Chapter 22

“There is an obvious conditional selection when I describe these cases. For every one of these occasions where a world was purged of eidolons after an incursion, there have been dozens where the planet in question was destroyed entirely, either through the actions of the eidolons, the local populace detonating some sort of failsafe, or as a result of orbital bombardment by the Ardent after the fact. All of which is to say, restoration of worlds that have been taken by the eidolons are rarely as successful as what has been achieved on Strife, and there is no expectation that the eidolon population of this training world will ever be reduced to zero in a true purge.”

—Restoration Projects, Remo Aurea, Part Two

The mission to call for a ship took almost three hours to complete. 

Messages flitted back and forth between Vaelith’s team and Kerbo down below all the way through it, keeping everyone in the loop except for Sylvas. The rest of them tired, they took shifts, and they dug in behind the defenses that had been raised, the iron palisades that Kaya had spawned from raw metal or the walls and trenches that the earth mages had raised or wrought. The retort of Rania’s rifle could be heard for ten-minute blocks, with ten minutes of rest as it recharged and cooled. The regular rhythm of it helped Sylvas to keep track of the passing of time. Without it, he doubted he would have realized the three hours had passed, or even that more than a few minutes had. His attention was turned entirely to the enemy.

Down on the surface, the Ardent fought to establish a safe landing area so that they might escape. They fought to drive back the eidolons for just long enough that rescue might come. They fell into their prescribed roles, and they worked with the desperate energy of people who might not see another sunrise if they faltered. They were fighting a war of attrition that they felt certain that they could not win, against a relentless and numberless enemy.

Sylvas was fighting a different war by a different set of rules. He wasn’t trying to hold off the eidolons of Strife. He was exterminating them. He was a trap that they were being drawn into. A shining beacon of raw mana that they were desperate to consume, and on they came from all quarters, the full mass of every eidolon on the planet mobilized and moving to get to him. Like moths to a flame.

At first, he fell into the rhythm of casting the same spells as he always had. The scything blades of gravity and war. The inversions and spikes that made all the world malleable, letting him twist the enemy to where he wanted them to be. Letting him make every blow land and every counterstrike miss. It had served him well through all the battles that he’d fought so far, and it served him well in the battle now. He didn’t tire. His mana was endless, and every spell could be caught in the instant that he thought of it. There was no reason that he couldn’t keep on grinding his way through the enemy like this forever. Except for the problem that it would take him forever. 

Mira ran some quick calculations on the number of eidolons that he’d been able to sense on the planet, extrapolating upwards from there to guess at their full number, subtracting those that he’d already annihilated, and came up with a matter of weeks or months to be rid of them all.

It wasn’t fast enough. Even casting instantly, it wasn’t enough. They were taking too long to come to the battlefield, to notice the movement of their kin, to notice the shifted flow of magic towards him. The beacon lit inside him shone bright, but not bright enough to reach the other side of the world. He could fix that. He had not drawn mana since finding equilibrium with his eidolon. His covenant and the infinite mana machine built from feeding his own mana into the eidolon to receive more in return had meant that there had been no need for it. 

But now the world soul was hooked into the apparatus, and the aching void at the heart of him could serve its purpose once more. He reached down into his core, and he pulled. All the mana on the planet shifted at once. Where before his reach was limited to the extent of his own sphere of influence, through the world soul he was connected to all mana everywhere in the universe. When he pulled now, everything everywhere responded. His core filled with mana faster than he could spend it on casting, and faster than he could feed it into the eidolon. It seemed that even Strife had an upper limit to its bottomless belly, the limiting aperture of its ravenous maw. 

Mana spilled out of him, washing down over everyone on the battlefield below. Mages who had been struggling to squeeze another spell out of their reserves suddenly found themselves bathed in more power than they knew what to do with. Sylvas was no longer a torch shining in the dark; he was an oil spill caught alight, and the eidolons of this world responded.

Fliers had been few and far between. There had been a massive rush of them when he first assumed his position above the battlefield, but after swiping through them all with his claws, there had been nothing up here with Sylvas. At last, the rest of the fliers around the world came as fast as their wings could carry them. The skies were bright with the two suns burning overhead, but both of them were blotted out by the wave of shadows coming over the horizon from every side. 

Down on the ground, while the defenders had been empowered by his casting, he could see that the fresh enthusiasm of the eidolons was beginning to take its toll. By weight of numbers, they were beginning to surmount the hastily assembled barricades, climbing over the top of the mountains of corpses to fling themselves in.

Sylvas cast faster. There was only the delay of his thinking about what to cast now, but even that had been too much of a delay against this endless swarm. He had to step it up if he wanted to keep pace. He let instinct guide his hands, let the eidolon shape itself into the spells he would use without his input. He made the eidolons a bloody smear across the sands while he waited for the flying swarm to arrive, and then he was enveloped in fighting them so completely that he couldn’t even see the battlefield below anymore. His vision went black as the sun’s light was drowned in monsters. His spells erupted through the fliers, his claws raked, his orbitals tore in lethal orbits around him, so fast that their spin was leaving a maelstrom of blood and sand in their wake.

It’s all blood, darling. The sand and the blood. All the colors of crimson are ours.

Mira was sounding a little punch-drunk from all of the rapid casting, whispering sweet nothings of encouragement to him as if he needed anything to drive him on in his extermination. This was what it had all been for. All of the work. Building himself up to be an engine of war. To reach this moment when he could turn the tide back on the things that had committed genocide against his people and make them pay. Make them die. Make them fade away into nothing, the way his world had faded away like a bad memory. 

Except her words weren’t just sweet poetry. She was a creature of intellect. If she was providing him with information, it was information that he could use. The blood that circled him was his to command, just as all the blood that made up their eidolon Strife had been, but if he could control that blood, why couldn’t he extend his control over all of the rest, too? 

It hadn’t rained on Strife since the eidolons first came, but if it had, they would not be standing amidst a desert but an ocean of blood, dried and baked in the twin sun’s heat to be the red sand. It was all blood, and it was all his. With only the slightest effort, he willed water mana from the world soul and into Strife within him. It could not consume it, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t use it. Just as Sylvas could move anything that gravity touched with his will, all blood was subject to the will of Strife, and infusing Strife with water did the very same to all of the blood in its sphere of influence. Sylvas couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before.

At once, the surface of Strife, from horizon to horizon, became an ocean of blood, and the moment that it did, every drop of that blood moved to the tidal pull of Strife’s will. The blood formed claws to rake the eidolons to the ground, and it formed spears to burst up through them. Sylvas had to fragment his mind over and over again, giving each section of the planetary surface in his reach a miniaturized version of his self to command it, but soon the eidolons weren’t fighting Sylvas or the Ardent anymore, they were fighting Strife itself. There was blood inside those eidolons of war, and he could tear it out. 

The few eidolons that had no blood of their own, he could put the blood into, seeping in through their wounds and the cracks in their chitin to tear them to pieces from the inside out. It could only go on for a moment before the strain of shattering his mind into so many pieces became too much for him, but that moment was enough to kill them all. 

Every eidolon from one horizon to the other died, and all of the blood rose up, like rain falling in reverse, every droplet a needle, and every needle piercing up through the fliers to form an ocean above them.

The ruins of Strife were laid out around them, obscured now only by the raining corpses of the eidolons. All the buildings and mountains that had been buried beneath the blood sands were exposed. More sand was trickling in at the very edges of Sylvas’ sphere of influence, becoming liquid and joining the rising tide to the sky, but everywhere inside of that rising waterfall of blood was still and silent. Everything except for the Ardent. 

At first, there had been cheers as the enemy fell, but now there were the distinctive, strained sounds of people too well-trained to let their terror show, trying to keep themselves from letting it show. Their eyes were cast up to the great ceiling of blood that had become the sky, and to Sylvas positioned as he had been from the start between them and that ocean of gore.

What he had done had worked. What he had done had worked too well. There was no question that he was the one who had called up the blood. Not while rivers of it still swirled around him in lazy orbits. War was not the domain of any mortal mage. Blood was not meant to be theirs to command the way that the eidolons could. 

Reaching up with both his hands and his will, Sylvas parted the red sea above him and sent it crashing down, rushing down to the edges of his sphere of influence to wash out over the planet’s surface and throwing just enough extra weight into it with his gravity that it wouldn’t come washing back over them again any time soon. It would wash away any stragglers among the eidolons who were still coming for them. It would infuse the red sands everywhere else on the world and make them into an ocean once more.

He hung there above them all for a few minutes more until the third hour of the siege of Strife came to its end, just to be sure that there were no more eidolons still to come, and then he descended to face the allies who feared him more than any monster now.

Touching down on unsteady ground, he was hit from two sides by projectiles he hadn’t had a chance to defend himself against. Two soft projectiles, one at chest height and the other wrapped around his waist. The lower one was the first to speak. “Stanzbuhr! That was so glaickhing awesome that I’m almost tempted to stop calling you stanzbuhr!”

“Don’t stop, whatever you do,” Rania quipped back, hugging him with all her strength. “We’ll need to work even harder to keep his ego in check now.”

“Ego?” Sylvas managed to get out before Kerbo marched up to them.

When confronted with an otherworldly situation that he had no way of comprehending, let alone addressing, Kerbo had elected to roll with the punches. Rolling with the punches could get you far in the Ardent, it seemed. “You couldn’t have left us some sand to work with?”

Sylvas had been expecting accusations of being an abomination, demands that he immediately wrap himself in chains and throw himself into a volcano to rid the universe of such unholy power. He was not expecting complaints about his landscaping.

“Sand. It makes a nice flat surface for ships to touch down on. Now, the poor earth casters are going to have to spend ages levelling the ground before a ship can land.”

Sylvas wet his lips. “Sorry?”

Kerbo threw up his hands and stomped off to issue orders, barking at everyone as he went through the gathered soldiers like a disgruntled middle manager. It prompted the scared Ardent to respond as they always did when he was barking orders, cussing at him under their breath and then falling into more meaningful activity than whatever he’d ordered them to do. In that moment, realizing what he was doing, Sylvas could have kissed the fiend.

You really do like them red and horny, don’t you?

Letting out a little snort that he managed to turn into a cough, he turned to the girls who had now disentangled themselves from him. 

Rania was quick to fill him in on what he’d missed. “Malachai got a message out and booked us a flight, and now he’s hunkering down in the administrator’s building until the ‘weather conditions’ stabilize before they teleport back to us.” She cleared her throat. “I think he’s talking about the tidal waves of blood.”

“Did you see my new steel powers? This covenant stuff is amazing. I made a whole wall just like…” Kaya fidgeted with her hand. “Well, I can’t get my fingers to snap in this armor, but it was like snapping my fingers.”

Sylvas snapped his fingers for her.

“Aye, like that.” She was grinning widely, and the metal that had been creeping back over her face was forced back again. “I tell you, though, I can’t wait to start pulling some of the kragh you’ve been doing. Blood tides and exploding eidolons and… kragh!”

It seemed that his dwarvish friend was too excited to notice just how badly his displays of power had alienated the other people that they were reliant on as allies. “I wish I’d thought a little more clearly instead of—”

“No.” Rania cut him off. “None of that. I was joking about your ego. You don’t actually need to be put down every time you succeed in life. You did good, and you beat the bad guys. Don’t go second-guessing it now.”

“I just think maybe—”

She caught him by the face, cupping his cheeks in her hands, and drew his gaze back to hers. It was nothing like being brutalized by Vaelith’s grasp. There was no force, just the gentle pressure letting him know that she wanted him to look at her as she spoke. “Maybe doesn’t matter. Here is what I know: Not one of us died today. And that’s thanks to you.”

“Is anyone injured? I don’t know if they’d accept healing from me, but…” Rania surged forward and kissed him.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Sylvas couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Nobody is hurt.” Rania cleared her throat after she pulled back from him, her warmth still on his lips. “I think the worst that happened was someone stubbing their toe on Kaya’s steel walls that she conjured out of nowhere.”

“Told them to watch their feet,” Kaya mumbled. She had very politely not interrupted the two of them kissing, which was the closest Sylvas had ever seen her come to being restrained, although she was now subtly fishing for a high five behind Rania’s back.

All around them, the mages with an affinity for stone had begun their work, not only smoothing out the ragged stone and buildings that had been exposed into a landing area and utterly destroying what probably would have been a decade-long archaeological dig, but also raising up buildings out of the red-stained stone. The exhausted troops began trudging towards what were clearly meant to be hastily constructed barracks.

Kaya managed to score the high five as Sylvas did his best to shove her hand away. “Did Malachai say who is coming for us?”

“I don’t know why he was so unhappy about it,” Rania began, “but the Dusont Cluster are the ones sending us a cruiser.”

“Oof,” Kaya said loudly.

“Oof?” Rania raised an eyebrow.

“That’s his family,” Sylvas explained.

“Oof,” Rania agreed.

Sylvas didn’t have a family of his own, but even he could recognize the deep-seated discomfort that Malachai had with the rest of the Dusont kingdom. “His family, who thought he was dead up until that call.”

“Oof,” Rania agreed even more vigorously.

“His family that owns solar systems, and that he’s meant to be the inheriting prince of,” Kaya added.

That was enough to bring Rania’s enthusiastic agreement to a halt. She looked considerably more serious when she said, “Oof,” the final time.

At maximum speed, a ship dispatched from the Dusont Cluster will arrive here in less than six hours.

“Alright, we need to get everyone dug in and rested up. I’ll keep watch for any stragglers, but I think the eidolon problem on Strife is… contained.”

Kaya snorted. “We can take shifts. Doubt there’s much left standing.”

“You know that I don’t require sleep the way that others do, so it makes more sense for me to—”

“Stanzbuhr, you slaughtered a whole planet of monsters like a big damn hero, and your girlfriend is right there… I don’t think you’re going to be doing much sleeping.”

Sylvas glanced at Rania, who glanced at the ground and blushed but didn’t deny that she had non-sleeping intentions for him. Sylvas wet his lips. “Ah.”