Chapter 17

“Deception is one of the fundamentals of wartime. If you do not allow your enemy to know your location, you cannot come under fire. If you do not allow your enemy to know your destination, they cannot block your ingress. The more information that you have on an opponent’s intentions, the easier it will be for you to counter them. The more information that you can withhold from an opponent, the more potent any assault upon them will be. 

The most efficient use of a squad is often to disguise the competencies of its component members. When confronted, rare affinity magic should be used only as a last resort, with common affinities bearing the brunt of the basics of combat. If your squad is capable of unusual means of transportation, they should not be used anywhere that they can be seen by the enemy, or in any way that betrays to the enemy their existence. If you have the misfortune of possessing a novel spell or capability, expect to use it so sparingly throughout your fighting life that you may as well have never developed it.”

—Squad-Based Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

Another of the huge eidolons had arrived in the absence of his attention. 

Towering and draped in rags, it hung over the field of battle like a shadow cast by some unseen horror. Its affinity was for death, and each spell that Hector cast into it vanished into the hollow shadows of its gaping robe without ever seeming to make contact. Malachai was by the other mage’s side, unleashing his own death spells at the eidolon, but they seemed to be no more effective than Hector’s shining green construct arrows had been.

The thing was too tall and thin to be considered anything like human in its shape, but describing it as just a draped shroud moving on its own didn’t seem to do it justice either. There was movement under the ragged cloth, shifting masses that bore even less resemblance to a human body than the bizarre elongation would have suggested.

After Malachai’s first few spells did nothing to the robed thing, he tagged Hector out and left him to contend with the other side of the battlefield, placing himself carefully in the encroaching death eidolon’s path. He seemed to go into a frenzy, casting so fast Sylvas couldn’t make out the syllables of one spell before the next seemed to overlap. 

Sylvas had misgivings about the man’s tactics for only a moment before his plan became clear. The torrent of sickle blades and glowing bombs that he was unleashing on the eidolon force were not being directed at the towering, cloaked figure at all. Instead, he was wiping out everything around it. Creating a dead zone that the presence of the eidolon only served to reinforce. As fresh eidolons approached, they withered. He might not have been able to slay the eidolon, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t use it. 

Its advance towards Sylvas seemed to have slowed at the sight of Malachai. While Sylvas was a pulsing beacon of raw mana, the mana that surrounded the necromancer was something else entirely, refined and purified until there was no trace of anything within it other than death. Sylvas might have presented a feast to the eidolon, but Malachai was its favorite meal. The warmth of the sun seemed to touch Sylvas’ skin again for the first time when it changed direction, the attention of the eidolon of death diverted.

He should not have turned his own attention away from the task at hand. The mana within him, and the circles that he had forged in his body and soul to contain them, had become unstable in the same way that white water formed where a river tried to course through too tight a ravine. It frothed up and out of him, raw, unfiltered magic bursting out through the scars coating his arm in the form of crystallized etherium. It sprouted first from the scars and then encased his whole arm. It rapidly crept up to cover his neck and chest, too, forcing his head to one side to avoid the sharp tips of the jagged mineral. He fragmented off another piece of his mind to focus on the etherium, sucking the mana back out of it, causing the crystal to collapse and redirecting the metal-aspected parts of it through his other hand into Kaya. Leaving that fragment to work, he turned his full attention back to her and the spell. 

Dimly, through their connection and his connection to the mana, he could feel the spell spreading across the sky, leaping from world to world, system to system. Everywhere it went, it repaired and then leapt again as fast as it could. It wouldn’t be a perfect, permanent solution. The worst damaged were beyond the spell’s capability to fix, but the beauty of a network was that not every single node of it needed to be fixed for the whole thing to work. The odd world might still be left out in the cold, but most would be close enough to another of the relays that they would still be able to speak again, even if their own relay remained in shattered fragments. The spell worked. Now they just had to ride it out.

With every fresh node on the network, there was another tug on Sylvas’ mana as it demanded the power to repair itself. Eventually, the spells would run out of places to bounce to, run out of relays to be relayed to, and they would sizzle out somewhere in the dead of space, but while they were still reaching new worlds, the flow of mana had to continue, or the whole exercise would fall apart. All their efforts would have been for nothing, unless the network was restored.

Every eidolon that tried to approach from Malachai’s side crumbled to dust and ash before it could make it a few steps into the zone of death spreading out from the eidolon he was facing. The eidolon itself had nowhere near that power; Malachai was amplifying it, dousing it in more and more death mana, making it stronger as it drifted ever closer to him. He rose up, borne by a flock of ghosts to hang level with the empty cowl of the thing, and he reached out.

Malachai wasn’t trying to kill the eidolon. He was trying to bond with it. To form a covenant. To meet his friends on their ascent to power. Both of his hands were reaching out towards that specter of death, desperately seeking to embrace it, but the eidolon would not close the distance. They could not find the accord that they needed. They could not align their needs and wants, and so they could not form a covenant. Malachai seemed to have realized this by the time that Sylvas gained any awareness of the situation. He was trying to pull back out of the eidolon’s reach, but in preparing himself to welcome it into his soul, he had left himself entirely too open to its touch. There were no limbs protruding from the hanging rags, no hand of death prodding at him, but a cold sweat covered the necromancer all the same, and all of the places where his own magic had reanimated parts of his body to keep him in motion through the atrocities he’d suffered seemed contorted and swollen with the proximity to power.

Bone shone through the dead-looking skin he’d plastered over his wounds. All the strength of the grave blazed inside him and cut its way out through him. Just as he’d stoked the power of the eidolon to clear away all the others fighting by its side, so too had its presence and the mounting death mana bleeding out from it done the same to his own. He had walked on a knife’s edge, all of his life, balanced between life and death. Now, finally, in what should have been his moment of victory, he was tipping over that edge.

Malachai could not find common ground with the eidolon, and all the rites and rituals he’d undergone to prepare himself for their union meant nothing without that shared purpose. Eidolons did not think, but that did not mean that they could not understand certain things, perhaps by instinct. This grim figure had started to understand that Malachai could have been its partner, but with that interpretation fading more with each passing moment, its initial interpretation of him came back to the fore. He was not a partner; he was food. He was prey.

The slow but inevitable progress of the eidolon that had come to a halt now resumed. It moved once more, coming closer and closer to where Malachai hung suspended in the grasp of ghosts that no longer seemed to obey his beckoning call, but now appeared to be under the sway of a new master, holding up the prince like an offering. Necromancy had often been considered almost as much of a danger to the universe as the eidolons, but inevitably, magic that fed on death led to it. That knife-edge that Malachai had walked had split and tumbled almost everyone who had ever attempted to walk it. Not close enough to the world of the living, and the necromancer would fade away. Too far from the world of the dead, and the power needed to master the dead would elude them.

Hector could see what was happening, and he was casting spells frantically to try and make it stop, but as those bright arrows drew close to the hooded form of the eidolon, they were siphoned away into the deep darkness within. His attempts to summon roots to bind it failed. The soil beneath its path was barren and blighted. He could not even unleash his eidolon again, not when just being close to the robed nothingness was liable to kill the poor crocodilian.

Sylvas didn’t know what happened to a covenant mage if their eidolon died, but he assumed it couldn’t be anything good. For that matter, he had no idea what happened to the bound eidolon if the mage died. They formed a symbiotic circle in life. Would either one be able to adapt to the death of the other and go back to the way that they were before?

On Hector’s side, the eidolons crept in closer. He was distracted by what was unfolding behind him, and all of the eidolons that should have been making a straight run at Sylvas from the other hemisphere were circling around to approach from the other side and avoid the dead zone. He was a competent mage, made insanely powerful by the benefits of his covenant, but he wasn’t like Kaya, Sylvas, or even Malachai. He hadn’t trained all his life to fight eidolons, and he was starting to show the fatigue and horror on his face as they kept on coming, on and on, relentless as only eidolons could be.

The spell still wasn’t done, but Sylvas couldn’t let Malachai die. If the spell failed, it failed. They would just have to start over again. It had been foolish to try and outpace the inevitable. He tried to speak to Kaya, to have her end the spell, but she was lost in the fugue that such an intense piece of magical working put the mind into. He tried to pull his hand away from Kaya, but his body was locked still by the forces flowing through it. One way or another, it seemed as though he was going to stay trapped in the casting until it was done.

Of all the bodies that Malachai had left in his wake, unmarked but lifeless, Sylvas never would have thought that the last one would be his own.