Chapter 27

“The Obsidian Dominion is everything that the Empyrean stands against. They are an autocratic dictatorship, ruled over by a single man who has absolute authority with no checks and balances to prevent him from doing whatever he pleases with all of that power. The spread of information from within such an empire is always going to be tainted by propaganda, but the lies that they tell can still inform us of the values that they hold. Many of the stories that have spread from within the Dominion speak of the personal strength and power that their emperor has at his disposal. They talk about the military strength of the Dominion and the many worlds that it has conquered as it has spread. From this, we ascertain that even if the Dominion is actually weak in terms of its military, it would attempt to project an image of strength.”

—Our Unpleasant Neighbor, Theron Greenmantle, Part One

The ship that they received was not as beautiful as the one that they had arrived on. It wasn’t some royal cruise ship; it was a combat vessel. It shared elements of the same design, the same grown-crystal quality, but it lacked all of the shine and affectations. Malachai had headed directly to one of the cabins and locked the door behind him, so it fell to Sylvas and the girls to prepare the ship for the arrival of the Ardent. 

That mostly consisted of sweeping it to destroy any of the listening devices that the Dusont family had planted, making sure that it hadn’t been sabotaged in any way, and then plugging Sylvas into the command circle to see if everything was functional. He was still sifting through all of the various sub-systems enchanted into the ship when he turned around to find Vaelith glowering at him. “Ever heard the phrase ‘diplomatic incident’?”

He shrugged. “Apocalypse first, hurt feelings later.”

Kerbo stuck his head out from behind her. “You said you were going to kill the queen and tear the palace down?!”

“No,” Sylvas corrected him, “I just said that if we didn’t get a ship and get off the planet, there was going to be trouble.”

“Yeah, it was Malachai that said we’d destroy their planet if they tried to keep us as slaves.” Kaya looked inordinately pleased about how things had turned out.

Vaelith made a hissing noise between her teeth, like a steam kettle, while Kerbo’s grin spread dangerously wide. Then the rest of the Ardent came pouring into the bridge, and things devolved into chaos as they argued over who would be taking what station. 

Instructor Fahred gravitated over towards the navigational array, which seemed to have been left out of the fighting but put him in prime position to chat. “It is so nice to see one’s students doing well for themselves. Making friends around the universe and influencing people.”

“Please don’t tell me you wouldn’t have tried something similar if you’d been in my shoes,” Sylvas grumbled, pointedly staring at Vaelith as he spoke.

However, with all the years of experience that the woman had, Sylvas’ ploy simply had no chance, choosing to ignore him in favor of pushing an overtly eager Ardent away from the weapons array.

“Well, I for one am happy to see that the situation was resolved without it devolving into violence. As embarrassing as the current diplomatic incident is sure to be for you, I’m positive that bloodshed would have been considerably more of a problem.” Fahred was probably trying to reassure Sylvas and the others by droning on, but it wasn’t really working.

Rania joined the instructor at the navigational array and transferred all that they’d uploaded from the Seeker’s slates into the system. Fahred leaned back to take in the array of star charts as they blossomed out. “Looks like we’re about three days off from the Dominion border.”

Before Sylvas could speak, Rania interrupted, “Yes, that is accounting for the speed you can get the ship up to compared to the average. Though…that depends on whether we are dropping off the Ardent along the way somewhere.”

“And risk another fiasco like that happening again?” Vaelith asked from her section of the room. “No. We’ll be accompanying you all at least a little further.”

Sylvas couldn’t help but smile. “Then let’s get away from this nightmare of a planet as fast as possible.”

Rania inadvertently snorted with laughter at that statement. “A whole world overrun with murderous Shikari and you’d take a week’s holiday there, but ten minutes of courtly politics and you’re ready to glass the place from orbit.”

“I’m a simple man,” Sylvas quipped back. “I like problems I can hit.”

Chuckling the words, “Simple man,” to herself, Rania headed off to the next station to pass on the relevant information. 

Fahred, meanwhile, was looking back and forth between Sylvas and Rania with a sickeningly broad smile on his face. “Well, she seems positively delightful, doesn’t she?”

Sylvas gritted his teeth and turned his attention back to the systems. “Yes.”

“And you seem to have her wrapped around your little finger, by my estimation,” Fahred said again.

“Probably more the other way around.” Sylvas couldn’t fight the little smile creeping onto his face despite his desperate desire to not talk to his old instructor about this.

“Then you’d be wise to remember that the life we lead is not a terribly safe one. It might be better to keep her away from whatever it is you’re planning on doing if you want the relationship to last longer than the expiration date on a bottle of milk.” It was like interrupting the gentle waltz of Fahred’s usual conversation with a bear trap snapping shut on his ankle. Sylvas twisted around to look at him, only for the man to shrug one shoulder. “It isn’t pretty, but it is how things are.”

“She is a grown woman who can make her own decisions,” he replied, very carefully.

You’re absolutely right, darling, but unfortunately, he is also absolutely right, and she is going to end up pureed if she keeps following you onto battlefields.

Sylvas cleared his throat, then promptly changed the subject by opening up a line to the whole ship. “We are now leaving Dusont. If anyone wants to make any rude gestures out the window, now is your last chance.” He tried to keep the tone jocular, so it wasn’t obvious he was trying to give Malachai one last chance to say goodbye to his home. “We will be setting a direct course for Leitnir 7 with no stops. That is three days before we hit our target. Until then, try and get some rest, I guess?”

It took only a moment before another chirp sounded throughout the ship, and Vaelith’s voice echoed down every corridor. “Do not rest. A remedial training schedule will be posted before the end of today. I saw your work on Strife. It was sloppy.”

Sylvas couldn’t quite stop himself from smiling at that either. The covenant that he’d forged with an eidolon would set him apart from the rest of humanity for all time, and it had severed him from the future that he’d been planning on pursuing in the Ardent with no way of going back. But it did have the one positive that he no longer had to follow any training schedule that the woman happened to post.

As they rose through the atmosphere, it was under Sylvas’ willpower alone. His mana had spread throughout the ship, and now it was as easy to move around as his own body. There were veritable flocks of other ships circling around them as they rose, ready to leap in and intercept them if they made any sort of hostile move towards the palace, but Sylvas didn’t pay them a moment’s interest. They’d be left behind in moments at the speed they were ascending. 

They rose until the palace seemed like nothing more than a sparkling speck, and the horizon was dipping down all around them, and then he spun the ship into alignment with their destination. There were some muffled sounds of surprise from the Ardent who’d never been on a ship he’d piloted before and had no idea he could spin it around like a toy in his hands. With a push, he finally fed mana into the engines, and they lurched forward. The ship was one of the better ones Sylvas had handled in his short career. Nowhere near as smooth and pleasant as the Folly but miles ahead of everything else. It responded to his every thought with barely a moment of hesitation, and more importantly, it didn’t feel like rusty nails being dragged over his synapses.

He had no need to cast a spell once they were breaking out of orbit, no need to bind together the complex words of the ancient Aion tongue to punch a hole through into null-space. The eidolon within him took the shape of the spell that he had always used, and he simply allowed mana to flood into that shape, the same way that it had flooded through the ship. One moment, the pearlescent oceans of Dusont were stretched out beneath them, and the next, they were plunging into darkness and the unknown.

The next three days should have passed in a blur of activity, but they were the longest of Sylvas’ life. 

All across the universe, new tears were forming in reality. More eidolons were coming pouring in. The interstellar communication network connecting the Empyrean was still out of action, but as they dipped in and out of null-space, they passed by patches where the local networks were beginning to link together once more, but there were no happy stories to be heard. Every planet seemed to be under siege. The regions of space surrounding the temple worlds that had returned from the eidolon dimensions were entirely without communications. Dead zones in space where nothing got in or out, though the worlds on the periphery of those regions were reporting hellish conditions inside and gradual expansion still occurring as the eidolons continued to pour through. 

Three days during which the sentient races of the universe could do nothing except give ground while Sylvas and his friends traversed the distance to the next vault. Sylvas had always done well in his arithmetic classes. From the orphanage, through the tower, and on to life among the Ardent, his ability to calculate numbers had never come into question, but now he was faced with a question of insurmountable numbers. 

How many were dying every moment? How many of those lives could have been saved if he’d done what everyone else was doing, finding a planet, drawing a line in the sand, and trying to hold back the tide? In three days, just how many planets would be lost to the eidolons, destroyed just like Croesia? How many were dying because he thought this was the right course of action?

He spent his free time with Rania, playing catch-up on all of the things that she told him they would have gradually learned about one another in the course of a normal relationship. He knew it was probably putting her in danger to share too much information about himself, his covenant, his abilities, but she had already pieced together more than anyone other than Bael had ever managed, and it felt stupid to give her every other part of himself except for the truth. In turn, he learned about her life, out on the edge of the Empyrean. Halfway between an academic and a graverobber, between a smuggler and an archaeologist, constantly having to switch back and forth between the different sides of herself to keep things moving forward. Making moral compromises about where the money to fund her expeditions was coming from, and being rebuffed by the big universities in the Empyrean Core because of the methods she had to use to keep her work going. More than anything else, he learned about her curiosity. The force that drove her out into the perilous stars when she could have stayed safe in the dirt. 

He also learned less important things that he cherished all the same. Like the fact that the back of her knees were ticklish, or that she made little frog noises in her sleep while loudly insisting that she didn’t snore.

When the ship needed to change course, to drop back into real-space to check its navigation, or when the engines needed more thrust, he spent his time on the bridge. He learned every part of the ship over the course of his shifts there, its capabilities and its flaws, but there just wasn’t enough to do. Not enough to keep him distracted.

In desperation, he might have turned to Vaelith’s training exercises that she was torturing the Ardent with. Malachai had thrown himself into that training with all that he could muster, politely requesting that his friends keep their distance so that he could regain his composure, and then unleashing the bared-teeth fury he was feeling on the training exercises that Vaelith was inventing. 

The sad fact was that there was nothing more that Sylvas could learn from Vaelith, and no way that he could improve himself further, not in the confines of a ship. Practicing the upper reach of his new powers would have torn the gunship apart, and practicing the lower end just felt like he was playing games. Between eidetic memory and Mira’s endless analysis, repeating the actions he’d already taken was pointless if he meant to train himself. Only new information or challenges would improve him now, and they weren’t available.

With his duties accounting for only a fraction of his time on the ship, and Rania insisting they spent time apart so that they didn’t become codependent—or, as she termed it, ‘weird,’—Sylvas would have had endless hours to stew on his own thoughts. Obsessing over the what-ifs and the lives that he could have saved by traveling a different course. Kaya proved to be his salvation.

Her covenant was still fresh and raw. She was constantly losing control over the eidolon inside her and letting its power spill out. She had no Mira in her head to guide her through every step of the covenant with a calm and collected voice, no vantage point inside her own mind that she could retreat to, to see which parts of what she was feeling belonged to her alone and what was being fed to her by the eidolon. She would have blundered through the way that she always had everything; she would have found a way to get things under control, probably at the last possible moment, but Sylvas managed to recognize what was happening to her before that last possible moment—after a brief crossing of their paths on the ship where her feet kept melding into the metal decking. His time, the awful burden of it, was now spent on her.

Sylvas would have thought that getting Kaya to talk about how she was feeling would have been the easiest thing he’d ever undertaken, given that he usually couldn’t get her to shut up about anything, but now that it would actually have been helpful for her usual verbal onslaught to carry on, she stoppered it. Getting her to explain what she was feeling, finding the parts of her own emotions that aligned with the feelings that the eidolon was trying to encourage in her, and trying to get her to embrace those feelings as her own became an arduous task. She was flippant as always, playing down the importance of working on her covenant, but the truth was that Sylvas needed her. They were up against a whole universe of eidolons, and he couldn’t go on carrying them through every fight. She had to get her new powers under control, both for her own safety and so that she could fight to protect the safety of everyone else.

Of course, it took Sylvas almost a day before he finally realized that the way to get her to open up was to be emotionally available himself. To admit that he was struggling, that he needed her help, that the foes that they were facing were so vast that no matter how much he improved himself, he couldn’t handle it all on his own. Kaya wouldn’t let herself merge with the eidolon for her own safety, or her own sake, but when she realized that Sylvas needed her, all those walls came tumbling down.

By the final day of travel, they had managed to merge her core and the eidolon into that familiar perpetual mana engine, and she had stopped leaking metal from every pore the moment that she stopped concentrating. Moving forward to the next steps would have to be up to her, with so much of the process being entirely about introspection and personal experiences with the eidolon, but Sylvas left her confident that she was on the right path, and that she would soon be manifesting her eidolon and casting through it instead of spell work in the near future.

Nobody was officially invited to the bridge. Sylvas was there because he was the pilot who was going to pull them back out of null-space. Many of the Ardent were there simply because they were assigned to certain stations. Everyone else on the ship just seemed to have shown up and crammed into the space so that they could have a better view of what was going on. Kaya found her way to Sylvas’ side, looking more at peace than he’d ever seen her in her life. Rania was over beside Fahred again, debating the finer points of the intelligence that they’d collected. Malachai was the last to arrive, holding off until the very last moment before he succumbed to the same urge that had taken hold of all the rest of the crew. He stepped out onto the bridge looking as calm and composed as he ever had been, all traces of his time back home erased from his face.

He greeted Sylvas with a curt nod, then moved to stand on the opposite side of the circle to Kaya. Sylvas couldn’t control his own urge to smile at the sight of him. “Nice to have you back.”

“I was never gone,” Malachai replied. “I was simply resting. It was long overdue.”

“Well, I hope you got a good sleep.” Sylvas flashed him a grin. “Because what comes next probably isn’t going to be very soothing.”

Which was right when they dropped out of null-space and into a firestorm.