Chapter 18

“Keeping your capabilities secret from the enemy can be worth more than victory in a conflict. It can be worth more than the lives of friends that you could have saved by making use of your full abilities. Tactical decisions fall to the leader of the squad, not to the individuals who make it up. They must bear the burden of choosing when to reveal potentially war-altering information, and they will almost guaranteeably suffer great career setbacks if they prioritize the safety of individuals over the preservation of secrets. Some people say that wars are fought with information. 

That spies and scouting are the fundamentals on which battle plans are laid. But what I say to you is that just as you are doing your best to deceive the enemy, so too are they going to be deceiving you. Any information that you receive from spies or scouts is always going to be limited. The capabilities of any enemy you face are always going to be superior to what you thought it would be. Do not fall into the trap of believing that any truth is unchangeable.”

—Squad-Based Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

The crystal that had been spreading to encase him as he dumped out excess mana had all retreated inside of him now, as the spell spread farther and farther afield. The magic being drawn through him came not in sudden bursts and jerks but smoothed out into a more constant flow. It was like being connected to an electric current; he couldn’t break the connection himself, but at least the initial jolts and shocks seemed to be over.

The eidolon closed in on Malachai. Hector, in a feat of heroism, abandoned defending himself against the incoming eidolons on his own side and flung up a shield of pure life between Malachai and his devourer, flooding the spell with mana until it shone as brightly as a star. Maybe he had hoped to ward the eidolon off with its antithesis. Instead, it barely even seemed to slow, eating through the shield with its inexorable advance.

Malachai was still the most tempting target. That was something Sylvas could do something about. The fragments of him that were drawing in mana from the etherium suddenly had a new task, draining only death mana. The world soul provided everything that the spell needed anyway. He could turn his body’s systems of absorption to more useful ends. All of the death surrounding Malachai and the eidolon flooded into Sylvas. He went numb at once, all the pain of the process washed away with the certainty of his own end. Using death mana as an anesthetic. He never would have thought of it. His own skin paled, the metallic tint of it coming to prominence as the life fled. Without the endlessly regenerating blood flushing it, his flesh looked almost like marble with veins of silver running through it. His stillness made him a marble statue. Still, he drew in more. The dead zone around Malachai began to thin, and the strength empowering the eidolon began to drain away. The hooded head of the thing moved to follow the death as it flowed away, as it flowed into Sylvas, and what had been a dim glow in its perception began to blaze brighter.

He felt sick to his stomach and as weak as a baby. All the strength that he’d spent so long building into his body vanished before the encroaching death. Still, he pulled more and more to him. His body should have begun to wither on contact with it, but with all of the endless reinforcement that he’d done, every contour of it stayed the same. He might have felt the poison of death flooding through his veins, but his body would not yield to it. He felt his thoughts beginning to slow as the death washed over the parapets of his paradigms. He felt his heartbeat slow, until each thump of it seemed so distant from the last that he had forgotten what they sounded like. But still, he went on drawing more of it in.

The eidolon moved through the last tattered remnants of Hector’s shield as though it wasn’t there, but it did not swallow up Malachai. Instead, it moved past him, creeping ever closer to Sylvas and Kaya. 

Malachai hung limp in the air like a rag doll until the ghosts that now seemed to remember their allegiance to him carefully lowered him to the ground. The trailing rags and chains that followed the death eidolon passed him by without touching him; the remaining death mana embedded in the earth ate at him like thousands of tiny gnawing bugs.

Sylvas’ mana-draining foolishness had left him feeling limp and boneless, too, and it had only bought them moments, but now, through the numbness, he could feel Kaya’s casting coming to its end. The trailing incomplete fragments of the replicating spells faded away into nothingness deep in the void of distant space. The eidolon crept in, closer and closer, and Hector could do nothing but give ground before it as all of his spells came to nothing. Worse yet, all the other eidolons coming for them had been given free rein during his distraction, and a swarm filled up every inch of Sylvas’ senses now. Slowed ever so slightly in confusion about the blazing beacon of death among them, but not so confused by it that they weren’t still pressing in, closer and closer.

Hector staggered over to the two of them, still locked together, and he looked as pale as Sylvas without any of the death mana to explain it. “We need to retreat, now.”

In the dead zone, Malachai still lay abandoned, no eidolon daring to risk creeping onto that blighted earth. He might have been dead, if Sylvas couldn’t still feel the movement of the blood through his veins and the fight in his heart. 

“Sylvas, Kaya, either of you.” Hector went from one to the other, desperately trying to rouse them from the trance that the casting of that great spell had caused them to fall into. “You need to stop now. We can try again, somewhere else, somewhere safer.”

Then the voices came through. Screams mostly, shouts of elation and surprise almost as common. All the voices of all the planets across the Empyrean that had suddenly been reconnected. They began with formal recitations of events, then degenerated quickly into begging for assistance, pleading with anyone out there who might be able to save them. 

Sylvas’ hand had stiffened as it lay against Kaya, and when he now drew it back, it took far too much effort to close it back into a fist. “Listen to them…” 

He took a staggering step back from Kaya, and she collapsed to her knees. Sylvas was weakened more by the influx of death mana than by the efforts of their great work. “There isn’t somewhere safer.” 

He coughed as his lungs seized around the chill air of the grave within them. “The only way to get somewhere safe… is to make it safe.”

The death mana inside him chilled him to the bones, and he could stand it no longer. It wanted to be out of him, and he wanted it out. The fragments of his mind combined back into him, their different tasks forgotten in the influx. His eidolons, held at arm’s length by Mira throughout the whole casting, now flooded back into his body, like puppies begging for attention. He reached out to them, contorting them with a thought into spellforms they’d never been before, and then he unleashed a spell. It was simple enough, so simple as to merely mimic the power imbued in Malachai’s scythe, a sickle blade of raw death. But while Malachai’s casting was always controlled and logical, the death that came from Sylvas was anything but. 

The crescent burned, sparking green as he slashed it into the air. It crackled and burned as it left him, draining the excess death from his body and sending it out on a collision course with the swarming eidolons. It cut into the front ranks, but while that would have been the end for Malachai’s casting, Sylvas’ own had been influenced by the endless replication that he’d just watched Kaya achieve. As the sickle cut down an eidolon, a blossom of death mana was released, and the spell captured that release to empower itself. With every death, it grew larger and more lethal, spreading out, farther and farther, in a wide wedge, carving back through the eidolons, and sweeping out over the cornfields.

Every eidolon that they were facing did not die to that single spell, but at least a third of them did. Every one that had stood even tangentially close to the center of their line was now dead and toppled. Towards the spell’s end, it clipped through just a few stragglers that had been rushing to join the party, giving it one last final burst of power and expansion, and then Sylvas’ second spell was completed.

Inversion had been one of the first spells of gravity magic that he’d ever learned, but now his mastery extended so far beyond just that single aspect of magic that he found it almost laughable that he’d never found a use for it again since then. As the death sickle that he’d sent out into the world, now wide enough to carve across a quarter of the planet, reached the last foes to feed it, his second spell seized hold of it and reversed its direction through 180 degrees. Just as it should have burned out, it found fresh fuel. The sickle blade swept back towards them from across the world, the pendulum swing of the magic dragging it back, still expanding, towards its source, carving back through the rest of the eidolons that the first sweep of the scythe had not touched.

Sylvas reached down to pick Kaya up by the scruff of her neck. Hector fell into place beside him without more than a glance, and Malachai was blocked from his line of sight, so there was no easy way to summon him. Not with the specter of death still hanging between them. Sylvas darted forward, both of his friends staying close, whether out of trust or because he had them by the collar, even as he closed the distance between them and the looming eidolon.

“Not to question your judgment”—Hector stared up into the hollow cowl—“but should we not be moving in any direction other than towards that thing?”

Sylvas managed a ragged chuckle. “Of course not. That’s our shield.”

As they came within reach of the thing’s odious aura, he twisted to the side, skidding across the blighted earth to encircle it, until they ended up standing over where Malachai fell. With a quick crouch, he deposited Kaya beside the necromancer’s still body, then reached out a hand to the both of them, casting healing to rejuvenate the damage done, and outright pouring life mana into Malachai to try and reverse the flooding he’d already suffered. He groaned but didn’t stir.

The looming eidolon had turned ever so slowly towards them as they passed, each motion more a ripple of cloth than the movement of any actual creature. The darkness within the cowl was once more locked onto Sylvas, and Sylvas was pleased to meet that stare.

“That’s right. Just stand there looking dumb.” He poured a bubble of life mana out to envelop them, then layered a shield of the same over the outside of it for extra safety.

The scything blade of death came rushing back, the curvature of it reversed as it had expanded out around the planet, the power of it increased exponentially with each eidolon that it had slain. It swept in on them from every side except for directly behind them, the intensity of the magic growing as it was compressed once more, a blade that had extended wide enough to encompass the whole world shrunk back down to return to its starting point. The starting point where the only eidolon still standing hung limp and impotent.

When the spell closed in around the eidolon, there wasn’t an explosion. Death magic had a tendency to cause implosions instead, trying to drag everything around it in. Sylvas had his heels set and his gravity so high that he was sinking into the ground, his hold on all of them with will and power locked tight so the blinding black implosion couldn’t pull them in. All that power, all that death, all crushed down into a singularity where the cloaked eidolon had stood. He had to blink away white afterimages of where it had been when it was finally over. The eidolon was gone. Everything on the planet that had lived seemed to be gone. In a few distant corners, Sylvas could still feel eidolons, some that had taken flight too high to be caught by the spell, and some that had buried themselves too deep, but none of them represented a threat anymore. Not to him or his friends.

“Even death can die?” Hector asked, as if posing a philosophical question.

Sylvas shrugged, “Either that or it popped like an overfed tick trying to absorb all the death mana of the whole planet at once.” 

Sylvas took Kaya’s hand and helped her to her feet. She still looked dazed, but a couple of gentle slaps on the cheeks got her eyes focusing on him and her mouth running. “Did it work?

“Yeah, it worked.”

She pumped her fist. “Damn right it worked, stanzbuhr! I’m the best to ever do it.”

Malachai let out a long moan from beside her feet. She glanced down, then back up at Sylvas, then down at Malachai once more. “Uh.” 

She prodded him with her foot, and the moan became a groan. “Is he alright?”

Hector squatted down to hoist the unfortunate Malachai onto his shoulders. “He tried to bond one of the eidolons. It didn’t go well.”

Kaya looked momentarily uncomfortable. She had been the one goading him into attempting it with her comments about his weakness compared to the covenant mages around him. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see his actions as a direct response to the things she’d said to him on the shuttle. Then she punched him in the backside. “Don’t worry, bone-boy. Plenty more ore in the mine, and we’re going to be delving every day.”

This time, Malachai’s groan seemed to be more of a direct response, but he still didn’t quite have the energy to form words.

Now that the eidolons were dead, along with everything else on the planet’s surface, the only noise was the relentless chatter and cries coming from the communications relay. They made their way over to it.

Kaya heard the shouting and panic, and she smiled. “Guess everybody can talk again. Maybe they’ll get organized. Fight back against the eidolons. The Dominion. Everyone.”

“It is a good first step,” Hector agreed, even if the tone of the communications seemed to be wearing on him a little more.

Sylvas stepped up to the relay and looked over the controls.

“What’re you doing, stanzbuhr?” Kaya’s eyes narrowed.

“If everyone can talk, everyone can listen.” He reached out to the controls and invoked a little bit of sonic magic to drown out everyone in a brief and singular shriek. Everyone in the Empyrean and beyond fell silent at the siren sound, but almost immediately, the Dominion’s automated message resumed playing.

“The Obsidian Dominion has the strength to protect you from this incursion. Our own worlds are already secured. Cede sovereignty to the emperor, and your world will be saved. Your families and children will live. This is the only way that you will survive…”

Sylvas cast a bolt of lightning into the relay, sending it bouncing off through the cosmos, from world to world, in exactly the same way that Kaya had sent her repairing spell. When it found the relay that the Dominion had hijacked, it burst out, destroying the device they’d jury-rigged onto it, and hopefully shocking whoever was responsible.

There was a moment of complete silence, then Sylvas spoke. “Hello, everyone.”

Kaya grimaced at his introduction.

“The Dominion is not your only option. It isn’t even a good option. Blackstar is… well, he’s evil. Putting yourself in his power isn’t going to end well for you. Sorry, this isn’t what I need to talk to you about.”

He should really have prepared this speech earlier.

“My name is Sylvas Vail. Some of you might have heard of me, some of you might know me as the Starbreaker. I’m going to put an end to the eidolon incursion. To all eidolon incursions. The aions left a plan behind for us to deal with this whole situation. That was the point of their vaults, to guide us to that solution. I’m sending out the coordinates now. This is where I’m going to find the weapon that the aions designed to wipe out the eidolons. It is where I need to go to put an end to all of this. To stop the eidolons for good. The only problem is that the whole Obsidian Dominion has decided to stand between me and it. I’m going to have to fight my way through everything the Obsidian Dominion has got to get there, and I’m going to need help. If you know me and consider me a friend, I need your help. If you don’t know me at all, but you still want the universe to survive, I need your help, too. Even if you know me, hate me, and want me dead, you can go on hating me a lot easier if the universe is still there tomorrow. I am asking everyone in the universe, anyone with a ship, anyone who can cast a spell, reach out through this communications network. Join me in taking the fight to the Dominion so that we can save everyone. Together.”

The lines of communication remained dead for a long moment, and Sylvas sighed. “That’s all I’ve got to say. I’ll see you all at the Nexus.”

He turned back to his friends as the chatter across the network began to pick up again, and he was pleased to see that Malachai had perked up enough to be giving him a horrified look. Kaya was gawking at him, too. Only Hector seemed to have enough wherewithal to put what they were all thinking into words. “What the hell did you just do?”

“You keep telling me that I can’t fight my way into the Nexus alone.” He tried his best to shrug his shoulders in a casual way after making a very public fool of himself. “Now I won’t be alone.”

“That’s true,” Hector conceded. “You won’t be alone because you just told the Dominion you’re planning on attacking their secret base, and now it is going to be swarming with reinforcements.”

“I always knew the Ardent didn’t actually teach tactics…” Hector said, as Kaya rounded on Sylvas.

“Did you skip the class where they told us not to tell the enemy exactly what you’re planning to do next?”

Even Malachai was looking at him like he was an idiot. Then the voices that had been raised in cries of horror and desperation on the comms network turned to hooting and delight. The Dominion were in retreat across all of Empyrean space. There was still plenty of horror and desperation from all the parts of the known galaxy that hadn’t been under fire from the Dominion, of course, but the voices that were delighted about the sudden withdrawal were loud enough to be heard.

“I said a few words, and now the Empyrean is no longer under attack,” Sylvas replied, trying quite hard not to smirk. “Seems like a sound tactic to me.”

“Our only hope of getting anywhere near the objective was stealth, and you just announced to the whole universe that you are on your way.” Hector was speaking slow and low, as if he was dealing with an idiot. “The reason all the Dominion ships have pulled back is that they’re parking themselves between us and the Nexus!”

Malachai managed to mumble out, “Bad idea.”

“I’ve bought us enough time to make a plan and execute it without the Dominion kicking the door down. And when you’re up against the full power of an intergalactic empire, I’m pretty sure the difference between fighting through half of their ships and all of their ships is pretty academic.”

Kaya tilted her head, as if conceding the point to Sylvas now. “When the numbers get too high to keep counting, I stop counting them, too.”

“More than ten?” Malachai seemed to be getting back to his usual self.

Kaya kicked one of his feet out from under him, and he nearly took Hector down to the ground along with him.

Sylvas held up his hands. “It doesn’t matter what you think about it. It is done.”