Chapter 3

“Some posit that this limitation of manifestation is simple survival instinct; they are reliant upon a common affinity with the mana of a region to maintain their physical form while on this plane of existence, but I believe that we are looking upon them as creatures when they are fundamentally not. An eidolon is not a creature. It is, so far as I can ascertain, a natural formation of mana that happens to bear a resemblance to a creature. A pattern, much like a spellform, albeit infinitely more complex and comprised not of fragmentary language, but from something older and more solid. Perhaps they are what that language was trying to describe.”

—On the Nature of Eidolons, Part Two, Vivien Hartwood

Sylvas caught himself before he’d plummeted far, but there wasn’t all that much distance to fall anyway. Less than a three-story drop before he would have arrived at the generously spiked floor down beneath the original chamber.

Upstairs had been all pristine carving and delicate curves, but this layer of the labyrinth seemed to be a little more utilitarian and focused on its purpose of containing and tormenting its occupants. The bare stone showed through, and the constructs that lurched into action to attack Sylvas were no longer pieces of art but finely honed instruments of war.

The smooth stone of above had given way to slick and shining obsidian, jagged and barbed. These constructs, already lying in wait for his arrival, perched on the various spikes, had the same spidery movement as the bigger one from above. Four legs each, but moving in such a blur that there could have been double that number. With so much more space in this pit, they seemed less massive and cumbersome despite being the same size, though some part of that was likely how finally honed they were in comparison. There were no crystalline growths protruding from these; they were streamlined and precise, every motion deliberate.

Throwing up a shield deflected the first charge of them. They curved around the Gravity Shear instead of striking right at him, but where a living foe would have been confounded and confused by the abrupt shift of up and down, the constructs reacted instantly. They spreadeagled their legs to connect up with the others that had leapt alongside them, connecting together with something like magnetism to form a broad web. Where individually they would have been flung around. By joining together, they were able to catch both sides of the curvature and stabilize their position.

They only accounted for half of the constructs—the closest of them. The rest skittered around the edges of the room to avoid the shield, leaping from spike to spike, rebounding off the walls when that didn’t buy them enough distance and closing in on Sylvas with such speed that he almost instinctively moved to fling himself back up and out of the room.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

The spell that had been broken, and the trap that it had then triggered, still hung in the empty air where the floor of the upper chamber had been, pulsing with a dangerous energy that it took only a momentary glance at for Mira to confirm his suspicions. It was another of the same traps from earlier that would eat spell energy and turn it into an explosion. Exactly what he could not be in the midst of if he was going to fight these constructs. A trap layered on a trap layered on a trap.

Cursing under his breath, Sylvas dropped his shield and went on the offensive, quick-casting a focused gravity shear into the shape of a blade and lashing it through the closest of the leaping constructs to tear them in half. It bought him a second of time. He launched himself from the position where he’d caught his fall, not to the side where too many of the constructs were in motion but straight ahead, flattening himself out as much as he could to pass through the gap in the net of constructs. Their legs snapped together like a trap as he passed through, but they were just a fraction of a second too slow to catch him in their pincers. From the other side of the net, he had a lot more options and no more enemies just waiting to pounce from behind him.

A focused gravity spike into the center of the net, where the legs had all snapped shut and brought the construct bodies together, was the first thing on his list. Shattering the mass of them gathered there and scattering all the connected constructs in disarray. 

He poured more mana into the spell, weaving extra Aion words into the original casting while it still lingered, intensifying the pull and extending its duration. It was a single point of gravity, dragging in everything around it, collapsing the crystalline structure that the constructs had formed together, folding those that were closest in on themselves, and most importantly, dragging all the surrounding constructs off balance.

They navigated the lethal spikes lining the bottom of the chamber with precise movement, and with that sudden surge of gravity, he had robbed them of that precision. They went tumbling down into the pit as he cast. It wasn’t deep enough to stop them, but the complex tangle of spiked stone protruding meant that they’d have to reposition themselves all over again if they wanted to take a leap at him.

It was just like the Ardent had taught him: control the enemy’s mobility and lock them into limited areas so that you can attack and they can’t. The fundamentals were the same, whether he was fighting eidolons, mages, or a swarm of spider constructs.

With the majority of the scuttlers down in the dark amidst the spikes with no direct route to him, Sylvas had a moment to think. To breathe. He poured a fresh torrent of gravity into the spike in the middle of the room, having to fly away from it with all his speed to maintain his position as its pull became ever more ridiculous.

The remaining attackers tried to leap for him, only to go tumbling in towards the point of gravity he’d manifested. One after another, they released their grip on the stone spikes to make their attacks as their programming demanded, and one by one, they went soaring off to collide with the crushed remains of their brothers.

At last, Sylvas felt a dip in his mana reserves, for the first time since the unfortunate event on Strife. It was like he had been floating all of this time, and his feet had finally touched down on the ground again. A moment of stability. Of reality re-asserting itself. His mana was not endless. He was still human. Or as human as you could call someone who had changed their body as much as he had.

Feeling that first hint of weakness actually made Sylvas feel so much better that he flexed his power for the first time since all of this had happened to him. Letting the focused gravity spike drop off, he cast a more generalized one across the room. Even as the lurking automatons down amongst the spikes found their footing and tried to attack him once more, his spell caught hold of them, slamming them back down, cracking some, impaling those that had made a more impressive leap, and leaving all of them inert and useless.

With a smile on his face, he felt the steady flow of mana from his cycling technique begin to refill his core, all automated now thanks to Mira. Everything felt like normal. Everything except for the weight there, where there should have been a hollow place.

He cast a glance around the chamber. It was obvious that it was meant as a pitfall trap to catch people from above, but that didn’t mean it was the only thing that it was. Every part of this labyrinth had shown layers upon layers of thought put into its design, so this would be no different. A casual glance around showed nothing, and now that he was aware of the trap still hanging in the open air above him, he could feel it constantly like an itch on his magical senses that he just couldn’t scratch. A distraction.

I’m not sensing any other exits from this chamber other than up, but at this point, I don’t know which senses can be trusted and which can’t.

Dropping down to ground level, Sylvas found a body’s width of space around the spikes all around the exterior of the room. If there was going to be an exit, even if it was one that had just been used by whoever built this place, that was the level it would be at. He moved along the wall, face to face with the stone, searching for a way out. Everything looked perfectly normal, and there were no obvious seams where a door might have been, but given that the whole place had been carved out with magic, that was hardly a surprise. Sylvas hadn’t really expected to see anything with his eyes, or even with his other senses, given how much effort had been put into masking everything in illusions, but there were some things that even the smartest mage couldn’t work around. If something was physically there, even if it was hidden from the senses, then it would be affected by gravity, and even if his gravity sense could be distorted by the illusions, the physical objects would still move when it pulled on them. Just as he had when he was pulling on the eidolon, just as he had when he’d pulled fire from a star in his vision of the future, he reached out with his power, and he pulled. He inched his way along, dragging at the walls until finally, something gave way in the face of that pull. His grin widened.

Please tell me that those aren’t endorphins bubbling around in that little brain of yours. Are you enjoying this?

With a little extra pull, the whole block of solid stone slid out from the wall, and he tossed it out into the mess of jagged spikes, which shattered with surprisingly little resistance. “Is it so terrible to enjoy your life?” 

The passageway beyond was pitch black compared to the well-lit chambers that Sylvas had been exploring so far, but just a tiny draw on the fire in the mana-stone lodged inside him produced a little glowing orb that began to orbit his head, lighting the way.

You’ve been abducted by the government of the intergalactic empire that is meant to be on your side, cast into a nightmarish maze filled with traps and monsters, with no clue as to what is going to happen next.

“Exactly. My life.” Sylvas ducked under low-hanging cobwebs. “This is my normal, so I might as well find joy in it where I can.”

It wouldn’t have been hard to convert a little of his own mana into something neutral and cast a spell of pure light, but the little flame served more than one purpose. It lit his way, of course, but it also showed him which direction air was flowing—something that his now-complex sensory apparatus usually had to make calculations for. The flame was still and upright as it passed into his vision, giving no hint of wind blowing through for now, but when he got closer to an exit, he had hope that it might give him some forewarning.

Enough time had passed for Mira to pretend that Sylvas hadn’t had a good point, so she pressed on to the next thing. Do you suppose that the lower levels were meant for maintenance, or will we have to pass through multiple layers before we finally find the way out?

“Hard to say. The plain décor makes me think these parts weren’t meant to be seen by…” He was at a loss for the right word. “Guests?”

Darling, if we’re guests, then we have had the rudest welcome I’ve ever encountered, and I used to wake you up first thing in the morning.

He stopped at the dead end of the tunnel. “I am perfectly pleasant first thing in the morning.”

A perfectly pleasant troll, she countered without missing a beat. Groaning and grunting for at least an hour before you finally manage something resembling conversation.

“Hmm,” Sylvas grunted back purposefully as he considered the tunnel before letting out a resigned sigh and mentally shrugged back at her. “If that’s true, then I hope we can finally find someone for me to grunt and groan at.”