Chapter 8

“It is easy to be deceived into seeing something that is not there. Pattern recognition was a vital asset for our ancestors trying to survive in a hostile world, and it has been carried forward and praised vastly through almost all sapient civilizations. But this same capability renders us susceptible to deception. We will see a pattern even when there is none. We will derive a picture from the chaos of random shapes. Faces in wood-grain. Dragons in the clouds. Constellations in the stars. It is our nature. So when we face an enemy that moves against us with all purposefulness, driving forward towards its goal with determination, of course our assumption will be that it too is sapient. That there is a logic and intellect driving it forward to commit its crimes against us. There is a comfort in that. In the idea that bad things do not simply happen, but rather have to be orchestrated by some evil and thinking entity. It lets us find a reprieve from the grim reality of an uncaring universe, just as surely as those of faith find reprieve through belief in a benevolent entity guiding them to happiness. When you fight the Eidolon, it will move as though it is thinking. It will fight as though it has a plan. It does not. It cannot. There can be no thought without a mind, and whatever composes the Eidolon does not encompass intellect.”

—Edicts of the Ardent, Hephan Lorleas

When his eyes shot open, Sylvas assumed it was because of the pain of his untreated wounds, but it was nothing so kind. An alarm was sounding throughout the Blackhall, and it took him the span of several blinks to recognize it. They were under attack. It was the Eidolon siren. Rolling out of bed with every part of him screaming in pain, he cursed himself for letting his bad mood get the better of him. Normally all of his gear was stowed away efficiently and ready to throw on at a moment’s notice, but tonight he had to scramble about in the painful sudden illumination of the emergency lighting to get it all back together.

Sprinting down the stairs, he was trailing behind everyone else. He could hear the distant clatter of their feet as they descended into the entryway, but he saw nobody except Kaya, who didn’t even bother to wave in her hurry. There weren’t many things Kaya could be convinced to take seriously, but the Eidolons were one of them.

Shedding weight, he leapt down the remainder of the stairs, and almost barged headlong into Instructor Aurea. She stopped him with a palm to his chest, and once again he was reminded what a difference a couple of circles could make when that simple touch was enough to stop him dead. She consulted her slate, before flicking her wrist and sending a location to Sylvas eyepiece. “Hold the ridge until your unit is relieved. No further instructions. Go.”

Sylvas went.

Outside the brightness of the twin suns was shocking. So much of the time on Strife was spent in a perpetual twilight as they lurked just out of sight beyond the horizon, even up on the Citadels and on the shuttles, light was kept dim so that they wouldn’t have to adjust. But now both the stars were shining, blinding and bright. It took just a gentle touch on his senses to filter them out, to mask their intensity and return him to something more tolerable, but the heat on his skin he left well alone. It had been a long time since he’d felt so warm. As a child, he’d been more than accustomed to the cold, in space it was always chill despite the best efforts of the spells meant to keep everyone comfortable. But here on Strife those very same spells worked overtime to keep them cool through the day. The air was forever sharp with cold and tangy with metal.

Recasting the flying spell from earlier, Sylvas took off in the direction marked on his eye-piece. Everyone seemed to be scattering in different directions. There must have been eidolons encroaching on all sides. He caught a brief glimpse of Gharia zipping off in the opposite direction as he took to the sky. That was a shame, the last time they’d faced off against the eidolons like this, she’d been by his side.

Still even without her, it would be interesting to see how some of his fellow recruits dealt with combat against eidolons instead of each other. To see who had been holding back, and how their various specialties would play out in open combat instead of training exercises.

The ridge where he’d been deployed was further out from the campus than he would have expected, but he supposed that he hadn’t had the mobility that he had last time around, so they’d probably kept him closer to home. In the dazzling light of day, the red sands of Strife were even more vibrant and pervasive than usual, but they swept by beneath him so swiftly they were a blur. 

By the light of the double suns, Sylvas saw more of the planet Strife than he had even when they were soaring overhead in the shuttle. So much of it was just a barren nothing, red sands and gentle dunes, but underlying that endless emptiness, he could make out shapes. He passed over what he felt sure had once been a settlement. The tallest of its ruined towers just barely scraping through the deep sand to extend some rusted metal spike into the air. Where there had once been valleys and rivers, the sands subsided deeper. They may have been entirely filled in with the rust red, but that did not mean that they were gone. If they could wipe away the sands of Strife for just a moment, he felt certain that there was a whole world beneath that wouldn’t have looked so different from home. Mountains now smoothed by the endless grind of sand and centuries. Seas now drowned in sand themselves. Forests long dead but petrified as standing testaments to all that had once lived here. 

He had not seen Croesia after its fall. He had been knocked out in the aftermath, and when he awoke on the Ardent ship they had refused to show him any images. He supposed that now he was one of them, he could have requested those pictures and scrying results to pour over himself. Could have seen if his home had ended up looking like this broad barren nothing. But there had been more than enough images of dead worlds in his lessons about the Eidolons. It wasn’t hard to transpose the withering destruction of a world without its soul onto the place where he had been born. A world without magic was a world without life, and even if anything had survived the destruction of the apocalyptic events that he had caused, it would now have all gone to rot.

There was a time before when he would have pushed all of these thoughts away. When he would have kept his focus on the here and now, laying out plans for the battle to come, as though he hadn’t learned the tactics of fighting eidolons by rote. His paradigm would have allowed him to close all these thoughts, memories and feelings away so that he didn’t have to deal with them, but he found himself indulging in them instead. Closing himself off to the horrors of what the eidolons did would not make him fight them any better. 

If he knew his enemy and the price that would be paid if he failed, it would make it so much easier to muster the courage to face them. He would still use his Clearmind paradigm to rid himself of the fear that Eidolons naturally triggered in all living things, because he could not afford to have fear cloud his judgement. But anger and disgust at what they were and what they did would only serve to make him a more effective soldier.

The last time they recruits had faced an eidolon attack, the fliers amongst the enemy had conjured a sandstorm to cover their movements, but as Sylvas approached his designated position he could see them all, spread across the field of battle. The ridge that the Ardent had selected as their battle line was about the only thing out here apart from the barren expanse, it would be, as the older recruits termed it, a duck shoot. All they would have to do was spread themselves along the ridge and take the enemy in their section out before they could close the distance. It made perfect sense that he’d been deployed here, where his longer-range abilities could shine. 

Even though he’d been running behind everyone else back at the tower, his flight spell had gotten him here ahead of the rest, and he had his pick of spots on the ridge-line. The height of it was inconsistent along its length, in some places sand had heaped up to make a natural ramp, eliminating the height advantage, while in others the rocky ridge itself had broken down under the endless sand-blasting of Strife’s natural weather. Yet there was one point just a little off the center of the ridge which still had a decent enough drop that if any eidolon did manage to surmount it, knocking them back off would probably do enough damage to immobilize them long enough for him to clean up afterwards. That would be his preferred spot, and the fact that it gave him a commanding view of the whole battlefield was just a bonus. 

On that raised patch of dust he touched down and started casting. One after another of the fragments of his mind were broken off to hold a spell in abeyance until he was ready to unleash it. It was the first time that he had enough preparation time to really use all of the alter egos that he’d created, and the experience was both easy and uncomfortable. Easy, becausethis had been the intention behind shattering his mind to begin with. Uncomfortable because for someone with an utterly infallible memory, having bits and pieces of that memory separate off and become unreachable was a truly alien experience. He couldn’t even tell what was missing from his memory. Whether it was the endless swathes of textbooks he’d been memorizing or his first kiss, or anything in between. It was all just gone, cast out to serve as holder for a spell.

As he prepared, the enemy charged.

The mass of eidolons had been milling around on the distant field, making slow progress towards the ridge in their distraction, some preying upon the lesser tier threats amongst them, some gamboling around with a wild abandon. But as Sylvas arrived and began to cast, they became focused once more. The spark of magic that he was calling on called to them too. He was a beacon flare to the eidolons, and the more powerful the magic he prepared, the brighter he shone.

It was only as he locked in the last of the spells that he was going to prepare, unleashed his orbitals into the air around him, and retrieved his staff from Cold Storage that he realized that something was wrong. He had been ahead of the other recruits because nobody could match his mobility, but there was still no sign of them after all of his preparation was done. In itself, that was not the end of the world, delays happened, directions could be misunderstood and travel across the surface could be slow going but his concern now was that he had triggered the eidolon stampede too soon. They were coming for him with all haste, and he was alone. Casting his senses back towards campus, he could still feel no sign of his reinforcements. The eidolons were going to hit the ridge before everyone else arrived. 

Sylvas had trusted in the competence of everyone else, trusted in them to get here as quickly as possible, and that trust was going to be repaid with catastrophe.

He drew in mana with his left side as he cast with his staff, falling into the rhythm of it again, letting the hollow in his heart draw power in even as he cast it out. Just like with the death trap. A moment of desperation now turned into his primary method for cycling mana. A gravity spike to the left of him, then a gravity spike to the right. All the sand forming ramps up to this section of the ridge was drawn off to rain back down over the outer edges of his defensive line. He could change the battlefield only so much with the spells he had available, but if he still had a few moments, he would do everything that he could to improve his odds. The ridge-line was deepened, the sheer wall of stone beneath his feet went from a lump on the barren plain to being a solid cliff-face. He could only hope that the eidolons were so drawn to his magic that they wouldn’t spread out to the easier points of ascent and flank him. He’d done all he could to prevent it now, but given the sheer volume of them, it seemed inevitable. 

The pre-ordained spells for gravity affinity mages had limited areas of effect. That had never been a problem before, on a space station, or a training battle, when the width of their spread had seemed far greater than he was ever going to need, but now he realized just how limited he was. If he could pour more power into them, skip past the limiters in the spell’s wording, then he’d have been able to cover a wider area with some success, but as it stood, he was facing serious trouble.

A quick scrying spell gave him the worst of the news about the composition of the enemy forces.

Leading the charge were the huge insectile beasts with bladed faces that he’d faced the last time he was out here.

Parching Charger
First Tier Eidolon

• Health: 100%
• Mana: 100%
• Affinity: Unknown
• Strength: D
• Resilience: C
• Speed: D
• Potency: F 
• Focus: F
• Regeneration: F

The bulk of the ranks behind it were made up of the bloody skeletons that they’d encountered beneath the ruined city structures during the Cull.

Callous Gaunt
First Tier Eidolon

• Health: 100%
• Mana: 100%
• Affinity: War
• Strength: E
• Resilience: C
• Speed: D
• Potency: E 
• Focus: F
• Regeneration: E

But in amongst that horde, there were stranger things than he’d seen before. Strange, jelly-fish like shapes with magic crackling between their extended tendrils, suspended atop massive crab-like legs that he couldn’t help but associate with the titanic eidolon that had destroyed his world.

Baleful Plover
Second Tier Eidolon

• Health: 100%
• Mana: 100%
• Affinity: War
• Strength: D
• Resilience: C
• Speed: C
• Potency: D 
• Focus: D
• Regeneration: E

While it seemed inevitable that the smaller eidolons would be as mindless and direct as they had ever been, these Plovers moved with a strange sense of purpose across the field, as though they were herding the little ones. The magic he could sense gathered around them made him suspect that they would not simply be flailing at him with tentacles and legs either. He had always known that their were eidolons that could produce effects like a spell, he supposed that this must be one of them. In the midst of the fighting, he’d have to keep an eye on them, to see what range they could operate at, and do his best to keep them beyond that range until someone else arrived to throw up some shielding.

There were other eidolons out there, shielded from his scrying by the sheer mass of the rest of them. Some looking not unlike the Gaunts and Chargers, with some variation to them, but others that were stranger still. One looked like nothing more than a tangle of chitinous red legs all sprouting out from a central point, it seemed to roll around the field, slashing wildly at it compatriots with the bladed hooks at each of its many joints. There was no time to catalogue them all now. He just stowed them away in his memory to deal with later.

It was a small comfort that there were no fliers amongst the horde this time around, one less angle that he had to cover and be aware of. It was almost a shame, given how easily his new gravity magic could have plucked them from the sky and dashed them on the ground, but he was going to take any advantage he could get at this point, and one less plane to engage on was definitely an advantage when there was only the one of him.

The Chargers were going to be the first to arrive, and much like the first time he’d had to defend against them, he could see that they were now inadvertently forming themselves into a great wedge formation as they came at him. The kind of thing that would punch through a conventional battle-line. Dozens, if not hundreds of Eidolons, all charging at him full speed, their axe-blade faces pointed straight at him.

No matter how confident he might have been in his abilities, he did not know how he was going to stop them. There were just so many. If he’d spent his time in the last day working on the gauntlet and the orbitals and gotten them operational, maybe the situation might have been different, but for now all he had was himself. It had always been enough before. But this was not before. This was now.

With one last glance back towards the campus, and the complete absence of any reinforcements, the reality of the situation began to sink in. He hadn’t made it here early. He had been sent out to face this horde alone. This was not a mistake, this was not a failure on the part of anyone or anything except for his own imagination. He had never suspected that instructors might do this to him, never thought that they’d risk him like this when he was so vital an asset. It had been a stupid miscalculation on his part. Of course they would do this to him. They weren’t happy unless he was pushing himself to the verge of death every single day. So when he had stopped pushing himself there to try and please them, it was inevitable that they’d be the ones to push him instead.

The first of the Chargers arrived at the ridge and plowed into the solid rock face with a chitin shattering crash, but the one in the rank behind made it further, leaping atop its fallen comrade to gain more height before colliding in exactly the same place, just a little higher. On and on the wedge of Chargers came trampling over their fallen, smashing against the wall and each other, building a ramp from their own broken bodies until those to the back could leap cleanly up to stand face to face with him. He was so taken aback by this suicidal madness that Sylvas didn’t even intervene. He couldn’t even comprehend them doing something so stupid when they could just as easily have swerved off to the sides and flanked him. It seemed that the flare of magic that he represented was just too delicious for them to pass up. Like a lighthouse, he was shining out across the field as a warning, and the eidolons were hearing it as a dinner bell and crashing against the rocks with joyful abandon.

He was alone, he was exhausted, he had poisoned himself, and cracked his bones, and now he was facing a horde of mindless monsters that had destroyed his whole world alone. 

Hopelessness would have been the correct response, but even in his darkest moments, Sylvas had always turned hopelessness aside. The Ardent wanted to hang him out to dry. Let them. He would prove them all wrong. These monsters wanted to kill him. Let them try. He didn’t feel hopeless. He felt rage. Now every Eidolon in sight was going to feel his rage too.