Chapter 36

There is no question in my mind that the second temple planet that we visited was one constructed by humans rather than elves. Despite the forest, it lacked all of the fine detailing that typically defines elven architecture and design. The tunnel beneath the planetary surface was functional rather than aesthetically pleasing, and there were none of the affectations that we’d observed on the dwarven temple planet, though I’m not discounting the possibility that there wasn’t actually any sentient intent behind the tunnel at all. The eidolon we encountered inside the planet might very well have burrowed its way down independently.

—Temple World Observations, Rania Clarendon

Kaya conjured metal beneath them. At first, it was just a flimsy sheet so that they’d still have their footing, then something denser as the flimsy sheet started fading away to nothing before her eyes. She’d listened to Sylvas’s sob stories about the thing that had eaten his world, and she had taken it all with a grain of salt since he was from some uncontacted nowhere where just about anything might have been impressive. This had to mark the first time that she wished she’d actually paid closer attention to what he had to say about his Twilight Prophet, Red Queen, whatever the hell it was.

Malachai had launched into an attack the moment that the thing had passed through the portal, but just like Kaya’s magic had proven practically useless against the Blacksmith before she formed her covenant with it, so too was his magic next to worthless in the face of a being of pure destruction. It couldn’t die, because it was not in the nature of death and destruction to ever end, so he was flinging spells that could topple empires, only for them to hit the thing with all the force of some wet paper towels. Kaya’s hair whitened as she waded across the impermanent steel beneath their feet to reach him and grab him by the arm. “Protect the stanzbuhr and his lass. I’ll hit it.”

Malachai looked ready to argue, as he always did when it was just the two of them without Sylvas to act as their intermediary, but he thought better of it, calling up a host of spirits to grab hold of himself, Rania, and Sylvas and drag them all out of the eidolon’s reach.

This would have worked wonderfully if Sylvas had been a movable object. His body was locked in place, not only by the seizure of his muscles, but also by a spike in his mass and weight. His personal gravity was such that even the strength of the dead was not sufficient to lift him. Giving up as soon as he’d begun that tug-of-war, Malachai hauled himself and Rania out of reach of the spreading field of destruction.

With her friends as clear as they were liable to get, Kaya leapt straight up in the air, and then she let herself drop, heading straight down at the eidolon where it had emerged. When she hit the sheet of steel underfoot, it folded in around her, crumpling down into a stabbing point, the whole sheet contorting into a spike, driven by her, into the heart of the monster. 

Even as it began to drive down, the field of destruction surrounding the Crimson King began to eat at it. She conjured more and more metal into being, enough that she would have sworn that the spike should have been half the size of the planet by the time it hit, but it hadn’t grown. Quite the opposite, it was a narrow, sharp point that hit against the king’s chitinous plates and sank no deeper. She pushed down with all her will, and the best that she managed was to scratch the chitin. What remained protected inside that chitin, she could not reach and would never know.

Sylvas fell.

He had finally come back to himself, back to his body, and the moment that his palm was no longer pressed against the vault, it released its grip on him, and he tumbled down towards the waiting maw of the Crimson King. Kaya tried to throw out iron beneath him to break his fall, but it was to no avail. The field of destruction stretching out from the eidolon was too potent. The platform that she’d tried to create was burned away before Sylvas even touched it. He fell and fell until, abruptly, his fall was halted. From amidst the gaping holes between the chitinous plates of the eidolon, pallid and sickly arms had protruded, seizing hold of him as he fell. 

Now these clawed hands pulled at him, tried to rend him apart, only to find that they lacked the strength. His old body would have been dust by now, but Sylvas, now, survived the touch of the eidolon. Kaya bellowed to be heard over the constant hiss of the Crimson King’s destruction. “Wake up, stanzbuhr!”

Sylvas’ head lolled to the side as those sickly pale fingers tried to force their way into his mouth. He was already slick with blood around every orifice in sight, but it had nothing to do with the probing hands of the eidolon and everything to do with whatever the vault had just done to his mind. As one hooked claw slipped under an eyelid and tried to pry it open, Sylvas’ gaze flickered, and he reached up to wipe whatever annoyance was interrupting his sleep aside. 

It was only when his hand finally touched the pallid flesh of the Crimson King that he seemed to understand what was happening. His eyes snapped open, and he began to scream. He bit down on the fingers that had forced their way into his mouth, ignoring that his teeth seemed to leave no mark on it, that his bare-handed, clumsy slap at the primordial nightmare was finished before it even began.

He had dreamed of the Crimson King every night since he left Croesia. It was the terror that haunted his every moment, waking and asleep. But this creature looked different now that all of his senses had come alive again. Not just because of all the new senses that he’d unlocked since the last time that they crossed paths, and not even because of the awful proximity he was in to it. 

When he had faced it before, it had been as a human alone. Now he was more than human… or less. He had an eidolon of his own fused with his soul, and while he had looked up at the titanic demon god from another world all those years ago and seen the end of all existence, he now looked at it and saw something else. Prey.

His fingers hooked into claws. War and gravity battled with one another all the way through his body to his fingertips, where they emerged, hooked and jagged gravity shears, crackling with destruction and battle. The hand in his mouth was severed at the wrist with a single swipe. It would have felt better if the monster bled, but once severed, the hand just tumbled down out of sight. 

Other hands came, grasping for him, trying to capture him before he could lash out again, but they were too slow. He rent the length of one pallid arm, stripping flesh from non-existent bone. The next time the monster reached for him, a pulse of gravity drove all the grasping hands back. He would not suffer its touch. Not again. Not while he was still alive.

The field of destruction that enveloped the eidolon was chewing off his skin, his clothes, all of it. But while the loss of a standard-issue shirt didn’t much concern him, the power of the eidolon rendering him down to dust, the way it had Mira, preyed on his mind. Yet though he distantly felt the constant pain of his whole body being destroyed from the outside in, nothing was actually changing. When he looked at his hands, he could see the skin sizzling away and the tendons beneath being exposed, but just as fast, the skin would be replaced again. As fast as it could destroy him, he could heal.

Rania and the host of spirits hung distant in Sylvas’ perception, lurking beyond the periphery of the eidolon’s sphere of influence. The constant bombardment of destruction pouring off the eidolon was still reaching her, but so weakly that there would be none of the tell-tale signs that it was tearing her apart. Slowly, she would weaken and wither and die, crumbling away into ashes after enough exposure. Just the touch of the ghosts was enough to make Rania shake as the life was slowly sapped out of her. At least she’d probably lose consciousness to that long before the eidolon shredded her down to her component parts.

Malachai was incandescent, overflowing with death mana and a rage that Sylvas had never seen on his face before, as if the Crimson King was an affront to him personally. It wouldn’t be until later that he’d realize that Malachai’s hatred of the eidolon was on Sylvas’ behalf. That the necromancer loathed it because of the hurt it had done to his friend. He launched one sickle blade of death after another into the eidolon, and not one of them so much as left a scratch. He was trying to kill something that did not know death.

Kaya was still trying to close in with the eidolon to start doing some damage of her own, but each time she launched herself forward, she had to raise an ever-thickening shield between her and her target or risk having the forces dissolving the steel away work on her instead. In practice, this looked like her flinging herself at the eidolon, rebounding before she could get close, bouncing off some of the scattered rubble orbiting around where the thing had just come through, and then launching herself all over again. She was having no effect, and the blurring motion made her seem like she was quite literally bouncing off the wall and ground.

The Crimson King was not sitting idle through all of this. With its attempts to paw and claw at Sylvas having failed, it now flung him free with a heave, chitinous plates locking together into a solid wall as it reached full flex. He tumbled through the empty air, clipped off an old brick from home, and landed with his feet flat on the underside of the vault.

The chaotic nature of this chamber made sense now. The jagged and misshapen parts, the ruins strewn in from across space and time, carried along by the eidolon of destruction as it went about its business. Carried back when it was banished and torn asunder whenever it lingered here. The only thing that Sylvas was surprised at was that the vault was still untouched. He had known that they were built to be resilient, but he was surprised the magic had held up, even against this eidolon’s power. 

It was a thought that he would soon wish he hadn’t had. Just as the last vault had lost its protection when it was opened, so too had the one beneath his feet. The smooth black stone that had lasted eternities no longer felt any compulsion to stay in one piece. It began to crumble to chips where his feet pressed against it, and to dust when those fragments drifted too far away. It was wrong. It was wrong for stone to feel soft beneath his feet. For this monstrosity to take something that the Aions had forged in their desperation to protect the universe and turn it into dust. 

The Vault. It had been opened with his touch, and he’d received the rush of information, but the actual contents… he hadn’t even seen yet.

Scrambling around the black pillar as it came apart, he launched himself out into the open air, then back in again, bouncing around like Kaya in his panic. There were papers there in the vault, stacked up just like they had been in the last one. A dearth of information passed down to them from the Aions so that he would know how to defeat the eidolons. Darting in, he grabbed the first page just in time for it to crumble to dust. “No.”

He tried not to touch the next page, just looking at it and memorizing everything, but as the Crimson King moved, so too did the air shift in the chamber. Nothing so huge could move without displacing air, and that displaced air became a wind, blowing the next page, and the one after, apart into tiny fragments. Sylvas threw up a gravity shear to try and protect the rest of the pages, but it was for nothing. The destruction field around the eidolon was relentless. Another page then another fluttered apart in the breeze. He cast another shield, like the ones that the Seekers had used to contain Malachai’s magic. A shield made of pure life energy.

Destruction washed through it all the same, as if it hadn’t even been there. That trick only worked with affinities that were in direct opposition, but what was the opposite of destruction?

I’m missing swathes of the text, darling. The instruction manual for saving the universe isn’t much use if we only have half of it!

In a panic, he reached for a part of his gravity magic that he rarely touched. Pouring more and more gravity into the one tiny segment of gravity that affected time. The destruction, the evaporation of the pages, it all slowed to a crawl, then slower still. Deeper into time than Sylvas had ever dared to push when he was rational, he slowed events past a crawl until they were at almost a dead stop. Silence fell. Even the rushing sound of continual annihilation came to a halt. 

The sands of time stopped. Reaching out, Sylvas no longer tried to pick up the next page; he knew it would come apart. Instead, he narrowed down his focus until it was no thicker than the sheet of paper itself, and with a push of will, he flicked it away into oblivion, revealing the next page beneath. The Nexus. The partially constructed spell that his body would complete, in the apparatus of it. All the instructions for how to unlock it were gone. All the myriad locations of eidolons, materials, and spells gone. But he would know how to make it work at least. He would know to walk onto the platform, to place himself against the spell graven into the wall just as the eidolons had been inserted as keys. He was the final piece of the machine, the final piece of the puzzle that would save them all. A puzzle that they no longer had any way to unlock.

It was over. His quest for answers and solutions was done. The early pages that had told him how to open the Nexus vault were gone. Even if he got there, it would not matter, because he would be stopped at the final hurdle. All the lives he’d sacrificed to be here had been wasted. All the trials and tribulations that he had lived through to become the thing he needed to be, defeated by the Aions in their foolish obsession with keeping everyone else away from power.

He flicked away the next page, then the next. More instructions, more pieces of the spell that he would need to enact. As familiar to him at this point in his life as they had been when he first learned them back on Croesia. The components of a summoning, fueled by etherium. Not just puncturing a hole through into the other world but drawing all of the eidolons to it. Bringing them all together. Collapsing that whole plane of existence down into a single point, at the Nexus. It was all useless. He couldn’t do any of it if he couldn’t get inside the Nexus. And how was he ever going to get inside it, even if the instructions hadn’t been destroyed? How was he meant to get to a planet in between two black holes? How was anyone?

It wasn’t fair.

He had left his home behind. He had traveled across the universe, chased by the ghosts of this spell and its consequences. He’d done everything that he’d done, all just to come full circle. Here he was once more, pathetic and useless in the face of the end of all he knew. Standing before the Crimson King, just waiting for it to unmake him the way it had everyone else he had ever known. Nobody was coming to save him this time. There would be no Ardent falling like stars from the sky. There would be no bigger universe beyond this one that he could retreat to when he failed to save this one. This was the end of the line, and it was all over.

Yes, you’re absolutely right, darling. We should give up on saving all of creation because there might be a locked door in our way.

“You know it is more than a locked door.” Sylvas’ voice sounded bizarre in the bubble of slowed time.

I know that if you give up and die here, everything else dies with you. Not just me, not just your friends, everything.

Time snapped back into its regular motion, and the final pages of the Vault’s secrets turned to dust, along with the vault itself. Sylvas hung in the air, standing atop nothing, with nothing to hold onto.

The Crimson King rose up out of the darkness like the specter of death. It drew itself up to its full skyscraper height and spread its spindly arms wide, chitin shining in the spell-light of all the magic being brought to bear against it, hopelessly. It had followed him here, closing the circle. From the beginning of his journey to the end. From the beginning of his life to… now. It had haunted his nightmares. It had destroyed everything that he knew. And now, just when an end to all of the misery came into sight, it had snatched it all away, turning his answers into ashes.

“Stanzbuhr, you were right.” Kaya had been rebuffed in her latest attack and now stood on a flat plane of steel that she’d created in lieu of there being any ground to stand on. “We got what we needed from the vault; we should get off this rock.”

“No.” Sylvas’ voice came out in a growl.

“Stanzbuhr, I can’t scratch that thing. Whatever it’s made of, we ain’t…”

“Take Malachai and Rania, and get them out of here. Make an elevator. Get back to the ship before it leaves.”

“And just leave you to fight this thing yourself? Not bloody likely.”

“You can’t scratch it, Kaya.” Claws manifested from his hands. “I can.”

“I know you think it’s stupid when I call you kin, but it’s true. To me, it’s true.” Kaya’s voice cracked. “You’re my brother, stanzbuhr, sure as any I’ve got by blood, and I’m not about to run and leave my brother to fight that thing alone.”

Sylvas drew in mana. All the mana that flowed through the entire planet rushed into the world soul inside him. “Nobody else can.”

“Nobody needs to.” There was a pleading edge to her voice now as she reached out and caught him by the sleeve. “We’ve got what we came for.”

She isn’t wrong, darling. We have enough information that we should be able to muddle through. Shall we say that today, discretion is the better part of valor?

“You think it’s just going to let us leave?” Sylvas laughed without mirth. “It’s the Crimson King. The Twilight Prophet. It is destruction made flesh. It won’t stop unless someone stops it… Unless I stop it.”

“We ain’t leaving without you.” Kaya stuck out her chin and crossed her arms.

“Kaya…” He looked for the words, the right words that would make her understand, and all he came up with was the desperate plea that he’d recited to himself a million times throughout his struggles. “I can do this.”

She met his gaze, and then she nodded and moved to do as he asked. 

He didn’t know what she saw, whether it was the confidence of a seasoned warrior, the certainty of someone whose actions were foretold by prophecy, or if she saw the anger still simmering inside him after all of these years. Sylvas didn’t just need to stay behind and fight this thing for the others to escape, he wanted to.