Chapter 27
“Of all the forces arrayed against the Empyrean Alliance, it may seem at a glance that a secret society like The Seekers represents one of the least threatening. They are dispersed, unable to bring any active political or military power against us without revealing where they are embedded, and while they have substantive intelligence-gathering capabilities, their largest danger is not in malicious use of that intelligence, but in the accidental dissemination of it to the powers that they have partnered with.
While no official alliance exists between the Seekers and any given power, due to the nature of their organization, it has been observed that they engage in free trade across all lines, including with forces that are antagonistic to the Empyrean. Regardless of whether the Seekers intend to do harm to the Empyrean, their access to sensitive information and willingness to trade favors with powers as actively hostile as the Obsidian Dominion represents a clear and present danger to the safety and survival of everyone in the Empyrean.”
—Antagonizing Forces in Interstellar Stability: A Primer, Part One, Elenya Starweaver
He touched down beside the troops, and they stared at him. Among the Ardent, he would have expected cheers. Among his friends, there would have been some celebration at least. But the people who were following him into battle didn’t know him. They’d never seen what the Starbreaker was capable of, except in the abstract. As he looked back at them, they flinched away in fear.
“We need to move.” Hector stepped up, barking orders. “Come on, that was loud; we don’t want eyes on us. Move it!”
Sylvas couldn’t even express his gratitude yet; his lungs were still regrowing.
The battle with the eidolon had been as attention-grabbing as it seemed. The enemy lines seemed to pivot now to face towards Sylvas’ approach. The other Tier-7 eidolons that Blackstar had left here as watchdogs started moving with haste towards their position, and while Sylvas could only take flight for a few moments before he’d be pinned down by enemy fire, the dragons could soar across the battlefield with impunity, shrugging off any spells cast in their direction. He wished that he’d had more than a moment of frozen time to study the things, to assess their vulnerabilities and capabilities.
Armor plating, flight, fire breathing, claws, and tail seems to end in a bladed spike. I wouldn’t want to get into a wrestling match with one.
Sylvas’ body was starting to bear the toll for the feats of magic that he was pulling in rapid succession. He still hadn’t fully recovered from transporting a star, nor had he found his equilibrium again after absorbing its soul, and now that they were down on the planet’s surface, he had suffered more debilitating blows in rapid succession than he’d encountered since nearly dying back in Ardent training.
“Alright, stanzbuhr?” Kaya clapped a hand on his bag as he stood for just a moment too long, feeling the approach of the eidolons. “Can’t be tired already?”
Sylvas chuckled. “Just looking forward to this being over.”
A single one of the Tier-7 eidolons had needed him to commit more power than any covenant mage could wield. It had required tapping into the flows of magic meant to empower whole solar systems. A half-dozen of them were closing in on him now.
The ridge up ahead of them, their only real protection from the enemy weapon emplacements, collapsed under a sudden burst of spellfire, and only Kaya’s father throwing up an abrupt wall kept that explosion from taking down half the soldiers with them. Their progress, such as it was, had been halted in its tracks.
Malachai met Sylvas’ eyes over the ducked heads of the soldiers and knights. One aspect of his paradigms was being able to sense impending death. It had served him well in combat until now, but Sylvas suspected that it now felt like he was being constantly bombarded by blinding lights. It did mean that he alone among all of them had a sense of what was coming that matched Sylvas’ own. In his gaze, there was a question. What now?
“Move!” Sylvas barked out. He cast his own version of the stonewall spell, seizing the one that Kaya’s father had raised and pushing it ahead of them until it slammed into the gap that had been made in the ridge. For good measure, he dragged more stone up to reinforce it against the barrage of spells already battering off its other side. When the soldiers still looked mystified, Hector repeated the order, roaring loud enough that whatever fear was filling their hearts was immediately overwritten by a gut response terror of the thing making that noise behind them. They took off at a run, Kaya and Malachai leading the pack, Hector following at the rear to keep any stragglers in check.
It was Hector who looked back and realized that Sylvas was still standing still, shooting him a puzzled look but keeping his mouth shut. The dragons closed in, and Sylvas readied the field of battle.
The wall he’d slammed up against the ridge was a good start, but it wasn’t enough. He raised more of them, creating an arena around himself of solid stone, digging out the earth beneath his feet to fuel the construction and dropping himself down beneath the planetary surface. They had flight and numbers on their side, so the logical course would have been to limit their use of both, to dig down farther, create a subterranean cave in which to fight them, where they were grounded and limited by their bulk. That would mean a war of attrition, taking them down one by one as they came to him. Channeling destruction on a cosmic level, again and again. Exhausting himself.
He made an open sky arena, blocked off from sight on all sides, but wide enough at the top of its cratered opening for all six of the dragon-eidolons to converge on him at once.
Waiting was a fresh torture. Whatever traps he laid, these eidolons could tear right through. Whatever plans he made, he had no doubt they would be shredded just as rapidly. Every idea that crossed his mind, Mira shot down, just as he found the flaws in every solution that she proposed. Distantly, he could sense Kaya and Malachai fighting, some lesser eidolons or enemy mages; his senses were so overwhelmed by the inbound dragons that he could barely tell. Only his familiarity with them let him know that anything was happening at all. It was the quiet before the storm.
Then they arrived.
He had expected chaos, each eidolon diving for him the moment that it came into range, but what he had not imagined was that as they closed in on him, they would form a flock, sweeping in formation to encircle the arena he had raised to face them in, their presence burning against his senses while they hid out of sight. When they finally came for him, it was together, all six equidistant from one another, entering from a different part of the circle. The moment that they dropped over the rim, Sylvas clenched his fist, and the arena’s roof snapped shut over their heads, plunging them all into total darkness. Darkness that lasted all of a fraction of a second before the candles of their breath were lit.
All six of them unleashed their flaming breath down on him. To scorch him down to the bones. To leave nothing but ashes, from which he could never regrow. They were fire and destruction and death made flesh. They were the pinnacle of what an eidolon could be. The most powerful, the most dangerous, the end of all things.
With barely a thought, Sylvas tore open the portal to his cold storage above his head, and all the flames poured uselessly into that vacuum. A gravity spike was the next order of business. Slamming his hand to the ground, he brought all six of them down to earth.
Outside, the stone spell still worked, piling more and more rock up on top of the arena, burying Sylvas alive with his enemies. Creating a shell so dense that when the time came, their explosive deaths would not reach anyone else.
Darling, you have never done this before. Not on purpose.
Even grounded by the crushing weight of the gravity spiking, the eidolons still moved in perfect harmony, each one of them a perfect duplicate of the others in appearance and motion. All six raised their heads once more, and without the portal protecting him, their flames would come pouring out to encompass the space where he stood. Unless he fled. Unless he gave ground to them. He had no intention of letting that happen. There were six of them, spaced evenly around him, and at the speed of thought, he cast six times. Six focused gravity spikes, placed in the midst of the gathering flames, snapping the jaws shut around them, muzzling the eidolons with no reliance on ice or steel or anything so flimsy to hold their jaws shut.
Darling, please. We don’t have to do this. We can run. We can find a way to separate them.
They bucked and strained against the hold he had on them, and already, the spells were weakening in the face of the destruction roiling around them. Every clever trick that he did, every spell that he cast, did nothing but delay the inevitable. Bought him just another moment of life. But that had always been the case. Nothing had changed between the first day that he had learned magic was real and now. “I can do this.”
You can’t!
He took hold of the gravity spikes while they still held, and he pulled. Dragging them all together. Dragging them all to him.
Gravity shook the enclosed chamber, vibrations running throughout the structure and the planet below as Sylvas increased his weight, turning up his personal gravity until he was denser than a star. The gravity spikes faltered and failed in the face of a source of pull so powerful, but by then it was too late. The draconic eidolons that had torn through the Empyrean fleet were close enough to touch, and in that moment of panic as they tried to pull away from him, they had forgotten that they could breathe fire. With one final scream of triumph, Sylvas spiked his own gravity and became a black hole. Inescapable. Irresistible.
Though they twisted and writhed, though they struggled and clawed, the eidolons were drawn into him. Swallowed down whole, just as the Red Wolf of Strife and the Crimson King had been. They were fire, and death, and power, and everything that an eidolon could be in the worst nightmares of mankind. But so was Sylvas.
The six eidolons collapsed into him, swallowed down into his core.
Even once he had absorbed them, they fought, raking against his insides, straining to escape the empty black void at the heart of him that drew everything in. That void was at the heart of all of his magic. A black hole in the center of his being, always needing more. Always hungry.
They burned him as they fought. The flames inside of him lapped out through his eyes and his scars. The thermal explosion that had marked the death of the last one of these monsters erupted in his core and barely touched against the inside of his circles before it collapsed back in on itself, falling down to his center with all the inevitability of a setting sun.
Then it was over. Sylvas was kneeling in the center of the underground arena, surrounded by a corona of flames. The walls of the chamber were obsidian black, shimmering in the firelight, and he was still inexplicably whole. In the absolute silence, there was only the crackling of the stone suffering the heat, and internally, Mira.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is going to be to integrate six new eidolons into your body?
“Well, they’re identical, so I’m guessing not any harder than if it was just an extra one.” Sylvas was surprised that he could speak, given the flames and smoke seemed to leap up his throat each time he opened his mouth.
Well, is this really the appropriate time to be absorbing yet more eidolons? Don’t we have enough to contend with, without incorporating new eidolons into the fabric of our being?
“It worked.” He had meant it to be a repudiation of her for doubting him, but it came out sounding more surprised than anything else.
Yes, congratulations, you can successfully absorb eidolons. As we’d already established. Multiple times.
Forcing himself back onto his feet was harder this time. In no small part because his bones had fused with the stone before the flesh around them could be regenerated, and he had to chip himself free before he could grow back into his normal shape again. If he had hoped that a hearty meal of six eidolons might have replenished him and taken the edge off the exhaustion that threatened to consume him even now, then he was sadly mistaken. Every step he took made his whole body ache.
He had performed miracles time and time again, but he didn’t know how many more miracles he had left in him before he collapsed under the weight of it all.
