Chapter 40

“Alliance. It is such a tenuous word for what we have become. An alliance is a group of like-minded individuals, working together to defeat some enemy. But none of these things are true of the Empyrean now. We squabble and bicker over scraps. We fight more amongst ourselves than we even go near to our enemies. For all the high-minded plans laid out for the future of the Empyrean, my money is on its collapse in our lifetime. Not destroyed by an enemy from without, but buried in memos and amendments. There are days that I miss the simplicity of the beginning, when every moment was a battle for survival. We won the war, but the peace might kill us yet.”

—Private Diaries of Theron Greenmantle

When the doors of the docking bay rattled open the next morning, Sylvas was as ready as he could be. Braced for the torture that was to come. It had occurred to him during the night, that there were people scrying this chamber to keep watch on him while he slept and many more doing the same during the time that the Inquisitor was present to ensure that they could activate the defenses if he moved against her. That meant that for hours, they had been watching as he was tortured, and not one of them had said a word. If he did somehow come out of this alive and was still a part of the Ardent, he would be filing some complaints.

If the Inquisitor was surprised to see that he hadn’t killed himself in the night, she didn’t let it show in her expression or body language. Crossing the distance to him where he already sat waiting for her, calling out her chair and settling herself in silence. He smiled at her. “I hope that you slept well.”

The smile seemed to throw her more than his ongoing survival. Even he hadn’t been sure if he could pull it off when Mira suggested it. Eventually she seemed to remember she was being watched. “The accommodations were adequate.”

“I hope that we can get this misunderstanding cleared up today, yesterday’s session was quite taxing, and I’d hate to have to have to endure another session after this.” His smile hadn’t shifted, but neither had her blank expression.

“The process will take as long as it takes.” She replied, quite blasé. “Your records indicate that you acquired a memory improvement after arrival on Strife. That is liable to prompt an increase in evidence to examine.”

“I hope that you enjoy tactical textbooks and theoretical fleet maneuvers, because there will be a lot of them to get through.” He was fighting the urge to jump up from the bed and run from her. The idea of her hands on him again made him sick to his stomach. The idea of her in his mind again was horrifying.

“If I didn’t know better, I would say that you were stalling.” She flared her nostrils ever so slightly. Gharia did that when she wasn’t annoyed enough to flick her tail but getting to the end of her patience.

“Not at all, the sooner we start, the sooner we are done. I just thought that given your job, you probably didn’t get much in the way of conversation.” He had been too reliant on Clearmind to keep fear away from him, and now that he had to face it and push through without assistance, it was harder than he’d anticipated.

“There are better ways for me to know your thoughts than exchanging pleasantries.” She snapped, reaching out to grab him by the face once more.

Not throwing up was all that Sylvas could manage as he felt the incision pierce his mind. She dove right in, heading for the same moment that she’d left off on the day before, giving no hint that there was anything untoward in her ministrations. She made it as far as his departure from Croesia before she encountered trouble. The world in his memory was cut off. There was a black and empty expanse just beyond the top of the tower, and it had nothing to do with the storm that had raged. The missing portion intersected the tower-top itself. As though they were earlier in the memory when the Crimson King was destroying everything in its path.

The incising blade of her mind pushed forward, towards the nothingness, seeking out what had been there and found the memory gone. For an instant she flickered into being inside the memory, standing on the precipice, before turning back to glower at Sylvas. “Your resistance will be noted, and held against you in the appraisal of your behavior.”

“I don’t understand what is happening.” Sylvas said entirely honestly.

“What is happening is that you have deliberately fragmented the part of your mind containing this memory to prevent me from viewing it.” Her tail whipped from side to side, disturbing none of the dust. “But I am not so easily led astray.”

She disappeared from sight, but Sylvas could feel her, digging around in his mind, circling the empty space of his memory so that she could memorize it, and find some other shape that matched. The minutes ticked by with this memory still frozen, Sylvas looked around for want of anything better to do, reacquainting himself with the faces of the Ardent who had come to his planet’s rescue too late. He had not heard from them since he’d enlisted, let alone when he’d gotten his affinity. He that would have been cause for excitement, cause for them to reach out. Though it was entirely possible that the three of them were out on some mission beyond normal communications range, or possibly even dead, given the nature of their assignments. He would have to remember to reach out to them if he remained in the Empyrean after this was over.

With a jolt, the fragment of his psyche that had been separated slammed back into place and the memory resumed. “Ah, yes and no, lad.” Fargus said gently, his eyes dropping down to the ground as if he were suddenly shy. “The yes part in the sense that the eidolon is back where it belongs and there won’t be any more of its kind coming through.”

“As for the no part, uh,” The dwarf continued as he cast a quick spell that manifested the outline of a glowing eye over his head for an instant. “Well, according to that last scry, the worldsoul of your planet is dead.”

Sylvas felt it like a punch all over again. “I thought that you said I’d stopped it in time. I thought you said that—”

“Aye lad, you stopped the Harrower, but there were other eidolons made it through. Lesser ones, a few class 2 Ravagers and…” Fargus paused for a second to look askance to his colleagues who were doing their best not to make eye contact. “Well… the fact is… the planet isn’t alive anymore, and even if it was, there aren’t enough of your people around for you all to keep living here. You wouldn’t have enough bodies to keep breeding without consanguinity setting in. You know, birth deformities and such. And that’s only if you all found a way to survive the eternal winter that will fall upon your world now.”

“None of this is relevant.” Sylvas spoke now to the empty air, breaking away from the script of his past. Can we get on with this, please?

There was another lingering moment in the memory then it was abandoned. The ship, the refugees, the lingering resentment, the challenge and his application to join the Ardent. It had been a trade, so he wouldn’t be trapped in some backwater with the people he’d betrayed under a mountain of debt, he’d almost entirely forgotten about the sordid beginnings of his career. The next segment of memory was already a chaotic blur thanks to the whiskey, but thanks to the trick that had already been pulled, the Inquisitor didn’t trust it. She slowed everything to a crawl, and he got to witness the wonders of a fiend party in full swing in frame-by-frame slow motion as the strobe lights rolled by. Out in the crowd he caught sight of the one girl who had kissed him. She was prettier than he remembered. He had been too hung up on the death of his fiancé and world to notice at the time. Also a little horrified at the existence of a whole species that looked like the demons of mythology.

Eventually she seemed to accept that the memories were fragmented by the alcohol poisoning and started speeding forward again, and just as they were about to have that fateful, mortifying kiss outside the rave, they ran right into another black expanse of nothingness. She’d been looking for the trick so carefully that she’d walked right into the same trap again. There was another long few minutes of lingering as she hunted down the fragment that he’d split off. Time to look back into the party, still going on forever in his memory. Time to hope that whatever Mira was doing that she wouldn’t tell him about was actually going to work.

He could have worked it out. For all that Mira joked about being smarter than him, they were, by nature, equally capable. But working it out meant that he would know what she was doing, and therefore, that what she was doing could be found in his memory.

The burning started as the memory slammed back into place and his mind was forcibly reassembled. It had taken until much later in the process on the previous day for the pain to begin, and he had to assume that this time, it was a deliberate punishment for resistance. The Inquisitor might have implied that resisting her probing would be painful, but she’d made it sound as if it would be incidental, a side effect of the friction of resistance. In reality, she was deliberately hurting him to break his will and gain free access.

The fiend girl was holding his face, drawing him in closer with a little smirk that he couldn’t recall, and then abruptly she was gone again and only darkness remained. Another fragmentation. Another incremental increase in his torment. Another delay.

It went on, and on. Every moment of his life, examined. Every choice that he made. The smell of Hotlips flesh burning. The cut of Vaelith’s blade during training. Everything that he had done. Everything that he was, laid bare. Yet even so, Mira fought and fought, shattering his mind into a million different pieces to keep them out of the Inquisitor’s reach, but it was never enough. She could find the connective tissue, the threads running through the memories that remained and the memories that he hid, and she used them to draw it all back together. But it took her time. All that Sylvas knew, was that he had to buy time. All the time that he could. Regardless of how it hurt, or what it cost.

He could feel her mounting frustration in the increasing clumsiness with which she made her incisions. Where before, the fragments of his mind were slipped back together seamlessly, she was now throwing them together with force, jarring his whole psyche each time. The more it slowed her, the more frantic she became, moving through memories quicker and quicker, searing closer and closer to the present, to the split in his memories between what he retained and what Mira did.

The Inquisitor hit a brick wall when she tried to delve into Mira’s memories. The knife of her mind might have sliced through brain matter cleanly, but the metal form of Mira’s thoughts were an entirely different proposition. She tried and rebounded again and again, before finally giving up, and chasing through Sylvas’ memories again, to last night. To his discovery of the suicide bomb she’d planted inside him and its defusing. To him and Mira making a plan. A conversation she could only hear one side of.

“What exactly did you hope to surprise me with?” She shuddered back into reality, sitting in the same chair she was perched on in real life in his memory of the cargo bay. “I can see every thought you have, and you have given me another full day to sift through all that remained of you. What could you possibly hope to achieve?”

“A record.” Sylvas could say that much at least. “You’re making a record of all my memories, including this one. So when the Ardent come to judge me, they’ll have the full picture of who I am.”

“You must realize that I don’t intend for the Ardent to keep you.” She looked genuinely puzzled by his stupidity. “I wouldn’t have planted your self-destruction command otherwise.”

“I know.” Sylvas admitted readily, “But I need to know who you’re working for.”

“And how exactly would you find that out.” She sneered, baring her jagged teeth. “Have you forgotten the position that you’re in?”

“Under observation.” He replied. “With a direct connection between your mind and mine. You’ve spent the day digging around in mine—”

She scoffed. “I have been aware of your consciousness and its location at all times.”

“You’ve been aware of one of them.”

“Hello, darling.” Mira flickered into being by the bedside, looking as scandalous as she had in her last hallucinatory appearance with a dangerous slit up the side of her tight dress. She leaned down to plant a kiss on Sylvas cheek before turning back to look at the stunned najash. “The Thesulan Consortium. A criminal enterprise by the estimations of the Empyrean. Proud freedom fighters by their own propaganda. Pushing back against the unfair regulation of their business interests in Empyrean space. They’re essentially pirates with a corporate charter. And they bought themselves an Inquisitor.”

“You are too dangerous to be allowed to live.” The Inquisitor growled. “And too dangerous to assassinate. This was the tidiest solution.”

Sylvas clapped his hands together with a smile. More than ready to get out of his memories and back into reality to get this all wrapped up, but Mira seemed to have other ideas. “Why exactly do the Consortium believe that Sylvas constitutes a threat to them? That was something I couldn’t find in your clandestine meetings with them.”

The najash’s tail swished from side to side through the gap in the chair back. “Because they hold more vaults than any other private collector?”

“Vaults?” Sylvas asked without thinking.

“You don’t even know?” The Inquisitor turned from him to Mira and back, and then she started making that awful rough gargling noise that came out of najash when they tried to laugh. “They sent me to kill you, and you don’t even know anything?”

“If I don’t know, then why don’t you tell me?”

“And give up my single hope of escape?” She continued with her guttural grunting. “I think not.”

Sylvas took a steadying breath. Though there was nothing to breathe in a memory, so it was really just the replaying of the sensation. “You might as well give up. I won’t let you twist me any further.”

She bared her teeth. “Oh, we’ll see about that!”

Just as she had dragged him down into his mind by force, she now threw him back into his body. The disorientation bought her the moment she needed to adjust her grip on his arm. It was locked around her neck, pinning her scaled body against his front, and holding her like a shield between him and the automated defenses which were already glowing with lethal energy. She shouted out to the glowing scrying eyes above them, “I won’t let him use me as a living shield! Ardent, you should shoot through me!”

Yet despite that proclamation, the machines refused to open fire on the Inquisitor, leaving them all standing awkwardly for a moment as the seconds ticked by. That is until the inquisitor dug her claws even deeper into his arm and began to drag Sylvas forward, away from the bed and towards the docking bay doors. 

“He says that he wants a ship!” She demanded as they moved, her eyes still fixated upwards.

Dragged along with her, Sylvas was able to catch a quick glimpse of the record that she’d been making, the slate still lying beside his bed. The very one that would prove his innocence. But as things stood right now he’d be dead long before he got anyone to look at it. In all his planning he hadn’t accounted for the woman taking him hostage, or rather  he hadn’t in this way. Using the threat of the automated systems to keep him compliant, or see them both dead, was a gamble that bordered on insane. Even for him.

Fortunately, as Sylvas soon discovered, it wasn’t one that she appeared all that comfortable with either as her voice echoed through his mind where nobody else was able to hear it. <You get me to a ship off this place, and I’ll tell you everything I know.>

He didn’t need Mira to tell him it was a lie. She had no intention of telling him anything let alone leaving him behind. Either he’d be her prisoner, or she’d find a way to properly kill or capture him before anyone got a chance to read through the memory record she’d made.

The doors to the holding bay rolled open under her authority, and she continued dragging him forward into the hallway. They were isolated from the station’s core, but not from where the ships that had been arriving for his trial were docked. She continued to drag him along. If he killed her, then he would inevitably be killed by the Ardent in turn without any chance for explanation. If he pulled away from her, there would be nothing to stop anyone on board blasting him to smithereens without a second thought, what with him being an escaped prisoner and person of mass destruction. All that he could hope was that when they encountered resistance, he was able to talk his way out of the situation.

Ah yes, talking, that thing you’re famously good at.

It didn’t take long before they encountered the expected resistance, but it wasn’t even slightly like Sylvas expected. A chime sounded from one of the upcoming docking bays, and Inquisitor Caymar’s teeth were bared. “A shuttle freshly arrived. Our ride out of here.”

Sylvas stopped her in her tracks, gaining weight until he was immovable. “I’m not letting you steal that shuttle. I’m not letting you hurt whoever is on board.”

For the first time since they’d stepped out of the holding bay, her claws loosened their grip in his arm, and she reached up, lacing her fingers through his hair. “What makes you think you have a choice?”

She drove back into his brain, and if before had been a scalpel now it was a pneumatic drill. Any defenses he might have hoped to raise against her were blasted aside, and she seized control. He moved without wanting to, fighting her with every step, but still he moved, following along behind her with his arm locked in place around her. “Maybe I’ll have you kill them instead, that way you’ll have no choice at all but to help.”

The doors of the docking bay were already opening, and beyond it Sylvas could hear the normal chatter of people at work. Before they were more than shoulder width apart, the Inquisitor drove them both forward into the gap, and they were abruptly face-to-face with General Wartback and several of his aides who had been waiting to disembark.

The dwarf looked from Sylvas to the Inquisitor in one smooth motion, made an instant assessment of the situation and stepped in with his fist cocked. The najash had barely had a chance to open her mouth and hiss, “General—” before that fist landed, knocking the top half of her head clean off above the jaw. Power coiled around the dwarf’s fist as she made gurgling sounds and then dropped to the ground. Sylvas was left standing there, his face covered in bone and blood.

“There, the situation has been handled,” Wartback growled angrily, his words very clearly not directed towards Sylvas at first. “Now get someone down here to clean up this damned mess and someone else to explain how in the blasted hells it could even happen in the first place!”

It was only once he finished speaking, and a pair of his aides turned to rush away to fulfill his orders, that the general focused his attention fully onto Sylvas.

“I’m startin to see more of you than I’d like to, cadet,” he stated in a hard, and all too dry tone. “Especially in circumstances like this.”

There was a brief pause as the dwarf let his attention drop down towards the inquisitor’s remains, which had unceremoniously fallen right between him and Sylvas.

“That said, though,” he added after a second’s pause. “That was quick thinking sending us a recording of that snake’s confession. Might have made a right mess of things otherwise.”

But despite those words, Sylvas found himself at a complete loss as to what the general meant, or at least he was at first until the shock of the moment finally passed him and his mind began to work once more. The slate in his eye was still connected to the network. Had been connected to the network all this time. That meant that he could still send messages. That Mira could still send messages. 

I told you that I would fix everything, the woman whispered into Sylvas’s mind, her tone unbearably smug. You’re welcome, darling.