Chapter 2
“The eidolon is magic given flesh. This state has not what we would call true sapience, but it certainly has imbued instinct and will to act into what should be mindless constructs. They are formed around their central affinity, with it providing the core of their form and habits, but the vast variety of eidolonic phenotypes observed suggests that either there is some deeper complexity to those affinities which has not yet been made clear or they are subject to some form of evolution dependent upon the environment in which they find themselves. Which is to say, even when bidden, an eidolon will not manifest in environs that run contrary to its nature and survival. One cannot summon an eidolon of fire at the bottom of the ocean, nor summon an eidolon of war in a place of peace.”
—On the Nature of Eidolons, Part One, Vivien Hartwood
He threw up a Gravity Shear overhead as the stonework crumbled away from the construct. There was a glimpse of glowing crystal through the distortion. Jagged slabs of it swung into motion like pendulums. Without the shield raised, they might have hit home, might have split him in half, first one way, then another. With the shield, they rebounded and dragged the spidery shape of the construct down from the ceiling as they did. The central mass of the construct was a whorl of stone, the capstone that held up the roof of the chamber repurposed now into a hammer, being brought down on the shear.
There wasn’t enough force in his shield to abrade it, but there was enough pull on its four bladed legs to pin it against the curvature of the shield overhead. The whorl lit up, glowing blue as it ejected crystal in the exact same way all the others had. But while they had projected them as armor or weapons, this one fired the crystals out like cannon fire, sprouting them through the shield, and then surging with power to launch them down into him.
He swung the shear as he tried to leap aside, hoping to foul its blind aim, but it was to no avail. As the shear turned, so too did the construct pinned on top of it, and so the firing position was rotated to keep him dead center. Dropping the shield, he flung himself aside, just as the four-legged construct fired off its payload of crystal. It hit the floor of the chamber with a catastrophic cacophony. The chiming of bells turned deafening and wrong as each delicate crystalline form shattered into razor dust in the air, bursting out in a cloud from the point of impact.
The twist of the shield had at least ensured that the full weight of the bow-legged construct didn’t come crashing down on Sylvas. It landed with a stumble to one side of him as he tried to deal with the explosion of razor shards heading his way.
An inversion would launch them up into the roof and out of the way if they had any weight. But the fact that they were drifting in the air showed just how little of that they had.
Spiked Inversion is ready to cast whenever you are ready to cast it, darling. I took the liberty of degrading the personality fragments carrying both Inversion and Gravity Spike to the point that their original spells lost coherence, then recombined them.
That particular shard of psyche that he’d snapped off before the fight began seemed to chime, drawing his attention, and he chuckled as he recombined it with himself and completed the casting. Gravity under the explosion flipped, up becoming down, and the intensity of that inverted gravity quadrupled, just like when he cast his basic gravity spike, launching all the shattered crystal back up into the roof from whence it came.
“What would I do without you?”
Die many painful deaths, darling. Now perhaps—
Whatever she was trying to tell him to notice, he was distracted by the impending doom, in the form of the big stone construct having regained its footing and now launching itself directly at him. Another shield would have stopped it, but those same pronounced whorls were engraved all over its stony shell, just waiting to unleash a fresh flurry of crystals. Sylvas had no interest in getting caught in a loop. These constructs may have had limited programming defining how they could respond to a situation, but he did not.
Flying straight up, he avoided the initial charge, but before the rushing form passed entirely by beneath him, he dropped once more, increasing his weight to the most his reinforced body could tolerate before crashing down with all the mass he could muster. The sudden impact knocked the construct to the ground, splaying those spindly legs across the room. Sylvas had hoped hammering down onto it would have been enough to break it, but it seemed this one was built of sterner stuff than those he’d already faced. He barely had a moment of advantage before all around him, the whorls in the stone began to light up blue, signaling fresh crystal growth was going to be forthcoming.
He launched himself again. Rather than risk being skewered, he shed all the weight he’d gained and soared off to the far side of the chamber to buy himself enough breathing room to cast. Even as the crystals came jutting out of the construct in every direction, his hooked fingers aligned with the center of its mass, and he unleashed a Focused Gravity Spike. A single point at the center of the construct was his target, each one of his fingers curled in to align on that point, and at that point, gravity intensified, drawing in everything around it until the construct imploded in on itself, all the potentially lethal crystals that should have broken away falling in towards that focal point until the whole thing was just dangling legs splayed out at broken angles and a condensed heap of stone in the middle. The magic animating it faded away.
—You can finish that thing off so we can get on with our day. You know it is very rude to interrupt a lady when she is speaking.
“I’ll just stand around until you’re done next time.”
See that you do.
The remaining constructs in the chamber had begun deploying from the walls, but there was no element of surprise left for them. If they’d mobilized a little faster, then perhaps they might have gotten the drop on him while he was distracted by the big one, but everything in the labyrinth still seemed to move at a much slower tempo than Sylvas was accustomed to. If they meant to ambush him, they would have to start moving faster, and if they didn’t mean to ambush him, then the painfully slow process of them extricating themselves from the walls only at his approach gave him a massive advantage. Targeting them in order of how close they were to actually being able to launch an attack, Sylvas rattled off a series of Focused Gravity Spikes, shattering and stilling them one after another.
After just a few seconds, silence fell over the chamber once more, broken only by the occasional tinkle of a fragment of stone falling from the shattered remains of the defenders of the labyrinth. This was all too easy. There had been moments of pressure but nothing even close to the relentlessness of what he’d been capable of handling at peak efficiency. Whoever was in charge of designing this labyrinth clearly hadn’t done so with someone like him in mind; whoever had made the adjustments to make it into a challenge or test for him had failed in their efforts.
Don’t get overconfident, darling. They may just decide to drop the whole building on your head and be done with it.
The prospect failed to inspire much fear in Sylvas at this point. Even knowing that above the labyrinth itself there was solid stone for as far as he could sense, he was relatively sure that he’d be able to break through. The only limitation before had been his mana, and the enforced restrictions that the Ardent had placed on the spells that he could use and modify. As their captivity stretched on, it became increasingly apparent that whatever loyalty he owed to the Ardent was not being reciprocated with any sort of rescue attempt, so he found himself caring considerably less about their rules. Not to mention that the restrictions were meant to be lifted after he achieved his fifth circle anyway. Something that he had managed, even if it had been overshadowed by later events.
Introspection time was over. He’d identified the next route to expand his map, and he took off once again. Forwards and backwards. Illusions and traps. Inch by inch, he mapped out the maze that he’d been dumped in, no longer waiting to face off with the constructs as they emerged, just letting Mira’s pattern recognition spot the specific shapes that they formed in the carvings and the floes of mana and unleashing a short, sharp burst of destructive gravity before they could unfold into threats.
Perhaps a minute passed in peaceful motion before the abiding sense of wrongness began to creep over Sylvas again. Something wasn’t adding up. Some sensory input or calculation was skewed. So far as he knew, he had been traveling in a straight line along the passageway away from where he’d last fought, but up ahead the same passage opened out into the same chamber, and his sense lied that it was somewhere else entirely, even though he could see the scattered debris in precisely the same pattern. Either it was an illusionary projection of the last room good enough to fool all his senses, some incredibly clever piece of spell-work to make everything in this room actually copy what had happened in another, or his senses had been tricked somewhere in that passage, and he’d ended up coming back along the same way that he came in.
I can find no evidence of us being tricked in the passage.
“Well, it wouldn’t be much of a trick if we could.” Sylvas grimaced.
He tried to realign the mental map with the new one that his senses were producing and found them to be directly at odds with one another. As they overlaid, they seemed to indicate that the whole world had been rotated through 180 degrees. Even when he manually contorted it back into its original layout, his senses went on insisting that this was an entirely new, unexplored area despite his boot prints in the dust.
With a sigh, he released his mental hold on the map, leaving it entirely to Mira. The contradiction was giving him a headache. There was some clever piece of magic here that he hadn’t even detected, and he had no patience to stop, search, and solve it when all the mechanical defenses of the labyrinth were grinding to life. He picked the next passageway around, and he took off again. He made good time, scanning as he went for any indication of trouble, finding none and then emerging into the same chamber yet again, with yet another overlaid version of reality that ran contrary to what he knew to be real. The whole room was a trap, and he’d fallen into it. He shot off towards the passage that had first brought him into the chamber, only to find that it too seemed to lead back to the exact same point. A systematic search of all the remaining tunnels led to the same conclusion. He was not leaving this chamber.
Less than ideal, darling.
There was clearly something about this chamber that mattered to the designers of the labyrinth. Some sort of dimension-warping oubliette wasn’t completely out of the question, of course, and a trap could be set in the ceiling above, just waiting for him to try and blast his way out before it blew him to pieces, but everything that he’d encountered so far spoke of a more elegant mind. One that meant to test, rather than destroy. If they wanted him dead, they could have just dumped him out an airlock while he was en route to wherever the hell this was. They were teaching him that his senses couldn’t be trusted in this place, that they could be warped and manipulated. Whatever was at the heart of the lesson had to be here in this chamber. It was the nexus around which all the manipulations centered.
Reaching out with his usual senses was providing him nothing useful. They had shown, time and time again, that they could be fooled, even his gravity sense—something that he was fairly certain only a scant few mages throughout history had ever had use of—was being confused. But that was here and now. His vision, his understanding, was not limited to the present.
He lowered the filters blocking out his newest Paradigm and let the waves of history wash over him. There he was, coming back into the chamber from each of the different entrances. There he was, rushing out of each passageway to return to the same place. Here were the elves installing the spider construct in the ceiling. Here were other mages, casting enchantments on the place, brushing against his domain of gravity magic in their manipulation of the dimensional structure required to keep inverting his journey down each passage. It wasn’t a portal partway along each of them; it was an anchor to keep anyone who strayed into this room from escaping. An invisible shackle, locked around his ankle, dragged him back here whenever he went too far away. The shackle was buried beneath the chamber floor, just as the construct had been buried in the roof.
He cast his Focused Gravity Spike straight down in the center of the chamber, manipulating its casting to put it in a spin, drilling down through the remains of the construct and through into the stonework below. Into the carefully balanced piece of self-repeating magic hidden there beneath its many layers of illusions and misdirection.
A ripple passed out through the air, washing over the chamber and beyond as the spell unraveled, then Mira carefully wiped away any of the mapping information they’d obtained since trying to leave the chamber for the first time.
“Shall we try that again, without the interference?” Sylvas almost mustered a smile before the trap tethered to the spell he’d just broken triggered, and the floor of the chamber gave out from under him.
