Chapter 11

“Elenya Starweaver is one of the longest-standing members of the High Council of the Empyrean. Born among the elite of elvish society on the thriving colony of Briarwynn, she soon rose to prominence among her peers after displaying a prodigy’s talent in magic. She progressed rapidly through the circles of magic, achieving the highest possible level of power by the time that she reached the age of maturity. Unsatisfied with universal politics in the Empyrean at that time, she was able to parley her talent with magic into political power, offering her expertise to various planetary governments and Empyrean agencies until she had established a network of friends across the core worlds. 

Using this network as the basis for her future activities, she proceeded to apply gentle influence to the decision-making processes of the Empyrean’s council, until such time as she was able to secure a position working as a councilor representing her home world. From there, it is easy to follow her career’s continual progress as she actively campaigned against injustice within the Empyrean and for an outreach program that gradually brought a plethora of fringe systems into the fold.”

—Green Goddess: The Rise of Elenya Starweaver, Part One, Baldaeth Whisperwillow

“No!” Hector had been hanging onto the wall for stability as the ship bucked, but now he set his feet and began to cast, that same ritual he hadn’t managed to complete before. 

Everyone else had fallen into silence. Being in the presence of a single eidolon was enough to suck the good humor out of a room. Being in the presence of a Tier-7 eidolon was enough to make whole solar systems quake, and now they were faced with fourteen of them.

Sylvas had fully expected chaos to erupt the moment the eidolons arrived. They would be drawn to magic, any magic, and summoned closest to the Dominion fleet. He expected them to round on it and start laying the ships to waste immediately. Instead, they spread their tenebrous wings and swept forward in unison towards the Empyrean line. 

Somehow, the Dominion were controlling them, commanding eidolons against their fellow mortals, and turning nightmares into weapons.

“How?” Rania was the only one who managed to put what they were all feeling in that moment into words.

As disgusted as it made Sylvas feel, the fact that the Dominion were controlling these eidolons actually made his life easier. If they had just summoned them in and set them loose, then he would almost guaranteeably have been their primary target with the world-soul glowing within him like a beacon to all Eidolons. As it was, they were going where directed and leaving the Folly in peace.

Sylvas accelerated.

“We need to evacuate the system.” This time, it wasn’t Saizen calling for the retreat, it was Malachai. The man had paled to an ashen grey tone at the sight of the dragon eidolons’ arrival, and now even his unbreakable composure seemed to be suffering. “This is not a battle that can be won.”

“The Empyrean has seven covenant mages in the field,” Sylvas replied. “There is nowhere we can retreat to that would give us a better chance of bringing these eidolons down.”

“Seven mages and a fleet of dead men!” Kaya snapped. “I’m not feeding these folks to eidolons to buy us the time to kill them.”

Rania took hold of Sylvas’ arm again, not for stability or to offer him comfort, but to force him to look at her. “We need to get everyone out of here. We need to turn around and go.”

For a moment, it seemed as though Sylvas would argue, that he’d drive them straight into the heart of the incoming wave of monsters, just for the chance to stab at the heart of it, but then his shoulders slumped. Rania took it as the sign she needed, scrambling over to take control of the comms console, “Empyrean fleet, this is the Folly. We need to retreat, now.”

“The thought had crossed our minds also,” Greenmantle replied snappishly. “But the opportunity has passed.”

Elenya Starweaver dropped into the channel, too. “The Dominion are blocking null-space access now that their secret weapon has been deployed.”

Sylvas didn’t even have to ask which ship was casting the interdiction. He could already feel it in his gut. Whether from some gravity sense instinct or just the weary inevitability of it. “The Eagle’s Shadow.”

It is the only logical choice, darling. Any other ship in their fleet we could focus fire against, but the Shadow…

Once more, Sylvas poured a fresh flood of mana into the engines, until they were pushed to their limits. He tapped into the comms. “We’ll deal with that. Get ready to make the jump.”

With the connection to the other ships snapped closed once more, everyone in the cockpit was staring at him, with the exception of Hector, who was still casting frantically.

“We’ll deal with that?” Kaya brayed.

Sylvas shrugged. The bombardment that had been flung their way by the Dominion fleet was being interrupted as the eidolons flitted through their line of fire, and the Folly had a brief moment of getting to fly straight and smoothly without getting buffeted around by explosions. “We need to if we want to get out of here.”

The spellforms that Hector had been casting throughout his ritual had grown larger and larger, until his arms were fully extended to encompass the gathered mana, and now he brought his fully stretched arms snapping together, and his hands clapped. Outside, his eidolon manifested in a brief, bright flash. 

The reason he hadn’t been using it to cast was that his spell was targeting the eidolon inside him. For just a moment, the beast’s massive jaws could be seen shining in the starlight, before slamming shut on the elegant neck of the nearest draconic eidolon. The impact of those jaws, amplified in size and power by Hector’s ritual, would have shattered any ship, and by all rights, the dragon’s neck should have been severed, but instead, as the jaws of Cookie faded away, the neck remained intact, twisted and crushed, but still in one piece. And that wholeness allowed the eidolon to begin regenerating. Hector cursed under his breath, then finally joined the conversation, “We need to go.”

There was a chorus of agreement from everyone on board.

Hector tried again, “We need to get out of here, now. There’s no way we can…”

He startled as Saizen patted him on the back. “We’ve done all this already.”

“Oh.” He looked at the screens. “But we’re still…”

Sylvas dipped his mind back into the ship fully, leaving it to the others to catch the preoccupied spy up. The eidolons had pulled far enough forward now that the Dominion fleet had a clear line of fire on them again, and they had been making good use of it, bombarding the Folly with the full array of destructive spells at their disposal. If Sylvas’ shield had followed the usual methodology, presenting a solid mass of force to intercept an enemy’s attack, then they’d already be crushed under the sheer power of the enemy covenant mage’s simplest assault, but the gravity shear twisted space to make the shots miss them rather than trying to actively oppose the spells. 

He had the ship and spell in a corkscrew spin as they dove onwards towards the Shadow, not only dispersing the incoming spells behind them, but flinging them away from the ship’s tail end in every direction as they went. If they flowed straight back from the Folly, they might have hit the Empyrean fleet, and the fleet had enough to deal with. Sylvas kept the comms locked down so that the frantic shrieking and panic echoing through space behind them couldn’t be heard, but he could still hear it. 

He could still hear the hardened soldiers of the Empyrean who had come to fight losing all their courage in the face of the eidolons. There was a reason that the Ardent existed, that they trained, specifically, to face this enemy. Because normal people, even normal soldiers, couldn’t.

“What’s the plan, Stanzbuhr?” Kaya had waddled her way cautiously across to stand by him. She was a lot more accustomed to space than the rest of them, much more so than Sylvas who would have probably been bouncing off all the walls and the roof if he didn’t have gravity control.

“We just need to take out the Eagle’s Shadow, and then we run.” He was trying not to think about what that might entail. “We don’t even need to take the ship out. The second we disrupt the spell stopping us from leaving, we should go.”

He unleashed everything he could spare. The full torrent of spells that had taken warships out of the sky as fast as the blink of an eye, led by the pure white beam of his new combined affinity magic. It broke the enemy shield wall, punching through towards the Shadow, only to hit the shields surrounding that ship alone. 

The white seemed to grey on contact with the shields, then faded away into nothingness like smoke. The other spells fared little better, some deflecting off the shield wall, a few punching through to hit the ship’s shielding and be swallowed by shadows.

Kaya opened and closed her mouth, weighed her thoughts for another moment, and then said, “Alright.”

The firestorm outside died down as they drew close to the enemy shield wall. The ships farther out couldn’t hit them without risking the rest of their fleet, and soon, only a handful of ships could still fire. That wasn’t to say it wasn’t an atrocious amount of magic battering off the shield, but compared to what it had been, there was a distinct improvement.

When the spiraling screw of their ship hit the solid mass of the enemy shields, they bit in, the gravity shear holding strong and doing its job, dragging all energy and mass aside as they pressed through.

Set back from the front line of warships, the Eagle’s Shadow seemed to stare at them as they pushed through. The forward curved crescents looked like nothing more than a claw about to reach out and snatch them.

Finally, they were close enough for Malachai to unleash his full strength through the weapons systems. Razors of pure death lashed out from the Folly’s weapons, not destructive forces or lethal energies, just death itself. They had been aimed for the bridge of the Eagle’s Shadow, but it seemed to shimmer and shift as the shots closed in, living up to its name and the impermanence of shadows. The worst of the barrage sailed by, with only a few of the flurry of shots hitting home. 

Malachai didn’t pause for orders or to second-guess himself. He just unleashed the same cascade of spells, again and again, as they closed in. A fighter fleet buzzed around them as they pushed deeper into the enemy fleet, spells rattling off the gravity shear. At first, Sylvas thought it was just luck that had them swooping in front of the Shadow as Malachai’s death curses were unleashed. It would only be after the second pilot died that he realized they were deliberately flinging themselves into the path of Malachai’s shots to protect their flagship and their emperor.

Hector was sweating almost as badly as Saizen after his feat of projecting his eidolon out into space, “Is that courage or crazy?”

Sylvas shook his head mutely as another fighter went still and dead in space ahead, only to be knocked aside by the shear and their approach. He couldn’t tell the difference between their devotion and madness. He doubted anyone could.

The next time that Malachai fired, Sylvas was ready, flinging out a hand, the gravity of his will batting the swooping fighter aside, sending it crashing into the others in its formation and leaving the way clear. 

A shield of glowing green burst into life, not around the whole ship, but around just the bridge. A life affinity mage, flinging raw power into the maw of Malachai’s death spells. With the shifting and shimmering of the ship, some of the spells missed, hitting other sections, killing or maiming whoever happened to be there. But the bridge was protected, and with it, both the emperor and the interdiction spell keeping them trapped here.

Distantly, Sylvas could sense the Empyrean fleet in full rout, heading away from the eidolons, the Dominion, and everything else, hoping to get out of reach of the spell blocking faster-than-light travel. The eidolons were gaining on them fast. The first ships that had been there, waging the war of attrition to hold the Dominion back, were the first to fall. 

They were all older ships, with weaker crews, incapable of the bursts of speed that might have kept them safe. The eidolons caught hold of their hulls and pried them apart, venting atmosphere and bodies into the nothingness of space. The spells fired in their direction didn’t even reach their armored hides before dissipating in the face of their power.

Of the Empyrean fleet, there were only a few who held their position and tried to give the rest covering fire, and of those few, only fewer still survived in the face of the Dominion’s bombardment and the approach of the eidolons. A few unique ships, built to reflect the wills of their masters. While the Empyrean fled, the council stood.

Stood, fought, and died.