Chapter 8

“We’ve forgotten more than we’ll ever know of our faith. Snippets and superstitions replacing text and ritual. We knock on a machine to make it work, even knowing that hitting it makes no difference. We speak the words of ancient curses on our enemies without knowing who they are invoking. Once, we lived on a world. Before we took to the stars and the moons and meteors. It was the cradle of stone that raised us, the tomb that buried us. Beneath it, we found our gods. We gave worship to them, and they gave us our strength. They gave us the tools to mine the diamonds shining in the night sky. They gave us everything that makes us dwarves. And now, we have forgotten them.”

—The Gods Below, Khagdzan Radogut

The gravity drill came together beneath Sylvas, starting slow at first, then churning up to speed, each oscillation in time to the orbit of mana around him, each spin increasing its speed. Just like his gravity shear shield, it remained a fixed distance from him. All that he had to do now was fall. He let go of the hold he had on his body to keep it flying and dropped. A plume of dust, then gravel, then huge hunks of torn rock began flying up from beneath him as he fell into the planet, letting the world’s own gravity carry him down. The Ardent who had been keeping a watchful eye on him threw up shields against the sudden downpour of stone, and the eidolons were simply bombarded with it, shrikes knocked from the skies, gorers pounded and buried in the unexpected landslide.

Sylvas broke through into the first tunnel, carving through yet more eidolons who had been lying in wait, and he gave their progress some consideration. The most important chamber would be at the heart of the planet, by Rania’s estimations, and hiking around the thousands upon thousands of miles of tunnels to reach it would take too long. Instead of letting the drill dissipate, he poured in more mana. He broke through the floor of the passage and burrowed down into the next, then the next. For seconds at a time, he was in freefall through what had been solid stone before he hit another part of the superstructure, and each time, his shear carved into another dense layer of eidolons lying in wait. 

If it had been as simple as walking through the tunnels, it would have taken them days, but fighting for every inch of progress would have stretched it out into weeks or months. There would have been casualties when he wasn’t able to protect everyone; there would have been the chance of failure with every step. He was taking all those risks away, the rock dislodged from his burrowing pushing out to fill in the empty spaces, blocking the passages, crushing the eidolons gathered there.

He would apologize to Rania for reburying all of the historical artefacts that she might have found later. It would be easy to apologize to her if she wasn’t dead.

As he traversed the strata of stone and eidolons, he caught glimpses of what he was passing by. This deep, the bedrock had been carved meticulously with geometric precision, and the walls were lined with equally precise and angular carvings that looked abstract to his eyes but strangely familiar, too. Not like anything in the Aion ruins they’d encountered, but more like something half-remembered. Some language or art that he’d seen glimpses of without giving it further study. The eidolons, too, were different the deeper that he fell. 

The gorers and shrikes had been left behind on the surface, and down here, while they still shone silver in the dim light from above and the red friction glow down below, the shapes were wilder and less recognizable as anything resembling any living species he’d ever encountered. Elongated battering ram heads were atop spindly, spiderlike bodies, and limbs bristled out the way that the spikes of the gorers had, each ending in multi-fingered claws with jagged tips. He was glad to see them buried.

The light up above had vanished at this depth, and only the glow of the destruction he was dealing below lit his way, yet even now, he could tell that his descent was too slow. He had reached terminal velocity some time ago in his fall, and he still sensed miles upon miles beneath him. This was taking too long. Up on the surface, he’d left the Ardent and his friends to fend for themselves, and while he had no doubt they could hold the line for a time, they couldn’t last for hours. Not in relentless combat, and not without infinite reserves of mana at their disposal.

He started adding more mass to himself, becoming heavier and denser, trying to overcome all resistance, and then, when he was falling as fast as he could, he started pushing down. His body moved in accordance with his will, and his drill stayed a fixed distance from his body. He started driving himself down, faster than any human could have survived. The tunnels and stratum all turned to a blur as he put on more speed. Minutes had already passed, and he needed to reach his destination sooner. He pushed down with all of his will, and he started to gain ever more speed.

When he broke through to the central chamber of the planet, he almost fell right through and out the other side. It was only the vastness of the hollow at the planet’s core that saved him. This was what they had been looking for. The massive spherical chamber had been carved out not with chaotic destruction like the one on Strife, but with the same precision as had dominated the rest of the superstructure.

The carvings were everywhere, and structures that he couldn’t recognize the purpose of, and raised platforms were arrayed around the chamber’s walls. Spells that were still barely clinging on after all the millennia since they’d been cast and rooted to give every surface of this interior world its own gravity. There was so much here that he had no basis to even begin deciphering, but there were other things that were all too clear. At the center of the great hollow, there should have been a world soul, and in its place, there was a tear. 

It was like the one that he had made so long ago, back on Croesia, when he thought he was summoning a god and was instead inviting hell onto his doorstep. But where that had been a carefully constructed spell designed to open the way for the eidolon menace to come pouring through, this one was ragged at its edges, uneven and tattered, with fragmentary portals drifting open and shut all around it as it shifted and fluxed. If this whole world hadn’t already been overrun by eidolons, this would have been where they were all coming from. As it was, there was a surprising absence of any eidolons to speak of within the room. They had free passage here, yet there was nothing calling to them. The world was dead. All its magic had been consumed and its world soul devoured. There was no reason for an eidolon to want to expend the energy to come here. Until now.

The world soul shard stowed away in Sylvas’ jacket beside his heart was thrumming. All of the arcane energies of the universe were meant to flow through this one place in the middle of this planet, and it was severed from the network. The shard he bore wanted to be in the place of the tear. It was meant to be the heart of a world, and this close to it, it was now thrumming in response to the misalignment of its position. Before, it had been a light in the darkness, beckoning the eidolons of this world to come closer, and now it was shining like a lighthouse, calling through the tear to all that lay there. 

Sylvas had to get out, or they’d be facing a horde of eidolons fresh from their own dimension. A glance up into the bottomless shaft he’d dug down from the planet’s surface told him that he wouldn’t have time to fly all the way back up before chaos began to unfold, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get clear before his presence caused a problem. With a quick bit of mathematics and a whisper to finish one of the incomplete spells stored in his psyche-fragments, Sylvas vanished into thin air with a gentle pop.

Back on the surface, he reappeared amidst the gathered Ardent, still under siege. He fell into step beside Kerbo and Rania before they even realized that he was there. “I’m through to the central chamber.”

Kerbo almost choked on his own tongue, while Rania merely jumped. “I am going to make you wear a bell around your neck if you keep doing that.”

“I can take us all down now that I’ve seen it.” Sylvas already had Mira running the calculations.

Kerbo rolled his eyes. “Nobody can teleport that many people without etherium.”

“Who said I don’t have etherium?” It had been growing inside of him the whole time that he’d been on this world. This close to Eidolons, it was a constant itch. He’d been increasing the density of the etherium filling up his arcane channels and filtering the rest through into cold storage until now, but with a slight lapse in focus, he let it start growing out onto the palm of his hand instead.

“What the hell have you been up to?” Kerbo reached out for the crystalline growth on Sylvas’ hand before snatching his fingers back before they made contact.

“Like I said before, a lot has happened.”

Kerbo cupped his hands around his mouth. “Everyone, form up on Vail. We’re going underground!”

The Ardent did as they were told. Kaya and Malachai broke free of where they were fighting, both slick with sweat and simmering on the edge of exhaustion, and ran to him. Rania took hold of his hand, but he had to gently pluck it free so that he could trace the words of ancient Aion in the air with his mana to complete the casting. There were probably other spells intended for mass teleportation, but Sylvas had never been given access to them. All that he had was the single-person version, which he was now twisting into something entirely new. He let his personal mana invert out of him, surrounding everyone in it as though they were all a part of him, and then he cast.

There was the briefest flash of total darkness as they passed through null-space, and then they were down in the chamber, falling to the closest wall before he quickly snapped out a flying spell to keep them from landing too heavily. Rania was off and running from the moment that they touched down, her mouth hanging open in a mixture of surprise and awe. “It’s dwarven!”

Kaya’s head snapped around. “It’s what now?”

“These carvings, the spells, the construction. This planet belonged to the dwarves.”

“No, it didn’t.” Kaya’s voice echoed back and forth in the strange acoustics of the sphere. “Because this place was sent to the kragh dimension by the Aions way back before dwarves were even a thing.”

“There’s no mistaking the carving. It’s old… older than anything we’ve ever seen of dwarvish ruins, but there’s no question that it is dwarvish in origin.”

“So what… the dwarves were kicking around with the Aions?” Kerbo scoffed.

The rift at the center of the planet pulsed, the gravitational waves it produced as it destabilized washing over all of them and knocking most of them to the floor. Sylvas and Kaya were about the only ones who didn’t at least get pushed to their knees. “This is fascinating stuff, but I need to deal with that rift before we do anything else.”

“Oh, you’re just going to casually close a tear between dimensions?” the glowing Ardent from earlier said without thinking.

“Isn’t his first rodeo, kid.” Kerbo shot his underling a disapproving glance, then leaned a little closer to Sylvas. “You do remember how to close these, right?”

Sylvas tried to smile at the fiend, but it was strained. “If there has ever been a day that I’ll never forget, it will be that one.”

Launching himself up towards the rift, Mira produced his memorized notes of the day he’d destroyed his home world.

Nice and gentle, darling.

It had been a simple enough thing, back then, to seize control of the magic he himself had created and reverse it. He had the words of the spell burned into his flesh and his soul. But this was a different proposition. More like the tail end of the magic that he used to close the tears to null-space, except coded to an entirely different dimensional location that rotated all of the spell effects through several degrees. First and foremost, he had to control the instability, reaching out with his will and his mana to drag the rough edges of the portal back into a more uniform shape that the spell could encompass, and holding it to that size so that it couldn’t buck free as he was casting and evade the whole effect.

Slowly, the rip became an oblong and then a circle. It kept jerking and bucking, trying to tear out of Sylvas’ grasp, trying to expand out again. Once it got started, it could go on expanding, ripping out wider and wider until the whole planet became a hole through into Eidolon space. There would be no reason for it to stop there. It could just continue expanding and shredding all of reality as it went. If there was a rip like this on all of the planets that had manifested back into the universe, then they represented not only a route of ingress for the eidolon invasion but also a threat to all of existence in their own right. The eidolons wouldn’t even need to kill them all. The fabric of reality would just unravel. 

The thrumming that he’d felt in the world soul shard was more pronounced now that he was even closer to where one of them should have been. It was radiating so much mana that even Sylvas couldn’t absorb it all.

He had known it would be a temptation. A beacon calling into the other dimension, ringing out across the eidolon universe like a dinner bell. What he hadn’t known was how quickly that bell would be answered.

The eidolon burst through, ripping the carefully constrained edges of the portal wide as it launched itself cleanly into reality and setting back Sylvas’ efforts.

The other eidolons that they had seen on their descent through this world had been prototypes or cast-offs. Poor replications of what this eidolon was. It had a shining silver body as tall as a building. Nothing but a continuous curve of metal, uninterrupted by a head, face, or any other frailty that accompanied the human form. From either side of that mass of smooth steel emerged a thicket of oiled-black limbs, neither arachnid nor mechanical but both. Some terminated in clawed hands with dozens of spindly fingers, others in blades; jagged and razor-edged, straight and curved, all in motion from the moment that it crossed into reality. It spun like a wheel moving forward, all of the limbs rotating with it as it dropped to the curved surface of the world beneath.

The portal began to unravel almost the moment that the steel titan was clear of it. Sylvas’ own efforts to contain it had the opposite effect, and like elastic, it sprang back out into an even more ragged and gaping wound in reality than it had been before. It started to spread faster than he could get hold of it.

Down below, he could hear the cries of dismay and horror. He could hear it even over the relentless scuttling progress of the eidolon. It should have sounded like a drum in this space, all of that weight, thumping along, but the weight was dispersed across all its myriad limbs, and it moved like clockwork.

He had to get down there. His friends were facing an eidolon powerful enough to annihilate a planet, and he was stuck holding onto the edges of a fraying hole. Kaya and Malachai led the charge against it, metal striking on metal, death carving into something that shouldn’t have even been alive, but the eidolon did not seem to even register their presence.

The split of his attention was causing problems. Only directly exerting his will over the stretching edges of the portal was slowing its expansion, snatching up at every seam of it before it got out of reach and dragging it back in towards the center. If his attention was elsewhere, so was his concentration, his will. He couldn’t bring the power that he had to bear while he was divided in his own purpose.

Down below, the dying started. The Ardent who had held back and laid plans now leapt into action. Kerbo was at their lead, leaping in a plume of smoke and flame, then soaring up to engulf the eidolon in an inferno. To blind whatever senses it had. To melt away its metal shielding. The eidolon stepped out unscathed and unwavering. Kaya’s javelins of steel were getting tangled up in the mechanical workings of its legs, where they protruded from the sides of its body, but it had so many limbs at work that having a few jammed up did nothing to slow its advance. There was no hesitation in its movements, no fear, no judgment, only the inevitable advance of that great silvery wall towards people who couldn’t scratch it.

Sylvas needed to be down there. He cursed himself for bringing them into this situation, cursed the eidolon that was bearing down on them, and cursed the stupid, broken magic that was letting all of reality unravel around them. He had to concentrate to pull the portal back together. He had to cast, but he couldn’t. Not like this. Not when everyone he cared about was down there, about to die.

Go. I’ll handle this.

“And how am I meant to do that?!” Sylvas couldn’t cry anymore. Not after what he’d done to his body, but there was still a memory of tears, of the stinging at the corners of his eyes. The frustration welling up.

I said go!

Mira slammed herself into the driver’s seat of his body, knocking him out of it. There was no slow sinking into darkness this time, just the abrupt impact of her seizing control and him being thrust out of his body. She’d done this before, leaving him stranded in his own hind-brain, but this time he wasn’t stranded. 

This time, his mind had a body to occupy.