Chapter 3

“One might think of the stars and planets as fixed and immovable when staring up into the night sky, the backdrop on which the stage of our world pivots, but it is not so. If your sight were clear and stretched beyond only the nearest beacons of light in the interminable darkness of existence, you would notice new stars bursting into life, old stars dimming into obscurity, and given time, you might even notice their slow and inexorable drift out from their point of origin, the turning of the galactic arms, and even stranger adjustments being made. The stars are ever in motion, ever changing, ever growing. The planets that have formed around them are in even swifter flux than those great nuclear furnaces. Collisions, altered orbits, and above all, the inexplicable gaps that our knowledge cannot fill. Places where it seems worlds should have formed but have not. Places where stars have vanished without leaving any trace of themselves behind. The more that we learn, the greater the void of our ignorance looms before us.”

—An Introduction to Stellar Cartography, Pover Marsal

“I don’t care about taking risks. I only care about the mission. I don’t care if I live or die.” Kaya punched Sylvas as hard as she could the moment that they were through into null-space and his input was no longer required. “Well, I bloody care, you culgh! You took years off my life with that jump!”

She hit him again, but by this punch, he’d braced himself and increased his density enough that it didn’t even rock him. “We don’t have time to waste. We don’t know what’s happening out there.”

“Which means that what’s happening out there might be nothing! Everything might already be sorted, and you’re trying to kill us all in case you miss the chance to sweep up the mess after.” Kaya growled.

As she drew back her fist once more, Malachai caught her by the wrist. “As loath as I am to encourage this type of behavior from Sylvas, or indeed anyone, we must admit that the likelihood of the Empyrean having emerged unscathed from an eidolon incursion of this magnitude dwindles the more we discover.”

She tore her hand free of his grasp, looking positively delighted that she now had someone to direct all her frustration towards. “So, it’s fine for him to dive bomb us through a hospital?!”

All the squabbling seemed so petty in the face of what they were up against now. Sylvas stepped out of the control circle and between his friends. “I think I’ve proven by now that I know what I’m doing.”

Kaya opened and shut her mouth several times before finally storming out of the bridge. Presumably, she was still looking for something to hit, and given the amount of maintenance the ship probably required, Sylvas hoped she’d find something constructive to do with that energy rather than breaking anything vital.

“Where are we going?” Rania asked, with her hands held up to fend off any more shouting. “Out of curiosity.”

“The last place we know the council was assembled was Alvarhain,” Malachai was quick to supply an answer, just in case Sylvas was still struggling to keep his anger under control. “I’d assume that’s our destination?”

Sylvas’ temper was under control, much to his surprise. The pain in his jaw from Kaya’s sucker punch had already faded—and any irritation he felt with it. Now that they were properly connected, the eidolon inside him no longer seemed to feel any desire to keep pushing emotion on him to try to force that connection. “Even if they aren’t there, it’s a central location to start working outwards from. We should arrive in about six hours. I’d suggest everyone finds a bunk and gets some sleep.”

Malachai gave him a curt nod and set off to do just that, but Rania still lingered. “You aren’t coming to bed?”

Darling, now might be a good time to put the moves on her. Lay on that old Sylvas charm. Er, wait. You didn’t have any charm before. Never mind. Just do what I tell you to do. Put your hands where I tell you to—

Sylvas very deliberately ignored Mira. “I don’t need sleep the way that the rest of you do. It’s best if I keep an eye on things up here.”

Rania closed the distance with slow, overly careful steps across the bridge until they were close enough to touch. “We’re in null-space. There is literally nothing out there that can happen to us.” She reached out and touched his bare arm where the scars curled around it. “Come get some rest.”

“I genuinely don’t need to sleep.”

“Then just come lie down for a while.” She pulled on his arm now, as if she could drag him out of the room if he didn’t want to go. He found himself following her as if she could. “Six hours is a long time to just stand there. Come on.”

A few hours won’t do any harm, Mira’s voice filtered back into his mind, though this time with a softer edge.

Reluctantly, he let her lead him back out into the ship, down a ladder clearly built with dwarves in mind, and then into what had probably been the crew lounge. There was a makeshift bar set up and the closest thing that the dwarves had to furniture bolted to the ground, a pair of beaten-up-looking sofas. Rania shoved him onto one, then shoved him sideways until he was lying down. A little line formed between her eyebrows as she frowned down at him, then she shrugged her shoulders and lay down right beside him, squashing him against the backrest. They lay like that for a moment, with Sylvas barely breathing, before she chuckled, reached back, and drew his arm over her like a blanket. “There. Now you can’t sneak off while I’m sleeping.”

“I think I still could—” Sylvas was already calculating how best to levitate up and out without disturbing her when she shoved her whole body back against him, pinning him in place. “I stand corrected.”

She wriggled a little to get comfortable. “Now, go to sleep.”

“I don’t—”

“Just close your eyes, shut up, and hold me.”

He had never held anyone like this. Not since Mira. And they’d never slept in the same bed. “Is this—”

“Eyes. Closed. Mouth. Shut. Arms.” She moved him around a little like he was a stuffed animal that she was using as a pillow. “Just there.”

He still couldn’t let it go. “What does this mean?”

“It means, close your eyes and shut up.”

With nothing more useful forthcoming, he did as he was told, closing his eyes, feeling the warmth of her body against him, and trying not to let his mind wander too much. He could stay perfectly still when he needed to. As still as a statue. But he was concerned that stiffness might be misunderstood as discomfort or rejection of one of the first truly pleasant experiences he could remember ever having, and he had no idea how to navigate any of this and…

Turning your brain off now. Night, night, darling.

He fell into darkness.

When he did wake, it took him a moment to work out where he was and what was happening before the sensation of a person cuddled up against him and his memory managed to align.

Five hours’ sleep, and she’s had about the same. You should head back to the bridge now. Or try for a quickie.

He tried not to groan, but it was difficult.

Movement made Rania stir, and she came around with a shock, the same way that Sylvas had. She jumped and tried to pull herself free of his arms for a moment, before realizing where she was and who she was with. It reminded Sylvas that she’d just spent several weeks in a war zone, and that the comfort of having another person so close might not have only been for his own benefit. “Good morning.”

She coughed to clear her throat before twisting around to look at him. “Is it morning?”

“Somewhere.”

They were so close it would almost have been easier to kiss than not, and from the way her eyes were locked onto his lips, it seemed like the idea had crossed her mind, too. She started leaning in just as Kaya stomped into the room. “There you are!”

The third and final stage of his Covenant would allow Sylvas to cast spells instantly. It was for the best that he had not reached that stage, or he would have struck Kaya dead in that moment.

Rania rolled out of his arms and onto her feet. “Here we are.”

“Look at you two, all cozy.” Kaya’s grin was so wide that Sylvas had concerns she was going to sprain something.

“I need to return to the bridge,” Sylvas said quickly. Taking Rania’s offered hand to pull himself to his feet, he gave it one last squeeze before letting go.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Kaya called after him. “We were in such a rush that we had to go through a planet, but we can wait for you two to snuggle some more.”

If Sylvas was still capable of blushing, he would have been a luminous red by this point, but Rania didn’t seem at all troubled. She was laughing along with Kaya as he made his hasty retreat.

They dropped back into real-space on the edge of the Alvarhain system, having no idea how dense traffic around the planet was liable to be, and it was for the best that they did. The skies above Alvarhain were full. All the ships that had been coming and going before were all absent, but in their place shone the slick white fleet of the Ardent. Yet even that massed cluster of battleships did not hold Sylvas’ attention for long, not when he was faced with the desolation. The planet where he had been kept confined, the home-world of the elves, was in ruins. 

Cities and forests had sprawled across every continent of the world, and now there was only the blotting smoke left in the aftermath of their destruction. More than that visible hint at what had happened was the distortion of mana. Every living world was a nexus for mana, a gathering place connected to the intergalactic flows of magic, and this nexus was suddenly and simply gone. The world’s soul had been destroyed, and with it, so too would die what was left of the world. From orbit, the Ardent were raining death and destruction down on the surface, wiping out the hordes of eidolons now roaming with no care for the damage that they did. The world was lost, its people either dead or escaped. There was no hope of recovering it, rebuilding, anything. Just as he’d lost his home years ago, Sylvas now saw the whole elvish people losing theirs.

“No.” It slipped out of Malachai before he could control himself, barely a whisper at the sight. If Kaya were there, she would probably have had a lot of more colorful commentary to make about the sight before them.

Sylvas’ legs felt like they might give out under him. This was everything that he had joined the Ardent to stop. Everything that he had devoted his life to preventing. Another world annihilated.

“How could this happen?” he asked, mostly himself.

If enough eidolons break through, it can happen anywhere. That is why they’re so feared.

The consoles lit up with an incoming message from the Ardent. A gruff voice echoed across the bridge. “Civilian vessel, leave this system immediately. It is under lockdown until the incursion has been contained.”

Sylvas was still too shocked to speak, giving Malachai the opportunity to step up. “Ardent vessel, we are Empyrean Intelligence Operatives. We have commandeered this vessel and are here to provide assistance. We need to contact the Council immediately.”

“You have any way to verify that?” The officer on the other end of the conversation sounded incredulous, to say the least.

Malachai looked askance to Sylvas, who glanced up from the scrying readings and said, “Any council member will be able to verify it.”

That earned them another scoff and a visual link before a new voice spoke out. One that belonged to a captain from one of the Ardent ships. Decked out in her pristine white uniform, the woman glowered at them as if she could make her problems disappear just by staring hard enough. “Well, we don’t have any of those.”

“You do have the Ardent Cruiser Basquiat,” Sylvas replied, having found what he was looking for among the scrying. “If you contact Kerbo Valnier, first officer on that ship, he can verify that I am Sylvas Vail.”

All that got them was another raised eyebrow. “So what?”

Sylvas made eye contact with the woman through the screens. “Please. Just do it.”

It took a matter of seconds before Kerbo was patched into the conversation, his red face taking up half the screen, his wicked grin taking up almost a quarter. “Yeah, I know this son of a bitch, Captain. He owes me fifty gold.”

Sylvas grinned right back. “You lost that bet.”

“Are you still in the Ardent? No? So you owe me fifty gold.”

Sylvas did his best to keep a straight face. “I made it the three months.”

“Then you died, so I get to take the money back off your corpse. That was the deal.”

“Died?” The unfortunate captain who’d intercepted them finally waded back into the conversation. “Officer Valnier, can you confirm that this Sylvas Vail is an Intelligence operative?”

She was partly ignored by Kerbo, who looked thoughtful at the news. “That’s where they disappeared you? That makes sense if you’re actually still breathing. Damned spooks.”

They had passed the threshold where Sylvas had any concern for revealing that he was alive. Matters had become more pressing, and at this point in his progression, he was pretty sure any foreign assassin trying to take him out was going to have a bad time. Saving lives took priority over secrecy in his book. So, he jumped right into questions. “So. You know who I am now. Any idea where we can find the council or a way to report back to them?”

“Not a damn clue. They don’t exactly announce where they are. Comms are down all over. Alvarhain fell, but that was just the biggest name.” The planet burned on the screens that weren’t occupied by the fiend’s or the captain’s faces. “We’ve lost contact with hundreds of systems. No telling how many have been taken.” 

Malachai stepped in closer so he could be heard by the comms spell. “Do we know what caused the incursion?”

Kerbo didn’t blink twice at the half-skeletal prince appearing on his screen. “Not a damn clue about that either. Nothing initiated it that we can see. No connection between the worlds attacked. No sense to it.”

The captain of the ship that had hailed them to start with interrupted again. “Officer Valnier. Does this man have the clearance to hear all this?”

“This man stared down a planetary annihilator when he was a first circle mage. Then he won the jackpot and landed a gravity affinity. Soon as our reserves run dry, he’ll be running our fleet here, let alone answering to any of us.” Kerbo seemed to remember himself a moment too late. “Sir.”

The ‘Sir’ seemed to be enough to turn the captain’s annoyance into a chuckle. “All right, then, if he’s as useful as you say, then the universe knows we could use the help.”

“What’s the move, sir?” Sylvas tried to curry some favor with the formal address.

The captain let out a heavy sigh. “Alvarhain is done. No survivors left on the surface. World soul destroyed. Our bombardment is just to make sure there aren’t any capable of spaceflight left alive and to kill those planetside back into more manageable numbers. If you couldn’t tell, we’re not exactly in a good way here either. I’m currently acting fleet admiral until I can find a poor soul with more seniority to take over. Right now, our priority is to find out what caused this, ideally before it happens again.”

Sylvas tried not to let his eyes be drawn back to the dead planet. “Where do we look for answers?”

“We’ve had dead tech that the Aions left behind activating all over the Empyrean over the last few days. Some systems that came under attack by the eidolons were defended by it, and some systems came under attack from it, just adding to the chaos.” The captain transferred an array of star charts marked with the dead tech that had sprung back to life. 

Sylvas didn’t have time to dig through it, but it did help make sense of certain things. “We encountered some of that ourselves.”

Kerbo added, “We think that with whatever’s happening, the Aion knew it was coming, and that’s why they left the tech behind.”

Sylvas did not groan, as that would not be professional. “So we’re back to chasing ghosts, hoping that we might get some answers.”

“No,” the acting admiral corrected him, “that isn’t all that’s been going on. The eidolons weren’t the only thing to break through. Long-range scrying is detecting planetary bodies across a dozen different populated systems that didn’t exist before today. Not to mention just as many exoplanets.”

That strained even Sylvas’ credulity a little. “The eidolons brought their own planets along with them?”

There was a slight sigh as the woman launched into the explanation that Sylvas had heard far too many times, “Eidolons are non-intelligent. We don’t know enough to extrapolate the connection between—”

Kerbo talked over them. “Yeah, it seems that way.”

Mira had sifted through all the information that Sylvas hadn’t consciously taken in. The new planets had been marked on the star charts, too. She flagged the closest one for his attention—an exoplanet somewhere on the far side of the galactic arm. Sylvas pulled it up on the screen for the other two to see. The admiral did a brief double-take. “We are assembling a recon team to do a fly-by—”

Sylvas and Malachai spoke together, “We’ll go.”

The woman tried not to sneer at them with mixed results. “With respect, that ship of yours isn’t going to have the maneuverability to get in close enough to the planet to perform any sort of detailed scrying before the eidolons bring her down. We’ve got some top-of-the-line—”

“I’m not making a fly-by. We’re landing. Scrying from orbit isn’t going to get us the answers we need.”

Her overplucked brows drew down. “Son, that’s a suicide mission. Even from here, we can see the whole world is crawling with eidolons. Not the small fry either.”

“We’ve faced worse odds.”

That didn’t seem enough to convince her, and while Sylvas was ready to admit that he existed, he didn’t think revealing his Covenant and ability to take on whole planets of monsters alone was necessarily the best move.

She shook her head. “I’m not ordering any of my people to—”

“I’m certain my captain will volunteer once she knows it’s Sylvas,” Kerbo spoke over her again. “And I’m betting that half the fleet will volunteer if she doesn’t.”

“I can’t spare—” The woman cut herself off this time. “I can spare you one ship, as many volunteers as you need to crew it, and no more. In the meantime, I’m going to commandeer that rust bucket you’re flying. We’ll use it to offload as many civilians as we can from our holds.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sylvas snapped to attention and gave the best salute of his life.

She just shook her head. “It was nice knowing you, son.”

Predictably, the Basquiat was the ship that began to pull forward to dock with them. Sylvas shot out quick sending spells to Kaya and Rania before the latter could panic over them being boarded and the former could start slaughtering their new crew in surprise. Through his gravity sense, he could feel teleportation spells going off all around them. Crew jumping ship and being replaced with others who volunteered for the thankless job of plunging into the maw of the beast.

Kaya stuck her head around the door. “Sign us up for another suicide mission while I wasn’t looking?”

Sylvas didn’t even bother to look abashed. “Yes.”

“Alright.” She managed to hold back a smile. “But if I die, I’m kicking your arse.”

“I would expect nothing less.”