-looking designs, and very little concession to the fact that the ship was going to be containing living creatures that might have wanted breathing room. There was a chair and a fold-down bed in Rania’s room, and that was about it. He sat in the chair, trying not to be presumptuous.

“Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Thanks.” She chuckled. “I got randomly assigned it.”

“Did I miss anything important while I was…out?”

“No, nothing much. We ran. Jumped around a lot. I caught the council up on everything that has happened since you last spoke. What’s left of the council…”

“Who survived?”

“Ironfist. Mostly. A few of the others had advisors ready to take over for them if they… Hector has been doing a lot. I think he might be the head of the council now, with Elenya Starweaver gone. Nobody else seems to want the job.”

Sylvas let out a heavy sigh. The Dominion had so many covenant mages, and they had so few to begin with. The loss of even one was devastating. The loss of almost the whole council was probably the death knell for the whole Empyrean.

“I think uh… you and Kaya might be councilors now? They weren’t entirely clear, but they said something about stepping up, which I’d guess…”

“Oh, hell no.” Sylvas accidentally channeled the voice of Kaya in response to that news.

“They said something about Veilbohr marking you as his successor?”

“He what?” Sylvas realized he was shouting before getting his tone back under control. “He must have still been feeling guilty about the seekers infiltrating it… Wait… Do I own a university now?”

Rania chuckled. “I used to ask who I had to sleep with at one of the big universities to get my digs funded… I guess that’s you now.”

“Congratulations, you’re head of the archaeology department. And whatever else you want. Actually, maybe you could run the whole thing? I don’t know the first thing about higher education administration.”

“At least we’ll be busy if the universe doesn’t end.”

“If the universe doesn’t end, I think we are entitled to at least a lifetime’s worth of holidays.”

“You’d get bored without anything blowing up around you all day.”

“I would like six months off to test that theory.”

She chuckled, then the smile slowly faded off her face as she stared at him. “So, I’ve been reading.”

“A very dangerous habit,” he said, trying to bring her smile back.

She hit him on the knee half-heartedly. “Yes, you’re very funny. Shut up and listen. I’ve been reading the stuff we retrieved from the vaults and the seekers. Not just looking at the Starbreaker stuff, but all the rest. All the incidental material. All the little side notes. The stuff the seekers didn’t bother to translate.”

“The aions are your area of interest. It makes sense that you’d want to…”

She let out another slightly strangled laugh. “Area of interest… that’s… that is funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“You’ll understand why in a second.” She took a deep breath. “So, one of the things we don’t know about the aions. One of the many things we don’t know, is what they actually looked like. We can make assumptions based on the size of the things that they left behind, and the way they designed things, but we have no biological remains. No fossils or even clothing to help work out what shape they were. But hidden in all the other information in the vaults, there have been these little fragments, and I’ve been putting them together, and I think I know what they looked like now. I think I know what the aions looked like, in the end, after they’d finished all their evolution and deliberately engineered changes and—”

Sylvas interrupted her rambling, because she seemed to need a little push to finish the thought. “What did they look like?”

She looked down. “You.”

He reached over to touch her, just under her chin. He tilted her face back up to look at him and asked, “What?”

She leaned back out of his reach. “Not exactly like you, obviously, it wasn’t a clone species of nothing but Sylvas. But they looked like… how you look. How you’ve modified your body. It is like you were following their design. Like you somehow knew what they looked like, before anyone else did, and you were trying to recreate them.”

He had been overwhelmed before, with the confusion of everything he’d learned, but now he was entirely lost. “I didn’t know anything about the aions. I couldn’t have. My embodiments started back when I was still on Croesia, when I was a kid. We didn’t even know aions existed.”

“I know!” She let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a laugh. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose. I know reading about the aions wouldn’t have had any influence that made you choose your embodiments the way that you did, even if this had been known, but… yeah. It’s weird.”

He solemnly agreed. “It is really weird.”

“And the extra weird part is, I don’t think it has anything to do with the Starbreaker stuff. I mean, there’s nothing in any of the prophecy of the writings that even suggest that you’d be like… a second coming of the Aions. There isn’t even a hint of it. It’s just like… you and them made the same choices… well, different choices… but choices that ended up with you both at the same endpoint.”

“Convergent evolution.” He’d heard the words spoken before, just after he’d completed the embodiment that gave his skin its metallic sheen. By whoever the mysterious visitor was who kept coming to him in the few quiet moments he had in his life.

“Exactly.” She looked delighted that he knew the term she’d obviously been dying to use. “You both evolved under different stresses to arrive at the same final form.”

He sat back and tried to unpick his tangled thoughts. “And you don’t think it has anything to do with me being…”

“I mean, it must, right? Even if the texts don’t say anything about it. Your life, your… It feels really weird to say destiny? Whatever it is. It is tied so closely to the aions. Surely, this is part of that? How could it be a coincidence?”

“But it is,” Sylvas tried to explain. “It was.”

“I know, but… I don’t know.” She rubbed her temples. “I guess I thought it would make you feel better, to know that some of it is destiny—or whatever you want to call it. That it wasn’t all… him.”

Bizarrely enough. It did. With just a few words, Blackstar had changed the context of everything that had happened in his life, but there were things that the emperor could not have known. Things that he could not have forced to happen. Things that were inevitable, in their own way. “Thank you.”

“Honestly, I’m just glad I had a good reason to tell you, because keeping it a secret would have made me crazy.” She grinned.

The ship lurched as they dipped back into null-space yet again. The last few jumps had been around the periphery of the Empyrean, places that the Dominion wouldn’t do too much damage to if they gave chase.

A gentle reminder that no matter how they felt, they weren’t all alone together. “I suppose I should go…”

She stood up and offered him her hand. “Universe isn’t going to save itself.”

The first step out into the corridor should have been the easiest, but it was interrupted by almost tripping over the pair of dwarves already standing there. What they lacked in height, they made up for in girth, low centers of balance, and stopping power. 

Kaya and Ironfist looked up at them in surprise, and the dwarf who had been so nervous just a half-hour before, now had a grin on her face wide enough to nearly reach her ears. “I’ve got a plan.”