Chapter 24

While all species started out life on planets, the dwarves, more than any other species, have colonized the stars. Others might have found other cradles of comfort across the universe, other planets like the one that they came from, capable of comfortably supporting life, but we dwarves have always been a wee bit more ambitious than that. Other people live on planets, but the barren moons, the meteors, and the comets, the endless expanse of rock and ore and wealth that is scattered between the stars and planets are what the meteoric dwarves lay their claim to. It is a hard life, reliant on trade. While the value of the minerals inside any meteor floating through the emptiness of space might be astronomical, the places themself lack in creature comforts like food, air, and gravity. 

If you’re a meteoric dwarf, you have to carry that all along with you. You have to make every expedition worthwhile and trade what you’ve found fast so that you can replenish your supplies, or you might not make it to the next rock at all. Because of these pressures, our meteoric kin have adapted in ways that you could never expect. They’ve learned to nudge cosmic bodies so that valuable resources don’t go crashing into one another. They’ve learned to survive in absolute darkness and absolute cold. 

They’ve rigged up meteors to fly straight into processing plants. Cracked open comets for their juicy filling. They’ve done things that any other people in the Empyrean would look at and call mad. But to them, it’s just a regular day doing their regular job. We are all dwarves, and while those of us down on comfortable planets might spit and curse and complain about how hard we’ve got it trying to pry the value out of solid stone, at least we’ve always got that solid stone to catch us if we fall.

—Our Siblings in the Stars: The Meteoric Dwarves, Hashka Redrock

There was little atmosphere around the Nexus world to provide friction as they descended, and the gravity shear cut through it like a hot knife through butter anyway. They didn’t so much as experience turbulence as they descended. The landing field was spread wide open and clear beneath them with fire now coming in from every direction except directly below, and Sylvas didn’t trust it even a little. Even as he was firing off shots at the anti-air batteries, he barked into the comms to the others. “Sweep the field.”

They had been descending as fast as it was possible to drop, and now every engine had been thrown into reverse to slow their approach to a survivable speed. It made them sitting ducks for the batteries of defenders, but it wasn’t optional. Now shots fired down from every ship that had been spreading out around Sylvas’ own, peppering the barren and rock-strewn zone beneath them. 

It only took a few shots to trigger the minefield that had been laid down, and a tiny push of the destructive mana that his second eidolon had granted Sylvas to amp up each explosion so that it enveloped the next mine in line. What had been a gentle rain of destruction from the descending ships became an inferno beneath them, but still they plunged down into it, having to trust in their shields. Momentum wouldn’t allow them a full stop, even if they’d wanted to stay hovering like sitting ducks above the chaos.

Flames licked up around them, blinding them entirely. Sylvas took over flight control to make the crunching landing on the blackened husk of the field beneath them, using his gravity sense as a guide. Here between the two black holes, it was as accurate as it had ever been, though the artificial gravity that the aions had installed within this tiny planetoid to stop it from bursting apart at the seams was doing its best to interfere with that clarity.

They hit down hard, and immediately, Sylvas was in motion, stepping out of the command circle and nodding to the unlucky Veilbohr graduate who had to take his place and try to keep the ship shielded while it was on the ground.

Not that we’re going to be needing the ship when we’re done of course.

Sylvas paused on his way to the deployment ramp, “What?”

You can’t possibly think that we survive all of this, darling?

He took a deep breath and then moved on at a run alongside all the other ground troops that were being deployed. “You’re wrong.”

Ah, yes, me being wrong. Such a frequent occurrence.

“I’m going to prove it to you,” he told her firmly. This was not the time to be getting nervous. “I can do this.”

Darling, you don’t even know what this is. For all we know, the aions meant to turn you into a bomb with this nexus of theirs. We just don’t know what…

“Shut up.” He didn’t shout, he didn’t growl, he just told her what he’d never told her once throughout her whole life, or this strange afterlife he’d created for her.

Rude.

But she did fall silent, and he could focus again. Not on what was going to be left of him when the battle was over, or the price that he’d have to pay to win safety for the universe, but on the task at hand.

The moment his feet hit the blackened earth, they were under fire. Now that the detonations of the minefield were over, the Obsidian Dominion’s troops were pressing in on them, layering down spellfire to try and keep them pinned in their ships. Shields were raised and shattered as the Veilbohr fleet tried to disembark, and the sky was filled with the screams of engines as the rest of the fleet descended. He could make a difference here. He could raise shields that held, he could push back the Dominion, and he could ensure that every able-bodied mage made it off their ships. But he didn’t have the time. 

The longer that they were on the ground, the more time Blackstar had to fortify the Nexus against them. The longer the fighting went on, the more people died. Sylvas took to the air.

From the moment he rose up, spellfire targeted him, but these were normal mages with none of the adaptability or power of the covenants. The spells that didn’t simply wash over his enhanced body harmlessly, he could deflect with just an inversion and push of his personal gravity.

He wasn’t trying to make himself a target. He was rising so he could get a clearer view of where he was and where to go, but it did have the pleasant side effect of drawing all of the enemy’s fire away from the newly landed ships that hadn’t yet had time to set up their shields and beachhead protocols.

From the outside, he probably looked like a little star himself as he rose into the dark sky of that dark world, completely bathed in all of the spells being flung at him. In the distance, to what he’d mentally designated north, he could sense two things. The single building on the entire surface of the planet, the Nexus itself, like a vast obelisk jutting from the same-colored stone of the world, and the swarms of eidolons that stood between him and it. 

There were mages, covenant mages at that, laid out along every ridge and gully of the planet, but they faded from his senses in such proximity to the towering eidolons. Each one of them was a planetary extinction event in itself, and each one of them had been brought here to serve as a guard dog. The massive draconic beasts that they’d seen in space were just the latest additions. Every eidolon that had been brought here to serve as a key in the complex lock covering the surface of the Nexus Vault had been turned loose afterwards. Sylvas had been on multiple worlds that had fallen to the eidolons, or that were in the process of being overrun by them, and not one had such a density of the monsters as could be found here.

He launched a gravity spike at the nearest cluster of enemy mages, and it carried off all the spells surrounding him with it as it flew. Some of those spells neutralized each other, others combined in catastrophic and explosive ways, but the net result was the same. By the time the spike hit the ground where he had pointed his hand, every mage around it was dead. Another storm of spells enveloped him, and again, he launched it forth to wipe out another cluster of mages. One of the anti-air platforms melted and collapsed in on itself when the spike struck. 

For a moment, he imagined what it must have been like to be on the other side of this battle. To be in the most fortified place in the universe, and for a single mage you’d never heard of to arrive, shrug off your spells as less than an annoyance, and then wipe your entire squad away with a single casting. He’d been on the receiving end of an apocalypse before, when the eidolons killed his world. It probably felt much the same.

Setting abstract thoughts aside, he focused on the mission. He moved with more purpose now, setting off towards the north, drawing off the defenders from the landing field. He’d scarcely made it to the edge before any thoughts of just flying to the Nexus at full speed were driven out of his head. A gravity bomb hit him, and he was thrown to the ground. He’d known, in the abstract, that the Dominion would have gravity mages, but the idea that one might have received a covenant hadn’t really occurred to him. 

The gravity bomb had done him a favor. Through the air where he’d hung, a barrage of spells came in from all angles. All the covenant mages arrayed against him had taken their shot while he’d been up in the air and exposed. The ones that had missed him tore into the descending ships, ripping cleanly through their shields and hulls, raining fire, molten steel, and blackened corpses down onto those who’d already made landfall.

Any one of them could have been him if he’d gone on being so arrogant. Sylvas had been pressed flat to the ground by the gravity spell, and for a moment, he stayed there, flattened out and protected by the terrain.

Shut up, Mira. I’m definitely going to survive this, Mira.

“Witty as always.” 

Sylvas pushed himself up and scrambled to his feet, throwing up a gravity shear to deflect the few spells that were still being lobbed in the direction of where he fell. Blackstar might have wanted him alive, but it didn’t feel like any of his soldiers had received the memo. Either that or the man had a very high estimation of how much damage Sylvas could take and still survive. Though he supposed that there had never been anything in any of the prophecies stating the Starbreaker had to be in one piece to open the Nexus.

The shear did its job, deflecting the falling spells to annihilate the barren land around him. Each one left a crater vast enough to serve as cover for a whole battalion of his own soldiers—if any of them survived long enough to get off the landing field.

It didn’t take long to reformulate the plan. A quick dart across the planetary surface to reach the vault was no longer an option. Not if he planned on surviving the trip. And no matter what Mira had to say for herself, he did intend on surviving the trip, both to the vault and back again. He’d make his way across country, staying low to minimize the angles of attack from the enemy covenant mages, fighting through whatever eidolons or troops he encountered. Pressing forward through the embedded defenses until he hit the vault.

The fleet was still landing behind him. They would probably go on landing for quite some time, with every fighting mage in the Empyrean pouring out and chasing after him. He could keep the worst of the fire off them by putting himself in harm’s way, by making himself visible instead of trying to blend in. With the failure of the initial rush, the best move was most likely to fall in with the rest of the troops and use them to conceal his presence.

Which might have worked, were it not for the fact that Sylvas was blazing with so much power he could be sensed from orbit. Every eidolon on the planet was already being drawn towards him, straining against whatever collar Blackstar had managed to slip around their throats. If he held back and moved with the rest of the troops, it wouldn’t hide him; it would just make them a target.

Almost half of the fleet had already touched down, and given the casualties that they’d suffered running the Dominion blockade, that was likely to be the better part of any fighting force that they could field. As he stood there gawking, one of the descending ships was hit, not with the regular bombardment that they’d all suffered in their descent, but by a gravity bomb. It twisted and shattered in the air, spinning out of control to crash into one of the landed Dusont cruisers. 

More of the covenant mage’s empowered spells were striking at the descending ships now, and Sylvas, feeling every inch the fool, threw himself up to try and intercept them. Casting one gravity shear after another, deflecting the spells out when he was quick enough to annihilate the Dominion emplacements nearby, or just peppering the unfortunate landscape with fresh craters and destruction. Another gravity bomb detonated, not aimed at the ships, but at him, jerking him sideways and smashing him against an upturned ridge of stone hard enough to embed him in it. If he wasn’t as reinforced as he was, he would have broken instead of the stone. As it was, his lungs and innards flooded with blood before regeneration could repair him, and as he picked himself free, he had to cough it out.

Even as he spat blood into the dust, he had to rise again, to cast again and keep his people safe. He could summon his shields instantly to deflect the enemy covenant mages’ spells, but even moving at the speed of thought, the sheer volume of them meant that deflecting their spells was all that he could do. He was pinned in place between them and the descending fleet, trying to keep his army alive long enough to have an effect, but the enemy had more than enough freedom of movement. 

The mages who had at first been distributed evenly across the nearby emplacements moved out now, securing higher ground and better vantage points, unchallenged by Sylvas or any of the Empyrean mages. They clustered together so that they could cast as one, unleashing barrages of spells instead of individual ones. Clusters of lethal magic that it took all Sylvas’ considerable power to turn aside, and that would have been more than enough to take any ship from the sky. 

But in grouping up to fight in units as they had been trained, the enemy covenant mages had made a mistake. They might have been feeling as invulnerable as Sylvas had when he first arrived without any return fire, but in grouping up, they had gone from being individually dangerous to tactically significant. They’d gone from being individual fighters that would have to be tracked down, to their groups being targets.

Not every ship in the fleet had come down on the surface of the planet. The vanguard was still fighting the Dominion fleet as valiantly as they could, outnumbered a hundred to one, but they were not alone out there beyond the unfolding chaos on the planet’s surface. Kaya and her clan, those star-bound dwarves who lived on meteors and moons, had not made the direct descent onto the planet’s surface with everyone else. They were more accustomed to riding the razor’s edge of a gravity well than any other people, more willing to make those calculated risks that would take them dangerously off course if it meant they could secure a worthy prize.

Fragments of this world had been cracking off since the dawn of time, ravaged by the black holes to either side despite all the countermeasures that the aions had built in to keep the place intact. Continental-sized lumps of stone hung in a low orbit, hovering slabs the size of cities dotted between them, and to the waiting meteoric dwarves, they were prizes to be claimed. Up there on the surface of those silent satellites, the miners had already made their landings while Sylvas and the rest were still in their descent. 

They had found where the rock was strong and where it was weak using techniques so ancient and ingrained that the dwarves themselves probably couldn’t have named them, and then they’d affixed machinery onto those points where they were the strongest. Not borers to dig in for their mineral wealth, but engines, like they used to reposition meteors that they were trying to mine in less tenuous positions. Those engines were firing now, guided by magic, by little boosters set on the outer reaches of the stone, and by the indomitable will of dwarves who had survived out in the cold vacuum of space for countless generations.

The sky began to fall. Meteors rained down across the planetary surface, plucked from their stalemate with gravity by the machinations of Kaya’s kin. The Runemaul clan were genius engineers, when they weren’t being shipped off to fight for the Ardent, and now, they finally had someone who could translate their genius directly into physical forms. Kaya’s handiwork was all over the shooting stars raining down. Her conjured metal seemed to grow from the solid stone, welding machinery in place, stabilizing fractures, and making what could have been a chaotic rain of stone into a directed attack on the enemy emplacements.

Where the biggest cluster of Dominion covenant mages stood, a meteor fell.

It didn’t come crashing down with all the weight of one flung from the depths of space, but what it lacked in speed, it made up for in its terrible mass. Everywhere across the planet, more of these massive rocks came crashing down, with dwarven ships riding them all the way down, leaping free just before the moment of impact to hover over the destruction that they’d wrought.

All across the surface of the planet, the rocks came down, and the dwarves made hasty landings. Now, instead of a single spot where the enemy could direct all of their ire, the battle had opened up.

One covenant mage from the cluster that had been bombarding Sylvas had made it free, but he hit them with a gravity spike before they were clear of the cloud, flinging them back to hit the stone’s side. They did not have his physical reinforcements, even if they had a covenant forged. They were pasted across the surface of the rock in a gory smear before the dwarves up top had even disembarked.

The meteor fall bought the Empyrean the time that it needed. The last of the fleet touched down unscathed, and the armies of a dozen different worlds came pouring out, ready to wage war. Hector led what he’d been able to gather of the planetary defense forces of the worlds lost to the eidolons, a rag-tag collection of militiamen, professionals, and the most chaotically equipped and armored outer-rim fighters Sylvas had ever laid eyes upon. 

He moved up past all the other forces making landfall to meet up with Sylvas. Likewise, the rainbow-armored knights of Dusont made haste to join him where he stood with their prince at their head. Out on the fallen stone Sylvas had just anointed with blood, there was an explosion of steel as the first enemies crossed paths with Kaya, and she burst into a spiked ball in response.

Just as the different parts of the fleet had been divided into attack wings, they all had their own purposes now that they were down on the surface. In a mass, they represented too tempting a target for enemy bombardment, so many of the small forces, better equipped to serve as skirmishers, spread out, but a few solid blocks of troops formed up. The ones who would accompany him. 

The ones who would attempt the other flanking approach, led by what remained of the original council, and the stalwart group of all the remaining organized armies that meant to march head-on at the Nexus and draw the bulk of the enemy fire. Those mages who could take flight tried, but after the first few were sniped down from distant enemy positions, they assumed a position far closer to the ground, ready to use their mobility to support the main body of troops without making themselves targets.

It was not directly on their planned path to the Nexus, but Sylvas pointed to Kaya’s rock as their destination before the rest of the troops had even caught up to him, and he set off with all haste, in the air but sticking close to the ground, down among the gullies and crevasses that characterized this broken husk of a world.

The initial shock of the meteoric bombardment was over, and the Dominion were scrambling to reorganize their forces into effective countermeasures. They’d had years to fortify this place and learn the lay of the land, and the sudden arrival of a slew of new mountains seemed to have disrupted their carefully calculated firing angles. Not to mention crushing more than a few of their dug-in fortifications.

Sylvas had scarcely made it a few seconds towards Kaya before the first eidolon attacked.