Chapter 30

“Correlation is not causation. Just because the shikari have been found in the ruins that the aions left behind does not suggest any sort of connection between them. It seems likely, of course, that the biological species that operates on almost an entirely different set of rules from every other one and appears to have been engineered into its current state was created by the aions. 

But that does not mean that we have any certainty that there is a connection. It is just as possible that the shikari happened to have evolved into their current state of biological perfection at some point in prehistory and came to occupy abandoned aion ruins simply because no other civilization had yet constructed anything for them to occupy. After our own extinction, who is to say that the ruins of our great cities and monuments won’t be populated exclusively by shikari, too? Assuming that we have built as well as the aions did. Which we most assuredly have not.”

—Connections: The Shikari and The Aions, Part One, Rania Clarendon

The next few minutes were some of the busiest in Sylvas’ life, but he moved through them like he was in a dream. 

Gravity shears blossomed across the sky as he rose up out of the trench, leading his friends and allies up to join the Ardent as they charged. Precise bolts of crackling white magic leapt from his hands to hit weapon emplacements, chasing down through the mages who manned them to detonate the etherium deposits buried below the planetary surface that were meant to fuel those turrets in raining death down on anyone who dared intrude. All the resources of a galaxy-spanning empire had been concentrated here on this tiny rock scarcely big enough to even qualify as a moon, condensed into the most effective defenses that Blackstar could imagine. It still wasn’t enough.

One by one, the weapons batteries fell silent. One by one, the covenant mages who had sought to crush and kill Sylvas’ soldiers from a distance realized that distance meant nothing at all in the face of the relentless power that he could bring to bear. The execution of Bael had taught Sylvas a helpful lesson about what he was capable of. He no longer squandered any of his attention constructing clever solutions to all the enemy’s defensive ploys or clever deflections. He could brute force through anything by just hitting them over and over with the same focused gravity spike until they collapsed under the relentless assault.

His ears rang with the relentless thumping concussions of his own spells. A staccato chatter like a machine running non-stop. A drumroll that never seemed to end. 

His troops and those pouring out of the cargo ships had intermingled past the point that anyone could distinguish them. The shining white armor of the Ardent was everywhere, but there was enough blood and dust that any one of the people fighting for him could have been any other one. He almost killed Vaelith when she caught him by the arm, fire leaping out of him and startling her back before he realized who she was. She seemed at a loss for words. He smiled at her. “Of all the people who heard the call for help, I wasn’t sure you’d answer. Not after…how I left.”

“Neither did I,” she grunted, pausing to spit as if the admission was distasteful. “Technically, we’re both oath-breakers now.”

“Because sometimes reality is more important than our promises?”

“What? No. No wonder you never made it in the Ardent,” she answered with a scowl. “Never learned that if someone gives you bad orders, you mishear them.”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen her genuinely smile in all the time he’d known her, but she flashed one now. Sylvas felt an overwhelming urge to give her a hug, but some sense of self-preservation prevented him. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m not.” She conjured a sword to her hand. “Awful place. But we go where the fight is.”

They parted ways, her leading the army off to join up with the main force still making its push, and Sylvas flitting over to where the ships still lay. The far side was comprised mostly of the Hammerheart fleet, while this side of the crevasse had a piecemeal mixture, equal parts smuggler ships and the last limping remains of the Thelusan Consortium’s ships. They were the ones that Sylvas headed for. Maybe it would have been more polite to go to his allies and greet them before heading straight for his enemies, but there was something more valuable still stowed away in the guts of those ships.

The rear end of these ships were dented and mangled, not from taking fire on the descent, but from the cargo inside trying to break out. The rear ends of all the ships hung open, the cargo bays open to the air, unleashing the horrific screeching and baying from inside.

The shikari were every bit as horrific as Sylvas had remembered, hideous mish-mashes of different creatures from across space and time, feral and furious. Almost impossible to capture alive. The Thelusan Consortium had done it many times over, selling them along to the highest bidder on the black market until Hector and Sylvas’ efforts shut it down. They had not gone back to finish the job and wipe them clean from every dark corner of the cosmos because more pressing matters had come along, but now Sylvas was grateful that they hadn’t. Where else would he have been able to order a shikari delivery?

They threw themselves against the bars welded over the opening, reaching for him, raking claws over the bending metalwork and chomping uselessly. The smugglers were nowhere to be seen, but Sylvas hadn’t expected them to hang around and fight. Their part in the job was done. They’d brought him what he wanted. He turned his gaze away from the monsters of nightmare to look at his girlfriend, who had also arrived with these reinforcements. “Ready to test your theory?”

“Hello, Rania,” she sing-songed back, “thanks for coordinating this whole thing.”

“Hi.” He smiled.

The shikari inside went on violently attacking their enclosure as Sylvas approached. Sparks flew from every strike. Sylvas stepped back in, closer than was safe, closer than was sane. Pressing himself up against the bars, staring into the many eyes of the beasts within. “You know me, don’t you.”

The endless violence stopped abruptly. The shikari stilled at the sight of him. “You remember the people who made you. You recognize me as one of them.”

Still, the shikari didn’t attack. Every time that Sylvas had encountered the shikari, there had been a moment of hesitation. Not on his part, but on the part of the supposedly mindless monsters. He had always struck first, always driven them to defend themselves, but now, finally, he took the moment that the shikari needed to recognize what he was. This was not just another prey item, teasing them from out of reach. He looked and smelled like one of their makers.

Sylvas stepped back and clenched his fist, tearing the bars off the back end of the ship. If they went for him now, it would be a bloody slaughter, but they didn’t. They remained inexplicably still. 

On the journey here, before they had parted ways, Sylvas and Rania had spoken about this. How they could turn his resemblance to the aions into a tool that could be used. Even without it, he would have brought the shikari here, dropped them behind enemy lines like the meteors the dwarves had ridden down, and hoped that the Dominion and the hunters would have eliminated each other, but after their long conversations late into the night, they had convinced themselves that there was a better way.

He glanced to Rania, “Ready?”

“You know the language better than me,” she said, but she scrabbled through her notebooks all the same.

Their initial trepidation seeming to have faded, the shikari began to tense for an attack. Sylvas read the word she held up on her slate, and the world shook with the weight of it. A language that hadn’t been spoken since recorded history. “Stay.”

It was difficult to speak words of aion without casting a spell. To shape the words not with mana but with his vocal cords. It was a strange language, every word seeming to end with the same sound as it began. Circular, like spells were. Powerful even without mana infusing the shapes of the words. He didn’t know if anyone else would have been able to speak it. There were echoing nuances to it that he had never heard in anyone’s voice but his own.

The shikari obeyed, all the tension leaving them as they stilled. Their master’s voice. Reaching out from beyond the grave. From across countless generations and millennia. They had been without commands for so long that they had turned entirely feral. The parts of their carefully engineered brains meant to understand and obey had atrophied away until they were almost non-existent. But some part of what they used to be remained within them. When he spoke to them in their master’s voice, they obeyed.

He backed away from the opening and then tried again. “Here.”

Slowly, the shikari emerged from where they had been so briefly contained. Stalking out onto the stone of this desolate place, all bright colored feathers and fur in a world that was dead. The shikari sniffed at the air, sniffed at Sylvas, and bored into him with their multi-eyed stares. Like they knew he was lying but couldn’t prove it. 

He was lying, he supposed. He was not one of the long-lost race of aions returned to this plane of existence to give their genetically engineered war hounds another round of orders. He was trying to usurp that command. The air was thick enough with burnt fuel, heated metal, magic, and the reek of ozone that he doubted any one of them could scent the eidolons within him, but they could smell Rania, and to her disbelief, they did not attack. Whether it was because they were bound by the command in their old masters’ voice or because they were remembering their purpose after so long left to go feral, Sylvas could not say. 

It didn’t matter either way. He walked along the row of cargo ships, tearing away bars, barking out the same command, again and again: “Here!”

The army that had just dropped in to join Sylvas’ cause had been making good progress across the planet’s surface despite the bombardment that they were being forced to deflect, but now they ground to a halt, not because they were under decimating fire or because the rough terrain made pushing ahead impossible, but because of the spectacle that was unfolding behind them. 

A parade of beasts. 

Sylvas was walking along the row of ships, unleashing an entirely different breed of nightmares from their holds, and the monsters, known across the universe for their mindless and relentless savagery, were following along at his heels like courtiers, snarling and hissing not as a threat, but to try and win his attention.

When all the Thelusan cargo was unloaded, Sylvas finally took inventory. He had quietly hoped that there might have been a queen among the secret stock that the smugglers had managed to hold onto, but the swarm of ravenous and murderous beasts that they had held onto would have to do. He turned to address the crowd of shikari and thanked the stars that he had a paradigm that let him filter out all fear. Taking a deep breath, he amplified his voice and then spoke two more clumsy words of aion. 

“Hunt. Eidolons.”