Chapter 45

“Supposition: Aions were bipedal or quadrupedal and displayed body line symmetry. Just as humans count in base ten because of the number of our fingers, almost everything that we learn of the Aions implies a fixation on symmetry and balance. The solutions to so many of their traps has been to apply equal but opposite pressure to what is already there, their architecture, where it has any commonalities almost always has symmetry, and if you’re looking for the button to push, it’s almost always bang in the middle, even if that would put it in the way of normal day-to-day use.”

—Selected Daybook Musings, R. Clarendon

Wrapping his arms around her, he launched them both back across the room. The tide of shikari stopped and turned once more, trying to follow his movements. “Where?”

“The center.” She pointed. “The Aions loved symmetry.”

He set her down as close to the middle of the room as he could manage, then pulled all his orbitals back in from where they’d been hitting shikari around the room, setting them to spin around her, keeping her at their center. It wouldn’t stop a shikari charge, but it might give him enough time to react before they tore her apart. He didn’t dare move more than a few feet away from her in case another one of the shikari came through the wall right there, but neither could he stay beside her. He needed room to fight, and she’d get caught up in that fight if he stayed too close. He couldn’t think of many worse situations to fight in.

Then he couldn’t think at all. The shikari bore down on him, and all of his attention was turned back to the fight, to the flow of future events, to the spells that he was casting and the blood running down his back in rivulets, now spreading out like wings behind him to lash out at any shikari fool enough to try and get past him. More than once, he had to blast one of the shikari away from Rania as she worked, but at no point did she seem to notice. Her head was down, and she was studying the writing on the ground, glancing back and forth from the symbols to her notes, and occasionally up, not to look at the war raging around her, but to compare the symbols on the floor with the ones on the illusory wall blocking their path.

Sylvas bled. He fought, and he fought well, but there were limits to even his enhanced body. His endurance might have been inhuman, but that didn’t mean it was limitless, and the shikari just kept on coming. As he slowed, as he weakened, he couldn’t do everything that he needed to do. He had to start making choices between suffering a blow or letting one land on Rania. 

Of taking a hit or letting one of the others take it for him. At this distance, it should have been harder to see what was happening in the battle raging at the other end of the room, but Mira kept track of it all, feeding it into the part of his brain that predicted what came next, and each and every time, it offered him options. Suffer this bite to the shoulder, and Kaya lives. This scratch along the length of his back, or Kegel lost a leg to go with the arm.

Rania didn’t tell him when she solved the puzzle. She didn’t tell him that she was unlocking the way. Her hands danced over the inscriptions on the floor, and they lit up, and in an instant, the wall blocking the rest of the way was gone.

Beyond it was the stuff of nightmares.

Every surface was coated with egg-sacs, all of them burst to disgorge the army that they had been fighting through. And looming over it all, at the rear of the chamber, was the shikari queen. ‘More physically imposing’ had been all the literature had to say. It didn’t mention that she was the size of a building in her own right. Shaped like nothing more than a vast caterpillar, with hooked razor claws running down both sides of her bodyline, the queen held court over the depleted remnants of the hive. She had sent all of her children out to defend her, and they had been slaughtered. Dozens of eyes shone in the hooded darkness at the top of that elongated body. All of them locked on him.

Grabbing Rania around the waist, Sylvas turned and fled back the way that they came, launching up and over the swarms of shikari still fighting on to land back beside Kaya and Malachai. Leaving Rania in their dubious care, Sylvas turned his attentions to the wounded. All three of the archaeologists had suffered injuries. The missing arm was the worst, but only barely. The elf had been gutted. Drawing on the life mana stored in the gem inside him, Sylvas cast a healing spell on Viv as the worst off of the three. Her wounds closed, her innards returned inward, and she stared at him stupefied. “You can’t heal.”

“I assure you, I can.”

Lass interrupted, “Sylvas Vail’s affinity is gravity.”

Sylvas opened his mouth to explain, then realized that he’d never told them his name. They could have worked out his affinity from the magic he’d been doing, but not his name. “How do you know who I am?”

The three of them exchanged looks. “Your dwarf friend introduced you.”

Except she didn’t. She wouldn’t. Kaya might have been more relaxed about a great many things than Sylvas would have liked, but she wouldn’t have given away his identity when he was meant to be dead. Besides, she never called him by name anyway.

He twisted away for a moment to launch a shikari away, then he turned back. “Who are you, really?”

There was some moment of unspoken communication between the three of them, then Kegel piped up. “The Empyrean is lying to you, lad. The Obsidian Dominion isn’t the enemy. The eidolons are. All we care about is keeping the universe safe from them.”

Sylvas’ stomach felt like he’d just stepped out over a pit. “You’re with the Dominion?”

“Aye, and we’re telling you so. We’re not lying to you like we could have.” The dwarf struggled to right herself without her arm. “Because you need to know, we’re not the bad guys in this. We’re just people, like you, trying to survive.”

The shikari queen let out a roar so low that human ears could not have heard it. Sylvas felt it deep in his gut, in his blood, and in his bones. He took a deep breath to steady himself. “I will hear you out when this is over.”

“Stanzbuhr!” Kaya called over. “Let’s get going!”

He cast the flying spell on the four of them, and they launched together, sailing across the sprawling open battlefield to land at the feet of the queen. Only a handful of shikari remained alive apart from her, but so long as she lived, they would repopulate and spread across the entire planet, across the entire universe, if given the opportunity.

Sylvas set his friends down carefully, then began to cast. All around him, they were casting too. Except for Rania, who was instead sighting down her rifle to pick off the closest of the injured shikari before it could charge them. In the distance, Sylvas could make out magic being done by the Obsidian agents, but he did not have the time to deal with that now. If they had any sense, they’d help him fight this monstrosity so that they all survived. If not, he could at least hope they’d run rather than try to stab him in the back. Either way, he didn’t have the time to worry about it.

The towering monstrosity came tumbling down, and thick scales ran up its belly, thicker than the hull of a ship, but around them was fur. It tried to use its own weight as a bludgeon, to crush them under those thick scales, but a shove at Malachai and a graceful leap with Kaya and Rania got them clear before it could come down. The trouble with something so huge was that it had a lot of weight to move around; it was slow compared to tiny lifeforms like Sylvas.

He unleashed a gravity’s arrow through it. Aimed deep into the heart of the beast. Just as shikari were much tougher and denser than any human being, so too was the queen made of sterner stuff than her drones. It struck off the scales but embedded in the furred side of the monstrosity.

From the other side, Sylvas could feel waves of chill air washing across the room. Malachai was pouring death magic into the colossal beast with a ferocity unmatched even by the creatures that they’d spent all day facing. It seemed like he wanted the death blow on the shikari queen, and if he could take it, Sylvas was not going to complain. The trouble was, for all of the death that Malachai was pouring into it, the queen was so full of life that it gained little traction. It was more alive than any living creature Sylvas had ever come across, even constructs made of pure life mana seemed to fade into the background when compared to it. Sylvas cast arrow after arrow, carving lumps out of the queen as she tried to lift herself back up off the ground. It had turned into a battle of attrition, with all of them trying to kill the queen, and her healing so rapidly that it seemed pointless to even try.

Summoning a gravity well inside of her did some good damage and kept her pinned down, but it also left Sylvas unable to cast anything else. He charged in, still chanting out the words to keep the spell going, and he raked at fur and flesh with his claws to little effect. Even when he went into a dervish berserk, ripping into the side of the beast and digging for vital organs, the wound began to close behind him, almost trapping him inside.

Brute force was not winning them this battle, so Sylvas began working on something else. His orbitals were still following Rania around like they were her pets, so he recalled them and set them spinning in a circle in front of him, speeding them up, faster and faster until they blurred together in his vision to be a solid circle.

He clapped his hands, readied his mana, and said, “Mira, give me something good.”

The spell started spilling from his lips before he even had time to parse what he was saying, the magic flowing through his fingertips into spell forms that began to drift in a circle around him.

You know, I always hated the limitations of mana. There seemed to me to be so much more that magic could do if one just had enough juice. What luck that there is, in fact, a way to generate an infinite amount.

Sylvas recognized fragments of this spell from what he had cast before, but there was as much war as there was gravity to it, and that whole branch of spellcraft was entirely alien to him. Literally alien, since it was devised from the text that made up the body of an extradimensional eidolon. The magic began to build layer upon layer, the forms matching up in places that he never would have expected, intertwining and swelling in complexity. The blood that coated him, his blood and that of his enemies, flowed out to join the invisible forms of mana that he’d already cast out, all of it drifting in a slow orbit around him as he brought all that he had learned throughout his whole life to bear.

Something detonated inside the shikari queen. Sylvas’ spell, hanging half-complete, fizzled and sputtered from the lack of fresh mana. The detonation sounded again, louder and more potent. The body of the beast swelled up, and suddenly, like a hive of locusts, death mana erupted from within it, buzzing and crackling as it passed. Malachai had crafted a death-bomb, the very same one that he’d conjured as a trap back when Sylvas first faced him, but instead of leaving it to block a passageway, he had summoned it inside a living creature.

Well, that was a bit of an anticlimax.

Sylvas’ own spell was entirely forgotten as he staggered back from the sudden outpouring of blood and other fluids unleashed as the vast shikari queen was divided neatly into halves by Malachai’s magic. The necromancer stood on the opposite side of the gap he’d carved, his scarred face alight with joy. “A point to me, I think.”

Everywhere that the death mana had touched the queen, corruption and decay spread. Sylvas had no idea how they were going to move the thing and access the vault that he could see nestled behind it, but as it turned out, there was no need to. Bone and flesh both rotted away as the death trap was unleashed. Every part of the shikari queen dissolved away into nothingness.

Sylvas cast a glance back across the room. There were no shikari left. They had slaughtered their way through every last one of them. Kaya’s blade was still dripping with their blood, and the Dominion agents were limping their way across the now-silent chamber. The only sound was the slow hiss of dissolution as Malachai’s final spell did its work.

Inch by inch, the final pieces of the queen bubbled away to nothing but a putrid stain on the floor, and finally, the vault that had caused all of this came into sight. It was a jet-black monolith, three times Sylvas’ height and twice as wide as him. On the outside, scribed down its surface, there were words in the Aion tongue. Mira translated for him as he read them aloud. “Quake thee with thy tyrant’s gift. Soulless flesh bars paths you seek. Blossom wide the heart of stone. Starbreaker awaken what lies beneath.”

The trio of Dominion archaeologists almost knocked each other over in their excitement to get closer and read it. “It’s another Starbreaker vault! Just as we hypothesized. Another piece of the prophecy.”

Sylvas turned back to look at them. They were the same people he had known all day, but now he knew that they were also something else. An enemy—if the Empyrean were to be trusted. Not that he knew if he could trust the Empyrean after everything that had happened. “What is this about?”

Lass explained. “Most vaults… they have random pieces in them, but the Starbreaker vaults, are all marked with verses of a specific prophecy. All of them about this figure, this Starbreaker, who’s going to fix whatever it was that drove the Aions away. He’s like a messianic figure in their mythology. And inside, there are always hints at the locations of others.”

“How come I’ve never heard of all this?” Rania asked.

“Well”—Kegel shrugged with only one shoulder—“most of the Starbreaker vaults have been found well outside the Empyrean.”

Beneath the scripture on the vault, there was a circle of completely smooth stone, indented into the surface. Sylvas reached out to touch it.

“No point, lad,” Kegel told him. “You need heavy gear to crack them. The only key to these vaults is the one the prophecies are about.”

“Seems a pity to come all this way and not even open it,” Sylvas joked, and his fingers brushed against the stone.

It was as if someone had abruptly turned out the lights. One moment, he was there, with his friends and potential enemies. The next, he was nowhere.

Darkness surrounded him, and with it, complete silence.

“Hello?” His voice echoed oddly in his own head, metallic and strange-sounding. He was also startled to realize that he couldn’t even hear Mira. This had to be some sort of dream. He turned and saw the figure standing before the vault, which suddenly loomed large in this shadowland, too.

“Hello, again.” The Watcher spoke softly, as if trying to hide how alien her voice was. The same way that the hooded robes served to mask her appearance. “It has been many years since we last spoke. Fewer for you, I think.”

“What are you doing here?” Sylvas strode towards her. All of his old fear faded. She might have severed him from Mira, but Strife was still nestled in his soul, protecting him. “What am I doing here?”

She sounded pleased as she answered. “What you were meant to do, following each step, precisely as it was predicted that you would.”

“What does that mean?”

The Watcher raised her arms and began to recite. “Thy legend was born in the shadow of the beast. Marked with their sign.”

“What is that?” Sylvas’ arm ached as if an eidolon was near, but it hadn’t hurt like that since he’d consumed Strife.

She allowed her arms to drop. “All dust in the wind.”

“Is that the prophecy, the Starbreaker prophecy?”

“Do they call you that already?” She cocked her head to one side as if considering. “No, it is too soon.”

Sylvas pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to keep his temper. “Could you just tell me what is going on?”

“Thy strength was forged in the shadow of the beast. Strength within. Echoes without. Loathe greatest of all when beasts’ shadows are gone. No longer in shadow, the shadow in thee.”

He growled. “I didn’t come here for a poetry reading.”

“You came… to deactivate the orbital platforms. And now you have done so. Will you not stay a while longer and learn?”

He voiced an old suspicion. “You’re an Aion.”

“I am of those you call that, though I am not one of them.”

His hands curled into fists. “You really need to work on giving straight answers.”

“Ender of hope. Feller of storms. Twinmaidens’ blood stains on sorrowful soles. Fast claimed war’s domain. Glad of war. Glad of pain.”

“Nobody is glad of pain… could you just…” Strife wanted to hurt her. To rip her apart and see what made her tick. It didn’t have to say anything for him to understand the desire and empathize. “What am I doing here?”

She tilted her head the other way and repeated herself. “Deactivating the orbital platforms.”

“What am I doing here in this… dark place?”

She looked around as if taking it in for the first time. “Does it seem dark to you, eater of light?”

“My whole life, you have been lurking in the shadows, watching me. I want to know why.”

“Is it not obvious?” She sounded as if she was laughing at him, despite her voice sounding like it was coming through a tin can.

His temper flared once more. “If it was obvious, would I be asking you?!”

“Seek out the vaults. The prophecy. They hold the answers you seek.”

“You hold the answers I seek, and you are going to give them to me or—” He reached out with bloody claws to grab her by the front of the robe and then lurched forward, almost falling before he caught himself once more on the vault.

It was opening. At his touch, the vault slowly creaked open, revealing its contents. Long metal bars inscribed with words of the Aion language that Sylvas had never seen before. All of them were drifting in a slow orbit around the central point. And in that central point, a crystal. Sylvas’ brows drew down as he reached between them to pluck it out. It felt like etherium to the touch but empty. He didn’t understand what it was until all of the mana floes in the room shifted towards it. Then he knew: it was a world soul. Or at least, something so like a world soul that all the mana in the room couldn’t tell the difference.

He turned back to his friends, and the massed corpses of their enemies, and every one of them was staring at him in confusion. All of them except for the Obsidian Dominion agents, of course. They had vanished entirely. “Where did they—”

“Ran when they saw you open the vault,” Rania explained. “Said that this was above their pay grade.”

Sylvas opened and closed his mouth before finally agreeing. “Mine, too.”

He gathered up the contents of the vault and pushed them into Cold Storage before anything else could go wrong. “I think it is time we get off this planet.”