Chapter 32

“While planetary annihilation can occur as a result of natural phenomena, it is unlikely. As a general rule, if there is going to be some mishap leading to a planet’s destruction, it is unlikely for the timeframe of that event to overlap with the period of its habitation, or even its observation. The universe is extremely old, and while everything can and will happen in the realm of deep time, the tiny window of space and time that we observe in the lifetimes of our civilizations are comparatively small. Which is to say, if a planet’s orbit is going to decay, leading it to collide with a star, it will either have already done so, or it will happen at so slow a rate we are unlikely to observe the moment of impact. This leaves unnatural causes for planetary annihilation as the primary focus of this paper. Destruction of the world soul is the typical observed cause for annihilation. 

Without a soul, the world no longer has a source of mana, and while in the short term this only affects a mage’s ability to cast, it soon removes the ability of the planet to support any life, and the eventual breakdown of its physical structure. World soul death is typically caused by either eidolon incursions or by necromancy disrupting the stability of the core in the latter stages of a death-mana overload. None of these cases are the subject of this paper. They are simply acknowledged so that the focus can be entirely turned to the other cases. In particular, the complete destruction of Ecclespin 9. 

The Ecclespin system is one of many on the border of the Obsidian Dominion—though it is now considered to be within their territory. Three of the planets in the system proved habitable and were settled without the consent of either the Empyrean Alliance or the Obsidian Dominion by individuals from the core systems of the Empyrean who had set out on their own with the intention of founding a new utopian society beyond the existing laws and structures. The Dominion contacted the system shortly after its settlement to demand that the colonists be removed, as they were not strictly in Empyrean territory, but the settlers either chose to ignore this communication or simply lacked the means to evacuate within the timeframe laid out.”

—Annihilation: A Case Study, Hespher Limevine

There was some degree of chaos unfolding as the Ardent plunged into the mass of regular soldiers and started bullying their way into command. It wasn’t any sort of inter-organizational posturing; it was just the inevitable result of a group of elite eidolon fighters being dropped onto a battlefield of eidolons. With the gravity mage taken care of, Sylvas plunged back down behind the protection of the formation’s shields to seek out whoever was in command. As it turned out, it was Anak. Just because he’d dropped out of the Ardent after his sister’s death, he hadn’t stopped fighting. He still looked far slimmer than any fiend should, but the years had been kind, and he was no longer emaciated so much as he was lean. He caught Sylvas by the wrist the moment that he dropped into the midst of the soldiers. “Good to see you again.”

“And you.” Sylvas mustered a smile. “Never expected I would.”

“You know how it is with us fiends…” He never got a chance to finish that sentence, as the deafening roar of an eidolon on their flank drowned out all other sound. The soldiers around them fell to their knees, clutching at their ears, while Anak and Sylvas, survivors of Ardent training and being on the receiving end of sonic attacks daily, merely stood there. Anak pointed, and Sylvas took off again.

The screaming eidolon was all mouth and flapping folds of skin. The mouth was lined with layer after layer of needle teeth, stretching down into its gaping maw as far as the eye could see, and that mouth itself hung open wide enough to encompass a whole battalion of soldiers if given the opportunity. Sylvas tossed a fireball down its gullet to shut it up. Or, at least, he tried to. The fireball slowed to a crawl as it approached the eidolon’s mouth, then halted and simmered right before it dipped past the flapping lips. The force of the scream drove the flames back, dampening them until the fireball itself shrunk and shriveled away. Sylvas blinked.

I also didn’t know that was a thing that was possible, darling.

The solution seemed simple enough. He launched himself off perpendicular to both the eidolon and the ground below, zipping around to hit it from the side. Sadly, the eidolon wasn’t willing to just let him kill it. It moved around, stumpy little legs shuffling as it traced his position, presumably by some sort of echolocation since there was nothing resembling an eye anywhere on its body that Sylvas could see. It was no longer flooring the main force of the army, but now Sylvas had to fight on two fronts, throwing up gravity shears behind him to keep the worst of the enemy fire away while also trying to outpace this eidolon’s projected screech.

He hit it with one focused gravity spike after another, all through his flight, the staccato rhythm of them falling like blows, setting the floppy skin around the eidolon’s mouth flying in every direction before its own voice blew it back out of the way again. But pummel it as he might, he just couldn’t hurt it enough to interrupt the endless scream.

Just as he was about to fling himself at the damned thing and use raw gravity to force his way down its throat and choke it, Kaya intervened. A lance of steel shot out from the midst of the battle line, piercing cleanly through the whole eidolon. The scream continued for a fraction of a gargling second as the thing bled, then it fell silent permanently. Sylvas grinned. It was easy to forget that he wasn’t the only one out there who could fight these monsters. Both Malachai and Hector were hard at work, a glow of life mana flooding across the unified armies of the Empyrean, healing injuries, bolstering energy, and getting everyone back to fighting fit. Hedgerows of brambles and jagged trees sprouted to either side of the forces, forming new buttresses that the eidolons flung themselves against hopelessly. They had a clean shot forward now, without having to delay and fight off every one of the planet-killing eidolons that had been left behind here.

Sylvas could see the change as his people, the Ardent, and all the other reinforcements from the Hammerheart ships drove forward, the revitalization of the Empyrean army. The realization that victory was at hand.

But they would not be able to just walk in and claim it, however much they might have wanted to. Up ahead, the Dominion had finally started to pour out of their fortifications. It looked like nothing more than an overturned anthill, all of their mages and soldiers swarming out to block the path. Just as Sylvas and his people had been modifying the terrain as they went to better suit them, so too did that smooth road to the vault now blister and bubble, with barricades raised and fresh trenches carved.

A titanic eidolon flung itself towards the flank of the army, and Sylvas had to throw his full will and gravity against it to keep it from crushing everyone. It was shaped like one of the war eidolons he used to fight back on Strife—a vast, solid plate for a face, and a body of interlocking, blade-edged chitin. While it had seemed to be a quadruped at first glance, now that Sylvas had pushed it back from crushing everyone, it found its footing quite comfortably on its hind legs, and the forelimbs that had looked just like the plodding tree-trunk limbs of all its kind now shifted, some plates contracting together and others being pushed painfully out into claws. This was something Sylvas knew how to deal with, at least. When it swung for him, he conjured a gravity shear blade, riddled with destruction and fire, and he carved clean through the claws trying to slash him from the sky. 

Sylvas did not think that eidolons felt pain the way that other creatures did, but they certainly knew rage. When the first swipe of claws ended in a hasty manicure, the eidolon stomped forward, swiping at him, again and again. He could cleave the claws without worry, but these hooked swipes would have brought the limbs crashing into him afterwards, and so he launched himself in a backwards loop out of its reach, only to realize at the last moment that he was essentially inviting the thing to chase him and trample on into the army below. He threw himself out of the loop and into a wild shot forward, inside the monster’s reach, forcing it onto the back foot if it still wanted to catch him. The two forelimbs seemed to dislocate at the shoulders with wet and crunching sounds to sweep in behind him in a titanic bear hug, but once more, being so small and being so fast saved him. He shot up, past the bladed face of the eidolon and over its shoulder.

There was a gap in the armor there, where it had over-extended to try to crush him, and that was where he hit it. Not with some grandiose lethal spell, but with a long chain of focused gravity spikes, one after another, as fast as he could cast them. The forelimb reaching out from that shoulder twisted and contorted out to the eidolon’s side as the mechanical connections of musculature were mangled and torn, and then with one last rapid-fire casting, it snapped cleanly off. The damage done to the connective tissue was too great for it to hang on any more. It fell towards the soldiers below, and Sylvas was already reaching to catch it when he saw Cookie leaping out to snap it in her jaws, savaging it like a terrier, before casting it aside, then launching back into Hector at the front of the army.

With an open wound gaping like that, all Sylvas had to do then was reach out and pull. The first eidolon he’d bonded was the Red Wolf, and its mastery of blood knew no match. This thing bled, so it was done. In the rankings of the Empyrean, the wolf wouldn’t have come close to the Tier-7 status of this towering monster, but it had grown wildly in strength since bonding with Sylvas, just as he had. It could stand tall and compete with the best of them now.

He tore all the blood from the Eidolon’s body, as Hector and Malachai cast spells of life, entombing its teetering lower half in vines and roots to pin its corpse in place so that it couldn’t topple. Gathering that blood up, Sylvas sent it out in a wave to rain down over the Dominion soldiers. It was his blood now, soaking into their clothes, spattering over their panicked fortifications. When the time came, he would command it to rise up and fight for him, piercing them, draining them, making their blood his, too.

Flitting back down, Sylvas met up with the others at the head of the procession. All except Kaya, who was still wading her way back through the crowd after her lancing of the screaming boil. Malachai greeted him with a nod, while Vaelith, who seemed to have assumed command of the whole operation, caught him by the sleeve and jerked him down to earth in the midst of the press of bodies. “One last push, and we’re there. We know it, and that means they know it, too.”

“Desperate times,” Hector agreed. “They’ll pull out all the stops.”

Anak scoffed. “How much more do they have to give?”

At the foot of the vault, in the shadow of the obelisk, Blackstar rose, borne up on wings of shadow and flame. Sylvas only spotted him on the periphery of his vision, head jerking around as he realized the significance. Rania followed his line of sight. “Oh, this can’t be good.”

Sylvas started casting at almost the same moment Blackstar did, using all of his eidolons to instantly cast, throwing out layer after layer of gravity shears, stretching them out as wide as he dared, trying to cover the whole army at once. Knowing even as he cast that it wasn’t going to be enough. He yelled over the clamor of battle, “Brace yourselves!”

Every mage who could cast a shield threw one up ahead of them, but even as they did, Sylvas could feel a lurch in his stomach, warning that it wouldn’t be enough. The flames gathered between the distant emperor’s hands shone bright as a star already, and still, he was layering on more and more. Through the star-soul, Sylvas could feel all of the fire mana on the whole planet being drained away. He reached out to try and cut it off, the way that he had with Bael, but when he reached out with his own magic to grab for it, he found the inevitable pull of the spell hauling on him, too, draining the fire mana out of his core, and sucking more in through the star-soul from across the cosmos. The best he could do was to cut that off before Blackstar managed to gain full access. Stopping the casting was beyond his skill.

The blinding white flame rose from Blackstar’s hands, expanding even before he’d unleashed it. And then his casting was complete, and it detonated.

Fire swept out across the world, an unstoppable thermonuclear explosion of impossible heat. The roar of flames was deafening, and the sight of the explosion was blinding. Sylvas’ eyes regenerated just in time for him to see the rear ranks of the Dominion’s occupying army consumed. The ball of fire expanded out, chasing the shockwaves of its detonation, burning everything away. All of the Dominion existed to serve its emperor, and every person serving in his army must have expected that one day they might be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, but none of them could possibly have guessed that he’d throw their lives away so casually.

Rank by rank, barricade by trench, the Dominion’s army was washed away in the relentless flood of flame. The eidolons that marched beside them were seared away into nothingness by the impossible heat. The hunting shikari sizzled and popped as it passed over them. Nothing would survive Blackstar’s flame. Nothing could. It burned as hot as a star, and it expanded on and on. Fortifications melted to slag. Those few soldiers of the Dominion who realized what was coming fled to the skies, only to find that the explosion could not be outrun.

Blackstar had killed them all rather than risk defeat.

In less time than it took to draw a breath, the Dominion army was gone, and the expanding sphere of flaming death was rushing across the brief stretch of no-man’s land. Every shield that they had raised melted away. Sylvas’ gravity shears were nothing in the face of such wanton destruction.

There was only one moment left before the end, and Sylvas moved, wrapping his arms around Rania, as if his body could shield her from the oncoming fire.

All around him, people screamed. Friends, family, and strangers alike. Then the flames reached them.

Sylvas had been burned before. It used to be a regular part of training against Hammerheart, but as the explosion passed over him, the sensation was unfamiliar. His nerves must have died too quickly for him to experience the pain, because he couldn’t even feel any heat. If anything, the lapping of flames across his skin felt mostly… ticklish. He opened his eyes, discovering that he still had eyes, and he gazed around in amazement.

To either side of the Empyrean formation, the destruction was apocalyptic. The stone itself had been turned to lava, churned up by the passage of the explosion into whipped peaks of molten destruction. Everything that had lived was vaporized in the terrible heat, and still the explosion washed out farther and farther. Turning his head, he could still see it moving past, they were still inside of it, but while it was blazing with flames and heat, there was one wedge of it, stretching back from where he stood, that was untouched. The ground below was still solid stone, and the screaming and terrified people were unharmed. He saw the tail end of the explosion wash past the rear of the army, watched the blue flames licking over the people there and doing no harm.

It was impossible. None of their shields had done a thing. No magic he could have conjured would have stopped the explosion. He twisted back around, and finally, he understood.

At the head of the Empyrean army, Hammerheart stood with one hand extended out towards the emperor. The rumors about him had circulated ever since he left the Ardent. The religious devotion with which he had applied himself to the study of peace instead of war. The way that his affinity for flame had inverted, until people spoke in whispers of the Monk of the Frozen Flame. It was the frozen flame that had washed over them all, doing no harm. It was Ingir Hammerheart who had saved them.

The explosion carried on across the world for a few moments longer, scorching everything into a twisted hellscape, but the screams of terror had become whoops of triumph as more and more of the Empyrean troops realized that they were still alive. Sylvas let Rania go, stepping back for an instant to get a look at her, to see her whole and unharmed, and then he launched himself forward. 

The explosion died as swiftly as it had come, a mushroom-shaped cloud rising up above Blackstar to block sight of the vault beyond and the stars above. Hammerheart stayed standing for just a moment longer, then toppled. 

Sylvas caught him before he could hit the ground. Tears streamed down the dwarf’s face, and he shook with the agonies that he’d subjected himself to willingly, but when he saw Sylvas, his face cracked into a smile. “You live.”

“Thanks to you.” Sylvas lowered him carefully to the ground, a jagged wedge of solid stone surrounded on both sides by molten lava.

“My debt to you… will never be…” Hammerheart was fading before Sylvas’ eyes. He had drained himself completely of mana to perform his miracle, and Sylvas didn’t even know how to invert flame mana to feed into him and preserve his life. So he did the only thing he could.

“Your debt is forgiven. You’ve done more than… I forgive you, whatever wrongs…” Sylvas was surprised to find that he was crying. He didn’t even know he still could. “This is what you’ll be remembered for.”

For a moment, it seemed Hammerheart might have something more to say, but when his lips parted again, there was no breath. He slipped limp from Sylvas’ grasp to lie on the stone.

Sylvas rose to his feet over the broken body of his old bully and swiped the tears from his face. There would be time for grief when this was all done.

Death mana flooded him. All the fallen soldiers of the Dominion, the eidolons who had roamed this world freely, the separate force of Empyrean troops that the elves had been leading, the shikari, those who’d stayed with the ships. The death toll, even with Hammerheart’s sacrifice, was unthinkable. The whole world lay dead around them.

In the distance, Blackstar sank back down to stand before the obelisk. Waiting for him.

He could not be allowed to cast again.

The others would follow after, but it would take them time to ready themselves, to forge a path across the molten ruin. Sylvas did not have any need to delay. He tore a hole through reality and stepped through to face his enemy.