Chapter 25
“The first four tiers of eidolons are considered to be destructive and dangerous. The difference between their rankings is primarily related to how difficult they are to destroy. Tier-One eidolons are within the capability of the average mage to kill, simply by exerting sufficient force. Tier-Two eidolons typically require a mage capable of combat magic specifically, who has trained with spells of an opposing affinity. From Tier Three through Four, the requirements become steeper. At Three, it is unreasonable to expect any mage below the highest circle to be able to effectively eliminate it as a threat without assistance or specialized training, and by Four, you will almost always require multiple top-circle mages to eliminate the threat without catastrophic collateral damage. These four tiers of eidolon are by far the most common, and the most likely to be encountered. While each of them represents a persistent danger to all life on any planet where they occur, they do not represent a threat on a global scale.”
—The System of Eidolon Categorization, Part One, Ardent Official Manual
While most eidolons looked at least somewhat like animals, albeit with some heavy abstraction to their forms, this one seemed more like a tree.
It moved with an almost hypnotic sway, and the air around it was thick with pollen or spores, shining bright and alive in the otherwise dead landscape. He didn’t need to scry it to know that it was a Tier-7 eidolon, as powerful as the Crimson King that he contained. It seemed to recognize him for what he was, too, as all of its attention was immediately focused in his direction.
From the dead ground beneath him, roots sprang up and tried to entangle his legs. He was already in the air, already moving out of reach before the tree lashed its branches in his direction, sending not just those whippy limbs to smack him out of the sky, but releasing fractal bursts of shining green, life mana given lethal shape, like tiny blossoming throwing stars growing ever bigger the farther they fell from the branch. A gravity shear turned them aside, and he returned fire, with literal fire. Wood burned, no matter whether it was grown on a regular tree or composited out of raw magic in some extradimensional plane, and the darts of flame that Sylvas unleashed should have burned up the eidolon, if it didn’t shudder its foliage at their approach, dumping a curtain of leaves and more glowing pollen to intercept the shots and smother them before they had a chance to take hold.
Hitting it with a gravity spike, Sylvas managed to pin it in place and inadvertently jerk all the roots it had been protruding up from beneath him back into the ground, too, but every attempt to hit the thing was stymied, either by it swaying inexplicably out of the spell’s course or by simply drowning everything in another fresh shower of leaves. Where those leaves fell on the ground, they immediately turned first to rot, then to a fungal bloom. Psychedelic colors rippled across the surface of every mushroom as it sprouted, trying to capture his attention. And still, it launched more and more of the same razor-blossoms at him with each sweep of its limbs—never quite enough to pin him down and hit home, but always enough to keep him on his back foot, unable to press for an advantage.
Launching himself straight up, out of reach of the eidolon’s grasping roots, quickly proved to be a mistake. Somewhere out there on the field of battle, the enemy gravity mage lay in wait for him, holding back all of their power, ready to be unleashed the moment that he came into sight. This time, when the gravity bomb detonated, it didn’t blast Sylvas back to earth but quite the opposite. He was launched up, not high enough that he had to fear escaping the world’s atmosphere, but more than enough to mark him as an easy target.
Spells came flying in from every direction, and this time, it seemed the enemy was less surprised and far better coordinated. They didn’t all collide with each other; they passed one another by. A complex crisscrossing mesh of spells fired from every direction, which denied him anywhere he could dodge to and hope to avoid it all. Throwing out a gravity shear was all that he could do as he accepted he was going to be hit.
Even with the magic lapping around him instead of hitting directly, Sylvas was scorched. He increased his own weight and gravity to the absolute maximum, dropping back to earth faster than they could launch another round of spells, only to meet the reaching tendrils of the eidolon’s roots the moment he dipped back down out of the distant mage’s line of sight.
This time, there could be no avoiding them. They encircled his whole body before he had the opportunity to think. Even after he had a moment to make a decision with the roots squeezing and dragging him down, it wasn’t quite enough. He inverted his own gravity, pulsing it to drive the grasping roots away, but some part of this living tree was tied to the gravity affinity, and that part was most invested in its roots. What should have been as simple as shrugging the roots off became a desperate battle of conjured claws raking him free and the constricting plant matter that seemed to have sprung up all around him.
Now, when the eidolon launched a razor-sharp blossom, Sylvas had to cast a shield to deflect it, in the midst of trying to wrestle and scratch himself free. The pollen fell, the air thick and glowing with it, covering him and all that surrounded him, pulsating with light and life in rhythm to his struggles. Its life and the life within him started to bleed together. Sylvas didn’t even know how far the pollen had intruded into him until the tree reared back, tearing it out. His flesh was rent, blood sprayed out to fertilize the glowing mushrooms around his feet, and while he regenerated almost as fast as he was hurt, Sylvas realized the true danger of the eidolon now wasn’t in lashing limbs, constricting vines, or shuriken stars of leaves. It was in the pollen and the insidious spread of that life inside of him. The eidolon wanted to be inside him, to be a part of him, to grow in the soil his corpse would become. Life and death were two sides of the same coin, and this life eidolon meant to spring forth from his corpse.
He readied himself to unleash the zone of destruction that had become a part of him ever since he absorbed the Crimson King. It rose up through him, from his core and out through his flesh, burning away everything that wasn’t him, and it was just rising up to the level of his skin when, suddenly, the eidolon’s grip on him loosened. He slipped free of the roots, and the insidious pollen hung still in the air. Reinforcements had arrived, and while Sylvas had no doubt that Hector and the Knights of Dusont would make bloody work of this creature, knowing their leaders, he was surprised at how abruptly the thing had been halted.
Landing hard by the front line of soldiers and skidding to a halt, he finally dragged his eyes away from the eidolon and saw Malachai striding forward with his arms outstretched. He wasn’t fighting it, and he wasn’t cursing it apart with his death magic. He was embracing it. Sylvas had only ever seen one covenant formed, under the awful crushing pressures that Kaya had formed hers. This one seemed almost sweet by comparison. This eidolon wanted to bring life from death, and in Malachai, it had found the perfect vessel. As his hands lay upon its bark, the full length of the eidolon seemed to collapse inwards until all that was left of it was a cloud of leaves that fell away from Malachai to trail through the ghosts that surrounded him.
“I learned from my mistake.” Sylvas didn’t think he’d ever heard his necromancer friend speak so softly before. “I didn’t want to kill, I never have. I never loved death. All that I loved of it was the power it gave me to protect those I cared for. It was why I could not bond with the specter of death. We did not want for the same thing.”
He bent almost double as the eidolon of life nestled in his heart. His death magic flowed into it and should have found direct opposition, but the eidolon itself was already adapted to turning death into life. Sylvas could not have imagined a better match for him. What had taken Sylvas days to manage in a cold cell beneath the elven homeworld, Malachai achieved in moments. No doubt it would take longer before he could project his eidolon as a separate entity or use it to cast, but after just a moment of cycling death through it, Sylvas could feel the new mana radiating out from Malachai. The engine forged within his soul that would let him generate mana of his own instead of drawing it in. Malachai, whose stern demeanor had been a thing of legend back on the Ardent training campuses of strife, had a smile on his face as sweet as any Sylvas had ever seen. His words came like a whisper. “I’m more than death.”
It was a touching moment, but this was neither the time nor the place. Sylvas turned his attention back to the newly created plateau, where he could already see the dwarf position being overrun. “Everyone to me.”
The soldiers and the knights looked perplexed, but both Hector and Malachai moved without needing to be told twice, crowding in against him. There were maybe two hundred mages and soldiers in the combined forces that they had gathered with them. Compared to a sun, they were practically weightless.
Tearing through into cold storage, Sylvas carried them all, gripping them tight with his personal gravity through that empty and frozen place until he tore them back out into real-space again. They tumbled out through the rift, scattering and staggering for only a moment before their training took hold, and they formed a battle line around Kaya and the dwarfish ship.
“Took you long enough to get here, stanzbuhr,” Kaya called out without looking his way. She had made a titanic hammer from the metal she extruded, and she was sweeping it back and forth across the battlefield atop her meteor, sending eidolons and enemy soldiers alike flying skyward. “I was starting to think you didn’t want to meet the family.”
Sylvas ducked under the next swing of the hammer to close the distance with her, blasting away a half-dozen lesser eidolons with a casual backhand and a gravity inversion. “The Runemaul clan?”
Kaya chuckled. “My ma.”
From the top of the ship at their backs, there came a dreadful roar, and in the periphery of his vision, Sylvas caught sight of the motion. A dwarf clad in armor that had clearly been molded onto her by Kaya flew from the top hatch to land, pickaxe first, in one of the sturdier-looking eidolons trying to mob the plateau. When it didn’t come loose with the first tug, the stout woman set her legs and started hauling hard, lifting pick and eidolon both to swing at the next to come charging over.
“Your mother,” Sylvas repeated, even though the resemblance was striking.
He cast a sickle blade of death out through the eidolons and dominion soldiers, sweeping the plateau in front of them as Hector, Malachai, and the rest of the transported troops drove off those coming at the rear side of the dwarven ship. Then he reached out a hand to Kaya’s mother. “A pleasure to finally meet you.”
She stepped past his extended hand to wrap her arms around his waist and hoist him into the air, to teeter unstably for a moment before she set him down. Her voice echoed inside her helmet. “This skinny thing’s my new son, is it?!”
“Da is round here somewhere, too,” Kaya informed Sylvas. “Better say hello before we go.”
The dwarf in question erupted amidst the enemy lines behind them, clad in an armor of stone easily as thick as the steel that covered his wife and daughter. It burst off him with another spell, shooting out as shrapnel to embed in the nearest eidolon. He spotted Sylvas and charged over with his arms already spread wide. Not being taken unawares again, Sylvas dropped into a crouch to intercept the oncoming tackle, and he managed to hold his own in the crushing hug that followed. “Welcome home! Kachkakan!”
Taking a step back, he looked Sylvas up and down. “So skinny!” He grabbed at Kaya clumsily, and she let him drag her over. “Why haven’t you been feeding your brother?”
