Chapter 11

“If a world is doomed to die all the same, what purpose does raining death down on the eidolons as the final stage of each evacuation plan actually serve? Surely, our purposes would be better served by deploying observation probes to track the behavior and interactions of the eidolons once a planet has fallen to them. If they are mustering to spread to adjoining systems or planets, then obviously it is logical to intervene at that point, but prior to that attempt at expansion and conquest, surely it is in our best interests to leave the eidolons in peace and learn what we can from them. The conflict between the sentient people of this universe and eidolons stretches back to before the dawn of history, and the relentless persecution and destruction of those creatures has resulted in us having no greater understanding of them now than people did back then. It is a fundamentally flawed approach which is guaranteed to result in us never making any progress.”

—Heresy: A Modest Proposal, Redacted, Part Two

Rania was finally disturbed enough by the chaos to look up from her work, to see the massive steel monster crashing down towards her. She dropped to her knees, threw her hands uselessly over her head, and just before the Blacksmith hit, it stopped with a deafening clang.

Sylvas’ momentum carried him on. He collided with her, scooped her up in his arms, flew free of the blast radius, and skidded to a halt. He barked, “How did you stop it?!”

Rania didn’t answer. She pointed.

Kaya was standing beneath the eidolon, her arms upraised, her muscles straining against it. She was just one dwarf, but she was standing there in the face of the blacksmith and bearing the full brunt of it.

All the chains and limbs that had trailed behind it in flight like the tendrils of a jellyfish were flung downward, ramming deep into the stone, finding purchase and pulling, crushing down against her with all of its might. Gravity was an afterthought in comparison to the force it was pulling itself down with. Kaya’s knees buckled. 

Sylvas dropped Rania and launched himself back in at the eidolon. Claws sprang from his hands, raking through the chains and throwing sparks. The newly thickened chains contorted as the gravity shear passed through them, but they didn’t sever. He was only easing the pressure on Kaya, not helping in any meaningful way. Everyone else had finally reacted to the eidolon’s launch. All of them were bombarding it, though Sylvas did note that Malachai had given up entirely on trying to harm the Smith and was instead calling spirits to haul those too focused on their offence out of harm’s way as the shattered stonework of the interior orb began to collapse in every direction at once.

Quakes tore through the whole planet, echoing out from the destruction being wrought mindlessly here by the smith. The temple world built in its honor began to crumble as it threw itself into a frenzy, lashing out at every surface as it tried desperately to find more purchase and crush the dwarf beneath its mass. It was at least a hundred times the size of her, made of solid metal, and was ramming itself down with enough force that the stone beneath her feet had turned to gravel, but somehow, Kaya still wasn’t breaking. She wasn’t even bending. The crushing blow that had made her knees give way had been only the first of many, but as Sylvas watched, she drove her way back up to her feet.

Through gritted teeth, she growled out, “Culgh!”

The eidolon was rewriting reality around it, making metal stronger than it could ever be in real life, but Kaya’s affinity was for metal, too. As it empowered itself, it empowered her. The more that it made metal unbending and unbreaking, the tougher it became for her to be beaten. In the first moment of contact, it might have done it, but now, every moment that they were in proximity, Kaya gained more and more of an upper hand.

She had always been strong, powerful in her magic, but compared to Sylvas, everyone else had faded into the background. The things that he was capable of went so far beyond a normal mage’s abilities that they had made all of her incredible talents seem meaningless. Now he got to see her shining bright and chrome. The way that she was always meant to be.

Sylvas had to throw up a shield against the falling rubble. The entire chamber that they were in had begun to break apart, but it was more than just the interior surfaces. Cracks stretched up from the rocky core of the planet. This world had no plate tectonics before their arrival, but now the whole surface became a jigsaw, held together with insufficient gravity to maintain its form. Whether it was the precise engineering of this chamber and its magic that had kept the planet in one piece or the rift generating its own sort of mana, he couldn’t say for sure, but what was certain was that this whole world was coming apart at the seams. Not just this one spherical room.

Kaya pushed up against the eidolon with all her strength. It pushed down on her with all of its power. All around them, the Ardent fruitlessly slung their spells and tried to keep themselves together. 

Sylvas turned to find Rania and realized she was already running to him through the chaos. Leaping from one fractured slab of ancient engraving to the next as they lost their cohesion and drifted in the broken gravity. He caught her as she made one final leap, and she was already talking. “We need to go, now. We need to get off this world.”

He lashed out with his claws, deflecting another sweep of chain from intercepting them. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in the middle of something here.”

“The atmosphere sealed in here is already depleting.” Rania let herself go limp in his grasp. Leaning in against him. Speaking softer despite the discordant shattering of stone all around them. “We’re out of time.”

Sylvas took in the angles, calculated the time. “If we can get Kaya free and get back to the surface, we can recall the Basquiat.”

Her hands were curled into fists, and she thumped gently against his chest. “You aren’t listening. The atmosphere will be gone. The surface will be exposed to space, if it isn’t already. Whatever the Aion did to trap it here is broken.”

Kaya roared in pain as the towering eidolon went on pushing down, and the stone beneath her feet gave way entirely. The whole beast slipped inches farther towards the floor as she was driven into it, the progress of the crushing only slowing when she fired out spikes of the metal of her armor to disperse the pressure over a wider area.

“Then I’ll go.” He moved them sideways, both to avoid the next lash of chains as the blacksmith tried to find fresh purchase and to find somewhere safe to set her down. “I can teleport us all up once the Basquiat is back in orbit.”

She let her forehead rest on his chest, despair washing over them both. “Through the gravity disruptions of a collapsing planet?”

He wasn’t just going to stay here and die a pointless death. Not when there was still a chance to get out. No matter how slim that chance. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

Kaya roared in defiance, digging her hands deeper into the once-smooth chrome surface of the eidolon. Where her armored fingers scratched, that perfect shine was warped and contorted, and now as it drove farther down towards her, her upraised hands drove farther up inside of it.

“Ashahkta pozad,” Rania whispered to herself.

“What?”

“The dwarves here. I can’t understand their dialect.” She scowled. “But they didn’t use ships to come here. They used something called the Ashahkta pozad.”

Among all the books that Sylvas had ever seen, there had been few written in dwarvish that weren’t already translated, but that didn’t mean that there had been none. Every once in a while, he had been confronted with words in a runic script he’d never encountered before, and Kaya had guided him through its guttural pronunciation. “The shahk means… tunnel, mine, passage. The ‘A’ prefix means large or grand. So the big tunnel… pozad… behind? Beneath?”

“The Great Tunnel Behind the Stars.” The Ardent had all come raining down to land beside them on the final slab of stone still solid enough to hold them. A slab that was stabilized entirely by Sylvas’ presence exerting its own gravity. One of the Ardent who had landed alongside them, as luck would have it, was a dwarf. “It’s an old myth. A way to travel worlds without going to space.”

“Do you know where it is?” Sylvas had to yell to be heard over the sudden shrieking of metal from the combatants.

“I know!” Rania cried, pointing across to where one of the altars that had dotted the interior surface had been until mere moments ago. Now a passage could be clearly seen beneath it, the smooth grey stone of the place stained a rusty tone as it descended out of sight.

Kerbo landed amongst them in a plume of flame. “We need to go, now.”

“Not without Kaya.” Sylvas braced himself for the argument, but it didn’t come.

Rania intervened before there could be any discussion. Grabbing onto Sylvas’ arm. “I’ll get them to the Great Tunnel, but you have to follow us. Get her and get out. Okay?”

He nodded tersely, already trying to work out how the hell he was going to get his friend out of this particular mess.Rania pressed a plaintive kiss on his cheek before the Ardent carried her off with them. Turning to face the eidolon and his friend once more, Sylvas set his shoulders.

Don’t look at me. I haven’t a clue what we can do.

“None of that new magic you’ve been cooking up—”

Afraid not, darling.

“Then we do this the old-fashioned way. Take the wolf.”

The sensation of the eidolon leaving his body was almost as unpleasant as the sensation of its invasion of his body had been. Last time he’d been cast out of his own mind to occupy it, but now, he was the one left behind.

Mira set off at once, charging at the closest embedded blade and tearing it loose with her teeth. Sylvas moved a fraction of a moment later, launching himself straight down into the gap beneath the vast eidolon, dodging through a dense thicket of chains and blades dangling there. There was a crater beneath the eidolon, where the force of its attack was driving Kaya down into the ground, but the space available to navigate was no taller than Kaya herself. If Sylvas weren’t flying, he would have had to crawl. As it was, he could scarcely scrape by some of the spots where stonework had broken loose to jut up. He was almost on top of her before Kaya noticed him, and she was so lost in the fight that, even then, her attention didn’t falter. “Get out of here, stanzbuhr.”

He set his feet beside her, raised his hands, and tried to push the blacksmith off, but it had absolutely no effect whatsoever. “Not without you.”

“I’m stuck.” She chuckled. “So yeah, without me. You’re the one who’s got to make it.”

Sylvas shook his head at the unthinkable thought that accompanied those words. “No. We came into this together, so we’re leaving together.”