Chapter 44

“It is a strange thing to be an advocate for technology in a world ruled by magic. There is nothing that science can accomplish that magic has not already done twice and with far more ease, yet in the study of natural processes we find new heights that magic might ascend to, and through the combination of the two we reach new heights.”

—Private Diaries of Theron Greenmantle

Despite having his back to the Charger, Sylvas felt its presence through his arm, and then through the air it was disturbing, it moved in perfect silence through the passageway, with its broad-bladed face taking up almost the entire width of it.

There was no time to cast. No dodging it or jumping it either. So he met it head on, not with a spell, but with his bare hands, grabbing onto the sides of the blade at the moment of impact and twisting. As strong as his Runeweave embodiment made him, he would have had no hope if he didn’t also have gravity on his side. One hand grew heavy in the push, and the creature who had been so assured of a kill just a moment before lost its footing. Given the choice between falling and having its bladed face torn off, it had chosen to fall, but that had been a mistake too. Jumping up, Sylvas flooded himself with weight, coming down with both feet on the part of the eidolon that might in a creature from some logical universe have been considered a head. The chitinous hide shattered, the structures within it broke, and as swiftly as it had come rushing at them, it was dead.

The crystals that had formed on Sylvas arm during this brief clash were tiny, little more that grains of dust that he brushed off, but he could feel Vaelith’s eyes watching him throughout the whole encounter. “Thoughts?”

Her expression was unreadable as she looked up from his arm, eventually meeting his eyes. “You really just…devour them? As if they were…food?”

It was an understandable question, and one that had been asked of him time and time again. Everyone had been shocked at what he could do at first, reacting to his ability with fear and worry. But now that the secret was out of the bag so to speak, he couldn’t help but notice the attention turning to that of envy. Mana was the most precious resource there was while in battle, the amount one had on hand dictating practically every choice a combatant made. However when that restriction was taken away, or loosened to the point of near irrelevance, well, truly anything was possible then.

“It’s not quite like food,” Sylvas answered with a shake of his head. “But it’s also not, not like that either. The best way I can describe is, is that I can sense the mana of their bodies, and just…pull on it, the same way that we can pull on the ambient mana around us. It’s just another source of it.”

“And you have to touch them to do it?” She asked, a hand coming to indicate the remains of the creature Sylvas had felled.

“Not to draw at least a tithe of something from them, but it does help,” he answered, recalling how much easier it was to draw mana from the creature the second his hand touched it. It immediately had him wondering about transference rates through different mediums combined with the mysteries of his body and the sigils upon it.

“Hmm,” the woman mused thoughtfully at his reply and for a moment looked like she was going to let the matter drop. However, instead of doing so, an inquisitive look appeared upon her face. “Have you ever read anything about the Ponadar of the Varaelfin?”

Sylvas blinked at the unexpected question, his mind racing to see if he had in fact read anything about what Vaelith had asked. Unfortunately however, he came up partially blank.

“The Varaelfin, the War Elves, are your people,” he said after a moment of thought recalling the term after having read many of Vaelith’s own writings. “But I haven’t read about the Ponadar.”

“That’s not surprising,” she replied. “They aren’t what one would call exemplary members of our species and were all hunted to death several thousand years ago for their crimes.”

Sylvas had no idea how to even begin to react to that statement, simply staring blankly back at Vaelith until she eventually continued.

“The translation of their name could described either as God Eaters or Sun Reavers,” she went onto explain. “They were a priesthood of warlocks that ruled our people in ages past. Somehow they used the powers of Eidolons, harvested their magic, to empower themselves and keep the lesser castes enslaved.”

Vaelith paused for a second to offer Sylvas a shrug. “Or at least that is what the official legends say. I have no doubt much of the truth was sealed away if not lost purposefully. Regardless, if you are looking for a starting point to perhaps discover more of…whatever this ability of yours is, then perhaps inquiring more about them might help you. If only to avoid whatever steps they took to lose themselves.”

There was a particular undertone to the way the last sentence came out of the woman’s mouth that gave Sylvas no illusions as to what might happen if the same fate befell him.

“I…I’ll do that,” he replied carefully, inclining his head appreciatively to the elf. “Thank you.”

“Thank me by staying alive,” she answered back simply, her tone reverting back to the terse, and almost imperceptible anxiety that she’d been displaying since his arrival. “I’d hate to see all the time I’ve invested in you go to waste. Now, are there any more about?”

Sylvas paused for a second as he considered the woman’s question, his senses stretching out to cover the surrounding area. “Three of them. One floor below us.”

They fell in step with one another almost immediately following that, the two of them walking along the lightless corridor to where Sylvas’ gravity sense had told him there was a drop to the next level, and then spreading out when they found themselves in a wider area. Vaelith’s eyes glowed green in the perpetual night, and Sylvas had no need for his eyes at all. His vision was overlaid with a perfect rendition of everything ahead, including a glow surrounding the three eidolons. Another charger and two more, smaller and humanoid in shape. Gaunts. 

He signaled their distance to Vaelith, and she fell back, letting him take point. Presumably so she could keep from having to turn her back on him, and thus still fulfill her duty of protecting him. In either case, the two of them as mages, one at the fifth circle, and the other at the fourth, must have lit up the eidolon’s senses like torches in the dark as they approached. Something that prompted the creatures to begin to close in from the passageway where they had been lingering towards the more open space, where he and Vaelith where. 

A foolish move that Sylvas let them do, choosing to simply wait for their arrival.

Then, when they finally emerged, Sylvas hit all three with a gravity spike. It dragged them all down into a gathered heap, allowing Vaelith to then take them all out in a single blast of green flame. It was over so fast that neither one of them had much of a chance to think.

There were actually surprisingly few eidolons in the upper levels of the pyramid, and by the time that the gear had been brought down, Sylvas, Vaelith, and the security detail had already cleared them all. There had been fourteen in all, and despite feeling them there in his newest sense, ripe for the reaping, Sylvas had taken care not to draw any mana from them. The last thing he needed was to accidentally create a mana well so enticing that it attracted a horde of the creatures from elsewhere on the planet.

The others had fallen into their training, forming a perimeter around their entry point and keeping watch while Gharia and some Sylvas’ accompanying guards ferried the academics and their gear down. It was a not insubstantial amount of equipment, enough to set up a whole field laboratory from the look of it, though he supposed there would also be camping equipment of some sort.

Using the same spell as the instructors and Kalisdrothan had used, Sylvas dumped out as much of the map that he’d managed to construct so far for the academics to argue over. To his eyes the obvious route stood out, but he suspected that was because of his familiarity with the other Strife-built structures. To anyone else’s eyes, the shafts used to traverse between levels likely were interpreted as air-ducts. There was a pattern to it as well, that he didn’t think people who hadn’t lived here would grasp. Going down shafts close to each other would most often lead to dead ends, while going down shafts situated opposite one another would get you deeper into the complex. It was pretty basic siege defense writ large across a whole culture.

Sylvas didn’t much like his chances of being heard amidst the spirited discussion going on, but it seemed that Bael had no such concerns. He waded through the researchers to whisper in Kalisdrothan’s ear, and before long the right course was plotted and they set off, trudging through the narrow passages down into the pyramid below. The larger supplies had to be broken down into separate crates or packs, and the dwarves had stayed behind to handle it along with a couple of the more nervous researchers who didn’t fancy venturing down into the monster-riddled darkness.

Between Vaelith, his security detail, and the rest of his friends, Sylvas didn’t see another living eidolon at all as they traversed the seventeen layers of the pyramid down to the central chamber that he’d started sensing somewhere around the sixth level. Thanks to the relatively increasing amount of danger, he was eventually relegated to the rearguard, where his ability to sense the presence of upcoming eidolons was somewhat squandered, but where he was willing to concede it would prevent any of them from creeping up on them from behind. 

He was not so lucky as to actually have that happen though, everyone was far too thorough in their extermination efforts. 

It would have been an entirely dull journey if not for the joint company of Kalisdrothan and his cousin Bael. They talked, not in the usual roundabouts of politeness that had typified their communication before now but with a rapid-fire intensity that the translations spells struggled to keep up with. Elvish was a dense language where a single inflection could add layers of meaning and that meant that sometimes translations lagged behind, which probably explained why Sylvas didn’t think either one of them had stopped for breath for a moment. Although, looking at their lips moving, that might also have been because they hadn’t stopped for breath. 

Every detail of the passageway was discussed, examined, cross-examined and compared to both elves apparently prodigious knowledge bases. Sylvas had considered himself to be quite advantaged with his eidetic memory, additional brain, and the ridiculous amount of books that he’d absorbed, but as it turned out a whole universe produced a whole universe’s worth of research papers, and he hadn’t touched them yet. His focus had been tight, gravity affinity magic, paradigms, embodiments, eidolons, anything beyond that and he knew as much as the average pre-school child.

Back and forth, back and forth, and always moving down. Sylvas leant a hand where he could in bringing down equipment, he was ready to rush a head the moment it seemed there was a threat the rest of the team couldn’t handle. Truly he was desperate to do something after all of his time cooped up in space, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for decisions to be made around him. But unfortunately everyone did their job too well, there was nothing to do but stroll along and listen to the elves lecturing on topics he knew next to nothing about.

As such, it was a genuine relief when they finally arrived at the central chamber and Sylvas finally had something to do. 

The plan was to use this chamber as their base for the whole expedition, expanding out to explore the various tunnels from here, storing all their equipment and findings centrally and securing this area against eidolon incursions. Sylvas and a few of the others set to work on putting things together while the rest pushed out into the adjoining tunnels to make sure they were clear of eidolons. He had never been camping in his life, but the process of assembling the tiny village of canvas in the vast chamber that they’d uncovered was therapeutically simple all the same. Though his favorite part of it was probably Mira’s ongoing commentary on which of his teammates now flinched away when he got too close. It was almost all of them except Kaya, Malachai, and Bael, though Bael was so lost in the excitement of the work that Sylvas could have grown a second head and he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I’m sure there’s an embodiment for that somewhere, Mira told him when the thought crossed his mind. Or if not, we could build one.

Sylvas couldn’t help but smile at the thought despite mentally shaking his head. That would be funny, but maybe not.