Chapter 37

“There is only one course when you know fear, to seek it out, confront its source, and destroy it. To do otherwise is weakness. To do otherwise is to court failure and destruction. Because what you fear creates a gap in your armor that your enemies will exploit at the earliest opportunity. To seal your armor, to guard against your enemies, you must kill the part of yourself that fears.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

“Keep moving!” Sylvas roared as he dropped down towards the Crimson King. It swiped its many clawed hands at him, and he severed each one of them that came close. “Don’t look back. Don’t slow down. I’ll catch up to you when I can.”

Rania and the others were too distant for him to hope to hear an answer. Kaya had enveloped them all in a bubble of steel and then ping-ponged it across to beneath the shaft before opening it out and readying their ascent. She shot him one final salute, then they were gone.

“Now it’s just you and me.” Sylvas turned to face the eidolon.

What he had taken for crustacean shapes when he was just a boy, he now recognized as being more like the growths of coral. There were twists and contortions to its chitinous armor that made no sense. The shell separated as the Crimson King moved, revealing the hollow emptiness inside of it. The Order that he had joined when he was scarcely old enough to think for himself, the Heralds of the Hollow Heart, this had been their inspiration for the name. This vast red expanse of monster, powerful beyond all measure, but with nothing inside it.

Gathering his power, he flung a focused gravity spike into it. The beast shuddered at the touch of his magic, but it left no mark on the armor, and there was nothing inside that he could sense, even with the plethora of new senses he’d developed since starting out.

So far as he knew, destruction was not an affinity. There was no flavor of mana that spoke purely to destruction, with the possible exception of war, but even that seemed to incorporate so many other elements that pinning it down properly felt nearly impossible. There were some theorists who argued that the affinities that the eidolons expressed were some sort of blend of the existing elemental ones that any mage could access or perhaps some more refined version of mana, filtered down even further from the general affinities into something more specific and potent. 

Seeing things through the eyes of the eidolons, he had initially believed that the theories were wrong. That each affinity ascribed to one of the eidolons was entirely accurate, and the mana was just inaccessible to the average mage. Now he was beginning to question that, too. He could draw on war mana. More of it was generated each time he went near the site of a battle. He even natively created some everywhere that he went, thanks to the internal conflicts that he was dealing with. 

He could smell war on other people. Hardened soldiers or survivors had war mana clinging to them, whether they knew it or not. But now that he had the world soul implanted in him and every different kind of mana could gather inside of it and inside his core, he was becoming increasingly convinced that there was no real distinction between the different kinds of mana. Or rather, that they were all just fragments of a greater whole. 

These thoughts had already been lingering in the back of his mind, but in the few moments since he’d read the Aion’s spells, his perspective had shifted again.

Ever since discovering his affinity, he had felt defined by it, by the weight of it, its rarity and importance forcing him to excel to justify having been chosen by chance to carry it. But he could remember back on Croesia, launching his Arcane Arrows at this monstrosity and making it hurt. Before he had any affinity, when he was throwing around raw mana, barely shaped into a spell at all.

He spoke the words of it now, that old spell he’d pieced together mostly by himself, and a pure white dart of magic leapt from his hand to strike the eidolon square in the center of its chitinous shell. Claws of gravity and war had been barely enough to scratch that chitin, but it lurched back at the strike of that arcane arrow. 

Sylvas probably should have been afraid to enrage it, now that he was alone with the monster. Except he was never alone. He wet his lips. “Mira.”

Yes, darling?

Until now, the eidolon hadn’t really done much in the way of fighting. It hadn’t done much of anything at all. It radiated malevolence and destruction wherever it went, so having to actively attack anything was probably a rarity. It had pretty much annihilated his home world just by showing up, and it seemed to be more surprised than anything else that Sylvas was able to stand in its presence without crumbling. 

One of the pallid hands arrayed around its chitinous center splayed open like the petals of a flower, and a sudden bolt of raw destruction shot out towards him. Sylvas flung up a gravity shear, turning the blinding bolt of light aside at the very last moment. It punched clean through the wall behind him, burning all the way through to space as far as Sylvas could tell. 

He couldn’t help himself, and he smiled, “Did you have a chance to look over the spell the Aions left me? I’ve found it a little bit inspirational.”

It must have looked as though he was talking to the eidolon, to anyone who couldn’t hear the ghost in his head. Why do I feel like this is going to be a lot of work for me?

Two more palms blossomed, and two more darts of blinding destruction fired out at him. A single gravity shear knocked them both off course, piercing through the wall behind Sylvas on either side of him. It was interesting to watch this vast and ancient eidolon at work. The usual ones, the young ones, attacked with all the frenzied fury attributed to them, but this one seemed almost methodical in its approach. As if it knew its victory was inevitable, and it felt no need to expend more energy than was entirely necessary.

“The parts I found particularly inspirational were the parts where all the different affinities of magic were written together in a single spell, as if there wasn’t actually any distinction between them.” He launched himself into motion before the next set of hands opened out. There were three this time, and instead of deflecting them, he simply moved so that he was no longer in the course of the shots.

Are you about to ask me to write an entirely new system of magic?

He deliberately didn’t answer that. “Let’s work off the assumption that all magic is actually one magic, and the reason the Aions were so much more powerful than everyone else was that they could use all the affinities together instead of only having access to fragmented parts.”

Now go and write a whole new spellbook combining all of the affinities, working off that assumption?

The Crimson King had reached the end of its patience. This time, when it opened out its lotus palms to unleash beams of destruction, it was not one, or three, it was all of them. It must have had two dozen hands, and every beam was fired off at once, not at him, but all around him, eliminating any possibility of dodging aside. Forcing him to expend mana to protect himself with another shear.

He smiled sweetly to the woman in his head. “Please.”

When the afterimages of the blast had cleared, Sylvas was still standing, entirely untouched, surrounded on all sides by the destruction that his enemy had wrought.

You are lucky that I am endlessly patient and benevolent.

He launched an arcane arrow at the Crimson King, only to marvel as it threw up a shield that seemed to be composed of the same even blend of different affinitied mana that he was now using. “Thank you, Mira.”

And that my continued survival is tied to yours.

He launched his arcane arrows instantly now, shaping the eidolon inside him into the spell that he needed, firing them off one after the other, testing the eidolon’s defenses the same way it had tested his. Each one struck squarely in the center of a shield. “Thank you, Mira.”

Having looked at that spell, it does, in fact, appear that the Aions were operating in exactly the manner that you suspect, and we should now have access to their magic.

He dumped double the mana into the next round of arcane arrows, empowering them until they were blazing as bright as the lethal beams the eidolon itself was unleashing. It countered, launching its own cascade of beams at him just before it bust out its shields. He only needed a single gravity shear to turn aside all of the Eidolon’s bombardment, while it seemed intent on creating a single shield for each of his shots. Beams deflected into one another, and some intercepted his charged arcane arrows, detonating them in mid-flight and filling the chamber with explosions. Yet when all of the blinding flashes cleared, neither he nor the Crimson King bore any mark of injury. One last time, he said, “Thank you, Mira.”

Be quiet and let me work.

He chuckled, even as the next barrage was unleashed. This time, the lotus palms opened erratically. There was no single flurry of shots to be deflected. He had to throw up multiple shears at different times to keep himself out of harm’s way, and the attack was pressed enough that he had no time to return fire, only trying to stay ahead of the bombardment. The constant press of destruction had torn his clothing to shreds and now had started eating at his equipment, too. Everything that he hadn’t incorporated into his body suffered. 

As his bag of holding came apart at the seams, his orbitals toppled out, and he had to launch them or risk losing them to one of the other shafts leading out of the planetary core. They were already looking the worse for wear after the many battles he’d run them through, and the repairs he’d been able to undertake in the meantime had been rudimentary at best. It didn’t matter. If this was their last battle, they’d served him well, and the effects that he’d been able to create with them were now well within his capabilities without them. Like so many of the tools the Ardent had gifted him, they had been crutches, designed to carry him until he could walk and run on his own. 

Launching the orbitals right at the eidolon would have been pointless; its field of disintegration would have rendered them dust long before they made contact, but that didn’t mean that they were useless. He sent them out around the periphery of the chamber, first shooting straight away from him, then spinning in an orbit to form a band around the room. When the time came that they could serve a purpose, they’d be ready.

He felt a pang of regret when the Bag of Holding came apart entirely. It had been a very convenient way to switch between different planes of existence when using cold storage, but between his absolute memorization of all the magic he’d ever encountered and used and the ease with which he could cast through his eidolon, performing the same function was even easier and faster now.

A beam of lethal, destructive energy, fired from one of the opening palms, did something unexpected. Where it intersected with one of the others, it refracted off in Sylvas’ direction. He’d thrown himself well clear of the initial casting, but this sudden change in direction had it set back on course to hit him. With his reinforced body and his rapid regeneration, it was possible that he’d survive a hit from one of the beams. They were, after all, just a more concentrated version of the field that he’d been actively resisting since the eidolon crawled back through into this universe. 

But he couldn’t be sure, and this wasn’t the right situation to be testing things like that. He ripped open a tiny portal where the beam was about to hit him, then another behind the eidolon. Just like they’d done to the orbital platforms of Leitnir. The beam struck it in the back, chipping off some crimson chitin and setting it lurching towards him. It was the kind of opening he had been hoping for.

He had dared to open little portals to null-space this close to the dimensional anchor rift, because if something went wrong, the only damage would have been to the spell being cast against him. He still didn’t want to take the unnecessary risk of porting himself around. Which meant that if he wanted to close the distance with the Crimson King, it would have to be done in real-space. But not in real time.

Pulsing a fraction of his own gravity, he slowed time around him to a crawl once more. The dense, interwoven webs of blinding white destruction that the open hands of the monster were filling the chamber with had seemed so solid as to be completely impassible before, but as time slowed, the openings that Sylvas could slip through seemed to lull open wider. 

Zipping in, he twisted and navigated his way through the oncoming waves, pausing to cast a gravity shear when he’d almost made it to his foe, when the density of the incoming beams became too much, and he had to warp the pattern and clear his own path. His mouth had twisted into a grin as he progressed through the complex maze of lethal magic, and now, at last, as the beams parted like the curtains before a stage show before his magic, that grin became as savage as he was feeling. He didn’t have to will his claws to manifest this time. They sprang fully formed from his hands entirely on their own.

The first rake of claws on chitin made a noise like a rusty nail on a chalkboard, setting Sylvas’ teeth aching from the reverberations, but despite that horror, he struck again, and again and again. The claws were only leaving scratches on the monster’s nigh-impenetrable hide, but those scratches were more than anyone else had ever been able to do, and enough of them would eventually constitute lethal damage. The eidolon, for its part, didn’t seem to understand what was happening. 

Its presence usually made everything that might want to attack it die without it having to put in the least amount of effort, and now, confronted with an enemy that didn’t instantly die, it was taking it longer than it should have to reawaken the old instincts from before it was so powerful and actually take action. Getting hurt was entirely outside of its usual experiences, and it had likely been so long since anyone other than Sylvas had done it injury, that it didn’t even know how to process what had occurred. It should have made him more sympathetic, that this thing that had slaughtered everyone he knew and cared about was entirely mindless, that there was no malevolence in its actions, but somehow, it made it worse. 

If everyone on his world had died because of some orchestrated plot, then there was at least a reason for it. If they’d all died just because this lumbering idiot happened to pass through, that made him feel worse. It made it feel like all of their deaths had been a joke.

The opening pallid palms unleashing beams of destruction had stopped once he made physical contact with the eidolon. The Crimson King didn’t dare to unleash its power on itself now that it had tasted the pain of doing so. But that freed up those hands to come grasping at Sylvas once more. With so much of his clothing burned away by the eidolon’s aura, he could feel the dry, papery touch of each finger on the pallid hands before he could slice them away. Every brush of the monster’s skin felt like a violation, and every time he rent its armor with his claws, he felt a little more human again.

The claws were hurting it, but he remembered perfectly well that the best way to do it real harm was to ignore the chitin and aim for the nothingness within. If he moved to a distance where he could take a clean shot past the armor, the barrage from the hands would start up again. It also seemed that he wasn’t the only one who could heal. Each time he tore through one of the pallid arms reaching out for him, another unfolded from within the shadowed center of the chitin armor to take its place. He might have been hurting the Crimson King, but he wasn’t killing it.

A hand caught around his wrist, another around his ankle. They’d moved in perfect harmony, masked by the chaos of scrabbling claws that seemed to characterize every other motion of the hands. The Crimson King didn’t wait to secure his other flailing limbs, knowing as well as he did that his next move would be to carve into the arms that held him. Instead, it turned all the hands that had been scrabbling over him to face him and opened them out.

The beams that he had been so casually dancing around so far now found him immobile. The searing agony that had covered every part of him from just being in the presence of this monster was drawn down into a dozen tiny needles of burning white. They pressed in. His flesh was hardened against magic, remade to be more resistant to any damage. It was resisting the intrusion of the burning pinpricks, but that resistance wasn’t saving him, it was slowing their progress to a crawl. Instead of piercing through him, each of the individual beams was being driven into him slowly, twisting its way down into his flesh.

Do I have to do everything?

A gravity shear surrounded Sylvas, deflecting the beams off in every direction but towards him. His perfect duplicate stood behind his back, Mira holding the doppelganger’s hands up in the completion of the shielding spell. Where the shear intersected the arms that were pinning him in place, they twisted and broke. Where the beams deflected, they cut into the chitin as efficiently as they had Sylvas himself, which was to say, they made barely any ingress before the eidolon cut them off.

The bombardment stopped abruptly when the damage was turned away from Sylvas, and his duplicate only lasted long enough to give him a contemptuous roll of the eyes before absorbing back into him. “Thank you, Mira.”

She didn’t bother to answer him, so he took his chastisement and launched himself off the eidolon before it could regroup and grab onto him again. Blood oozed up from the dozens of holes it had punched in him, but now that the eidolon was back in his body, its mastery of blood meant that it didn’t even get the chance to drip before he was healed. It had hurt, but the damage was nothing. Much like the damage that he was doing to the eidolon. 

Unstoppable force was meeting immovable object, and Sylvas was running out of time. He could keep this thing occupied forever if he made no mistakes, but he needed it gone. Not just because he had to catch up to his friends, or because he had a mission to complete out there in the stars above, but because he had to kill it. He had to. This monster had destroyed his world. It had destroyed everything that he cared about, and then it had just wandered off when it encountered resistance. He had to kill it because until he did, the fear of it would always be in him. He had to kill it because the universe wasn’t right so long as it existed.

The Crimson King would die by his hand because that was the only thing that could make the universe make sense.

The new magic that Mira was preparing for him wasn’t going to be ready in time. There was too much to do, to combine all the existing affinities of magic into one coherent spell system. But that didn’t mean he had no access to spells beyond his own gravity and war magic. He had spent his whole life on the receiving end of hundreds of spells meant to kill him. Spells crafted by the greatest minds of the Ardent, that were meant to be powerful enough to bring down eidolons.

The arms of the Crimson King had withdrawn almost all the way back into its shell after their last bout, but now they came dangling out again, twisting at odd angles as they tried to take aim. He shot back in, closer, close enough that he was in immediate and obvious danger of being grabbed. He lashed out, bringing all the claws of gravity and war together into a single slicing beam that he raked over the Crimson King’s armor, and he cast.

Predictable as the rising sun, the Crimson King grabbed for him again with all of its hands, and the very moment that they touched Sylvas, they burst into flames. “Thank you, Hammerheart.”

Rearing back from the sudden heat like startled snakes, the hands tried to take aim at him, only to be intercepted by a sudden tidal wave bursting out from Sylvas’ body in every direction. The field of destruction wiped it away almost as quickly as it had come, but the impact of it had knocked every grasping hand away, and now, ever so briefly before it could be annihilated, the mummified flesh was sodden with water. “Thanks, Abbas.”

Sylvas unleashed a storm. Chain lightning leapt from his fingertips and earthed in the soaked flesh of the eidolon, chasing up the arms and into the hidden nothingness at its center before discharging in thunderclaps. “That one was for you, Ironeyes.”

Lightning passing through the eidolon’s body seemed to have shocked it into immobility for just long enough for Sylvas to actually think about his next move. Golden light shone around the periphery of the room as the mana Sylvas poured into the ever-spinning orbitals changed. They were both surrounded by a halo of shining gold. The complexity of this spell was far beyond any of the others that he’d borrowed. It had been a complex ritual the first time that he’d seen it, and even with the instant casting granted by his eidolon, it took Sylvas the full length of the breath the lightning storm had granted him to complete it, and then the tower-breaking spell took hold. Light reached out from the circle in multiplying fractals, drifting up and down until the whole chamber was surrounded by flares of sunlight. “Thank you, Bael.”

If the Crimson King’s chitin had been made of stone or steel, it would have been rendered down to dust by the sudden impact of the rite’s completion. As it was, the red chitin went from solid and untouchable to cracked through and through. There was no part of the eidolon’s armor that didn’t show damage after the tower-breaking spell was cast. No part that he hadn’t shattered.