Chapter 35

“The fundamental nature of all living things is broad and varied. But the fundamental nature of the eidolon is destruction. Whatever else it may be, whatever facets it has taken on, at its core it seeks to destroy all. It is for this reason that the eidolon is considered the enemy of all living things. Even those that lack the good sense to recognize it.”

—Fauna and Eidolons of the Outer Reaches, Smaven Pedritch

When the curved blades of death came this time, Sylvas was prepared. He did not need to leap around, cast spells or anything else, he simply took hold of his body with his will and moved it out of the path of each one in turn. Malachai was indeed relentless as he promised, twisting and spinning the scythe to unleash an endless pattern of crackling black arcs, but there was always some gap that Sylvas could dive through to avoid them. As good as Malachai was at locking down the possible directions that Sylvas might go, he couldn’t cash in on any one of those victories with the scythe alone. Which was presumably why he was casting again.

But Sylvas wasn’t without options either. He cast a gravity spike at Malachai, forcing the man to move from his fixed position and muddying his aim. Another soon followed, forcing him to call on his cadre of spirits to carry him to safety. 

Malachai launched his counter almost as soon as the last spike dissipated. It wasn’t as simple as the ghoulish apparition he’d launched at Sylvas before. In fact it was such a complex working that it put Sylvas in mind of Bael’s beautiful spell earlier. But while Bael’s had been an elaborate weaving of different elements, this was singular in its focus and its purpose. A writhing, seething ball of death leapt out towards him. The same death-curse that Malachai had left like a booby trap up on the station.

Sylvas cast another teleportation spell, but like his fight earlier in the contest, he deliberately held the passage open behind him. He vanished from in front of the death sphere, appeared behind Malachai and then flung himself aside as the throbbing black orb followed him through, bearing down on Malachai, who spun to face it with a laugh.

It collided with the necromancer, and his laughter just rose in volume as it completely engulfed him. For one moment, Sylvas thought that they were through, that he had won, but slowly the sphere shrank down and down until it vanished inside of Malachai. The aura of death around him was no longer a smoky haze, it crawled with barely contained malice.

When the scythe swung his way again, Sylvas was already in motion, but he was still taken unaware by just how much wider each of the arcs had become. It wasn’t a solid and lethal curve of death mana anymore, but rather wide sweeping lines of death being disgorged in every direction. He’d been able to cut his dodges close before, but now he had to throw himself entirely clear or risk being hit in passing. It made the gaps in the oncoming storm even smaller and harder to reach, but not impossible.

He renewed a set of part-cast teleportation spells into his fragments and in a moment of desperation, tried throwing out a Gravity Shear as a normal shield, only to see the death-mana passing through it entirely unscathed. It was a mistake that Malachai was quick to jump on. He launched out another set of his apparitions that Sylvas had to fly away from as fast and far as he could so that he could gain enough time to teleport out of its reach. All with it chasing him every step of the way, and more of the scythe blades in hot pursuit accompanying it.

If this was going to be a game of attrition, then he was going to lose. Malachai was right about that. He had a whole planet’s death to draw on, and he’d never tire. Meanwhile, even though he had plenty of time to cast, Sylvas himself was burning through his mana much faster than he could restore it. Inversion would have no effect, since Malachai had the same range of motion as him with the ghosts carrying him. There was nothing from his repertoire of spells outside his affinity that he thought would be directly useful, his tools had all either been integrated into him or disabled. His embodiment and close combat abilities would be effective, but he’d need to get in close enough to Malachai to actually use them, which was not going to be possible. Even if he did teleport in close enough, Malachai was surrounded by the aura of death, and his host of spirits.

Sylvas bent in his fingers to create his old staff’s focus, and cast a Focused Gravity Spike at Malachai’s back, then as quickly as he could, activated his next teleportation. As predicted, the necromancer had flung himself out of the first Spike’s course, but Sylvas could see where he was dodging to, and launched his next Spike to intercept him. It was a nearer miss that Malachai would have liked, but still far short of taking him out of the fight. The passage of that condensed ball of gravity knocked him into a spin, giving Sylvas a chance at a third shot before the other man could stabilize himself, but by then Malachai seemed to have realized what was happening and hauled himself well clear with his cadre of ghosts. Sylvas grunted his frustration and took off flying at top speed to stay ahead of the next barrage of death-arcs.

He has us beaten unless we can source a mana supply to match his.

“We can’t.” Sylvas growled as he ducked another crackling arc of black death.

Darling, you can’t lie to me, I know everything you know. And you know that you’ve tapped some mystery source of mana on this planet multiple times.

Not on purpose! One of the arcs swept a little too close and a crackling discharge brushed past his head, turning a long streak of his hair white. Far too close for comfort.

Another of the massive death orbs erupted from Malachai, not heading straight for Sylvas this time, but simply drifting away from the necromancer to hang in the air and swell as it absorbed more of the world’s ambient death. For all that his application was unique, Malachai used the same tactics as they’d all been taught. Deny the enemy space to maneuver until you can guarantee a hit. Sylvas could slip the thing into cold storage, the way that he had before, but it had taken a massive effort and time that he didn’t have.

At the limit of your senses I’m detecting something that seems to be providing a steady but miniscule stream of mana. Try reaching for it.

She highlighted the distant lumps in his perception. They were deep underground, scattered and oddly shaped to his gravity sense, but what they lacked in mana output, they more than made up for in numbers, buried beneath the sands of the arena there were dozens of them. Odd little deposits releasing that same mana he’d sometimes touched.

He did reach for it now, using the heart of darkness at the center of his being to tease the mana out. The more that he pulled on it, the more mana seemed to flow, and then, with all of the different deposits all outputting mana, the steady trickle that he hadn’t even noticed became a flow, coming to him from every direction.

There you go, darling.

As if realizing that something had changed, Malachai increased the intensity of his assault, launching not only the barrage of scything blades, but also trying to patch the gaps in the pattern with his lesser death spells. More silent screaming skulls lurching towards Sylvas, making him turn to teleportation once more to escape.

His Runewoven body had been perfectly balanced. He had essentially remade it that way on purpose, to ensure that he was operating at peak efficiency at all times. But now as he emerged from null space, he lilted ever so slightly to the left. As if that side was weighed down more. Not enough that he’d usually notice, but with his weight and mass set so low so that he could move more freely, even the tiniest addition made a difference. He spared a fraction of a second to glance down and had no idea what to make of what he saw.

The scars that covered his arm were covered in crystals. They were growing right atop the scarred sigils that adorned it. More to the point however, they weren’t just any kind of crystal, but rather something that Sylvas recognized instantly.

Etherium. He thought in shock while taking in the white hued glow that covered the entirety of his arm. I…I am creating Etherium.

Quite a substantial amount of it too as he soon discovered, for the mana that the mystical stone radiated was so great that Sylvas’ disadvantage disappeared in almost an instant. It was raw mana of every affinity, funneled directly into the channels of his body. All around them, deep beneath the surface, the deposits he’d been drawing on were moving closer, and the closer they came, the more mana bristled from his arm and swelled within him.

Malachai punished him for his moment of shock, a sickle blade of roaring death leaping straight for his throat, forcing Sylvas to throw himself to the ground with no small amount of urgency to avoid it. The move left him skidding wildly across the sand before he could regain his footing and launch himself into the air once more. He just barely made it back into the sky before another blast of magic filled the spot he’d just been standing in. 

While he’d been distracted by his surprise and the constant barrage, Malachai had been hard at work doing what necromancers do. There were no bodies buried beneath the sands, so skeletal hands did not burst out to grab at Sylvas, but there were so many dead lost beneath this world’s surface and it had taken little more than a tug for Malachai to give them some ethereal form. The whole sandy surface of the arena seemed to be covered in them, barely perceptible at a distance but outlined in green tinted smoke and wavering in the breeze when viewed up close. His brief touchdown had nearly allowed them to get a grip on Sylvas. 

Where the fingers had brushed across him, he could feel the chill of death seeping into him. If he’d been any slower, they would have dug in, pinned him down, given Malachai all the time in the world to end him. Just as the death bomb was blocking him from using one area of the air above the arena, so too did these hands rob him of the whole floor. If he were still reliant on mana for flight, it would have been a crippling blow. Instead it was only a tightening of the noose.

The emptiness of his core was no longer an issue for Sylvas. He could cast anything he was capable of directly from the Etherium. So when the next barrage came, accompanied by another of the lunging skeletal specters, that is exactly what he did. The growth on his arm shrunk and he punched a hole through to null-space, blinking in and out of reality to arrive right in front of Malachai. Inside of his scythe’s reach. Directly in front of him, where he’d never expect anyone to risk going.

“Bold!” Was all Malachai managed to bark out in between castings.

Sylvas swung for him, invoking that same sickle blade of Gravity Shear as before. He thought that he had him, he really did, but there was a sudden eruption of ghosts. All of the dead that had been wrapped around him surged out towards Sylvas. They caught hold of his wrist, slowed his swing, pushed back against him with an unending and relentless strength while his own was sapped just by their touch. 

Even as they held him back, Malachai slipped away. The same spirits that now tangled with Sylvas had been the ones keeping him in the air, and without them he descended with more grace than he should have, to land amidst the growing crop of reaching spectral hands while Sylvas had to wrestle himself free.

If he had been flesh alone, those grasping hands of death would likely have put an end to the fight then and there, sapping him of all the strength he had. But with his Runeweave embodiment complete, he had a whole new layer of defense within his body, all of which bloomed into existence and either blunted or redirected the attack before it could truly harm him.

May I try something?

Sylvas didn’t think she’d interrupt him unless she had to, and despite her tone, he still trusted her implicitly. Yes?

From down on the ground, Malachai was swinging his scythe once more to conjure up a new storm of blades, but where before Sylvas had to wait until they were in flight he was now presented with an image overlaying where the necromancer stood, a ghost of something yet to come. From it there came broad strokes of motion. The places where the scythe would unleash its next blade, the course that death mana would take, all of it was plotted out in advance.

Wait, I can see the future now? Sylvas could see where the gaps in the assault were going to be now, moving into them before Malachai had even cast.

You created me to analyze the information that your senses provide, and now I have analyzed the pattern of his attacks.

As he adjusted course, he had to make a sudden jump as a twist of Malachai’s wrist sent a blade off at a different angle than the premonition showed.

Oops. It doesn’t look like it’s perfect yet.

It’s better than nothing. Sylvas darted down towards Malachai once more. If he could get in close enough, he could eliminate the man’s ability to evade his spells. All it would take would be a single gravity spike making it through and the fight would be done.

Unfortunately, it seemed that Malachai was aware of this, his latest casting amidst the storm had imbued the arms around him with more strength and considerably more reach, the distended spectral limbs swayed around him like a forest of kelp, reaching out towards Sylvas, just daring him to get closer. Even at the distance they were forcing on him, Sylvas liked his odds of landing a hit, so he continued his descent.

As he came lower, so too did the deposits feeding him mana rise higher. His connection to them was drawing them up through the sands of Strife, or his sapping of their mana was robbing them of whatever weight had left them buried for so long. Regardless, they rose and rose, flooding him with more mana. Without fear of running out, he could cast very differently now. Launching an unfocused Gravity Spike beneath Malachai and pouring all the mana it wanted into it. Gravity beneath the necromancer doubled, then tripled. The groping hands of the dead now had to reach down towards him and hold him up. They had to grasp the scythe alongside his mortal hands so that he had the strength to keep it in motion.

Sylvas couldn’t wear down his mana supplies, but he could wear down his body. With such a focus on casting, Malachai reminded him of himself before he’d started shoring up his physical weaknesses. He didn’t have the resilience required to stand up to the forces involved in a fight with Gravity Affinity. Heaving against it, Malachai’s sickle blades of darkness were slowing down, his sluggish motions became more easy to predict, Sylvas was going to make it through.

Or so thought before the first Eidolon broke through the surface of the sand right beside him.