Chapter 41

“To be limitless is the end goal of any mage. But to achieve that, most construct a cage around themselves. Dangers they will not face. Things that they will not do. Magic that they will not use. Counterproductive.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

Sylvas had to maintain a palm on the controls or the door would stop opening, but that did nothing to stop him talking to his team. The screeching of metal did interfere with that a bit, but before the doors were close to being wide enough open for them to move in, everyone had heard, “Ambushers on the roof just inside the chamber. Two or three.”

He was a little annoyed that he couldn’t tell exactly how many there were, but their irregular size and the weird consistency of bone was making it hard for him to get a clear read. On the plus side, his last scan when he’d spiked gravity had combined with his mental map to let him know this was the last stretch of outer ring before they hit the next pylon.

The skeletal reapers came lunging down out of the dark like birds of prey, only to collide with a surprisingly solid shield that Bael had cast. The same microfractures that had plagued Sylvas as he learned to master his embodiment appeared all over their skeletal remains after that. And every blow dealt or spell cast seemed to have no trouble digging into those points of weakness and blowing them apart. He gave the elf a grateful nod, but it was brushed off with more of his usual silly over-the-top politeness. Good, it seemed like their earlier disagreement would be forgotten.

Clearing that final section was easy enough, and Sylvas senses, stretched out into the next chamber, seemed to confirm that they would not be facing another ambush. Or at least, not a skeletal one. If there were mages in there, and they’d found a way to mask themselves from his gravity sense, then Malachai and his team were smarter than they had any right to be.

Seeing no point in dawdling, Sylvas pressed his hands to the controls once more. 

“Wait.” Sylvas looked up, startled to see Havran in front of him. The man seemed to fade from view constantly, even when he wasn’t actively turning invisible. Like he’d made being uninteresting into an arcane power. “I’ll go through first, look and see.”

“Your incorporeal form protects you from physical objects, not energy. If you get hit with a spell…”

“I die, same as anyone else.” Havran had never seemed terribly brave, and he didn’t seem any braver now, just more accepting. “Difference is, they aren’t expecting me. That door starts to open, they’re definitely expecting all of you.”

Normally, Sylvas would have looked to the others for their opinion, but they had set about their usual tasks with the energy of people who’d just seen what a successful ambush looked like. Nobody wanted to be the next Orson and Luna. This was up to him. He sighed, “Do it. Quick.”

Removing his hand from the controls, he waited, still stretching out with his senses for any hint of trouble ahead. In the still dead silence, Havran shimmered out of sight and stepped through the solid metal of the door. The silence stretched. Moments passing by. Time crawling, as they waited for his return.

It was just getting long enough that Sylvas was ready to crack open the door and go in all-spells-blazing when Havran burst back through. Flung with some force and nearly sinking cleanly through the floor of the corridor before he managed to reassert himself as solid. The moment he touched down, Sylvas saw the ruin that had been made of him. The front of his chest was frothing with blood – punctured lungs – and his guts were perforated too judging by the sewage smell. He was trying to speak, still trying to warn them of what was ahead, still trying to do his duty. Sylvas put a hand over his bloody mouth to still him. “Shh. It’s okay. You did good. Just… rest for now.”

The spasms that had been racking Havran slowed, the manic terror in his eyes faded, and then he went still. Dead. The Crest enveloped him.

Sylvas stood. “Bael, front and center. I’ll shield. Kaya, open the door.”

“Are you certain that we don’t just backtrack?” Bael was quick to suggest.

Sylvas drew himself up and readied his Gravity Shear. “Malachai doesn’t want us going this way, and that’s reason enough to go this way.”

Kaya had the good sense not to argue with Sylvas after a glimpse of his expression. She went to the controls and started the process of opening the next lock.

The screeching of metal, the roar of machinery, Sylvas heard none of it over the rush of blood in his ears. He’d done this. He’d sent Havran through, knowing the man’s potential weaknesses. Knowing that this was the risk. He’d done it anyway, because it could have bought them an advantage. He was as cold as Hammerheart had ever been. Just as willing to sacrifice others for his goals. It made him sick to his stomach. But he wasn’t letting that sacrifice be for nothing.

Gravity Shear formed between him and the door, up ahead of Bael, whispering dust and fragments of bone up and away to flow around them. The rest of the squad, barring Kaya, slipped into position behind him to benefit from the protection of the shield. The door was barely open a crack before they saw it. The arcane landmine beartrap that had been laid in their path.

It was a chaotic roiling mass of death mana. A hovering sphere of flickering black and green, like a tiny dead sun, unleashing flare after flare of razor thin energy in every direction, scarring the metalwork of the next chamber, blackening it and aging it wherever it touched. The ribbons of lethal energy swept out through the gap between the doors and washed over Sylvas shield.

Kaya ducked as one death-flare crackled off in her direction. Where it slammed into the controls, they aged a decade before their eyes, ancient technology long preserved by the canopic jar of this space station suddenly hammered with the passing of time. Sylvas didn’t need to think. “Get behind the shield.”

“Door won’t open if…” Sylvas slammed one of his orbitals into the button to open the door. Pinning it down.

Ironeyes echoed Sylvas’ words. “Behind the shield.”

She had to duck and weave her way through the flares as they came, looping around the front side of the shield so that it didn’t just launch her aside the same way it did everything else. Sylvas mana was draining fast, but he couldn’t let their only protection falter. Who knew what anyone else’s attempts at a shield might do when struck by raw death. Gravity had the virtue of being eternal, immortal and unchanging, any other affinity might be wisped away to nothing.

Safely secured, Kaya elbowed her way up to Bael. “What is it, how do we undo it?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Bael answered with unabashed awe. “Some fragmentary pieces of the spell, I recognize, but so much of it is death affinity that I’ve never even…”

He trailed off, still lost in admiration. Sylvas had no patience for it. Not now. Between the chanted words of his shield he barked, “Solutions?”

Bael was rambling mostly to himself. “There’s a recursive element, each time it deals harm it will be empowered with the release of death mana, anything that we cast at it is liable to be absorbed as fuel and expand it further. Given time to study it, I believe we may be able to create a counterspell, but the time to study it… we do not have the mana to keep it shielded that long.”

Sylvas managed to get a personality fragmented off to maintain the shield, even though it made his head ache shunting so much control off into one shard. “Pull everyone back.”

Bael still couldn’t be made to shut up. “It would not be in our best interests for you to sacrifice yourself in some sort of foolish, guilt-riddled display of…”

Sylvas voice came out in a growl. “Pull. Back.”

Kaya caught his eye just long enough for her to feel confident he wasn’t going to self-destruct, then grabbed Ironeyes and Bael by the back of their jackets. “Come on lads, let’s give him some room.”

With each passing moment, the door had spread wider. More and more of the churning orb of death had been revealed. It was as big as a man, hovering ominously in the middle of the chamber, lashing out relentlessly in every direction. It wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t be reasoned with, it couldn’t be killed.

With the last of them gone a safe distance back, Sylvas let his shield fall.

At once the seething waves of death mana started coming his way, but at this distance, he had time enough to step aside, to leap the ones at a height for his legs or duck the ones at a height for his head. Despite every instinct inside of him telling him to run, to get as far away from this lethal thing as it was possible to get, he stepped forward. He pressed in closer, all the way to the threshold of the doorway. All the way to the threshold of death. Pressing one finger to a thread on his bag, he took a deep breath and opened his Cold Storage. The spell to open the way into the parallel planes was nothing more or less than a Gravity Spike, a spike of such intensity that it punched its way through the very fabric of reality and into one next door. It was a kind of magic that he knew now came so easily to him because of his affinity, but also because of the years he had spent practicing it back on Croesia. The same magic used to open the way for the Eidolons let him punch his way through into the myriad universes were they did not exist.

He didn’t open the way in his satchel, he opened it in the heart of the death-orb.

At once, the vacuum of the empty space in his pocket dimension began pulling at it, but when that was not enough he poured in more and more mana, letting the gravity spike that should have been brief and momentary to open the way gain more and more weight. The event horizon at the center of the trap began to widen, a tiny black hole at the center of the monstrosity that had been cast before him. His hand shook as he spread his fingers wider, opening the way wider, making the hole between worlds big enough for whatever lay at the heart of this death spell to be drawn through. 

It cost too much. Too much mana, more than he had to spare, he was draining down to the dregs of his core before he felt the lurch. Before the flares of death that had been launching out seemed to stall in mid-air before being drawn back in towards the center.

He was going to burn himself out. He had overextended, and he knew that, but there was no way back now. If he didn’t keep going all of the entrapped death that he had been swallowing down into another universe would break free, explode out with the same force that he had been imploding it. It would wash over him, shred him to bones and dust. He needed more power.

So he did something insane. He fragmented his mind in two. Not into his thinking and rational mind and one fragment to maintain the spell, but into two evenly sized pieces, one continuing to cast relentlessly, and the other, which he gave control over the left side of his body. Mana flowed endlessly out from his core, through his right arm, so fast that even with the density of it in his core it was ripping through with enough pace that he’d be emptied in just a moment, but his left arm, the whole left side of him that he’d assembled the gauntlet around, lay empty. Through that, he pulled.

The hollow in the heart of him was what he used to draw mana, the emptiness called to it and pulled it in, but now as he cast, there was an even greater pull. The more mana he poured out, the emptier he became and the greater the draw. Gravity affinity mana from all around the station flooded into his left arm through the gauntlet, dragging every other kind of mana with it into the crystals arrayed around the device. Up here in space, so far from a world, it wasn’t nearly enough to replace all that he was using, but it was just barely enough to keep him from death. Every time that it seemed his core was empty, there was that tiny trickle more pouring into it. Every time that it seemed he was dead, he drew one more breath.

His eyes had been closed, he had fallen to his knees, but with agonizing effort he forced them open to see the moment that the death-curse fell through into nothingness, and just like that, the right half of him cut off the spell.

Collapsing forward onto his hands and knees, he hauled at the mana around him with all his desperation, drawing it all in, dragging it out from the artificial generators beneath the floors, from the distant stars and the planet below. He pulled and he pulled until the sputtering dark emptiness of his core became steady once more. Then, at last, he let himself fall flat onto his face.