Chapter 13

“Of all the forces involved in the casting of magic, the least well understood is will. Will is, in essence, the strength of a mind. By direct application of will, a mage can produce change. Yet there is no clear manner in which will can be quantified or understood. It can vary in strength not only between individuals but also between different days for that individual. Some have tied its power to the concept of hope or the idea of self-belief, but it seems neither one of these fully encompasses everything that will is or that will does. 

Some of the most powerful magic users throughout history have possessed will sufficient to reshape reality around them, to direct mana and the elements of their affinity through its direct application, but just as many of those lauded as incredible mages were possessed of a paltry amount of it, relying instead on clever spell craft to bridge the gap that this lack of native will presented between them and those outliers. In practical terms, will is an incredibly powerful force that cannot be trained or relied upon. Some might argue that there is something inherent about the force of a person’s will, as if it were granted to them at birth, others that a strong will is produced by adversity or by being raised in the right environment. There are as many conflicting theories on will as there are stars in the sky.”

—Fundamentals of Arcana, Albrecht Magnus

He was shorter than Sylvas imagined he would be. A man with heavy eyebrows, a hawkish nose, and an almost bored expression plastered over his face. He was clad in simple robes of black, with no crown or decoration to indicate that he was their emperor. He didn’t need any affectation. Power didn’t need to advertise itself.

With a wipe of Blackstar’s hand, the steel shell that Kaya was trying to raise around them melted away. But the expected attack did not come. Instead, the emperor of the Obsidian Dominion sat up fully and called out a greeting.

“Sylvas Vail, I presume?”

Whatever Sylvas had been expecting, it wasn’t this. “You know me?”

“I have been following your career with great interest, and now, at the end of all things, you should understand that I mean you no harm.” When the man smiled, it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We may have been set against each other by circumstance, but there is no personal enmity between us. In fact, we want exactly the same thing.”

“I don’t want to conquer the universe,” Sylvas snapped back.

To which the emperor responded with something entirely unexpected, something so unexpected that even his own people looked startled. He laughed. “Nobody would want the responsibility that I have shouldered.”

“Responsibility?!” Kaya snarled as she tried to push through Sylvas and Hector, who sensibly held her back. “You murdering…”

“We both want peace above all else. An end to the terrors of the eidolons. We have both done all that was in our power to bring about that end.” Blackstar turned his gaze from Sylvas to look out across the stars at the war blooming behind his back. “I built an empire as a sea wall, to hold back the tide of chaos. But you will turn that tide.”

The hair on the back of Sylvas’ neck stood up. He didn’t even know that his body was capable of goosebumps anymore.

“You don’t seem to have any eidolon troubles, Emperor.” Hector bristled. “In fact, it looks like you command them.”

“Eidolons lack will. Anyone could command any eidolon to obedience if they had the strength. I possess an excess of it.” Every word he spoke was spoken with absolute confidence. Even now, the pause seemed deliberate, as if he was following the script of a speech. “But I cannot be everywhere, fighting every battle. Halting every incursion. Our foe is relentless. To defeat them, we need the Starbreaker.”

Rania had been hiding behind the bulk of Hector and Sylvas until now, but curiosity had led her to places that Sylvas wouldn’t have gone with a full battalion of Ardent at his back. “How do you know that he’s the Starbreaker?”

“Because I made him so.” Blackstar steepled his fingers in front of him. “The Aions left specifics in the vaults. Details of the Starbreaker I chose not to share with the Seekers. Nothing to specify a single person or world, but a list of circumstances that could be met to bring about that person. I caused those circumstances as frequently as possible to maximize the possibility of his creation. From there, I just waited for one of the survivors to flourish.”

Sylvas’ head was spinning, trying to keep up with everything that was happening. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Croesia died to an eidolon incursion. You didn’t…”

“Disseminate partially complete information and resources to uncontacted worlds to cause incursions.” The emperor lowered his hands to rest on his lap. “I did. I am telling you now plainly that I did, without deception. There will be no lies between us, Starbreaker. I destroyed your world, I destroyed countless worlds, to create you, and I would have paid that price of blood over and over again for as long as it took.”

It was too much. “My home. My people.”

“Discard your sentimentality. We cannot afford to think in such small terms as a single life or a single world.”

“But it wasn’t a single world, was it, Blackstar?” Hector seemed to be following all of this a lot better than Sylvas could stomach to.

“When you rule, you make whatever decision is best. You make hard decisions that lesser men cannot.” He met Sylvas’ gaze as if nobody else was in the room. “You know this already.”

Sylvas had been forced to choose, but that felt a world away from laying plans for mass slaughter. All of his life, he had been suffering, and now the cause of it all sat before him, smug and expecting him to agree that it had been worthwhile.

He was leaping forward with claws manifesting around his hands before he even realized that he’d moved. The covenant mages standing guard around the emperor threw up spells, not to kill him but to catch him, and with a rake of claws, those spells came apart. He landed before the emperor’s throne, wrath and power blazing through him. He raised a claw for a killing blow and then stopped.

Blackstar had raised a hand, as if calling for a polite pause, and Sylvas had been frozen in place. His body still tried to move, every enhanced muscle screaming against the sudden ensnarement. With a gesture from the Obsidian Emperor, he was flung back to land beside his friends. Friends, who he noticed, had started to charge in and help him before they, too, were halted by a gesture from Blackstar. The man’s raised hand dipped towards the floor, and Sylvas was put to his knees.

“Please do not be foolish.” Blackstar rose from his throne, keeping his hands extended out towards Sylvas and the others. “I would not have allowed you here if you were capable of doing me harm. I have watched your growth from child to man. I have studied the prophecies of what you have done and will do. You hold no surprises.”

Sylvas was still struggling with all his might against the pressure of will holding him in place. He had full control over his own personal gravity; he should have been able to subvert any force being exerted against him, but even as he tried everything that he could imagine, nothing let him move.

Your eidolons. He is holding them.

While Sylvas had been overcome by his wrath, Mira had been thinking. She had scanned the room, located the mage whose task was to maintain the interdiction preventing access to null space, and marked her. She wore the same black robes as the emperor and all his covenant mages, hooded to hide her and the rest of them from sight, while the emperor bore no cowl. If they could interrupt her casting, the fleet might escape. Sylvas and the others had no real hope while Blackstar held them so intimately, but they might have a chance to rescue everyone else.

Reaching out with his senses, Sylvas found Rania, Malachai, and Saizen. They had no eidolons to bind them. They were constrained only by regular magic, cast by the mages surrounding them. They could take out the mage. They could save the Empyrean fleet. If he could just tell them.

“You strain against the inevitable.” Blackstar sighed as if he was genuinely disappointed. “I mean to raise you up to stand alongside me. For you to rule alongside me. Casting that aside for the memory of people who did not know you is foolish. You are not foolish.”

The awful grip that had held Sylvas in place was released. He heard Kaya gasp behind him as her own eidolon slipped free of Blackstar’s control, and she could breathe again. Sylvas ached as he forced himself back to his feet. Body and soul were never meant to pull in different directions, and while nothing had torn free, the pain was unique.

“Sylvas Vail, you are the Starbreaker I have spent lifetimes seeking. You will open the Nexus and grant us the weapon that will slay all eidolons. You will do this, because despite your temper, you care more about doing what is right than appeasing your own desire for vengeance.”

Through his eidolons, Sylvas could instantly cast, and he did now. Unleashing a barrage of rapid darts of magic. The covenant mages by the emperor’s side stood ready with their interlocking shields of myriad affinities, and they proved enough to stop the torrent from reaching Blackstar. What they failed to do was intercept the broad spread of other darts he had fired off chaotically in every other direction, shattering machinery, killing members of the bridge crew, and most vitally, hiding the one dart that Sylvas actually cared about from sight in the sudden explosion of destruction. The dart that soared in a curving arc up and over the shields around the emperor, along the length of the bridge, and sank straight into the temple of the mage casting the interdiction.

This time, the emperor did not stop at constraining Sylvas. With a jerk of his hand, he unleashed pain like the man had never known. Every part of him screamed with electric agony as his magic, his soul, was ripped asunder. For a blessed moment, it was all too much, and he fell into darkness. 

There was peace and painlessness for but a moment, and then he was returned to his body as if thrown. It was a hollow and aching shell. As though he had been cored like an apple, and there was now nothing inside him. He reached for his magic, for the mana that would heal this hurt, but it was gone. His magic gone. Everything gone. He couldn’t even take satisfaction in the Empyrean fleet beginning to make their escape, because satisfaction would forever be out of his reach.

By the side of the emperor, four eidolons hung limp in the air. The wolf Strife and the Crimson King had been torn from his body, just as the Blacksmith had been torn from Kaya, and Cookie had been rent from Hector. The eidolons looked as stunned and helpless as Sylvas himself felt.

With numb fingers, he tried to shape magic on his own, but everything was tied to his eidolons now. Magic no longer flowed through him, but through them, and without them, he could not reach it. He reached out to Mira for help, for some clever solution, but she didn’t answer him. He was completely alone in his own body, and while that once would have been cause for celebration, now it was a nightmare of silence and cold.

“As you can see, I do not need your consent. You will obey me regardless. I sought only to offer you a kinder way.” Blackstar looked up at Strife and ran his fingers through its bloody red fur. “Just like your eidolons, your will is less than mine, and I can force your obedience. Do not bite your master’s hand again.”

He was speaking to Sylvas, but it was not Sylvas who replied. It was Strife. Or more correctly, it was Mira who had leapt into Strife as it was being pulled from his body. Without Sylvas, it should have been pliant, without a will of its own. With Mira inside it, it was less than pliant. She twisted in the air and clamped her jaws down on the emperor’s arm.

It was obvious she had been trying to tear off his hand, for the symbolism of it all, but she settled for shredding through the flesh of his forearm as he tried to jerk away from her, roaring and snarling all the way. The Covenant Mages of the Dominion leapt to their emperor’s defense, but there was nothing they could do as he staggered back to trip over his throne, and the wolf’s claws raked at him. No spell that they could cast that might hurt the eidolon would pass over Blackstar without killing him. With a wet crack, Mira tore the arm at the elbow, losing her grip and flinging it away. Through bloodied teeth, she cried out, “Run!”

Arms threaded through Sylvas’ arms. Malachai had a hold on him, dragging him upright, charging forward towards the eidolons where they still hung limp with Sylvas dangling in front of him like a shield. “Apologies, but we must move.”

The emperor flung Mira away with a burst of flame and shadow that stunned the whole room into abrupt silence. The charred wolf slid across the deck to knock the feet out from under Malachai, and both he and Sylvas fell forward onto the wounded eidolon.

Mira and the wolf vanished the moment that Sylvas touched them, flooding back inside him, filling the empty void where they belonged. His magic was back. His power was his again. He reached out to the eidolons, latched on with gravity, and flung them at their respective masters. The Crimson King washed into his body as he gained his footing, completing the circuitry of his magic and returning him to his full strength even as Kaya and Hector let out their own sighs of relief. 

Flinging up a gravity shear, Sylvas deflected the emperor’s next assault and did his best to ignore the delicious scent of grilled meat as the man cauterized his own wounds. They had only a fraction of a second to make their play before the emperor regained his focus and tore out their eidolons all over again. Sylvas made a decision that he didn’t think he had ever made before. He pulsed his personal gravity, dragging everyone together, and then he teleported them away.

In the screaming, silent void of null-space, the others hung as if frozen in time for just a moment, before they all fell to the deck of another ship. Smoke filled the air, thick and choking, hiding Sylvas and the others from sight and buying them a moment before an alarm was raised over their boarding party. Sylvas left them there, safe on the deck of the bridge, staggering through the smoke to collide with Durgan Ironfist, where he stood staring out at the battle they’d lost. 

The dwarf should have been startled, but he was too seasoned a veteran to have something as small as Sylvas trouble him. They had traversed the gap between the fleets through teleportation, but now they were back to where they’d started. A worse position than where they’d started, really. Without a ship of their own, aboard the limping and crippled remains of the fleet that hadn’t been able to make its own escape.

“We lost,” Ironfist groaned. “We gambled it all, and we lost.”

“It isn’t over yet.” Sylvas drew himself up to his full height and began to cast. Mira was back in his mind, flooding him with the equations and angles, the feedback from his gravity sense, and the words of aion that he needed. 

The eidolons were there inside him, both contorting through the shapes of the spell, layering together and creating an ever more complex tapestry of interlinking spellforms until, finally, he was done. The remains of the Empyrean fleet blinked out of the Dominion’s sight, falling into null-space. The ships with engines too damaged were dragged along by the tight grip of Sylvas’ gravity and will. The fighters stranded behind enemy lines, he plucked out of reality, too. He left nobody behind to face Blackstar and his dragons.

All the way across light-years of distance, he clung to the fleet, holding it together with shaking hands, until, finally, they reached the rendezvous, in the shadow of some vast purple nebula. The limping, defeated fleet of the Empyrean arrived back at safety, and Sylvas fell.