Chapter 4
“On the moon of one planet previously uncontacted by sapient species, there was a great mound of dead bodies, raised up as if a monument. Dozens upon dozens of mages from all of the different civilizations who had risen up on the world, spaced out over millennia of development. This was one of the worlds where they were able to reach their third circle with their own studies and unlock teleportation early in their development. Down on the planet, everything was designed with teleportation in mind. Their civilizations were planted atop great plateaus unreachable from the surface. Their homes had no doors.
And in every one of the separate cultures scattered across time and geography, eventually one of them had looked up at the moon in orbit of their world and decided to visit. The moon had no atmosphere. It was a barren rock. But while the people of the world had knowledge of teleportation and other advanced magics and sciences, they had never learned about air. So each time some fresh eyes turned up to the night sky, a fresh fate was sealed by ignorance.”
—Apocryphal Tales of the Uncontacted Worlds, Terwin Crickta
The metal of the floor melted away beneath Sylvas.
The aura of destruction that he’d been so desperately restraining was allowed to do what it was meant to do. It ate its way right through to open space, and he was dumped out into the void. A glance up let him see liquid metal sealing the gap behind him, then he turned his attention to the void he’d just flung himself into.
In the vacuum of space, Sylvas moved by will alone. He no longer needed to breathe, and the pressures exerted on his form were less than it had been reinforced to survive. He did not need a ship to traverse space, or even to make the jump to null space, though his journey without the acceleration of a ship’s engines would have been a long one. The only real impediment of being without an atmosphere was that he could not speak; he could not form the words of spells to cast them. A problem that his pact and eidolon had solved.
The moment that the Saizen brother who’d been bullied up into the cockpit took control, the ship broke off from its death-spiral down towards the enemy battleship and launched away in a random direction to get out of the direct line of fire when the arrays were repaired. Sylvas gave chase, will alone moving him through the void, manipulating his personal gravity to push him to where he wanted to be. In truth, where he wanted to be was in easy firing range of the battleship, but for now, he had to keep his friends alive.
The fighters converged on the smuggler’s ship from every direction, and Sylvas shot ahead to intercept them.
In space, everything was blissfully silent. None of the alarms being sounded could carry to Sylvas’ ears. None of the screams or even the explosions.
I’m still here, darling, don’t worry. Shall I hum you some musical accompaniment?
Sylvas would have snorted if he had any air to push out through his nose. As it was, his face twisted into a smile for just a fraction of a moment.
Two of the fighters were coming in from a similar angle, so they were Sylvas’ first target. He reached out a hand, and with a twist of his wrist, he dragged one to collide into the other. Both fighters were breaking apart before they even hit one another. Even when he reached out with gravity alone to move things, it was infected with destruction. There was a flash as the ships collided, and their crews died in a brief, blazing inferno. Then the vacuum swallowed up what little air had been released, and that explosion vanished as if it had never been. The melded husks of the two fighters, now nothing more than a little scrap of detritus in space.
The other fighters broke off, blossoming away from both the smuggling ship and each other when they realized what had happened, but they were too slow. Even in their souped-up fighter craft, they were slower than the speed of Sylvas’ thoughts. As one of them tried to zip away out of his reach, he caught it by the engine block. With the sudden opposition of forces being exerted, the fighter was ripped in half. The other fighters gained enough distance that he couldn’t so easily blot them out of existence, spreading themselves as widely as possible before looping to come right back at the smuggler’s ship. They hadn’t even noticed him yet. They had no idea that there was a mage out there in space, killing them all.
Nine fighters remained in range of Sylvas’ expansive sensory sphere, and they were all carefully maintaining their distance while trying to get a clean shot at the smuggler’s ship. They were keeping their distance from the ship, thinking that the invisible force that had destroyed their comrades had come from it. They had no idea that the tiny, once-human body flying through space towards them was the actual cause of their impending doom.
When he reached the closest fighter, Sylvas accelerated instead of slowing and let the aura of destruction that he’d absorbed from the Crimson King surround him once more. He could feel it, shifting inside of him, scuttling legs scraping across the inside of his ribs, pallid, deathly hands prying at his joints. But as much as he loathed those sensations and it, he could also feel its satisfaction as he destroyed. It was a being of destruction, and he was reveling in it. Not because he wanted to, not because it was who he was as a person, but because it would help them to come into alignment and end the leakage of destruction.
He passed cleanly through the fighter without even feeling the impact. The intensity of the destruction surrounding him was too powerful to allow him even the pleasure of impact. He ripped through and carried on towards the next ship.
Time was against him. Even if he flitted through space as fast as he could move, puncturing every one of the enemy ships in turn, in the time it was taking him, the battleship would have more than enough time to repair their weapons array and blow the tiny smuggler’s ship away.
Sylvas dove back to the ship. He couldn’t be on board, couldn’t risk his proximity disintegrating his friends every time he flexed his power, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stay close enough to protect them.
He threw up a gravity shear around himself and dove, not for the ship, but to put himself between the ship and the enemy. His timing couldn’t have been better. The barrage started up again, first in random sputtering shots, then in the same overwhelming torrent as before, and it washed over the umbrella of the gravity shear that he’d raised up to wash around the Saizen ship as it tried to outpace the rotation of the enemy ship that kept that flood chasing them.
As fearsome as the barrage was, it was almost a relief. They were back in the protective wall of the bombardment, hidden from the sight of the fighters by the chaotic magic flooding by.
But the fighters weren’t hidden from Sylvas. His senses were so different from a human’s by this point, the motion of objects in space and the pull of gravity on them so ingrained in how he perceived the universe that despite all the magic and light and heat, he could make out the position of each fighter just fine.
They had to die. He couldn’t move against the battleship, leaving the Saizen ship alone, if disabling it was just going to bring the wrath of all the fighters down on his friends. He had to deal with them now.
Taking careful aim at the first one to come into his line of sight, Sylvas shaped a gravity spike, condensing and focusing it in until it was almost as dense as a black hole before launching it out through the torrent of magic. He aimed a little ahead of the ship’s trajectory to account for how slowly his own magic would travel once launched. Mira was still diligently working on the new system of magic, and his new spellbook to accompany it, but what he fired at the Dominion fighter was almost as good. He couldn’t cast his own destructive spell containing all of the different types of magic yet, but he could send out a spike that picked up an orbiting system of all the other destructive spells that it passed through on its way by. What emerged from the torrent of artillery fire bore no resemblance to the spell he’d cast. It was a chaotic mixture of every different kind of magic being launched at them, and even though the fighter spotted it coming and tried for evasive maneuvers, it couldn’t escape.
The gravity spike lost cohesion as it reached where its target was meant to be, unleashing all of the magic that it had captured on its way in a catastrophic explosion that, to Sylvas’ senses, felt like a new star being born. A supernova of all the captured spells of the enemy detonated, and the fighter, despite the distance it had managed to put between itself and the coming gravity spike, was consumed.
The Crimson King wasn’t an animal in the same way that Strife had been. It couldn’t purr and rub up against his insides when it was pleased in the way that the blood wolf had, but he could feel the approval radiating from it, and he could feel their two separate souls sliding together to occupy more of the same space.
With that test out of the way, Sylvas cast, again and again, in rapid succession, holding his spikes back just long enough for the gravity of them to intensify before launching them out at the fighters. They scrambled to escape, and a couple of them did, but the element of surprise was on Sylvas’ side, along with every other element that a mage could have an affinity for. Whatever shields they frantically tried to raise could only protect them against a portion of the spectrum of magic, and he was hitting them with so much more.
The two that did manage to escape pushed their engines to the limits, fleeing to the outer periphery of his sensory bubble, before swinging back in, not heading for an attack run on the Saizen ship, but flitting back towards their mothership. The order to withdraw must have been issued by whoever was in command.
It was all that Sylvas needed. He raced the fighters back to their ship, but while they only had physics to defy, he had to press back with his gravity shear against the full weight of all the spells that the battleship was unleashing in their direction in its endless barrage. His progress was slower, made slower still by the fact that he had to keep on expanding his gravity shear out wider and wider as he went to ensure that the little ship behind him was still under its umbrella.
The structure of the spell was never meant to be twisted so wide. Gaps were forming between the curved sigils of the Aion words that made it up. Mana sparked between them as if they were separate works of magic, disrupting each other instead of one coherent piece. As the next wall of spells descended on it, the impact tore the structure further, and a stream of sparks flooded through one of the minute gaps, heading straight past Sylvas and toward the undefended smugglers.
Pulsing his personal gravity, he pulled the sparks off course. Driving it up even further, he put them into an orbit around him. As more and more holes started to punch through his shield, he moved, gathering each stream of spell fire up until he was enveloped like an atom in the flow of dozens of orbiting spell fragments.
The shield was coming down if he tried to press any further forward, but that didn’t mean he had to accept the death of his friends or defeat. Sylvas cast another gravity spike, right down the center of his own shield, picking up the fragmented remains of the shear along with all the other spells hitting it. Gathering up all of the magic from that vast torrent of a dozen casters or more most destructive curses into a massive glowing sphere as it passed through, gaining more and more mass as it flew towards the battleship.
The Dominion ship could see it coming. They’d seen what happened to their fighters when one of those spheres made contact, and they weren’t willing to risk it all to prove the strength of their shields. The bombardment stopped, and they burst into motion, peeling off from the level that Sylvas had fired on, and then throwing everything they had into thrust. It was the smart play. The collected mass of all their spells detonated messily in space behind them, and even with all the distance they’d managed to put between them, it still slapped the crescent of the ship into a spin.
Sylvas’ grin left frozen spittle crystallizing across his teeth in the chill of space, but he couldn’t contain it. He had needed time to close the distance, and they’d handed it to him. The battleship managed to regain control of the direction it was headed, levelling out and starting to turn back in to unleash its full strength against the smuggler’s ship. It never got the chance. The engines were firing, the magic flowing into them, but it made no difference. They stopped dead in space, and Sylvas, with his hand held out toward them, knew it was over. They were in his reach now, and no matter what they cast or what cunning plans they might hatch, his gravity enveloped them.
Clenching his fist, he watched as the distant warship began to crumple inwards under the weight of his will. Through the gravity extending out from him, he could feel as the pilot of the ship desperately flung it around in every direction that they could, to absolutely no avail. There was no force in the universe more relentless than gravity. They were not escaping. Not in this universe. Hopefully, the pilot was smart enough to realize it, too.
The black void portal through to null-space opened up, and Sylvas let the battleship drop into it without a struggle. The disruption to faster-than-light travel was over.
