Chapter 20

“I have never known defeat. If I were to hear any other man speak those words, then I would call him a braggart, a liar, or a fool who could not recognize when he had been outmaneuvered by a superior mind. Yet I say them to you now without pride, deception, or any of the recognizable signs of idiocy that seem to plague others. When I have been confronted with a situation in which I cannot achieve victory, I chose not to fight. To divert my energies and attentions in directions where there was no gamble. I chose to fight on my own terms, on a different battlefield, starving out the entrenched with siege, wielding power directly when confronted with those who relied on the weak power of influence. There has been no battle that I have waged where I have spent more resources or lives than I intended to from the outset, and I do not claim that this is because I have such a vastly superior intellect to the common man that it beggars belief. I claim it, because while others allow themselves to be blinded by sentiment and hope, I see the reality of what lies before me. Most of all, I have never known defeat because I have never known fear. My victory is always assured, because my strength is never robbed from me by indecision.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

The organization of the fleet under a single unified commander took much longer than it should have. Gathering all of the ships and troops that had been spread across the borders, trying to hold back both the Dominion and the eidolons, would have taken far too long, so instead of the full fleet gathering, Sylvas and his crew were forced to depart with only half of what was hoped to be their full strength. It was assumed that he’d take one of the Veilbohr ships as his flagship, but there wasn’t really a standout among what was left of that part of the fleet. He wasn’t going to try and borrow Ironfist’s ship again—the dwarf had been disgruntled enough the last time. Hector had managed to secure a ship for himself through that interminable network of friends he’d built up over the years as a spy. Kaya would be travelling with all the family who had thought she was dead all this time. Malachai had taken his place on the royal Dusont cruiser with some degree of pride after the support that his people had shown him in the council chambers. Technically speaking, Sylvas could take any ship that he wanted, and whoever actually owned it would just have to tolerate that, but it seemed a bad time to be antagonizing allies.

In the end, Sylvas just picked the ship that was in need of the most repairs out of the viable options and set his new crew of overly excited and overly specialized grad students to work rebuilding most of the systems from the inside out to match the specifications that he provided them. It didn’t matter that it lurched along at about half the speed that the Folly used to achieve without him even having to think about it. The trip had to be made at the speed of the slowest ship, at least until they hit the rendezvous point just inside of Dominion space, and the fleet started splitting up into its respective attack wings.

After so long in the company of his friends, he had expected to feel lonely standing on the bridge of his new and battered ship, but he was surrounded by people at every moment of the day, and what he was rapidly coming to discover about graduate students of the Veilbohr Institute was that they all had theories and ideas of their own. Ideas that they seemed almost desperate to bring to him, even though they were on the way to a war that they had no feasible way of winning. There wasn’t a moment of the day that one or another of the new crew wasn’t there, looking at him with big puppy dog eyes, just desperate to ask him questions about being a covenant mage, about the world soul he’d embedded in himself, about Blackstar’s ability to control eidolons, about his experiences in the aion ruins, or about… 

His whole life history had been disclosed at about the same time that he had announced that there would be no more lies or secrets in the council chambers, and now each of these students was using those moments as a jumping-off point to write whole new theoretical frameworks for how magic worked. He spent about half of the time letting Mira field the questions, chattering away about her unified system of magic encompassing all the various affinities, and the other half almost overwhelmed by the enthusiasm pouring out of every single person here. In another life, he could have been happy amongst these people, not as a soldier or a myth, but just learning about the way that the universe was put together. Without any real need for sleep, he could, feasibly, have stayed on shift throughout both the day and night as they travelled, maximizing the time he was available for questioning, but while Mira might have enjoyed being the center of attention for a while, Sylvas had other things that he needed to get done.

Retreating to his cabin, he worked his way down the mental list of everyone that he’d ever crossed paths with. Contacting each and every one of them through the newly repaired communications network, begging for help. Begging everyone in the universe to just once set aside their differences and come together in the face of the real problem.

Most of them, he never reached. Old friends who’d dropped out of Ardent training and had no intention of being found again had vanished off the map. The ones who were in the Ardent were equally unreachable. He could have called out to any one of them on the front lines, trying to hold off the eidolons and make sure there was some universe left over when all of this was done, and asked them to abandon their post, and he was pretty sure that they would have. And more people would have died. The Ardent were exactly what he needed, professional soldiers trained to fight eidolons, and they were the one thing that he couldn’t have. He ran through the list of friends throughout the years pretty quickly, which just left the rest of the list. Enemies.

It would have been nice if the enemies that he’d left alive didn’t take up almost as much mental capacity in Mira’s lists as all of his friends and allies combined, but the sad truth was that he’d never really killed anyone who had gone after him over the years, even when they desperately deserved it. With all of the power he’d gathered, he should have been considered pretty dangerous, but not one of the people who’d crossed him had ever felt the sting of his revenge. Not really.

Working down the long list of them, some were enemies of the petty variety, and others had made serious attempts on his life. The truly distressing thing was that in this time of crisis, it felt more likely that he’d get assistance from the latter camp. The ones who had petty issues with him were unreasonable people; he couldn’t trust that they’d work in their own best interests by allying themselves with him temporarily to see the threat of the eidolons permanently dealt with. Meanwhile, the much more dangerous and organized foes he’d come up against were logical about why they wanted him dead. Which meant that they could be relied upon to make logical decisions about their own survival and future now.

He was just about to make the first call of that list, when the other reason he wasn’t feeling lonely came bustling in. Rania startled at the sight of him sitting beside the console before seeming to remember that she had decided to share quarters with him. “Have a fun day?”

She scoffed. “If I’d had a fraction of the resources this lot squanders every day, I’d have reconstructed the whole of aion civilization by the time that I turned twenty.”

He swiveled the seat around to face her, the screens behind him glowing with a halo of data. “So they don’t shine quite as bright as you? Hardly surprising.”

Tossing her belongings onto the couch, she slumped down beside the stack of slates she’d pilfered for later perusal a moment after. “It isn’t that they aren’t clever people, some of them are brilliant, they just don’t have any sense of urgency. They can take their time and learn every single thing from every single thing before moving on to the next thing. I never had that.”

“Well, judging from what I’ve seen of your dig sites, that is probably because you were under fire. Maybe even on fire.” He summoned a bottle of wine and a pair of glasses from the table on the other side of the room. The glasses hovered politely between them as he plucked out the cork with a twist of gravity. “Or were they usually nice and relaxing?”

She accepted a glass and slurped the first mouthful of wine down greedily. “If I told you some of the stories, you’d call me a liar.”

He glanced around at where they were and what they’d done. “I’m not sure I have a good baseline of what reality is meant to look like.”

She snorted into her glass.

“You enjoy it, though?” he asked, trying to move the conversation towards the difficult part he’d really rather ignore. “Archaeology. Even if it does have some difficulties?”

“It’s all I’ve ever cared about, ever since I was a little girl.” She settled back in her seat. “My world out on the edge of the Empyrean. We never had much, but there was a museum of the scraps and fragments of aion tech that had been found during the colonization. Nobody knew anything about them, and they were small enough or common enough that nobody from the big universities ever came out to confiscate them, but to me they were… they were everything. They were proof that life wasn’t just mud and misery. That there was something bigger out there. Something that mattered.”

They both sipped at their drinks and fell quiet. Sylvas was trying his best to work out how to word what he had to say next, how to lead into it and get out of it without a fight. Rania was lost in her own memories of her early life, at least to begin with, then her eyes slipped back into focus on the here and now, and she studied Sylvas as he struggled internally.

Eventually, she got tired of the silence. “Just spit it out.”

He chuckled despite himself and then did as he was asked. “I don’t want you to come with me to the Nexus.”

She let out a long breath. “Okay. That’s okay. I understand why you might feel that way. It is going to be dangerous. There is going to be fighting. You think you can’t be hurt, but I can, so you are worried about me.”

His shoulders slumped. “Exactly.”

“And you’re the foremost expert on ancient aion technology, so you won’t have any problems deciphering whatever encoded messages were left behind in this mega-vault.” 

She didn’t sound angry, so much as exhausted, so Sylvas tried to fend this off. “Rania…”

“There definitely won’t be a situation where you need someone who is actually an expert, like you have at every other vault, and the temple worlds, and every time you’ve encountered any piece of aion writing or technology or…”

He set the wine glass in orbit around him after nearly spilling it. “I’m not saying that your expertise wouldn’t be invaluable… you are just…”

“Weak, powerless, fragile.” Rania counted them off on her fingers. “I’ve been called those things before. I’ve even felt like they might be true sometimes. I just never expected you to be the one saying them.”

He felt her words settle like a lead weight in his stomach, but he didn’t know what else to do. “When we arrive at the Nexus, I don’t know if I’ll be able to protect you.”

“Will you be able to protect Malachai? What about Hector? Kaya?” She was still speaking calmly, but her grip on the glass was tight enough that Sylvas feared it would shatter. “What about all the students on this ship who’re going to be following you? Will you be able to keep all of them safe?”

“I won’t need to protect all of them the way I’d want to protect you…”

“Because they have magic.” She scoffed. “You know how powerful the eidolons are. Hell, you know how powerful Blackstar is. The difference between someone with magic and someone without fighting him is basically zero. So why should it make any difference if I can…”

“I don’t need to protect them because they aren’t you.” Sylvas forced himself to meet her eyes. “It isn’t about power or magic. If you… I don’t know what…”

He had become so strong. He had devoted his life to becoming strong. Built himself up until he was able to turn back forces of nature like the eidolons. So why did this one thought leave him so thoroughly powerless? So powerless that he couldn’t even voice it. In the end, he settled for the completely insufficient, “I can’t lose you.”

His gaze fell to the ground, and in his turmoil, he didn’t even realize that Rania had put her glass down until she was taking his hands. “Sylvas. The only way you are going to lose me is by saying stupid things like ‘I don’t want you to come to the Nexus’ when I’m clearly going to be the most valuable person to have there.” She squeezed his hands. “Also, given your track record, you’re probably going to blow the whole place up, and I want to see it before that happens.”

“I don’t blow up every…”

“You consistently blow up everything, everywhere we go.” She held on to his hands tightly as he tried to protest. “And I’ve made peace with that.”

For all of his stubbornness, Sylvas knew when he’d lost a fight. He couldn’t do anything more than chuckle. “I can’t talk you out of coming, can I?”

“You absolutely can’t.” She brought his hands up to her face and kissed his knuckles.

They stayed there, for another long moment, this time without any of the awkwardness, before Sylvas finally felt settled enough to speak again. “Dinner or sleep?”

She groaned as she picked up the glass again. “I’m not going near the mess. If I have to field one more question…”

He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure being the captain of the ship entitles you to dinner in your quarters.”

“Okay. Let’s abuse our privilege a little.” She nodded. “Wine. Dinner. Bed.”

“Wine. Dinner. Sleep.”

She drew her knees up in front of her, but he could see the smile in her eyes over the top of them. “We’ll see.”