Chapter 1

“The art of healing is among the most difficult that any mage might undertake. It is the only branch of magic where the deeper you go into your studies, the less effective your magic becomes. At its most basic, healing magic encourages the body’s natural healing processes and infuses them with additional energy so that they can make the repairs necessary. But when that most basic healing magic fails, when the magic itself has to do the healing for the injured person, the complexity of a living organism becomes overwhelming. A cut must be healed element by element, muscle stitched to muscle, nerve to nerve, skin to skin, and every one of these things must be understood not as a singular thing, but as a holistic element of the whole creature. It is of little surprise that life affinity mages often pursue other career paths.”

—Fundamentals of Arcana, Albrecht Magnus

There was blood everywhere, throbbing just on the periphery of Sylvas’ senses. In the bottles hanging over the patients’ beds, being rinsed away through the pipes, pulsing through the sickly bodies that crammed in on him from all sides. Sylvas had been in cities only rarely in his life, but never before had the presence of so many people weighed on him like this. It was like a crushing weight unless he used his paradigms to silence it, but silencing it felt like cutting out his own eyes, and in all the chaos that was unfolding, he did not feel safe to blind himself.

One of the nurses had dragged them out of Hector’s room as the procedures began. It was a testament to the man’s injuries that even in all of this destruction, he somehow qualified for that level of privacy. From there, they’d been hauled along a corridor and deposited amongst the few other healthy bodies in the hospital, not in some waiting room, but in a queue to donate their blood. There was no question of refusing. Not when there was so much death unfolding every moment. Malachai was practically glowing from the influx of relentless death. Kaya, meanwhile, was wilting in the face of it. She had no fondness for hospitals at the best of times, and all this trauma and mutilation must have been bringing back dark memories of her own dismemberment. 

The only one of them who seemed to be taking it all in stride was Rania, who Sylvas supposed had just been plucked from a crisis not so different from this one back on the last world where she’d been trapped. Her hand, in his, had been an anchor throughout all that was unfolding, and there was some reluctance to let it go when he was called forward and hastily scanned. The medical mage glanced at his scrying results and then looked back at Sylvas in confusion.

“I’m…sorry, but you don’t seem to be a match for any known blood type,” he said while shaking his head, clearly hoping for an explanation. But Sylvas simply nodded in response and stepped aside.

Malachai, Kaya, and Rania, on the other hand, were pushed on through the process, needles pressed into their arms to suck blood from them as the same technicians who’d just scanned them casually cast spells of regeneration so that they could go on drawing more blood long after the usual safe supply would have been exhausted. It was being snatched away, still warm, as soon as the donations were complete so that it could be rushed to whoever needed it the most in that moment. It took Sylvas only a fraction of a second to realize that he was in the way where he’d moved to, and he shuffled back out into the corridor to let the steady flow of still-living bodies go by him. They’d come down amidst the chaos in the shattered wreck of the Folly, and since stepping off, it seemed that there hadn’t been a single moment to breathe. He took that second now, and a moment to think.

We need to find out what is happening, Mira whispered to him.

I know, he replied, closing his eyes as he did so.

There have been multiple eidolon incursions out of nowhere. That doesn’t just happen on its own. This is a coordinated attack, darling. The Empyrean is being attacked.

He took another calming breath and wished that the air didn’t taste so strongly of blood. For some reason, Strife did not find the scent calming this time, and it unnerved him. That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it? 

All of the consoles around the hospital were occupied by people desperately trying to call friends and family all across the galaxy, most of them cutting off every few seconds as one relay or another went down or switched to emergency broadcasting only. If there was some secret code that intelligence operatives had available to them to hijack the emergency channels, Hector had never mentioned it to them. Still, as one console was abandoned by a sobbing family missing their mother, Sylvas had no better idea of how to try to seek information.

With a swipe of his hand, he tried to bring up a newsfeed, but it was all suspended, probably to stop the spread of panic across the whole Empyrean until some sort of order could be re-established. He flicked to local information instead, hoping that something might prove useful, but all that he could get to without breaking encryption was a guide to Hospital World Gallius, with instructions for which departments could be found on which continents, and docking manifests that were updating in a blur as more and more refugees and injured arrived. This whole world was set up to deal with medical crises, and even it was overflowing and overwhelmed. If he wanted to find out more, he was going to have to leave.

He felt uncomfortable with the idea. They had fought so hard to get Hector off the last world and haul him back here in one piece. The idea of just abandoning him here was less than palatable.

You don’t get to sit around doing nothing while the universe ends, darling. That’s the price you have to pay for all the power you’ve fought so hard for. Now that there is a need, you have got to use it.

Sylvas grunted in acknowledgment and annoyance, so as not to upset the people crammed in against the consoles around him by talking to himself.

All the information on the docked ships scrolled by with Sylvas oblivious to it but Mira recording and filtering every word. There wasn’t enough on the surface level of information to be useful, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be able to discern some pattern hidden under the surface, given time and comparisons to star maps. A suggestion of where the Empyrean had been hit hardest.

The docking manifests revealed a laundry list of planets of origin. People all across the Empyrean had flooded to this world, renowned for its healing, when their friends and family had been injured. Everyone with the means to get off a world being hit by an incursion had gotten off that world. It gave Sylvas a list of systems that he could cross-reference with the star maps in his head to try and discern a pattern. 

But there didn’t seem to be one. 

Most of their origin worlds were nearby to this system, but that didn’t mean that the eidolon incursion was occurring only here, just that ships from farther out hadn’t arrived yet. He set aside the planet of origin in the manifests and looked for owners instead. It took him only a moment to find what he was looking for, and then he finally had a reason to move.

The first stop was back at Hector’s surgery bay. There was frantic work still being done there, and while he could take in all of the information on all of the consoles around the room, he wasn’t enough of a medical expert to understand their significance. He didn’t know if they were going to be able to save him or not, and he could not afford to wait and find out. So he went to his next stop and found the others.

Kaya yelped as he pulled the needle out of her arm. “Stanzbuhr?”

“We’re leaving,” he said, his voice as flat and hollow as it had ever been.

Malachai was a little more aware of what was going on around him. He plucked the blood drain out of the crook of his elbow himself. “Where are we going?”

“We need to reestablish contact with the Empyrean. Find out what is happening and where we’re needed.”

The equipment that had been attached to his friends began making distressed noises, and one of the medical staff, already harried beyond belief, began jogging in their direction.

“We’re just leaving Hector?” Kaya was on her feet and falling into step with Sylvas long before the medic could get there.

“He isn’t going to be ready to fight, and waiting for him is costing other people their lives.”

“Cold-blooded.” Sylvas was startled by Rania’s voice. She’d extricated herself from the blood donation apparatus and come over to join them without being asked. Sylvas hadn’t been sure that he wanted to ask. Their mission now was not going to be a pleasant sightseeing tour of old archaeological sites; it was going to get brutal.

Some unexpected support came from Malachai. “That is the price of power, making decisions for the greater good, even if they aren’t what you want.” 

“I’m not saying it’s the wrong call.” Rania shrugged. “I just didn’t know you had it in you.”

“So, uh, how are you planning on getting off-world? Because the Folly was falling to bits.”

“I’m going to take someone else’s ship.”

Malachai’s pace slowed a little. “So quickly we fall to banditry.”

Sylvas smiled. “I’m going to ask permission first.”

“And what happens if they say no?” Rania seemed a lot less concerned about stealing, which made sense, given her professional history.

“They won’t.”

The distance from the surgical department back to the spaceport was substantial, but while there was a great deal of foot traffic surging in both directions, blocking the way, there was no air traffic to speak of. A simple spell had the four of them in flight, clearing the tops of everyone else’s heads while also brushing along the roof of the pristine white hallways. There were a great many cries of annoyance, and some hurled insults at them for skipping the queue, but for the most part, everyone was too focused on their own trials to worry about what a few flying mages were up to. The corridors opened out from ivory passageways into big transparent piping before long, letting the full size of the docking array on the planet become visible even from inside. 

On the lowest levels were the massive ships that really should have stayed in orbit but couldn’t for whatever reason, then gradually smaller ships were attached to the scaffolding extending out from the side of the hospital heading up, suspended with anti-gravity charms to keep them in place. There was still a catastrophic amount of traffic coming in, but none of the docked ships were moving out, and it was easy to see that the planet was already well over its expected capacity. 

Level 87, pylon 41.

There were elevators and stairs leading down from the docking ports above, but given that the docking ports stretched all the way up to brush the lower side of the planetary atmosphere, there weren’t many people hiking down the stairs. The flight spell eliminated the need for walking or for waiting on one of the massive, cramped elevators to arrive, though how much time it really saved when heading up about 80 floors was questionable.

They landed once they were up there. It was not that the spell was a drain on Sylvas’ boundless mana supplies, but rather, the whole place had not been built to be navigated that way, and everyone had brushed against the ceiling enough times to be fed up with it. Their own ship had been abandoned somewhere on the upper floors—somewhere about level two hundred. Sylvas already missed it.

“You sure about this?” Rania managed to ask one last time as Sylvas approached the 41^st pylon and the ship attached.

He didn’t bother to answer, instead hitting the switch by the airlock and waiting for a response.

There was a surprisingly long delay before there was a chirping reply from the device, and then an illusion of a scowling dwarf sprang into being between him and the door. “What?”

“My name is Sylvas Vail. I need your ship.”