Chapter 23
When I discovered my affinity, I was unsurprised. The aspect of shadow, of operating with the majority of my faculties hidden from sight, was already something that I was accustomed to. One might look upon me and my history and assume that I am the type of person who walks proudly into any situation, trusting in my own personal power to carry me forward. This is not the case. If one only has enemies that are weaker than oneself, then there is no longer any challenge in life. Your skills cannot be honed by sparring against the feeble. As I never lose, being able to defeat more powerful enemies without resorting to brute force has always been a requirement. Shadow was a most fitting affinity for me to manifest, not because I am in any way underhanded, but because shadows exist everywhere on the periphery, and that has always been my position, on the outside, looking in.
Even now, with an empire at my feet, there is a distance between me and my servants. If the empire is the body, then I, the emperor, am the shadow of it, rising up greater and darker than the thing itself. Moreover, while you see me now in my completion, I was not always so. Earlier in my life, it was a necessity for me to conduct my business without being observed, to avoid the attention of those who would move against me, and to preserve allies who might take offense at my own mounting strength and fear that it might be turned against them instead of my foes. Ever have I been a shadow, lit from within. As to my affinity for fire, this too was entirely predictable. From the moment that I was born, I have had a burning in me. Ambition. Greatness. These are things that must be seized and directed, or they will burn their bearer to ashes.
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
Sylvas’ ship returned. A glimmering speck against the void. Slipping back into real space once more. This close, Hector could feel the portal tearing open, the resonance of the universe that Sylvas had found his way into. Null-space was blocked by the enemy interdiction, teleportation was impossible, and with it, faster-than-light travel, except for the fact that Sylvas had not taken his ship into null-space. Null-space was just the plane of existence that everyone used to travel. Sylvas had chosen a different plane, one that was not subject to any enemy spells, one so personal that nobody else in the universe even knew it existed. He had taken his ship, his crew, and everything aboard into Cold Storage.
The personal pocket plane, where mages could stow away their belongings when they didn’t want to carry them. It was one of the simplest pieces of magic that most mages of the fifth circle learned, and he had turned it into a replacement for one of the most complex. The more that was stored in that pocket plane, the more mana was required to maintain it, and to return things from it. There was many a mage throughout history who had tried to carry something with too great a mass and never been able to pull it back out. But Sylvas had just carried a whole ship through it.
A message crackled through as Sylvas emerged. “Engage solar shields.”
It was nonsensical. Casting a filter over their ships to block light when they were plunging into absolute darkness would leave them blind. Yet without fail, every captain of every ship did as they were ordered.
Which was when Sylvas delivered his prize. He had not risked travel through cold storage for the enjoyment of a quick jaunt away. He had gone to collect something that he needed, and now he stood in the command circle of his ship, slick with sweat and shaking with the effort as he tore a hole in reality and brought it through.
The rift in space ahead of Sylvas’ ship opened, and from it there shone a blinding light. His tiny ship became a silhouette and then vanished as the rift opened wider and wider, and more of the light came pouring out.
Gravity disruptions rocked both fleets as Sylvas twisted the fabric of reality out of shape. Well-drilled formations of Dominion ships were hit by waves of gravity, flinging them into each other. The Empyrean fleet, already plunging headlong towards the anomaly, hit and bounced from one crest of gravity disruption to the next, surfing along the top of it.
And then Sylvas was done. He had ripped a hole wide enough to disgorge the full sun that he had plucked from the nearest system and carried off in his pocket back into real space.
The star did what it had always done. It blazed with light. The shadow shield, impenetrable until now, sizzled on contact with the light, but it didn’t break.
Sylvas had two of his grad-student crew at his side, holding him upright as he almost toppled from the exhaustion of his last feat. His whole body shook from his efforts. Mira had felt pretty confident in her calculations, but she wasn’t the one who had to feel what it was like, carrying the weight of a star tethered to her soul. Clumsily, with half-numb hands, he pushed the crew away, gesturing vaguely off towards their stations but forcing a smile of thanks. He could stand under his own power, and his work was not yet done.
Holding out his hands towards the star dominating the viewports across the front of the bridge, Sylvas reached out with his will.
Flares erupted from the star’s corona, lashing against the shield. Searing it away, but it still wasn’t enough. More light, more power; Sylvas could break this.
The fleet caught up to his ship’s position, still surging forward, and without needing to be told, the pilot assumed their position back at the head of the formation, sending them plunging forward towards both star and shield.
All around Sylvas, gravity worked. He could feel the pull of every distant star, and the one closest to him. He could feel the attraction between every single thing that had mass, like invisible threads drawing everything together in a vast woven tapestry. This was his affinity, and while he might have been able to use any magic and have it obey his words, gravity answered to him like a loyal servant. He reached past the star, past the shield, and he found the Eyes of the Beast. Each of the black holes alone could have served his purpose, but with the two of them there, positioned perfectly beside one another, the next part was almost easy. Through his two eidolons, he cast a gravity spike into each one of them.
The whole fleet, already plunging down into the gravity well of the eyes, suddenly lurched forward. The enemy fleet, already burning fuel to maintain their positions, found themselves dragged backwards towards the shadow shield. None of these things mattered. What mattered was the tipping point, when the star that he had carried here could no longer resist the black holes’ pull and began to sink.
The flares had seared the shadow shield without breaking it, but now the full weight of a star came down on it. The shadows danced away at its approach, lashing out with a terrified fervor as though they could smother the fire of a sun, but for all of his power, there were still some inevitabilities that Blackstar could not avoid. Where the sun touched the shadow shield, it broke.
The light seared out across its surface, chasing all the darkness away, and for the first time, Sylvas and the Empyrean fleet laid eyes on the Nexus.
The two black holes dominated the system, vast and as invisible as the shield had been, but lit all around by a halo of the light that they were eating. The planet itself was tiny in comparison to those cosmic bodies. If they hadn’t already known that it was there, it would have been quite possible to overlook it.
One of the bridge crew zoomed in their view. The planet was as desolate a rock as Sylvas had ever seen, surrounded by a fragmented cloud of shattered pieces peeling away from its surface. It should have been dust with the forces being exerted on it by the black holes, but instead, it was just a barren husk of a world, bare stone crisscrossed with cracks and chasms. What the stone was, Sylvas couldn’t say; it was dark and silicate, and the places where it broke off all seemed as jagged as shattered slate, but it matched no material he could think of except for that which the vaults had been made from. Whether it was the source of that material, or if it was some otherworldly substance conjured by the raw magic of the aions, he couldn’t even guess. There was no rotation to the world, and no hope of ingress from any direction except straight ahead. If they tried approaching either side of it, the pull of the black holes would no longer be balanced, and they’d be hauled off to meet oblivion. Maybe with some very perilous piloting, it would be possible to head somewhere else along the vertical axis, but there was nothing to see and nowhere to go.
The Dominion may have made this place their secret base of operations, but in terms of infrastructure, there were defensive trenches dug and a cleared space for ships to touch down and little else.
“Take us down,” Sylvas ordered, glancing at his other screens to see how the rest of the fleet was faring behind them.
The occupying forces of the Dominion had been taken by surprise. Even if they had been warned that Sylvas would find a way to break the impenetrable shield surrounding the base, that was a very different situation from seeing it actually done. That surprise had produced an interruption in the bombardment of the Empyrean fleet, which had allowed them to slip entirely behind enemy lines. Even as they passed by the back of the enemy fleet, the ships at the rear of the Empyrean flotilla began to turn, momentum and gravity still carrying them onward towards the black holes, even as their ships pivoted to face the Dominion.
It was here that Ironfist’s dwarves and what was left of the Technocratic Union would make their stand. There was no way that they could hold back the entirety of the Dominion fleet, and they weren’t meant to. They were just there to slow them down. Sylvas had explained that to both Ironfist and the specter of Greenmantle personally. That there was no expectation for this rearguard to actually hold the line, that all that they were going to do was buy time. The Union had no issues with it; most of their forces were drones and constructs like the one that had replaced Greenmantle, but the dwarves were another matter. Sylvas didn’t think he’d ever met anyone, outside of the most hedonistic fiends, who loved life as much as his dwarvish friends. The idea of asking them to die for him made him sick to his stomach. Yet he did ask, and Ironfist thumped his namesake into his chest with an unsettling fervor.
He could hear the dwarf now over the comms, singing. Some ancient dwarvish war ballad, about some hopeless last stand. The metallic clang of the old dwarf’s fist on the arm of the captain’s chair the only musical accompaniment to his voice. Then the other dwarves on the other ships picked it up. They sang the harmonies, and they howled and thumped. For the first time, Sylvas hoped that the enemy were tuned into their comms lines. So they could hear what they were about to face.
He turned his own attention forward again to the next spectacle about to unfold.
The star that he had borrowed and carried here was coming apart. It had done its job, burning through the shield that hid the Nexus from the universe, and now it was retiring. The two black holes had been dragging it closer and closer, but now whisps of flame, corona, and plasma that had been merely teased away from the star to begin with, now flooded out from its surface to spiral off into the Eyes.
This tiny planet nestled between two black holes was bathed in light for the first time in millennia, but it would not last. Already, the star was beginning to lose its cohesion as the opposing forces of the two black holes ripped at it. What had been a spherical nuclear furnace became elliptical as it was stretched and elongated. Each end of the star became a vortex, spinning off light and flame into the hungering nothingness.
It stretched out thinner and thinner as Sylvas and the fleet plunged on towards it, twirling and twisting as it was contorted apart. Spinning out the star into spaghetti before finally, as the fleet plunged on into the emptied space, it snapped.
All of this time, Sylvas had been hearing about the mythical Starbreaker. The Starbreaker had been at the center of the prophecy, at the center of all their hopes for the future. Not once had it occurred to him to ask why they’d named him the star breaker. Now, they all knew. Now, there couldn’t be any denying who he was.
Something out there in the dark echoed. Sylvas was staggered by it, the sudden exposure of it in such proximity, singing to him like nothing had ever sung before. He moved without thinking, without speaking, casting a teleportation spell, altered to send him through his own pocket dimension instead of null-space, bursting back out into reality outside in the freezing void of space, face to face with what the death of the star had revealed. It looked and felt, for the most part, like a world soul. Like the miniature version that rested inside his body. Even now in its dying throes, it was connected to every other star in the universe, mana flowing into it and out from it, spreading in every direction at once. Just as the star had radiated light, the soul radiated magic. He reached out his hand, pulling with his will and gravity, and it came to him. There was no time for surgeries now, no time for clever tricks; there was only his faith, and the knowledge that the power that was in him, and the power that made up the universe was one and the same. The star soul flooded down into him, down through the veins he’d carved into his body so long ago. Drawn to the world soul inside him. It burned all the way down, but he held steady. He trusted that he would survive, and that his instincts hadn’t led him astray.
I’m so glad you asked my opinion on this course of action, darling. I would most definitely have said to do it. I’m certainly not seething at your suicidal…
Sylvas shut her out, focusing on the feeling. Ignoring the pain, the fear, and anything else as the star passed into him, into the world soul, and then bloomed.
He was already overwhelmed by the mana flooding into him from the world soul—he had only just gotten a handle on it and how much more he could now do. It had opened him up to the full spectrum of magic. Like a door being opened that he hadn’t even known was there. The star soul tore down the wall that door had been built in. Before, Sylvas had been drawing mana into his circles and trapping it there in a pool. Now, he didn’t need to. As the star soul took root, he was connected to all the mana flowing throughout the infinite universe.
The world soul and the star soul had both merged into one, but so too had Sylvas’ own core. There was no longer a distinction between the parts within him. The constructed shapes of mana that he’d used to become a mage had all been blended and combined into this new, glowing wholeness.
It took a thought to tear his way back through space onto the bridge of his ship. To the crew, he had been gone for only a moment, but time seemed to have dilated as he absorbed the soul and merged it with his own.
Then they were off again, plunging down towards the planet’s surface along the only trajectory that kept the opposing forces of the two black holes at bay. The Vengeance shook as both of the Eyes tried to take and tear it apart, but they had known the forces that they’d be up against when doing the redesign. The hull held, and if it shed a little paint or a few superfluous parts, then Sylvas was fine with the loss.
Distantly, he could hear the dwarf song reach a fever pitch and battle with the Dominion fleet being joined, but there was no time to spare for thoughts of the dying. Not if he wanted to make sure that they didn’t all join them. As desolate as the Nexus world was, it was certainly not abandoned. It seemed as though every ridge and crevasse of the planetary surface had been stuffed with weaponry, and familiar constructs began to rise up from the surface, even as Sylvas plunged them down amongst them. The orbital platforms that the aions had constructed to defend their vaults were here, taken down and taken over by Blackstar’s minions, and they drifted up now to intercept the incoming fleet. Sylvas didn’t have time to waste on them. He fired off a single shot at each of them as they broke through the little planet’s tiny atmosphere, and each one of those shining white lances was empowered now with so much mana it made the spells and rituals he’d performed for most of his life seem comically underpowered. Each shot killed one of the platforms, raw magic erupting out across the graven patterns on their surface in a brief flash before the stone itself could no longer contain so much power.
The fleet dove for the planet’s surface amidst swirls of stone dust and destruction so dense that even the weapons platforms down on the surface couldn’t pierce it. Shots were fired up at them, dozens, then hundreds of spells unleashed to intercept them as they fell, but not once did Sylvas falter in his course. A gravity shear surrounded the Vengeance, and as they fell in towards the single course leading down to the planet, narrowing their formation down to a singular stream of ships, it protected everyone close behind. Farther back, shields were raised, and ships were hit, but here at the tip of the arrow being shot into the heart of the Nexus, they moved with the invulnerability of those who could not be touched.
Off in the night, far behind them, Ironfist fought on. The massive weight of the Dominion’s fleet was closing in around them, the one roadblock to them hitting the Empyrean from behind. Their magic fell on the dwarves’ shields like a hammer, but with the Technocratic Union welding their ships together into a single cohesive block, they were an anvil. Shaken by the falling thunder but unbroken. Over and over, they were struck, but they held. They made no effort to fight back. Killing was not their purpose. They existed to survive, to resist, to endure. As the dwarves across all their myriad worlds and moons had always done.
