Chapter 29

“Alliances are by definition transactional and temporary. If someone is your friend, you have no need to ally with them, as their interests and your own are aligned. Eventually, every alliance ends. While you are in an alliance, both of you are working towards the same goal. You are putting resources and energy into the shared project. You are able to lower your defenses and redistribute the resources and energy that would have been needed to protect against that ally to address other forces working against you. You create vulnerability to your ally, and they offer the same in kind. And in this way, trust is built. Yet there is a paradox. Knowing that all alliances are temporary and transactional, you are incentivized to betray your ally. 

Not just to break off from your joined efforts, but to be the first one to do so, so that you might extract more value from your ally’s contributions without expending your own resources. Likewise, you are incentivized to maintain secrecy about this betrayal for the longest time possible, to keep your ally working for you, while you work against them and maximize your gains. Moreso, you are incentivized to maintain that secrecy until you reveal your betrayal by attacking the ally. So long as you have gained their trust, they will have lowered their defenses and diverted the resources required to defend against you. They will never be as weak to attack from you again as when you are deep in their trust and in alliance. It is the optimal time to destroy your ally, even if there is no immediate need to do so. Simply because of that diversion of resources from defending against you. This is the nature of all alliances. A nature that even those who brag of honor and virtue accept as the fundamental truth.” 

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

It was Bael.

How the elf had made his way among them unseen was a mystery. Even Sylvas’ many and myriad senses had somehow overlooked his presence. Two more Seekers emerged from the shrouding magic around to stand flanking their leader—not enough to form an actual defense against the gathered soldiers, but perhaps enough that the elf didn’t feel like he was about to be stomped into the ground. Kaya and Malachai were already in motion, ready to hit him, but Sylvas caught the pair of them before they could do anything too permanent or lethal.

After pausing that moment to make sure he wasn’t about to be trampled, Bael offered a smile. “I would welcome you to the most inhospitable planet in known space, but it seems that the Dominion has already mounted a considerable welcome party, sparing no expense.”

“I wasn’t sure if you heard my invitation,” Sylvas replied evenly, needing to force his tone into politeness. Especially when Mira spoke out to him at the same moment

Sylvas—

I know, he replied. The simple word was enough to cause her to retreat back to her duties.

“The Seekers have managed to secure a route for you to the Nexus Vault. It was just a matter of intercepting you and getting you on the right path,” Bael said, stepping in closer. “But before we depart, I must request that you allow me to perform some small works of magic upon you to conceal your unique and rather stentorian arcane presence? It is all very well concealing the route with complex illusions that befuddle the Dominion’s senses, but walking through them with the equivalent of a siren blaring does spoil the effect somewhat.”

“By all means.” Sylvas made no move to intervene as Bael began casting. For his faults, there was nobody who had a better working knowledge of magic than Bael that Sylvas had ever met in his life. If anyone could find a way to tamp down the signature signs of a world-soul, it would be him.

Kaya was fuming silently as the spells were layered together, but she didn’t intervene, even if all of her instincts were telling her to kick this particular elf so hard that he saw the curvature of the planet. Hector had never really known Bael, he hadn’t been present for the betrayal, so his view on the Seekers in general tended to be a bit more pragmatic. He was certainly keeping an eye on what Bael was doing, but he didn’t have that violent impulse.

With the new cloak in place around him, the bombardment that their position had been suffering seemed to falter. Shots began to rain down around them, rather than right on them. Mira didn’t need to be told to record the precise spell that Bael had used so that it could be replicated.

Bael nodded, pleased. “Now, if you would do me the kindness of following me, we can get you to where you need to be.”

“Show me our route,” Sylvas said, casting an illusion of the planetary surface out between them. 

Bael frowned but did as he was asked, tracing the line across the battlefield. It would bring them back in towards both the central Empyrean force, where it was pinned down, and into the midst of the weapon emplacements that they’d managed to skirt around until now. If the stealth that the Seekers promised was complete, then the latter problem wouldn’t matter, but given the number of massive eidolons massing around the battle on the central road to the Nexus Vault, they might still encounter some trouble, even under magical cover.

With the route traced, the illusion vanished, filed away with Mira and shot off in a sending before Sylvas even had time to check it twice. He nodded to the elf. “Lead on.”

It took some small amount of backtracking, not going as far as where Sylvas had encountered the draconic eidolons, but almost half of that distance, before Bael took a turn and led them directly into the solid stone wall of the ridge they’d been following along. He passed through it as if it wasn’t there. Presumably, because it wasn’t. The illusion rippled back into place, and the trench that had been cut across the battlefield along the route Bael had traced became visible for the first time, now that they were behind the shroud of illusions. 

Sylvas chuckled when the angles of the cut stone became familiar to him after a few steps. “The same spell they used to raise cityscapes on Strife. The same one you used to bring down a tower, with me on top.”

Bael looked pleased that he’d noticed. “My own modifications have been minor.”

Sylvas walked beside him at the head of their group, admiring the spell work of the camouflage that had been layered overhead. “We’ve come a long way since then.”

“One might say that we have come to the end of all things, if one was feeling poetic and dramatic.”

In the distance, explosions blossomed, and the air shuddered.

Sylvas couldn’t help but chuckle at the choice of words. “Seems like a good day for being dramatic.”

They proceeded at a pace along the corridor of stone with spells and eidolons flying overhead. Malachai and Kaya had moved up, trailing behind Sylvas, relying on his reaction speed to protect the group, but apparently not trusting in him to protect himself if this tentative truce with the Seekers fell through too abruptly. Sylvas couldn’t entirely prevent himself from smiling at that thought. That even though he’d gone through so much and become something that the average soldier on this battlefield found as terrifying as an eidolon, he still had friends who were ready to leap to his defense, no matter how unnecessary it would be.

It had taken them considerable time to cover ground when they were under constant fire from the Dominion fortifications, even cowering under the protection of the ridge that had carried them so far. Moving along this graven trench was considerably quicker, even without resorting to flight. They drew closer and closer to the vault, with Sylvas counting down the moments. He could have almost called it companionable silence, if it wasn’t for Kaya staring daggers into the back of Bael the whole way.

“When I gave you the information that the Seekers had spent decades gathering on the vaults, I did not truly believe that you would provide us with anything that you learned from them. My expectation was that I would never hear from you again.” Bael spoke in a rush, as if he was trying to outpace his emotions. “When I received your message requesting aid, I was quite overwhelmed. To know that I was in your trust, even now—”

“I should have listened to you.” Sylvas spoke before the elf’s voice entirely cracked, as if he was trying to save him the embarrassment. “Back on Strife, when you were trying to steal the eidolon. If I’d just taken the time to understand why you were doing it and talked things out with you… well… things might have turned out differently.”

“We were both victims of our circumstances at that time.” Bael reached out and laid a hand on Sylvas’ arm, his eyes shining with brimming tears. “But we need not be any longer.”

Sylvas nodded, then threw up a shield just before seventeen separate darts of magic thumped into his head, and with a pulse of gravity, he sent them flying back at the Seekers who were lying in wait along the upper ridge of the perfect spot for an ambush that Bael had made. “The tears were a bit much.”

“I thought that they brought some much-needed sincerity to my performance,” Bael quipped back, jerking his hand away before Sylvas could catch him by the wrist.

“The Bael I knew was never that emotional.” Sylvas flicked out a spell, a snare of gravity to pin the elf in place, but it dissolved away into nothing before it could take hold. Bael had created counterspells to everything he’d ever seen Sylvas do, and it seemed he hadn’t forgotten any of them in the interim. “He kept his secrets.”

More of the same darts came flying in from all quarters. The consistency of them meant that they weren’t just some spell that all the Seekers had been taught. It was some sort of manufactured spell, trapped in a weapon, like Rania’s rifle.

On its own, a squad of armed snipers all trying to hit him with what he assumed was some kind of tranquilizer spell that had been developed specifically to counter his unique physiology wouldn’t have worried Sylvas all that much, but as Kaya, Malachai, and Hector all charged for the sides of the ravine and the enemies beyond, eidolons swarmed down them.

Firing off a gravity spike at Bael resulted in absolutely nothing happening once more. The elf’s fake tears had dried all too quickly. “You are entirely surrounded, of course.”

“Of course.” Sylvas’ next gravity shear was countered, and he had to fling himself aside to avoid the darts. A job that would have been easier if they didn’t curve unerringly towards him.

The tide of eidolons pouring down into the trench with them was not overwhelming, not by any stretch of the imagination. For the knights and Hector’s soldiers, they would probably have presented an existential threat, but either Kaya or Malachai alone would probably have been able to handle them. More powerful eidolons tended to be larger, and these were all scarcely bigger than a human. If there was anything more substantial to throw at them from the vast menagerie that had been trapped here, they were being directed elsewhere. The Seekers seemed to be entirely focused on taking Sylvas down, so all that the eidolons here were really achieving was to prevent the other ex-Ardent from helping him.

Sylvas didn’t mind. It gave him some time to ask the pertinent questions. “You’re the one who worked out how to counter my teleportation. Blackstar isn’t a genius on top of everything else?” 

Another flurry of darts slipped by so close to Sylvas’ neck that he could hear them whistle, but a pulse of his personal gravity knocked them back off course when they twisted in the air to come for him again. Kaya moved like a lawnmower through the eidolons pouring down. Hector and the soldiers returned fire on the Seekers, only to discover that the illusory wall that had covered the trench only allowed the passage of objects and magic in one direction. Malachai was holding his own but seemed reluctant to push forward with his usual lethality, still finding the balance between the two aspects of magic within him. 

It seemed to amuse Bael that Sylvas wasn’t more flustered by the sudden turn of events. “The genius of the Obsidian Emperor is doubtless a subject of much debate within his own courts, but I can assure you that your inability to make use of the rather clever solution that you developed was entirely my doing.”

Sylvas tried casting one of Hammerheart’s old fireball spells at the elf, only for it to be wiped away just as casually as the gravity magic had been. “So when I kill your Seekers, it will be back in action. Good.”

He unleashed a series of old spells, each one remembered from his old school days. Each one was easy enough for the elf to counter, though Sylvas did note that he was sweating by the end of the flurry. The focused version of the sonic scream in particular seemed to have taken just a little longer than it should have to dispel.

Bael scoffed. “You cannot cast a single spell, and you expect that you will be able to defeat…”

The end of that sentence was drowned out by the roar of engines.

Out in the dark of space somewhere, Ironfist had been doing his job, fighting the entire Dominion fleet with black holes at his back, drawing all of their fire and, more importantly, all of their attention. It was hard to look away from a brave last stand, and with the longest-standing covenant mage in the whole Empyrean leading this particular last stand, it was a spectacle. 

The tiny remnants of the fleet that had been left in space should have been crushed almost immediately by the superior numbers of the enemy, but they just went on holding out, building up better and better shields to withstand the inferno being unleashed on them. Returning fire with spells that nobody had ever seen before. Combining the technological mastery of Greenmantle with the raw power of Ironfist to construct impossibly dense walls in space. Keeping all eyes on them.

The Hammerheart Consortium were not smugglers, but the remnants of the Thelusan Consortium most certainly were, and with clones from the Saizen crime family stationed on every ship in the shipping fleet, it was easy enough to copy their tricks and stay out of sight as they slid right past the occupied Dominion fleet.

Reinforcements arrived at the coordinates Sylvas had sent them.

To either side of Bael’s ditch, the massive transport ships of the Hammerheart fleet slammed down. Those Seekers with quick reactions flung themselves out of their path and into the chaos of the ravine to avoid being crushed, while the rest fell foul of gravity’s most direct application, landing gear mangling them.

What had been a precise ambush on the part of the Seekers now became a bloodbath. Hector’s troops and the Dusont knights may have been outclassed by eidolons, but these were just mages leaping into the fray now, and their demise was swift work for trained soldiers.

Sylvas’ voice echoed off the stone walls as he enhanced it with sonic mana. “Surrender now, and you’ll live.”

Most of the Seekers were no more warriors than the academics that had manned Sylvas’ own ship. They were a conspiracy made up of people from all walks of life, and their loyalty to that cause had doubtless been muddied considerably by being forced to ally themselves with the Dominion. A solid half of the survivors threw down their weapons and dropped to their knees without even being ordered down. The other half tried to fight on, trusting in the strength of the eidolons around them.

Kaya and Malachai had been slaughtering their way through those eidolons that came down, not because they were covenant mages, but because they had been trained by the Ardent. The universe’s pre-eminent eidolon slayers. Now, from atop the ridge, they were joined by others.

The Hammerheart ships were just ships, not battleships bristling with weapons and mages. Just transport ships. What made them dangerous was their cargo. 

Vaelith led the charge out of the nearest cargo bay with a hundred Ardent at her heels. Wolves of green light constructed by her magic tore out throats, shields of the same deflecting the incoming fire of the distant weapons platforms that the whole landing party had now been exposed to after the illusionists hiding the secret trench had been crushed to paste.

Sylvas and Bael were alone and face-to-face in the midst of all the unfolding chaos. The battle raging all around them faded into the background as the elf sighed. “You knew that we had allied ourselves with the Dominion. It was not merely my poor acting that gave us away.”

“No.” Sylvas paced towards him, and Bael backpedaled, tripping over the corpses of his allies and the monsters that they’d aligned themselves with. “It wasn’t.”

It was as if Bael still truly believed that he might be able to talk his way out of the current predicament. “May I ask how you knew?”

“Because I took the time to understand you,” Sylvas replied as he watched the possibilities dance before him. “Because I saw where things would lead.”

Still, Bael kept on talking. “Surely, you can see that allying with Blackstar to gain immediate access to the vault was the most expedient—”

Sylvas cut him off with a blast of flame. Not a spell that the elf could counter, just a flare of the anger that he’d kept stoked inside himself made manifest by the latest eidolons that he’d been forced to consume. “The quickest way to ensure that he got whatever he wanted out of it.” 

The sleek and elegant robes that Bael had dressed himself in were scorched away, leaving pink, seared skin and the artificial limb that he’d grafted onto his body. It was made of the same material as the vaults, probably made from some fragment of a broken vault somewhere out in the universe, but what made it stand out was not that it was living stone, but that the elf and his Seeker allies had been carving into it, tracing patterns over its surface and filling them with etherium. 

Sylvas recognized the patterns tattooed onto that artificial arm, because they were the markings that had been burned into his own flesh by the failed ritual that killed his world. Bael had been trying to make himself into a copy of Sylvas, a backup Starbreaker, in case the original couldn’t be captured or made compliant. It was all the evidence Sylvas needed to know with certainty that his suspicions had been correct. “I knew you’d betray me, because being the one to save the universe always mattered more to you than actually saving it.”

Bael’s back was against the wall of the trench now, and all his allies had quit or died. Up on the ridge, out of sight, the Ardent were driving back the eidolons, cutting them a path across to the main body of the Empyrean army. The elf wet his lips. “In consideration of our long friendship and the many advantages that I have brought to you throughout our acquaintance, I assume that the terms of my surrender will be more favorable than…”

“We are done.” Sylvas clenched his fist, and the flows of mana around Bael came to a halt. The elf was a master of magic, attuned to magic itself as his affinity. But through the star-soul, Sylvas could control those flows of mana, directing them away. 

Without a covenant, Bael could not generate mana of his own, only draw it in. He cast counterspells frantically, trying to undo what Sylvas was doing, but his reserves simply were not deep enough to give him the required strength. Sylvas had all the mana in the universe in reach, and Bael had only the paltry pool he contained within his circles. 

The same spell was cast instantly, over and over and over, and then countered, again and again and again. There were other ways that Sylvas could have won, easier ways, but this was the one that felt right. 

One gravity spike after another was dispelled, until finally, one was not.

Bael’s head was crushed like a grape. His body toppled to the ground, the manufactured arm shattering as it hit stone.

Sylvas unclenched his fist. “I’m done.”