Chapter 14

“If you’ve never travelled the stars, you’ve never lived. It sounds like a pilot’s bragging, but it speaks to a more fundamental truth of planetary civilization. There is a plateau that any sentient species eventually reaches when they run out of resources on their home planet or living space for their population. At that point, crises begin to emerge, and if the species has not taken steps to expand their horizons beyond the literal horizons of their world, those crises will continue to escalate to the point of self-destruction. The very same drives that make a species the dominant one on its planet also doom it to death by over success, and equilibrium with the natural drives of the species and their environment can rarely be achieved within the window of sentience before interplanetary travel becomes a necessity.” 

—Principles of Pre-Gate Intersystem Flight, Leighton Jagul

Sylvas was the first to rise, his grueling schedule from Strife still thoroughly embedded in his psyche, and he made good use of his ability to fly to navigate his way down from the top bunk and out of the room without disturbing either of the others. Malachai lay flat on his back with his arms at his side, as stiff while asleep as he was awake. Kaya had one leg dangling out from under the blanket to trail on the floor, one of them disconnected and shoved under her pillow for extra life, and she’d still ended up snoring all night.

Don’t think I can’t feel that surge of affection, darling. I haven’t a clue where you learned this from. You really care about these friends of yours, don’t you?

You and they are all I have, why wouldn’t I? Sylvas answered as he used a gentle application of gravity and opened the door without disturbing anyone. A few quick steps later he then had the run of the ship. He did at least make some pretense of exploring it, looking in on all of the parts he’d ignored the day before. He blinked in surprise at the fairly substantial supply of etherium stored in the rear next to the engines, wired directly into the spells that would allow for interstitial travel without a gravity mage or gate.

Darling, you are full of it. You and I both know where you want to go. Just take us there.

Sylvas chuckled. His mana channels were full of etherium that was constantly regenerating now thanks to his proximity to the eidolon within him. He could burn it, if his own mana supplies ever ran too low, instead of channeling through it to empower everything he cast, but as of yet, that hadn’t been necessary. Even in his worst moments of crisis in the labyrinth, it wouldn’t have served much purpose.

At some point, and after another less than polite round of urging on Mira’s behalf, he gave up on stalling and made his way to the front of the ship. Opening up one of the various planes of cold storage he could access, he gathered up the miscellaneous garbage that Hector had spent weeks or months accruing in the room and wiped it away. The plates he carefully stacked up and took through to the sink in the makeshift galley, contemplated washing, contemplated blasting into pieces, and then eventually left for someone else to sort, and returned to his cleaning. Then, after a fair bit more work, everything that he could feasibly remove from the pilot’s cabin was gone, and it had been stripped back to how it had looked when it was originally built. The way it had been made for Durgan Ironfist before he’d gambled it away. Sylvas smiled at the thought, then he stepped into the circle. 

At once, his senses expanded out, the ship became his body, and its spells and systems became his nerves and his muscles. It was so difficult not to flex them. Like trying not to scratch an itch. The ship felt in every way like it was his body to the degree that he decided to experiment with draining away its weight, the way he would have his own body. It worked, but the sensation was entirely different from when he did it to himself. When he was changing his own weight, or those of the orbitals that he’d made into essentially a part of his body, it was painless, effortless, like turning a dial on one of the control panels. Removing the weight from the ship was an entirely different feeling. His physical body here in the cockpit became the axis on which the weight was turned. All of it passed through him as it left the Folly.

He cast his attention back to the others, to see if any of them had stirred in their sleep, and he was pleased to find he remained alone in the early morning’s dim light. Wetting his lips, he decided to play around a little. Just a little. In exactly the same way that he’d simply will his body to move around, he willed the ship to rise off the ground by just an inch.

Once more, he became the crux on which the whole thing was anchored, all of the power required to lift the ship pressing on him, but with so much of its weight stripped away, that was scarcely more power than it would have taken him to lift himself off the ground. The ship rose, slow and steady, into the air, without a single spell having been spoken or a single system activated. Sylvas grinned and then moved them forward. Once again, it couldn’t have moved more than a few inches, nice and slow and steady so that nobody might be accidentally flung out of their bunk and onto the floor, no matter how tempting it might have been.

Slowly, so slowly, he drew the ship forward and into a turn, spinning the Folly around in one long, slow circle before returning it to where it had been before and carefully setting it down. The vibrations of touching down again couldn’t be felt anywhere else on the ship, but in his body, Sylvas could feel them, reverberating through him. He let out a steadying breath.

Then the whole ship jumped and landed again in a clatter, in time to Sylvas’ own sudden spike of panic when he heard Hector behind him saying, “You didn’t think this thing would have an alarm in case somebody tried to take off with it?”

Alarms started blaring all over the ship at the impact. The other two came charging into the cockpit in varying states of undress and battle-readiness, only to discover Sylvas looking more than a little embarrassed and no impending doom to speak of.

“Sorry, guys,” Hector spoke over Sylvas before he could apologize, “piloting lessons got a little out of hand there.”

The fact that Hector had taken the time to dress himself and pick up a cup of coffee on his way to come and scare the hell out of Sylvas definitely helped contribute to the appearance that this was just an impromptu lesson gone awry, and it also confirmed to Sylvas that the man knew exactly what he was doing in his decision to pop in and say hello just at the moment that he did.

He clapped his hands together. “Anyway, you two had better get yourselves put together. Sylvas is about to take us out.”

“I am?” Sylvas cleared his throat. “I am.”

Hector cast a couple of quick spells that activated some apparatus off in the factory outside, and the roof began to unfold with the same beautiful simplicity as all elven architecture seemed to effortlessly possess, like folding paper. The pale green sky opened up above them. With a glance at his slate, Hector told Sylvas, “Nothing between us and the other side of the sky. You’ve got clearance. Take her up.”

Sylvas had stepped back into the circle after all the alarms had shut down, but now he paused. “Are you sure about this?”

“Quickest way to learn is to do.” Hector leaned against the wall. “Besides, I’ve seen you itching to take the Folly out. Don’t pretend you haven’t been wanting to do this from the second you stepped on board.”

“I… really can’t.” Sylvas found the other man’s grin was infectious. Without casting, without effort, he lifted the Folly off the ground once again and started bringing it up into the light. As they rose, his senses, the sensor spells woven into the ship, seemed to blossom out. The higher they rose, the farther he could see and feel in every direction. He moved in a vast sphere of awareness extending out from the ship in every way. He could feel the birds fluttering by, the pull of gravity being overpowered by the uplift of their wings. Everything sang to him.

Again, his reverie was interrupted by Hector’s voice. “Let’s see how fast you can get us into orbit.”

Letting a little touch of his magic flow into the protective spells meant to defend the ship from the forces brought on by sudden motion, Sylvas pivoted the ship. The artificial gravity spells beneath the decking hummed to life, keeping down for them level with the bottom of the ship instead of the planet below. All the engines at the back of the ship were primed and ready, but Sylvas didn’t need anything as basic as raw force to move them. He extended his will out ahead of them and then flung the ship up. The same way he threw himself around in a firefight. The same way that he’d moved a city’s worth of stone with just a pull a few days before. Raw gravity. Raw will.

They shot up so fast that anyone blinking would have missed their whole passage through the sky and into the black beyond that blossomed out across the windows. They rose and rose, past the dense network of satellites around Alvarhain and out into a loose orbit just shy of its first moon. Hector hadn’t made a sound through their whole ascent, but now he let out a low whistle. “Alright, I admit it, you can fly.”

The older man flicked his wrist, casting information from his slate onto one of the upright displays around the cabin, into Sylvas line of sight. He needn’t have bothered. The ship and Sylvas’ own slate had already synchronized, and since his slate was also synchronized with Mira, he’d already begun pivoting them in the right alignment for the jump to the Glamrock system.

“Permission to go fast, sir?” Sylvas turned to look at Hector now and saw that the wolfish grin had spread all across his face and showed no signs of faltering.

“I already told you I’m not your boss. But if I were, I’d say hell yes.”

Sylvas readied the same teleportation spell that he’d been using for himself all this time—a microcosm of the one used for ship transport. The spells already woven into the ship seemed to slot into the gaps in that spell’s syntax, filling in the blanks that he usually had to do himself, needing only the complex calculation it would have taken any normal mage a long period of working out. He already knew it, thanks to Mira, thanks to his connection to the slate, and thanks to his own natural instincts for gravity and the positioning of everything in the universe. He pushed mana into the spell, and they leapt forward, drawn into the rip in reality and on into the total nothingness of null-space.

A teleport could only take a person so far. They could only traverse null-space for a few moments before it would begin to take its toll on their body, but in a ship, propelled by the spells that usually drove them forward, or Sylvas’ will, which was flinging them ahead with all haste now, they could traverse the distances between stars.

Without consulting Mira’s mapping, he already knew where their ship was headed in the big black nothingness ahead. He could already feel their exit point like a faint touch on his skin, guiding them onwards. He could activate the spells of the engines, step away for an hour, and come back to find them perfectly positioned to punch back through into reality, but he had no desire to stop feeling the perfect nothingness on all of his senses from all around. Every moment of every day, Sylvas was bombarded with sensory information and had to use his paradigms to filter it down so that it wasn’t entirely overwhelming, but here in null-space, there was exactly nothing. No gravity pulling at him, no flows of mana, and no lights or sounds. Nothing at all except his ship and his will, in motion.

“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done so smoothly in all my life.” Hector turned to the other two, newly arrived back on deck and dressed in the cobbled-together civilian outfits that they’d managed to acquire. “Maybe we have a little round of applause for the kid?”

Kaya whooped with excitement. Malachai politely patted his hands together until she nudged him viciously with her elbow, and then his applause became a little more enthusiastic.

“I am willing to admit that I might enjoy this a little bit.” 

His friends laughed while Hector stepped in closer to the consoles to read the information being fed back to them from the ship. “Okay, so this baby can actually go a lot faster than I knew it could. Good to know I was the obsolete part. New plan: we pretend that you’ve never learned how to handle your covenant, so I get to keep you around as my pilot forever.”

The reminder of the monster inside him should have brought Sylvas’ mood down, and there was a momentary pang of sadness as he remembered what had led him here, but he was running high on the speed he was managing to coax out of the ship. So instead, it made him smile as if something that had been missing all his life finally fell into place.

“I could think of worse ways to spend my life.”