Chapter 34

“The use of stasis magic found around ancient aion vaults informed us of the existence of magic that can affect time. This was information deliberately withheld from us in the arcane knowledge directly imparted to us by the aions in the primers that were contained in many of the earliest discovered vaults. For obvious reasons, experimentation with time magic has been very deliberately limited, as there are issues of causality that any actual attempt at traversing outside of the normal flow of time could cause. Some degree of dilation of time has been achieved, based on the preservation methods of the ancient aions, used typically in medical settings to preserve a patient in need of life-saving care for long enough to receive it. There have also been instances of the reverse of this stasis magic being employed, where time is accelerated for those within the area of influence, allowing them to perform complex operations prior to strict deadlines, but the mana cost of this acceleration seems to grossly outweigh the potential benefits. 

The precise methodology used by the aions in the production of their own stasis magic still escapes us to this day. While we are able to produce the same effects as their original spells, we seem to be lacking in some vital component. The aion preservations spells were cast once, and then their own resolution was slowed by the same effect that they produced, allowing for them to continue onwards throughout future centuries without the need for them to be recast, while our own attempts fail and falter almost as soon as we stop supplying them with fresh mana. 

The aion version of the stasis spell seems to contain some sort of recursive loop, placing the casting of the spell inside of the dilation effect, while ours do not activate until that phase of the casting is already complete. In essence, the aion spell works in perpetuity because there was some secondary effect of time magic being used to place the casting inside of itself, while we lack the capability to cast magic into the past or future in the same manner.”

—Unmoving: The History of Time Magic, Ansel Lethridge

There was no moment of peace. There was no trumpet of victory. There was just another fight.

Magic drew eidolons like moths to the flame, and nowhere in the universe was as much magic being flung around wildly as here on this planet of endless battles. It was honestly more remarkable that the smoke of Blackstar’s final inferno hadn’t cleared and revealed the whole world covered in them.

Rifts began tearing open. Sylvas could feel them, each time the gravity spiked and the way through from another dimension opened up. Even if he couldn’t feel the fabric of reality rupture, the incoming eidolons would have set his senses screaming. He had seen the aftermath of an incursion on a world many times, but he had only been present for one, the fall of Croesia, and this felt exactly the same. Portals opening wildly and without reason. Tears in the sky disgorging hordes of flying monstrosities. Chasms opening up at their feet and unleashing all the denizens of the hell beyond. 

Sylvas took only a single step back towards his friends before he remembered why he was here. Rushing back to them, fighting off the eidolons swarming towards them, it would all serve no purpose. There was a never-ending supply of enemies; the battle would never end. He could fight and fight forever at this point, the mana infusing him, flowing into him from across all of space, would ensure that there would never be a moment when he couldn’t cast, and with all the reinforcements that he’d made to his mind and body, he probably could go on fighting and fighting, but nobody else could. There were limits, even for Sylvas, and he had already pushed himself to those limits so many times today.

He looked out at the monsters charging at his friends and the people who’d followed him all the way to this awful place, and he turned his back on them.

The vault rose from the earth like a raised middle finger to everything that he’d already been through, unchanged throughout the ages, unscarred by the chaos and destruction that had been wrought across the surface of this world. All across the exterior surface of the black obelisk, there were the keyholes—indentations where various eidolons had been pressed into place to unlock the layers upon layers of locks. Blackstar had devoted his life to trying to find his way inside it, devoted countless more lives to fetching and gathering what he needed to get through every barrier to the secret inside, and he didn’t live to see it.

Sylvas strode up the path that had been carved out for him, reaching out with gravity to slam shut any rifts that were opening nearby, unleashing the same rapid-fire gravity spikes at any eidolon unfortunate enough to approach him. They folded up inside of themselves the moment his attention landed on them, crumpled up like empty cans. Bat-winged nightmares swept down from the sky, only to be turned to pulp. Skeletal forms of wood and vine shattered beneath his glare. Every eidolon of every affinity seemed to be here, now. He saw cloaked shapes like the eidolon that had almost killed Malachai, steely blocks like the Voidsmith that Kaya had claimed, bone-bladed faces without eyes aimed at his heart and shattered with a single casting of the same focused spike of gravity each time. 

It didn’t feel like a victory; it felt inevitable. Through the star-soul, all the mana in the universe flowed through him. He was connected with absolutely everything. Each time he cast, it was with the absolute certainty that the spell he was bringing into being was meant to be cast. He had ignored all the talk about fate and prophecy, focused on the task in front of him, but now he had to confront the fact that his body seemed to move on its own, magic springing from him without him needing to do much more than desire it. He had tried to unlock some glimpse of the future with his last paradigm, some fragment of what the aions had once achieved, and now he realized that it had worked. At the time, it had seemed as if he was making every decision for himself, taking every step as he would have chosen to take it, but throughout it all, every motion unfolded exactly as his own sense of precognition dictated. It was like he had been following a script his entire life, and the paradigm had finally allowed him to read a few lines ahead. All of the books he’d read about time magic, the impossibility of truly predicting the future, it worked differently for him, because he was already following the course that was set.

Yet despite this new sense of certainty in all that he had done and would do, as he approached the vault, he realized that he had no idea what was going to happen when he touched the stone. 

Last time, he’d been pulled into some mindscape, leaving his body paralyzed and vulnerable. He couldn’t risk it with eidolons springing up all around him. He couldn’t risk a magic circle to keep them out either, not if it might block out some of the vital information that had been left for him by the aions or cut him off from some source of power that he’d need to use to make what he found inside work. After everything he had done to make himself stronger, he now found that here at the end of his journey, he couldn’t do what needed to be done alone.

Blackstar had been so certain that he alone could control whatever force was inside this vault and use it to create peace. He had been so certain that he had used that certainty to justify any atrocity. Whatever evil he did, it was for the greater good of opening this vault and bringing an end to the chaos of the eidolons’ tyranny. But if he had been in Sylvas’ place, he wouldn’t have been able to move forward. Not without someone that he could trust to protect his back.

Distantly, Sylvas could feel the fighting begin again. The eidolons swarming towards him crashed into the back of the Empyrean armies where he’d left them to lick their wounds. He could feel people dying. Not just here, but everywhere. Through the star-soul, he was connected to every star and every world, and on every one of them that had sentient life, the eidolons were rampaging. His sphere of influence, the limit of his senses, had grown with each eidolon that he bonded, until it encompassed the whole planet that he stood on, but now it was stretched out across everything and everywhere. His mind couldn’t process all of the information flooding into it. His perfect memory couldn’t record every scream and sob and whimper. Not without it driving him mad. He had to shut it all out. Clapping his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut, it was too much to bear. He shut it out, shut it down, closing off his senses to every atrocity being done, every child being carved in two by an eidolon, every desperate prayer for salvation. He couldn’t face the universe that his choices had created.

On creaking metal wings, Kaya, Malachai, Rania, and Hector all came crashing down behind him in a heap. He shouldn’t have expected anything less. While Malachai and Hector tried to pull themselves out of the tangle with some dignity and Rania lay on the ground looking shellshocked, Kaya scrambled forward on her hands and knees before staggering to her feet. “Right mess you’ve made of this, stanzbuhr.”

The only reason that Sylvas wasn’t covered from head to toe in his own blood was that it had all been burned off. He was swaying slightly in the breeze, and he nearly choked on his own laugh. “Me?”

“You kicked down the load-bearing emperor.” She said it with such sincerity that Sylvas nearly collapsed into fits of laughter, only managing to maintain a straight face through brute-force blocking his emotions with his paradigm.

Hector was the next to make it over. “It can’t be a coincidence that you kill the guy who can control eidolons, and suddenly, they all start pouring through. He must have been holding them back somehow.”

Malachai had politely waited behind to offer Rania a hand up and to manifest a scythe in his hand that he used to hack through the first of the approaching eidolons before it could lay a single tentacle on her. The two of them hustled over now.

“I do not subscribe to this theory.” Malachai was quick to tell Sylvas. “Rather, I believe the planar ruptures are a result of his excessive mana consumption.”

“Could be both,” Hector conceded.

“Nah.” Kaya shook her head. “I know my boy Sigil’s luck. And it would be just his luck that kicking that culgh in the culgh was what brought on Armageddon.”

“It doesn’t seem worth arguing about right now.” Sylvas tried to move the conversation along and get back to his existential crisis.

“Right you are, stanzbuhr,” she agreed. “Get on with it.”

Rania collided with Sylvas at a speed just a little under a run, rocking him back on his heels before he wrapped his arms around her for stability. “The fire… I thought we were dead.”

He tucked her head under his chin. With his arms around her, the memory of it came back. The awful moment when he thought that they were both dead. That his failure had brought her to her grave. His stomach turned over at that memory. “Me, too.”

With her current position, he couldn’t see her face, but it sounded like she was crying. “Then I thought you were dead. Running off to fight that…”

Kaya proffered a few choice words in dwarvish to describe Blackstar, none of which the translation spells dared to touch.

“Villain,” Malachai announced, cutting off any further colorful suggestions.

“I had a plan to deal with him.” He pulled her back a little so she could see his face. “I always have a plan.”

“And it always goes culgh over tea kettle the second you try to use one of your plans,” Kaya was quick to remind him.

Through gritted teeth, Sylvas said, “Thank you, Kaya.”

“We have to keep you humble, somehow.” Hector clapped him on the shoulder, smiling wolfishly at him.

They had been chattering for too long. Even though Sylvas was closing rifts as they appeared throughout their entire reunion, he couldn’t close all of them. All the eidolons coming pouring through onto the scorched surface of the planet were headed straight for him. Kaya and Hector seemed to sense it just a moment before Malachai, spinning out to launch a barrage of steel and vines respectively at the incoming hordes. Malachai took a moment longer to respond; his magic couldn’t be cast instantly yet, he was still learning the strength of his covenant. But when he did cast, it was spectacular. A sweep of his scythe sent out sickles of blazing green, flying in what seemed like every direction, but as they boomeranged through the air, each one of them unerringly curved in to strike one of the approaching eidolons. Corpses littered the flame-smoothed battlefield once more. Bodies that had escaped the cremation of the rest of the world by only a matter of minutes.

So far as Sylvas knew, these were the last three covenant mages in the Empyrean, now turning to stand in a final defensive line between all of creation and the vault. Hector called back, “Get moving. We can’t hold them forever.”

Cookie’s head burst out of Hector to snap a winged eidolon in half before tossing it aside, then returned to her natural place inside him. He cast fast and wild, throwing a healing spell in Sylvas’ direction as a matter of habit in between blasting the incoming swarms with razor-petals of vibrant green magic.

From inside her freshly grown suit of armor, Kaya’s voice sounded echoey and metallic. “Don’t listen to him, take your time, enjoy the sights, I can do this all day!”

She stomped a boot, and spikes of metal shot up out of the planet’s surface, jutting out through a row of eidolons so swiftly that Sylvas doubted that they even realized they were dead yet. With a sweep of her arms, those spikes became blades that hacked down on the eidolons beside them in the sudden crush of bodies. Before Sylvas tore his eyes away, they had split and shifted again, becoming something like the blades of a fan, buzzing their way through any eidolon foolish enough to approach.

The last mage of their party moved with a calm and grace that seemed to be a poor fit for the battlefield, crafting complex spells under the cover of the other two, and then unleashing them when he was ready and they would have the most potent effect. Sickle blades of blinding green light struck home, then from the corpses, mushrooms erupted. Mycelium spread across the scorched earth of the planet, taking root, bringing life where there had been nothing before, and then each corpse that lay atop it began to bloom, erupting outwards in a gory mess that revealed yet more fruiting bodies of fungus that swelled and burst, unleashing yet more of the same green sickles out into the world to continue the cycle. Life and death, all in a single casting. Malachai spared him a thin smile before turning to his task. “I sincerely hope that what you find inside there is worth what was paid to get you here.”

“Me, too.” Sylvas took a step towards the vault, only to pause when he realized that Rania was still clinging to his arm.

“I’m coming with you,” she told him firmly as he tried to draw away.

“We have no idea what we’re going to find,” he replied cautiously, trying to remove himself from her grip, “The aions might have made whatever’s inside lethal to anyone other than me as a final security measure.”

She shook her head. “This is why you need an expert. I know them well enough to know they wouldn’t do that.”

“They wouldn’t?” He had hoped that she might be reasoned with, but she had found a way to make the conversation about her expertise, and he knew he didn’t have a hope of contending.

“You can say a lot of bad things about the aions. A lot of people do. But one thing you can’t say was that they were lacking in confidence.” She started moving forward, dragging Sylvas along with her. “They’d have trusted the lock they made to keep people out of this vault, the same way they trusted them on every other vault. And I guess they were right to. Nobody ever forced one open in all recorded history.”

Behind them, all hell was unleashed. Kaya had raised some jagged steel fortification to slow the onslaught and funnel the earthbound eidolons to a single chokepoint. Both Hector and Cookie sprang into action to deal with the eidolons overhead, tackling any that got close and chomping them apart. Pieces of eidolon rained down from where he intercepted the fliers, while whole bodies fell dead from the sky when the Prince of Dusont’s spells found their mark. With his spore-bomb curses doing so much of the killing for him, Malachai was now being borne up by his usual host of spirits to face off with any higher-tier eidolons that came lumbering their way. There were plenty of them coming, but their bulk and the masses of smaller eidolons slowed their progress. 

Sylvas ached to go back, to join them. To fight something he knew he could beat, or at least something he knew how to face. He was the reason that they were all flooding here, now. The power inside him called out to them, even across the boundaries of different dimensions. Left to their own devices, he wondered how many eidolons would have died flinging themselves into stars, just trying to taste a soul like the one that rested inside him now. Maybe that was how everything ended: The eidolons slaughtered everyone and everything, cracked open every world to eat its soul, and then flung themselves into the stars until they went out and there was nothing left. He squared his shoulders and went on walking.

You need to tell her, darling. Otherwise, she might interfere.

“There’s something else we need to talk about,” Sylvas said as the black tower ahead filled up the entirety of his vision. “Whatever is in there to stop the eidolons. I’m going to use it. I have to.”

“And I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

He turned to face her. “Even if it kills me. I’m going to use it.”

Inside him, he could hear Mira quietly raging about his self-destructive impulses, but he ignored her for now. He had to concentrate on one obstacle at a time, and it only seemed fair that his dead girlfriend got less of a vote than his living one. More importantly, Mira could hear his thoughts; she had known before him that he was willing to carry this through regardless of what happened to him.

“If you… If I can save you, I will.” She let him pull away from her to lay a hand on the surface of the obelisk. There was no special slot for him to be slid into, nowhere for him to direct magic or press a switch. But touching the surface of the colossus that had lain dormant since before the dawn of history seemed to bring it back to life. Power hummed inside the stone. The vault came back to life.

He hadn’t been pulled into a mindscape again. There was no history lesson this time around. If he had made it here, it meant that he knew why he had to be here. He shook his head. “Not if it means all of this was for nothing. Not if it means the eidolons go on destroying everything and everyone.”

Rania didn’t look upset; she put her shoulders back and met his gaze. “Like I said, I don’t think you know the aions very well.”

The surface of the obelisk had been completely smooth and unbroken stone before Sylvas touched it, but now he could see a seam opening up, a thin crack in that solid rock that had appeared as if by magic. The entire obelisk was a massive vault, and it was splitting open to let him inside.

Dragging his eyes away from the darkness within the opening, he glanced back to Rania. “I thought you said I was one?”

“Your body, the changes you’ve made… You look like one, but you don’t think like them. They loved life, all life, to the point of self-destruction. Just look at the shikari. Even when they went feral, the aions didn’t try to put them down, just found someplace safe to put them, out of harm’s way.” She was smiling, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She was trying to convince herself that what she was saying was true, even as she tried to convince Sylvas. “Even the eidolons got the same treatment, banished to another plane where they could go on living without hurting anybody. They certainly wouldn’t build something that would kill you for using it.”

“Do you think that’s why all of this had to happen? Because the aions were too civilized to put an end to the eidolons once and for all? Do you think that’s why they left this weapon behind, for someone more… savage to use it?”

The opened vault hung vast and dark before them; every breath that they took echoed inside the hollow at the heart of it all. Sylvas hesitated before he stepped in, reaching back to take Rania’s hand. She didn’t seem to have an answer for him, so they stepped into the darkness together to find out what the truth was.