Chapter 33

“Cruelty does not exist. It is merely a title given by those who do not understand pain to those who do. The opinions of the ignorant are not deserving of respect. Those who do understand pain, understand its applications. They understand that it can be used as a tool to influence others, but that using it in this manner is not its only purpose. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pain has a great many uses. It is a reminder to those who are weak enough to be injured and scarred that they failed. It is a reminder to those who are weak that the strong will always dominate them. Fear of pain is enough to break the will of lesser men, and the sensation of pain is enough to break the will of most, if given enough longevity. 

People misunderstand willpower. They think it is a fixed and infinite force that each of us possesses, but willpower lasts only as long as there is food in the belly and comfort for the vast majority of sentient life. Remove comfort, and it depletes; inflict pain, and it depletes rapidly. At their most fundamental, most sapient species are still animals, biological machines that seek to propagate themselves and prolong their own life. When they experience pain, they withdraw from it, because there is a biological imperative to do so, in the same way that they have a biological imperative to seek pleasure. 

Pain and pleasure are the two inputs that allow for mastery of the sapient mind. One, the fundamental nature of the thing cries out to avoid and the other to seek. For cruelty to exist, the causing of pain must be elevated to an act of moral weight, when in fact pain is about instinct and biology. For cruelty to exist, we must believe that the messages conveyed by our nerves bear some moral weight, too. In this fantasy, they are not simply electrical impulses but some gift granted to us from some divine power that is judging whether or not our actions are moral. 

If such a fantasy were reality, and pain was truly the punishment of the divine, then there is none closer to being a god than I. If such a fantasy were a reality, and the divine was dispensing justice through torture, that would, by necessity, make all pain an act of cruelty. It would mean that all of our actions that cause us no pain are moral ones, and each hedonistic delight we indulge would be righteous. What luck that we live in reality, where such a thing is not so.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

Blackstar was ready and waiting for him, as if he’d never expected his awful pyre of death to touch a hair on Sylvas’ head from the beginning. He reached out a hand, and his will settled over the eidolons inside Sylvas like a vise grip. Sylvas barely made it a step towards him before he was caught.

“I had assumed that the Starbreaker might have the capability to learn from his mistakes and not fling himself directly into the same situation as before. It seems that holding you high in my estimations has always been an error in judgment.” He looked none the worse for wear after their last conflict. The injuries that Mira had managed to inflict on him had been healed. He was even wearing the same casual robe, as if nothing had happened at all. “To have read about you for so long, to have learned the intricacies of your life from the prophecies, it made me believe that you would be more than the common rabble. It made me believe in you. That you might finally be the equal that I have long desired.”

Sylvas tried to speak, but his jaw was locked tight in place.

With a flick of his wrist, flames leapt from Blackstar’s hand to sear away Sylvas’ own clothing, scorching his skin black, but only briefly before the searing flames moved on, and the burns healed. 

He was exposed from the waist up to the sweltering air of the molten world. Sweat beaded across his skin, and everywhere that his scars had spread shone with tiny crystals of etherium. 

Cocking his head to the side as he stalked in closer, Blackstar studied the whorls and patterns of his scars. “The Seekers’ elf spoke of the patterns on your skin. He attached great value to them, believed them to be significant. He did not understand that scars are just a visual representation of all your failings. A spell you failed to cast. A world you failed to save.”

Straining with all his might did nothing but make Sylvas shake where he stood. He could not move. His eidolons were turned against him. He was helpless.

“This is the savior of the universe.” Anger crept into Blackstar’s voice. “The prophesied hero who would turn back the eidolons and bring peace. You would be dead in an instant if I so willed it.”

With a jerk of his hand, Sylvas was dragged forward, feet scraping through the dust, leaving lines, suspended like a puppet. “In this, as in all things. You fail.”

Sylvas stopped fighting. He let his body hang limp and useless, flesh draped over the unmoving iron frame of the eidolons inside him. There was no point in wrestling with Blackstar’s will. It couldn’t be bested.

“You will serve as the key to this final vault, revealing its secrets to me, and me alone. You will be used as a component, as required.” He spat on the ground at Sylvas’ feet, and it sizzled away. “I meant to raise you up to sit beside me. To make you my equal, my heir. What a terrible disappointment you are.”

Sylvas fell to the ground under a press of the emperor’s will, prostrate before him, and he didn’t fight it. He didn’t strain, and he didn’t struggle. He just waited until the man who wanted to feel superior had stalked over to look down at him. Then he unleashed Mira.

She had occupied the blood wolf before they’d even teleported over, hiding inside of Sylvas until the time was right. Now the wolf leapt out from him, jaws open wide and pouncing for Blackstar’s throat.

The emperor caught her. A fist formed in the slick red fur beneath her jaws before she’d even cleared Syvlas’ body. He chuckled. “Just because you are incapable of learning, it does not mean that I am.”

His fingers dug into her flesh, and she howled in pain as she writhed, dangling helplessly in his grasp, just as helplessly as Sylvas, still pinned down on the ground. “A fragment of your mind, occupying the manifestation of an eidolon. Like a covenant formed in reverse. It was a clever trick… the first time that I saw it.”

The wolf’s face contorted in its struggles, then continued to twist as fur gave way to skin, and he found that instead of a bloody eidolon, there was a slim, lightly built girl with dark hair hanging around her cherubic face. Mira smiled at him. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

She punched out, and her replica body, made in Sylvas’ own image, if modified to suit her purposes, let her swing the gravity through her, the way that Sylvas always had. Her fist caught Blackstar in the chest, sending him staggering back and tearing her from his grasp.

He clutched a hand to his chest where he’d been struck, and his breath came labored and uneven for a moment, but the emperor’s will held. Mira was free to move, but the eidolons within Sylvas remained where they were, holding him down. 

“This must be the young love, lost in the holocaust of Croesia. Remind me of her name?”

“The name is Mira, darling.” She flicked her hair back from her face. “And if you haven’t realized it yet, I am the brains of this entire operation. You no longer need to deal with the monkey.”

“A fragmented psyche.” He shot a dart of flame out at Mira, which she casually sidestepped. “Yet the weaker one is dominant.”

“I allow him to operate the body so that I can focus on more important tasks.” Mira looked entirely too pleased with herself as she and Blackstar circled each other. “Such as planning this entire operation, overpowering your entire empire, developing entirely new schools of magic, and most importantly…”

Sylvas caught Blackstar by the back of his neck. “Working out how to beat your stupid tricks.”

Blackstar tried to twist free of his grip, but Sylvas’ body had been enhanced far beyond the limits of human capability, and the hand that held him was infused with such gravity that pulling away would have been impossible all the same. He tried to cast, but Sylvas threw him down with such force that whatever concentration he’d been able to bring to bear was broken.

Pinned to the stone, face pressed down into the dirt, Blackstar was eye to eye with Sylvas Vail, where he still lay prone. The body that he was holding down with his indomitable will had not moved an inch, but the eidolons that were inhabited by fragments of Sylvas’ mind, just like Mira inhabited the red wolf, stood around him now. One eidolon left empty and idle, so that Sylvas could be manhandled with it and lull Blackstar into a false sense of security, and the other six perfect copies of him standing around, waiting their turn. The integration of the draconic eidolons had been completed sometime between killing Bael and releasing the shikari, and fragmenting his psyche into pieces had been one of the first tricks that Sylvas ever learned.

Blackstar still had every advantage in a fight. He was capable of instantly casting any spell that he could think of, while Sylvas and his copies had to cast each spell the old-fashioned way, speaking the words and shaping the mana. But what he didn’t have was seven extra bodies.

There was no signal, just motion. All six eidolon copies of Sylvas started kicking.

To his credit, Blackstar took the beating like a professional. As the boots came slamming down, he rolled with the momentum each blow transferred, trying to get out of reach, to get back to his feet, to fight, but the myriad Sylvas-eidolons did not give him the moment that he needed. A stomp broke his hawklike nose. Ribs cracked. When a hand was flung out to cast, it met a kick, snapping two fingers. 

This man had raised an empire, destroyed countless worlds, codified an ancient prophecy into an action plan, manipulated events behind the scenes, and willingly played the villain on a universal scale, all for the chance to control Sylvas, and now Sylvas was going to beat him to death.

After the fingers snapped, Blackstar pulled his hands in, curled around himself, and tried to weather the beating, but he only endured a couple more kicks before Mira had finished casting her spell. A blade of destruction loomed heavy and obscene in her hands, and she stalked in, raising it, ready to plunge it down. Ready to take revenge.

Which was when Valtoris Blackstar, Emperor of the Obsidian Dominion, proved that he was not as helpless as they might have hoped. His eidolon exploded up out of him, the force throwing Mira, Sylvas, and all of his copies flying and bathing them all in flames.

The moment that Sylvas realized that his actual body wasn’t being held still anymore, he launched himself up, not aiming for Blackstar, but tackling his eidolon in mid-air. His hands were seared where they buried in the thick plumage of the shadow phoenix, but he shut out the pain and grappled for a hold on the monster.

Down below, Mira and the copies had already found their feet, and they were charging back in at Blackstar. He had found his footing again, too, and though he looked punch-drunk after the beating he’d taken, he was already casting. Mira herself held back from the melee as the various Sylvas copies flung themselves bodily at the emperor, not trying to hurt him, so much as to interrupt whatever spell he was trying to cast.

The eidolon beneath Sylvas’ hands beat its wings with a steady rhythm, lifting him farther and farther from the master it served, but while it might have been attuned to Blackstar’s soul, and more than capable of obeying his commands, it wasn’t like Sylvas’ duplicates. It couldn’t think for itself. Which meant that it couldn’t understand the significance as he clamped his hands around both sides of its head and cast Gravity Spike.

Little more than a moment had passed since the eidolon was unleashed, and now its head collapsed inwards under the crushing force of the tiny black hole Sylvas had conjured inside it. It didn’t die, which was a shame, because dying would surely have been a mercy. It did lose control of its wings, or at least the coordination to use them. Both phoenix and Sylvas came plunging back down to earth, and with just a little pushing as a course correction, Sylvas brought it down straight on top of its master.

There was a brief struggle, as the confused and damaged eidolon was sucked back inside Blackstar’s body, but it was only brief, and then everything faded to stillness once more.

For the second time, one of them was on their knees with the other standing over them. Sylvas couldn’t help but feel some pleasure in the reversal of their positions. With a swift cast, he manifested a blade of ice and light in his hand and strode closer.

Blackstar looked a lot less formidable now that he was bruised, battered, and bleeding. Just a man. A man who had done terrible things in the pursuit of power, who had abandoned all sanity for his desperate need to control everything, but just a man. “You…”

Sylvas kicked Blackstar in the face, sprawling him back across the floor. He raised his blade and plunged it down.

A shield of shadow and flame erupted from the emperor, cast in a panic. The blade of light and ice bit into it, and the opposing affinities sparked and crackled as they competed for dominance. Blackstar had lifetimes of experience perfecting his magic, while Sylvas had never touched the light or ice affinities at all until the last few days, but what he lacked in precision, he made up for in raw power. All the mana in the cosmos flowed down into him through his star-soul, and the blade blazed brighter.

The eidolon copies of Sylvas crowded in, merging back into him, restoring his mind to wholeness and giving him more and more spells that he could cast simultaneously. Now that he had his own eidolon back, Blackstar was blasting away at him, with raking claws of shadow, darts of flame, and more and more shields layered over each other in a dense lattice, trying to keep the blade from descending. He grunted out, “You can’t…”

Sylvas countered the spells as they came, deflecting those he couldn’t with gravity shears, unweaving the mana from the spellforms that he was most familiar with, and often just letting the flames lick over him. He healed from the burns faster than he could suffer them.

Mira was at Sylvas’ side just a moment after the rest of the eidolon copies, but she had no intention of merging back into him. Not when she still had that oversized blade of destruction in her hand. She stabbed it down into Blackstar’s shield, too, and every weave and spell that touched it unraveled. It was destruction given physical form. Chaos that would tear apart the careful order of every spell and thought that Blackstar could create.

Abandoning all magic and logical thought, Blackstar flung his raw will at Sylvas like a bludgeon, trying to seize control of his eidolons, to paralyze him, like he had before, but there were forces more powerful than even the will of the Obsidian Emperor. The blade in Sylvas’ hands might have been forged of light and ice, but the hands that held it were heavy with more mass and weight than anything short of a dying star had ever mustered. Sylvas didn’t need to drive it down. Gravity would do it for him. All that he had to do was wait for the inevitable.

For a moment, there was relief on Blackstar’s bloodied face, but then he realized that even without the use of a single muscle in his body, Sylvas was going to win. 

Pushing up onto his elbows, Blackstar thrust out one quavering palm. He drew all his remaining mana together and unleashed a fresh hell. A torrent of flames as hot as he’d scoured the surface of the planet with.

Sylvas could not counter it. He didn’t have any eidolon that he could control and shape into a counterspell, nor did he have any means of moving himself to speak a spell or raise a shield. He was trapped in place as the inferno rose up to consume him.

It washed over him, searing hair and skin and flesh, burning him away. 

If Mira had been with him, then maybe with her incredible mind, he might have been able to copy some aspect of Hammerheart’s last act of kindness, to render the flame harmless, but Sylvas had never been able to do anything like that. He had spent his entire life throwing himself into the fire, knowing that he would be burned, and accepting it as all that he was due. He could shut away the pain, but the damage was always there.

The fire swirled around the length of the blade he’d forged of light and ice, dancing up to sear away skin and muscle, digging down until it hit the veins of etherium that ran through him. The channels that he’d spent days carving into himself when he was just a child, to be a better tool for his masters. It struck those veins of etherium, and then it was conducted through them, like any magic. The flames went racing down into his core. Burning their way into his soul. Scorching all the way down to the black hole at the center of him.

The emptiness there swallowed the fire down. It didn’t snuff it out, it didn’t push it back; if anything, it drew it in all the more hungrily. Just as he had pulled in mana from the whole cosmos through his star-soul, now Sylvas inverted it. He poured the raw fire and shadow mana out, flooding the universe with it. There was no clever spell, no artifice, just his body and mind perfectly adapted and conditioned to allow mana to flow through them, doing exactly what they were made for.

The firestorm flooded into Sylvas now. He was no longer subject to it. He was a willing participant; his hollow heart was swallowing down the flames faster than Blackstar could unleash them. Slowly, agonizingly, the flesh began to grow back over his blackened bones. He went from being a shriveled husk to being a man again in the span of mere moments, and the flames that Blackstar still tried to kill him with poured straight into the scars that still covered his exposed skin, spiraling down into his core and then being released into the universe. The stars closest to the Beast’s Eyes burned a little brighter, a little hotter. The worlds in this sector of space had an unseasonal heat wave. All of the destruction that Blackstar was trying to unleash on this one man in this one place was evenly dispersed throughout the universe, spread so thin that it became barely noticeable at all. And then it was over. Blackstar’s reserves of mana ran dry, and his wounded eidolon could regurgitate no more without losing cohesion. And still, the two blades hung over him.

Valtoris Blackstar had never known defeat. He had always been the strongest, the fastest, the best. His power had been unmatched within the Dominion and all known space. His will had been so powerful that he could command eidolons. He had never known defeat, and now that he looked it in the eye, he had no idea of what to do. His exhausted arms fell limp, and he flopped flat out on the ground. Powerless to stop what came next. His will—the very same will that had let him dominate and rule over everyone—was broken. He snarled, “You can’t do this!”

Sylvas looked down at the man and said the very first words that had driven him from the first moment he’d begun to learn magic. “I can do this.”

Sylvas was freed. Lurching forward before catching his balance, his blade dipped down to brush Blackstar’s chest. Mira’s did not. She had not been held by will, she had been held back by the shield, and now that it was gone, she drove her weapon home.

It was destruction forged into a solid shape. It passed through his mortal flesh like it was little more than air, and from around that wound annihilation spread, tearing out through his body, disintegrating him as it went. Blackstar’s eyes bulged as he realized that it was already over, and by the time he had the wherewithal to try and speak some final words, his lungs had already been disintegrated away to dust. He became nothing before Sylvas’ eyes. The architect of his entire life of misery and the torment of the whole universe dead.

Mira let the sword in her hand dispel; she dropped down onto her knees before the ashen outline of the dead emperor. “I never had anyone but myself to blame, darling. All of these years haunting you, I’d only ever blamed myself, and you, of course. When he came along, it was almost a blessing. Somewhere else to put all of my hate and anger. The perfect excuse for the failings of our youth. We destroyed Croesia, we destroyed ourselves, because he manipulated us.” She let out a shaky laugh. “Except it was us, all along, wasn’t it darling? It was you, so desperate to impress anyone who might be looking, so desperate to have anywhere to belong and anyone to care for you. I’m just your memory of Mira, the ghost inside your head, and even I know her part in it was just to prove you right, to tell you that you’d never be worth anything unless you were powerful. No wonder you conjured me up to torture you.”

Sylvas held out a hand to her, but she didn’t take it. “I don’t think you want me back in your mind right now, darling. I’m not thinking very highly of you… of either of us.”

Words came rough and raw from his freshly grown throat, but Sylvas spoke all the same. “I was a child. I made a child’s choices. Now we both know better.”

“Do we, darling?” Contempt dripped from that last word. “Aren’t you just about to do it all over again. Just about to throw yourself into whatever contraption the aions left behind to try and prove that you’re the most special boy? Because you feel guilty about getting me killed?”

“No.” Sylvas took a step closer. “Not because I feel guilty. Not because I want to matter.”

“Then why?” Sylvas hadn’t known that eidolons could weep, but the distant starlight shone off Mira’s cheeks. “Why can’t this be enough? Why do we have to…”

“Because nobody else can. Because it’s the right thing to do. Because there are people I care about, and I want them to have a chance to survive.”

“Without us?”

“I keep telling you. I am going to survive this.” He wiped soot off his hands, revealing that they were whole once more. “We are going to survive this. Just like we’ve survived everything else.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

He crouched down and wrapped his arms around her. “It is what everything has been leading to. All our lives. All the pain. Everything brought us here.”

She pressed her forehead against his and chuckled along with him when he said, “I can do this.”

“Alright.” She merged back into his body.

Let’s do it.