Chapter 45
“It is impossible for any worldsoul to bear an affinity, for the simple reason that a world cannot exist except as a holistic whole. To remove death from a world would be as destabilizing as to remove life. To remove fire, or air, or water or earth… the universe is in a state of balance that cannot be disrupted if it is meant to persist, and some argue that this is why the interplanetary mana tidal network actually exists. To transfer those affinities that a world produces in excess and distribute them to worlds lacking in them. But when delving into the dark art of soul fragmentation, the truth could not be further from the natural state of things. When a worldsoul is fragmented, each piece begins to turn to corruption with immediacy. Mana of a certain affinity soon dominates, drowning out all others. It is for this reason, among others, that the fragmentation of a worldsoul cannot be used to manufacture a false facsimile to replace one that has been destroyed.”
—Cosmic Errata: Notes on Interplanetary Mana Tides, Theron Greenmantle
They erupted from the deck of the core room, propelled up by a rising elevator made from the torn-out floor of the room below. There was only the briefest of moments to take everything in, then the chaos began.
The worldsoul fragment hung in the center of the chamber, twice the height of a man, and just as wide. Once it had been a part of some grand sphere, but now only a piece of that outer curved surface remained along with a craggy mineral root heading off to the side. Death radiated from it. The surface of the stone, if it was a stone, was as deep a black as any Sylvas had ever seen but on those edges where light caught, he could make out the green reflection of life affinity mana. Surrounding it was a cobweb of walkways and gantries, ancient as the station itself by the looks of their arched design. Entry was meant to be from one of two doors connecting with those raised platforms, both at opposite ends of the circular chamber from one another, and at each of those doors, Malachai had laid out his soldiers.
Each held two mages and one skeletal construct. However calling it a mere construct didn’t really do it any justice. It was a towering conglomeration of bones. A hulking monstrous thing that must have contained a dozen corpses or more. Each of them had four limbs arrayed along the sides of its vast and empty ribcage, and each limb ended in a blade. As for legs, it seemed that fewer limbs had been the preference, with the traditional two being kept on, albeit thickened with clusters of added bones until they were as broad as tree trunks. Yet none of that concerned Sylvas so much as magic that was gathered inside those constructs. Not just Malachai’s spell to raise the dead, but a maelstrom of captured magic from either an enemy or ally, ready to be unleashed.
Malachai himself was at the center of the room. It gave him a commanding view of both doors, as well as placing him close enough to the worldsoul fragment that if he wanted to he could reach out and touch it. As it was, it didn’t take second sight to know how much power he was drawing from the thing. It must have felt like all of the mana in the world was his, filtered down to just the flavor that he liked.
“The soul is the goal.” Ironeyes murmured, as if they needed reminding.
“Then let’s get it.” Kaya’s face split into a grin for just an instant before a mask of cold steel covered it up.
Sylvas had five spells being maintained by fragments, and he let the first one spring to life now. Flight. It cost practically nothing now that his body could shed all weight, but it still wasn’t efficient enough for his needs. More often than not he was finding himself using it to slingshot himself to a new position where he could cast his next spell, maintaining it just wasn’t practical in any fight that required casting.
Which was why he had contingency plans in place.
Shooting up, he meant to pass right by Malachai, hit him with a cheap shot and take him out if he could, disrupt whatever he was casting if he couldn’t. There was no way that Malachai could have seen him rising up from beneath. No way that he could have been aware of the rising doom heading for him. Yet his head turned as Sylvas soared up all the same, and there could be no mistaking the smile on his face for anything friendly.
“Finally. You’re here.”
Sylvas cast Gravity Spike at him through his staff, the same lethal blow that had twisted up all of Vaelith’s guts down on the surface. The air around it heaved and writhed with its passage, the metalwork that Malachai stood upon creaked and buckled at its draw, but the man just held up a hand in response.
Where the spike hit the necromancer’s shield it faltered and slowed. It still had its draw, its weight, all of Malachai’s clothes swayed out towards it, but the man himself was unmoving. Where usually mana would have shone in the defensive construct of a shield there was only a whisp of white, a face screaming into the void. Sylvas had heard that necromancers dealt not only in the bodies of the dead but also their spirits, but he’d taken it as more of the same superstition that surrounded anything to do with death affinity magic.
He should have paid more attention to the superstitions.
Having switched out fragments to cast his spike, he now soared only on momentum and his own near-weightlessness, his flight spell abandoned. Spinning his staff in his hands, Sylvas took hold of the orbitals embedded in each end. He used them to steer him through the air, out of the path of the scything blade of green-black death that Malachai had launched after him. Where it hit the walkway behind, rust blossomed and age warped, the whole structure could be brought down with a few missed hits. Something that might come in handy later on.
Kaya and the others were in motion. Ironeyes had set off up one set of stairs, already casting one of his more grandiose spells to bring down lightning from the heavens directly into the world-soul fragment. Bael was casting too, placing wards on each of them using what he’d learned from the death mana trap that they’d encountered earlier. As it took hold, Sylvas suddenly felt like he could breathe easier, as if the inevitability of death was weighing on him less. The presence of so much death mana in one place had been overwhelming his ability to block out the feelings it brought on without him even noticing. But Bael was not casting on his own. Kaya had a hold of him around the waist, and her other hand upon one of the metal support beams holding up the walkways and gantries around the world-soul. Just as metal flowed around wherever she touched, she now flowed up the metal in the same way, carrying her and Bael up into the belly of the beast.
Malachai had not hesitated since he first laid eyes on Sylvas. His constructs had turned to come lumbering back towards the center of the chamber, the mages they stood alongside finally noticing that something was happening as they were abandoned. But the necromancer himself saw only one thing.
The thing that he had been building back on Onslaught Citadel was not a staff or a sword as Sylvas had presumed, but a scythe. Bones were worked into the top of the blade, the mysterious texture he hadn’t been able to identify back then with his gravity sense, and all around it death mana hung thick and heavy. With a sweep of it, he launched another of the same assaults on Sylvas as before, another wide edged blade of raw death mana soaring up towards him, losing its cohesion and shape as it got further from its caster until it became a great roiling wall of black across the whole of his vision.
He gained weight, plummeting like a dropped stone to beneath the lethal band and flinching as its cold reached out to him, beckoning.
Weightless again, Sylvas continued to fall, the momentum of his drop carrying him on down until he hit the same gantry that Malachai stood upon. The necromancer had looked excited before, but now he looked ecstatic. Presumably because he had his own little army charging at Sylvas from behind. Sylvas could sense them even if he couldn’t see them, his own gravity spike still echoing out through the room and giving his senses clarity. He cast the third of his five spells. Inversion.
Where before the lumbering construct and duo of mages had been charging at him freely, their feet now found no purchase on the metal mesh of the gantry, they drifted up, slowly at first, then faster, tumbling end over end as they rose towards the ceiling, the great bone construct, slow of mind and motion, flailed around as it tried to right itself, batting one of the mages right out of the Inversion and dropping her with a spine snapping crunch back onto one of the walkways. Some part of the magic contained in the other bone golem at the other end of the room died with her. Some part of its borrowed power lost. Sylvas could only hope it would help.
The other mage seemed a little more canny than his fallen counterpart, he cast some spell Sylvas didn’t know, lashing out a whip of shimmering silver to catch onto one of the walkways below before Sylvas could cut out the Inversion and send them all tumbling down again.
At least the construct fell with almost the full weight and distance that the inversion could muster. It shattered on impact, all the many bodies that had made it up coming apart.
Now it was Sylvas turn to grin, reveling for a moment in his success.
Next, it was Ironeyes turn to call down the lightning. It struck from out of the nothingness above directly into the abraded root of the world-soul shard. The kind of destructive power that could have torn a hole right through the whole station if it had been out of control. Yet to everyone’s dismay, there was no sign of any harm done. It wasn’t like the trap earlier which could have eaten up any energy poured into it. The world-soul shard was simply too solid, too real, for the magic to have any effect.
That was our hardest punch, Sylvas thought with a scowl, leaving him with no idea as to what they could do to the shard if that spell in particular hadn’t even left so much as a scratch.
Then he had no time for thought. Malachai had closed the distance and was whipping the scythe back and forth in a figure of eight, sending waves of lethal magic soaring at Sylvas that he scarcely had the time to dodge before the next arrived. He let one of his fragmented personalities assert itself and cast Gravity Shear. The shield rippled into effect between them just in time, sending the cross hatch of oncoming death mana lapping around it, dispersing out to strike about the room.
“Very good!” Malachai called out. “But not nearly enough.”
Throughout all of this, the necromancer had been feeding mana into his scythe, using it to cast attacks in Sylvas direction, but that had freed his mind up for the actual work of casting, and now he unleashed what he had been preparing. With one hand torn free of the scythe handle he thrust it out at Sylvas, and from it leapt a ghostly replica. The white mist had no substance, so it passed clean through his shield, plunging on until it reached him. The hand, so like the skeletal remains that had been grasping at him all day, plunged straight into his chest, its touch burning cold, and when it reached his heart, it squeezed into a fist.
All the strength immediately left Sylvas, so much so that he toppled like a ragdoll, the quite literally life crushed out of him. A second later everything went dark and he felt himself fall into an endless nothing. He’d died before, or come so close as to make no difference, but this time, this time it was entirely different.
This was a plummet into absolute nothingness.
All around him there was nothing but darkness. Nothing but silence. He was completely alone. Completely aware of the absence of his own body.
This was real death.
This was the end.
That is until he felt a breath on his cheek, one that was accompanied by the feather-light press of lips atop his.
“Stop slacking Sylvas,” Mira whispered to him. “You’re not finished yet.”
