Chapter 36

“Proposal One: The shikari are the Aions. Faced with their inevitable decline, the Aion people instead chose to divorce themselves from magic and their higher brain functions, leaving behind only their bodies, which they had enhanced beyond all recognition, into the pinnacle of what can be achieved without magic. In this way, they could ensure their own continuation despite whatever arcane disaster was certain to doom them.”

—The Shikari Potentialities, Olivan Veilbohr

There were four mages on the Folly. Four of them at the peak, or close to of what was considered possible. None of them cast fast enough to get a shield up in time. The destruction of the Aion defense platform, and the ensuing explosion, tore through the ship, melted through the ablative armor and hull, tore through the cockpit, and hit Sylvas head-on. If he hadn’t had complete control over his position through his embodiments, then the sudden exposure to the vacuum of space would have sucked him out into the ongoing destruction. As it was, the consoles were destroyed, the walls were scorched, and only the presence of the eidolon within him was enough to keep him alive. The destructive force of all that mana unleashed washed over him, stripping skin from muscle, muscle from bone. The blood remained, hanging in the shape of a living man despite the catastrophic injuries he’d suffered, and the blood gave him life and form again. It flowed out from where the veins had hung in the air like the tendrils of a jellyfish, expanding out to fill the spaces where Sylvas had been, and as it tightened and dried, his body took form once more, replicated not as healing magic would have replicated it, with his original biological form, but with his new runeforged flesh. He would have gasped for air, if there had been any in the cockpit. As it was, there was only him and the vacuum of space.

Requesting immediate repairs to the cockpit from Ms. Runemaul.

The ship was torn to pieces. The blast had melted through most of the hull. Through Mira, he could still get feedback from the systems that were intact, and they painted a grim picture. Their engines were gone, the weapon systems were gone, and artificial gravity was active only because Sylvas’ own mana was flowing through it and created the effect without effort. That same natural effect of his mana was the main reason the structure of the ship hadn’t come entirely apart. Sylvas was the glue holding it together. His mana, his power, was the only thing keeping the shattered parts from drifting apart like all the other debris in orbit around the planet. The remains of every other ship that had come this way.

He could not feel his friends. He could not hear them breathing or feel their hearts beating. The systems of the ship were all turned outwards, and his own ears were designed to hear through the vibration of air—something absent from the space around him. He could be the only survivor of the blast for all that he knew.

Their crippled craft had been launched away from the destroyed platform by the force of the explosion, spinning slowly out into space, and with all the sensory apparatus of the ship melted apart, all that he could make out was what was spinning past his face. The other platforms were still in motion, still lighting up with additional volleys. The explosion had destroyed the Folly, made it so that there was no possibility of it going anywhere or doing any harm, but the inexorable Aion weapons still moved into place to take another shot. To obliterate all trace of them from existence.

Every moment since they’d come into orbit had been an unmitigated disaster, and now that they were headed for the inevitable conclusion, Sylvas was ready to accept his fate. His mistakes had killed them all. His arrogance in thinking he could outwit the Aions’ defenses. He closed his eyes against the growing glow of the barrage being launched against them and braced himself for death. Then darkness started to creep in. Around the edges of his closed eyes, the blinding light of the incoming spells dimmed. His eyes snapped open, and he saw the metal around the edges of the cockpit beginning to grow back into their original shape. Kaya. She was alive. And he was going to keep her alive. He was willing to die for his mistakes, but she should not share that fate.

Somehow, throughout it all, he had kept the air in his lungs, even though the vacuum strived to rip it from him, and with that air, he could cast a single spell. He was still standing in the command circle. The ship was still his, and he could cast a spell. That was all he had ever needed to win.

Even as his vision was filled with the blinding light of the incoming spells, Sylvas cast. Every word flowing out in that single breath. All of his focus and instinct honed in on this one act.

They slipped out of reality into null-space. Tears of relief froze on his cheeks. The resonance between the platforms that had stopped them from escaping before required all three of them in place. He could still feel the other two trying to stop him punching out of reality, but they were out of harmony.

If the void of space had been cold, it was nothing compared to null-space. Frost crusted over him, and the liquid flowing of the metal Kaya had been using to repair the ship slowed to a crawl. There wasn’t enough of the infrastructure of the ship left intact for Sylvas to make it move under the power of his will. The engines were gone, and all that they had was the momentum of their spin. And his instinct, once again.

Darling, please don’t tell me that you’re trying to…

With the air mana stored in one of his gems, Sylvas refilled his lungs and spoke the second half of the teleportation spell to bring them back into reality.

The explosion had sent them flying directly away from the platform, but their spin had been the touch of the planet’s gravity. They had been spinning in towards the planet, back in real space. And with the discrepancy in distance between the two, the moment that they had been drifting and freezing in null-space was all it would take to close the distance. Mira’s concern was that they would emerge into the solid mass of the planet, but she needn’t have worried. Sylvas may not have been able to calculate the exact distances, speeds, and differential like she could, but he did have his entire nervous system plugged into gravity mana at all times. She thought, but he felt, and he felt right.

They crashed into the planet’s surface with a force that ripped Sylvas out of the circle and smashed him not just into the regrowing wall of the cockpit but through it. He hit the dirt rolling, slammed hooked, bloody claws down into the ground to stop his slide, and then rushed back at the Folly. It had looked horrific from the inside. From the outside, it was essentially unrecognizable. There was no part of it still in the same formation as it had begun. Kaya’s hasty attempts to patch it and keep it together had been more focused on survival than beauty, and the different parts were all oddly angled and mangled. Those parts that still remained, anyway. Most of it was gone. For the first time in almost a minute, Sylvas drew in a breath. It was sweet here, pollen or something similar on the air.

Launching himself back through the hole in the cockpit, he headed deeper into the ship. Kaya had been alive before the crash, but would she still be alive now? He flew down the length of the long corridor to the engine room where she’d been, tearing the door out of its porthole when it wouldn’t budge. Kaya was there, bloodied and battered from the rough landing and the fight before. The storage units for the etherium had been torn apart, but not by the fighting. Kaya still held the last lump of the mana mineral in her flesh and blood hand, veins of raw magic ran up her arm glowing as bright as the Aion weapons had, and it was only then that Sylvas realized she wasn’t holding onto it deliberately. Her hand had seized shut around it. He took hold of her fingers, tried to pry them apart, and ended up breaking them to free the crystal and shake it loose from her grip. Her eyes were shut, which he hoped meant that she was unconscious; otherwise, she was going to have some things to say about him breaking her fingers.

“Please just be unconscious.” He began casting with the life mana stored in his gem, summoning all of it that he could muster to repair her flesh. “Please be alive.”

The mana flooded out of him, shaped into the spell, and washed over her. The bruises blossoming across her face seemed to recede. The shoulder he hadn’t realized was out of its socket popped back in, and the fingers that had been sitting at wrong angles after him brutalizing them straightened back out. It wasn’t everything—she’d need considerably more medical care than he could provide to fix up all of her injuries—but he hoped it would be enough to keep her alive.

He leaned in to put his ear by her mouth, to check for her breathing, and he was nearly startled to death when she suddenly gasped and then launched into the loudest and longest stream of dwarvish expletives that he’d ever heard in his life. She headbutted him entirely by accident as she lurched up to sitting, reaching out to cast again immediately, realizing that their situation was no longer life-or-death, and then finally, she slumped back. “Oh, stanzbuhr. What did we drink?”

“A tall glass of unmitigated defeat.” Sylvas tried for a smile, but it looked too forced to fool anyone. He held out a hand to Kaya, and she took it. Not to pull herself up, just to hold it.

“We’re alive.” Kaya groaned as if she wasn’t entirely sure it was true. “That ain’t nothing.”

He caught a glimpse of the scars running up the length of her arm from where she’d been hastily consuming the raw mana of the etherium to try and power her magic and keep the ship afloat. She’d burned herself from the inside out. Without channels carved through her flesh to direct the magic, it had seared out of her in every direction, leaving behind marks. She spotted them at the same time as him. The sigils of Aion text burnt into her flesh and then hastily healed by his clumsy magic. She looked from her scars to his, chuckling. “Twins.”

Dragging his eyes away, he let her hand go and rose. “I need to go check on the others.”

“Bone-boy is alive, but he’s probably mad about it.” Kaya groaned as she tried to stand and failed. “Wrapped him up in a layer of ablative before the last blast hit us. He was in a bad way. Didn’t figure he’d make it otherwise.”

“Hector?” Sylvas had been so focused on what was going on outside the ship, he’d scarcely given his friends a moment’s thought.

Kaya looked uncomfortable. “Don’t know.”

Her look of discomfort more than anything else sent Sylvas off running. There had been weapon stations off the main hallway, where battlemages were able to cast through the ship’s systems to target enemies out in space. One of them was entirely submerged in a cocoon of metal, as Kaya had said. But the other, the door hung just slightly open, and Sylvas could feel the treacherous breeze coming in from the forest outside. He ripped the door open. There was nothing left of the cabin. The outward facing walls had been melted away by the first barrage. No wonder Kaya hadn’t bothered trying to save the guy from the next hit. There would have been nothing left to save.

Except somehow, there was. From the waist down, Hector was just gone; there were some gelatinous strands of skin, fat, and muscle trailing down to the molten patch of floor, all coated thickly in the frost of null-space. That was probably all that had stopped him from bleeding out entirely, the fact that he’d been flash frozen. Sylvas grabbed him under the arms and dragged him into the ship. He was still breathing, which was some sort of cruel miracle, given the state of him, but there was no other sign of life in his body. 

His head lolled to the side, and he didn’t even let out a cry of pain when Sylvas dumped him onto the deck and tried to heal him. The paltry amount of life mana he’d managed to drag in since casting it all out into Kaya was only barely enough to empower the spell, and when it cast, it did next to nothing. 

Sylvas, the eggs in storage, we could—

He started to move before Mira could even finish the thought, pulling free the Tandonian Roc’s egg from his cold storage and letting them gently fall upon the man’s body. He’d taken them from the Truthseekers…taken them during Bael’s betrayal where they had been used to temporarily nullify Malachai largely out of reflex, as a way to remove them from the battlefield. But now as he drew the incredible amount of mana out from them and shaped them into another healing spell, the most powerful one that he had ever cast and sent it into the man’s body, causing it to buck and writhe wildly.

“Come on, come on,” he whispered as he rolled Hector onto his back for a better look at his injuries. A move that caused him to promptly wince as he saw exposed bone, burns, and all manner of other horrific wounds that he was in no small part responsible for. Wounds that despite all his effort hadn’t all been healed. But that hadn’t been Sylvas’ intention, or at least not wholly, for he knew his limits. What he had been trying to do was push Hector along just far enough for him to wake up, for if he did, then he could have healed himself in a blink.

But Hector didn’t wake up, his burned and charred body laying as still as it had ever been.

Which meant, despite Sylvas’ best efforts, Hector was going to die.