Chapter 1

“It is a fact universally acknowledged that there is an upper limit to what mages can achieve. Our progression to new heights of power is ever tempered by our mortal frame. Or more succinctly, the body can only contain so much mana before it destroys itself. This is the true hard limit on all magic. The line drawn in the sand can be moved, massaged around through cunning methods of regeneration and cutting corners in spell-work, but ultimately any spell that requires more power than that must become a ritual, reliant on the perfect harmony of all involved, and given the influence of affinity upon the mana being used and the costly nature of conversion, this hard limit is very rarely breached even by ritual work as the effort of harmonizing the magic strips us of much of the excess mana that might have been generated to begin with. The more mages involved, the more costly the harmonization and the faster the diminishing returns. For this reason, methods of mana sharing are rarely worthwhile after the first circle is achieved, and for this reason, we do not see the universe fall into chaos as living gods walk among us, remaking reality to their will.”

—Fundamentals of Arcana, Albrecht Magnus

The spell was a simple one in comparison to most of what Sylvas had encountered thus far. A trap, but not one that was liable to take him by surprise. A combination of a chilling and time-slowing effect, the latter of which he probably wouldn’t have even noticed before his new Paradigm.

Come along, darling, think it through. If it isn’t hidden, then it is meant to limit your mobility in the impending ambush.

He sank into a battle-ready stance, hooking his fingers to form the runes graven into his bones into a focus. If Kaya were here, she’d make some witty comment and call out whatever lay in wait for them. If Malachai were here, he’d make some grand proclamation about how mighty he was, and how all foes, hidden or seen, would fall before him. If Bael had been there… 

Sylvas’ mind glanced off that line of thought before it could lead him anywhere darker. He wasn’t the kind of man to make proclamations or witty snipes in the middle of a fight. “Come out and face me.”

The wall of the labyrinth unfolded. What he’d initially taken for yet more of the elaborate elven carvings unfolded into some sort of golem. Magic crackled between the separate plates of stone that formed its body, and crystalline blades everted across the whorls of carving on each of those stones. The shape had been vaguely humanoid as it detached from the wall, albeit missing anything resembling a head, but with the sudden outburst of razor-edged crystal, it lost that resemblance.

He’d encountered these constructs already. When they were hit, the crystals shattered, filling the air with sharp-edged fragments that he had to siphon away with gravity or risk shredding him.

It is hardly a challenge at this point. I don’t know why they even bother.

Mira’s endless smugness came to an abrupt end when the construct launched itself forwards. Sylvas flew straight up onto the labyrinth’s roof, out of the path of its rush, only to realize as he was in flight that he’d made an error in judgment. The sudden lunge had not been the construct, only the crystals. It had launched them all at him, waited a moment for his reaction, then launched itself up at him. Whoever had made these constructs had done a far better job than Vaelith used to with her combat dummies. That was a degree of tactical thinking that he hadn’t anticipated facing.

Stop thinking how clever the thing trying to kill us is and kill it!

The hooked fingers of his hand curled now into a fist, and he swung it to intercept the stone golem as it surged up towards him. His strength, enhanced by the shifting gravity within his already enhanced body, met all the force of its leap, and the solid stone turned into little more than a puff of powdered stone and suddenly directionless mana as the engraved lines of spellwork inside the stone shell were shattered. The golem’s limbs flew past Sylvas to clatter off the roof before tumbling back down, but he was unharmed.

Which was when he realized his second error. The thing had launched its crystals at him. It had served as an excellent distraction, making him give up a stable position on the ground and put himself in line for a direct attack. But that hadn’t been its only purpose. The crystals had shattered on impact, and now the shimmering glitter of its razor-sharp remains was drifting out in a cloud. It had to be contained, or it would continue to spread throughout the area, slicing into Sylvas when he least expected it. Another nuisance. Another delay. He prepared a gravity spike to drop all the particulates to the ground but paused before he cast. Not because of Mira’s intervention, but because some instinct in the back of his mind had sparked.

The cloud continued to spread out, but he moved away from it instead of handling it, drifting over towards the trap that had proven completely irrelevant to the fight with the construct. A second look at the structure of it with his second sight revealed nothing out of place, but he didn’t believe his eyes. Drawing just a tiny amount of mana to his fingertips, he released it. At once, the spell-form buried beneath the obvious one that made up the trap thrummed to life. Ready to capture any magic he expelled and overload the trap with his own power, encasing the whole section of the labyrinth in ice—if he’d been fool enough to cast.

Oh, I didn’t think of that. Why didn’t I think of that? We’re thinking with the same brain.

“Maybe I’m just a little more suspicious than you?” Sylvas replied, heading off along the coiling passageway once more, staying ahead of the crystal cloud and all the minor injuries it would bring him.

Do you suppose that the traps have been customized to your psychology? Are they creating situations in which you have to accept temporary solutions because of your desire for completionism?

“I guess?” Sylvas hadn’t really given it too much consideration.

Mira highlighted a pattern in the stonework up ahead, the same engraving that he’d just encountered. He cast a gravity spike into the golem construct before it had even had the opportunity to pull itself clear of the wall, crushing its core to dust like the one that had come before.

He paused just long enough to take a breath, making sure that his senses hadn’t deceived him and some new trap wasn’t about to trigger, and then he set off again. Mira had been building a map of the maze that they’d been dumped into from the moment that he realized it was a maze, combining his eidetic memory with his gravity sense to project a three-dimensional model into his vision to guide him. In some places, the ancient magic imbued into the stone had illusions woven through it to interfere in this sort of cheating. Illusions of such complexity that they even generated a false signature of mass, but for the most part, all that it took was closer examination to discover them. Making the journey to all of the unexplored corners that could lead out and making sure that those illusions weren’t keeping him trapped here was Plan B. 

Plan A was to move as swiftly as possible throughout the whole complex to map it out, find whatever exit there was to be found, and use it.

Plan B is to level the entire place so that we don’t have to waste our time wandering around all day.

Sylvas rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m sure that there are no wards in place or traps that specifically feed off magic thrown around so carelessly.”

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, you know.

As they rounded the next corner, all of Sylvas’ senses started screaming warnings, which meant he didn’t have to listen to any more commentary on comedy from his dead girlfriend. There was nothing in sight, but he threw up a Gravity Shear all the same. It had taken him many painful lessons to develop the instincts for these situations, so ignoring them would have been foolish. A blast of blinding blue magic fired out from the engraving on the far wall, closing the distance faster than he could blink and washing over his hastily raised shield to bathe the corridor in crackling energy. It probably wouldn’t have proven lethal without the shear in place, but that was only because of his enhancements. Whatever font of mana the trap was drawing on died long before he even felt a strain on his own mana reserves. In fact, everything that he’d done since being dropped into the labyrinth was yet to touch them in any significant way. The etherium that lined his arcane channels constantly radiated a low level of mana that seemed to replenish his core, whether he was actively drawing it in or not. He refused to think about the other reason he had such boundless mana. Just like thoughts of Bael, it would only lead him to a dark place.

Once the initial blast had cleared, constructs deployed from the walls to attack him. More of the graven stone golems that he’d already bested. This time, he launched himself straight through them with the shear still in place, flinging them out of his path, grinding them along the walls as he bypassed them, and leaving nothing but broken shells in his wake. He had expected more of a challenge.

The corridor twisted again, abruptly stopping in a dead end that his map hadn’t predicted. He let out a heavy sigh and reversed course. The constructs he’d just dismantled hadn’t had a chance to deploy their crystalline defenses, so there was nothing to worry about there, but the longer he was in this labyrinth, the more time that the rest of the apparatus had to lurch into motion and close in around him. When he’d first arrived, there had been a construct or two lumbering around, but over time, more and more were activating. Perhaps it was all intentional, meant to gradually scale up the difficulty, but he suspected that this place, ancient as it looked, was taking some time to wake up again after however long it had lain dormant.

It took only a few moments to reach the cloud surrounding the trap and realize the next problem. The passage’s last split was a distance behind the spread of shimmering air.

Disarm the trap, trigger it, and outrun it or suffer the sting. The first seems the sanest option, though it will invariably take quite some time.

“Time that I don’t have.”

He had already let the gravity shear drop, and he had no intention of raising it again so close to the trap. He had no idea just how destructive the spell woven into the stonework could be, and he had no intention of finding out. Closing his eyes, reaching up to pinch his nose shut, and holding his breath, he flew through the cloud with all the speed he could muster.

The cuts came fast and many, but none were very deep. His uniform jacket absorbed most of the hits to his body, leaving only his exposed arm and face to suffer the worst of the damage. Each fragment of crystal was absolutely tiny but sharp as a razor, and as he pushed through the cloud, he could feel the heat as it abraded his skin.

He’d only just started to bleed when his gravity sense warned him of the approaching wall, and he swerved around into the next passage. Opening his eyes, he took a moment to check himself for further damage and cast a quick healing spell to patch the little damage he’d endured. The embedded mana crystals throughout his body were connected directly to his mana channels, so they too were full and showed no signs of depleting. There was no pain casting from them anymore. The different types of mana moved freely through his channels of etherium without ever touching his unaspected flesh.

It was a short flight to the last turn-off, by which point he’d established that it was his best option for filling out more of his map.

Pressing on, the tunnel branched three times, and each time he swerved to the one farthest from his already mapped areas without a second thought. It would almost invariably result in another dead end, but the full sphere of his senses was wasted if it was being used to look over areas that they’d already covered, so he made the turns all the same.

So far, the labyrinth had been exclusively passageways, except for the small round chamber that he’d been dropped into initially. This meant that when the passageway he was following opened up into a big, round chamber that his gravity sense hadn’t detected, it made him doubly nervous. There were engravings all across the walls, of course, and enough magic thrumming through them to make him quite certain that there would be more of the constructs stowed away inside them, just waiting to ambush him the moment it suited their plans. Doubtless, there would be some traps spread out amongst those carved murals of stone as well, but none of that was what sparked his anxiety. This much open space would allow for a bigger enemy to engage him. Something built to a much larger scale than the ambushers with an equally increased capacity to bear unknown enchantments and capabilities, and that had the potential to slow him down considerably. 

Now that he was inside the illusion that had masked the presence of the room, his gravity sense was leaping out once more, mapping things correctly and informing him that there were a half-dozen exits arrayed around the chamber, almost all of them leading to places he had yet to map. Making a break for one of the exits and hoping for the best might have let him avoid whatever enemy force had yet to deploy, but he would almost guaranteeably have to return this way when he hit a dead end since it was clearly some sort of crossroads in the labyrinth, and that meant that he was only delaying the inevitable by attempting to dodge out now. 

He came to a halt near the center of the room and began casting some spells into psyche fragments, storing them for later activation.

Still no sign of whatever you’re so sure we’re going to be fighting.

“Give it a moment to wake up.”

With enough spells for a small war prepared, and no noticeable dip in his mana supplies, Sylvas waited, letting not only his senses stretch out but also his slowly developing precognition. It was still sporadic at best, but there was no denying that it was working. The only trouble was that it remained untethered in time. Most of the visions it gave him had to be filtered out by his Paradigms. They were just glimpses of different eras, past and future, with no way to tell which was which or when the events took place or would take place. He was gradually starting to get a better sense of when things took place, able to narrow down the visions based on context clues thanks to Mira, but for places like this that had remained unchanged for so long, a century ago and tomorrow could look identical.

Yet despite the torrent of chaotic images constantly pouring into his mind, there was the odd glimpse that could offer guidance. Even if he couldn’t place it in time, he could see the ghostly figures of the elves in ancient times building this place, carving their magic into the stone. He could see the work of the more recent elves, updating and modifying those ancient defenses to empower them into something worthwhile to face him. 

“There,” Sylvas announced as he saw the elves raise their arms upwards as if in prayer, dozens of kinesis spells at work as they collectively guided something above them. Glancing upwards, he followed the vision towards a spot in the distant ceiling above which had begun to ominously crack and fragment. “There it is.”