Chapter 5

“Alignment is a key element to understanding magic at its highest levels. As each of us contains a core and orbiting circles, so, too, does each solar system in the cosmos contain a star and orbiting bodies, whether planets or less structured shapes. Regardless of the specifics, the result is the same, with the highest flow of mana passing through the gathered planets when they all come into alignment. For grand-scale ritual magic, this increase in available mana can be vital to pushing a previously unworkable spell over the finish line into plausibility, but the variation must also be accounted for in lesser workings, also. When a planet rife with fire mana comes into alignment with our own, the spell that previously lit only a candle can flare into destruction. When the distant planet on the edge of the system comes into alignment, and death mana floods in, weakening all healing, wounds that should have been sealed will suddenly begin to bleed again. 

When a planet of overabundant life comes into alignment, our healing spells can spill over from merely assisting a body in fighting off a disease into creating an autoimmune disorder. We are not alone in this universe; we do not act in a vacuum, unaffected by the movement of the stars and planets. Magic is about balance in all things, and if you do not have knowledge of the alignment of all the elements of the spells that you cast, and the outside factors that will warp them, then that balance will be lost, without you even realizing it was a possibility.”

—The Patterning of the Cosmos, Elenya Starweaver

Within a blink, Sylvas had teleported back into the Saizens’ ship and pulled all his aura of destruction back inside his body. It was, technically, eating away at his flesh every moment, but he could filter out the pain, and the other eidolon within him constantly regenerated and healed him, so the actual effect was pretty minimal, apart from odd moments when a spike of pain ran through him as the alien mana lashed unexpectedly against a nerve cluster and destroyed it.

He took in a deep breath, feeling the thin layer of ice covering him loosen and melt, and then he charged back through to the cockpit, where everyone was gathered. The Saizen piloting the ship was distracted. The other leapt away from Sylvas as if he was a ghost, and while he might have taken the initial startle as nothing more than surprise, it was hard not to read more into the fact that the sweaty little man chose to retreat all the way out of the room the moment Sylvas wasn’t blocking the doorway. “I’m back. Let’s get out of here.”

The Saizen in the pilot’s circle came back to awareness with a jump almost as dramatic as his clone-brother. “You!”

“Yes, me. I’m back.” Sylvas moved forward to seize control if he had to. “Let’s go!”

“The etherium is all buggered.” The smuggler spat. “Your magic’s cracked it.”

“Then let me…” He stepped forward, ready to flood the ship with his mana and throw them off through null-space again. He wouldn’t get the opportunity.

Something hit them. 

It would take Sylvas some time to realize that it was a spell, and not a meteor or some other detritus, and it would take him even longer to realize that they’d been hit by the opening volley of the warship that had dipped into null-space for only a moment or two before emerging to resume its bombardment. Of course, it was something of a moot point, since the other two battleships had closed the distance throughout their long fire-fight and were now beginning to unleash their own bombardment from what felt like every direction at once.

When the spell hit, instinct saved them. Kaya threw up a sphere of steel around the people in the cockpit to protect them from the impact. Sylvas threw out a shield against the forces being flung against them outside, something closer to a work of unified magic than he really should have been able to muster, flung together in a panic with a twist of his eidolon.

The others could see nothing but the solid steel shell, but Sylvas’ senses showed him exactly what he feared: the rest of the ship had been obliterated. Cracked like an egg by the first spell to hit and then ground away to nothing by the rest. All that was left of the ship was the parts inside the sphere. With a quick cast, Sylvas made a glowing orb to generate air with a fragment of his world-soul mana, then he gave Kaya a nod, and she let the steel sphere begin to melt away.

The three battleships dominated the sky. Their fighters swarmed around them as they crept in closer to inspect the corpse of their enemy, not even realizing that the most dangerous part of the Saizens’ ship was still intact. Sylvas rolled his shoulders and started planning.

Darling, I think you’ve forgotten something…

“No.” The Saizen pilot had been hunched down among them, cowering as his ship was destroyed, but now he rose to his feet and looked for his brother. His brother, who’d fled the room before they raised their shields around it. “No!”

A black spot appeared at the periphery of Sylvas’ vision, but it was gone by the time he turned to glance that way, and he discounted it as damage to his eyes from the vacuum of space being repaired.

The Saizen brother who lived tried to throw himself at Sylvas, tried to swing his fists, but the others caught him before he could get close. All it would have achieved was breaking his hands anyway. Sylvas couldn’t think about this right now. Not with their survival still hanging in the balance. He used his paradigm to shut down his screaming conscience. “I’m sorry. We can mourn him if we live.”

That just seemed to enrage the surviving Saizen even more. “Bastard!”

A flash blinded them, halting their arguments for a moment. Two of the Dominion fighters must have collided, judging by the destruction. Sylvas reached out with his gravity and began snatching others as they came within reach, smashing them against each other like a clumsy child manhandling toys. Then his gravity touched against something that his eyes told him wasn’t there.

Another ship was out there, just a little bigger than the Dominion fighters, hidden by layers of magic. Yet it still felt familiar to Sylvas’ touch when his gravity brushed over its blocky surfaces.

The Dominion attack wing sprang into motion. They couldn’t see this ship, and the chaos of Sylvas slamming fighters together created a good enough smokescreen that their reactions were muddled, but they were moving as if to give chase to it. The ship was invisible, but the motion of it through the enemy fleet was easy to track. Green explosions burst in lines along the warship’s side as it swept by, fighters bursting apart as they were overcome from the inside out with equally explosive vegetation cracking them apart.

A fighter snapped in half as it tried to move into the course of the hidden ship, exploding apart as if it had been caught in the jaws of some titanic reptile. That was when Sylvas knew for certain. “Everyone together.”

Malachai raised a wry eyebrow. “How much closer can we possibly get?”

Sylvas answered by grabbing Kaya and Rania around the waist and ramming them in towards the Saizen brother who lived. With a yank of gravity, Malachai was hauled off his feet, too, flung onto the pile of bodies. Sylvas and Mira were both lost in frantic calculations, but he remembered at the very last moment to call out, “Hold your breath!”

They teleported, Sylvas’ spell complete. Everything went black and silent as they passed through null-space, then abruptly everything was bright and loud again. No longer bathing in the glow of distant stars, they were all crammed on top of a table and half-booth built into a ship that definitely shouldn’t have had a mess hall crammed into its middle.

Untangling from each other took a moment, one that seemed to be particularly mortifying for Malachai, who had received a Kaya directly to the face on landing. Sylvas dragged himself free first, clawing his way out from amongst his friends, staggering along the passage to the bridge, and then freezing in surprise.

Hector spun around in his circle, grinning wolfishly. “You were expecting someone else?”

There were certain experiences in life that Sylvas had never had. Certain impulses that he’d seen in others that he didn’t think that he himself possessed. It turned out that some of them just hadn’t been triggered before. He crossed the room and had Hector wrapped in a hug before the man could get out another word. 

When the rib-creaking embrace stopped, he leaned back to look at Hector again. To take in all of the healing that had brought him back to looking human again. “Yes, I’m alive, Vail. Yes, I’ve come to save the day. Don’t act so surprised. It’s what I do.”

A dull tone sounded from one of the consoles, and Hector groaned. “Of course, it would be easier if the Dominion would stop blocking null-space.”

The others had managed to untangle themselves and follow after Sylvas by then, and the force of Kaya’s hug knocked Hector right out of the command circle. Sylvas stepped in with a chuckle.

The Folly leapt to his command like an obedient dog awaiting the return of its master. His mind flooded out through the systems so fast it was as though he’d never left, as though it had never been destroyed and rebuilt. The new spells keeping it hidden from sight were unravelling from the prying of the Dominion’s scrying spells, but they still had a few moments of being hidden that Hector probably meant to use to jump out of the system. It was unfortunate that the Dominion were so quick to catch on to what was happening. Sylvas missed fighting eidolons. Idiot enemies were easier to deal with.

His mana didn’t immediately blow up any of the Folly’s systems, presumably because they were so much better made, and so well reinforced against surges, but he knew that there was only going to be a limited window that he could use to fly before he had to turn over control to someone who was less corrosive. He had to use that time well, to set up whoever replaced him with an easy trip out of this mess.

There were three battleships, and any one of them might have been the source of the arcane blockade keeping them out of null-space. With the rebuilt Folly’s cloak of invisibility, there would be enough time to make an attack run on one of the enemy ships of the line before they were revealed, and the other two could obliterate them with their overwhelming firepower. They had a one in three chance of hitting the right ship and escaping, and a two in three chance of dying the moment they hit their target. He opened his mouth to say Mira’s name, but she was already there, answering.

Darling, I’m in the middle of incorporating an eidolon of destruction into your magical core without killing you. If you think that there is any chance a prediction of the future generated by your paradigms while they’re flooded with this chaotic mana is going to be accurate, then I’m not sure how to help you, short of signing you up to receive a brain transplant from someone less fundamentally stupid.

“Thank you, Mira,” he grumbled to himself before startling back to his body at the touch of Rania’s hand on his arm.

She looked worse for wear after everything that had happened, but she didn’t look defeated, and that put a little bit of hope back into Sylvas, too. “We have a plan.”

Saizen scoffed. “I have a plan.”

“You’re… still helping us?” Sylvas had almost forgotten that the crime lord was even on board. There was an anger burning behind the sweaty little man’s eyes when they met. Furious enough that it made Sylvas hesitant to speak again, but he had no other choice. “What’s the plan?”

“This guy says you can take one out, but you think like a soldier. You need to think like a smuggler. Where’s the blind spot?”

Sylvas threw an illusory map of local space up between them. All the objects in space were smaller than the Folly. “There isn’t one.”

Saizen reached up and spun the map through all three axis, then jabbed his finger into a spot in empty space. “Go there.” He tapped the most distant of the three warships. “Shoot there.”

The other two warships were aligned along the axis that Saizen had picked. They’d be using one of them as a shield against the other. Making it so that only the closest ship could attack them when they became visible.

“Come on, gambler. One in three just became two in three.” Saizen tried to smile, but it turned into a grimace as tears pooled in his eyes. “Gambling with our lives.”

Sylvas stepped towards the command circle, only for Hector to stop him. “I want you on weapons.”

It made more sense, especially given that everything he cast seemed to be inadvertently destructive at the moment. “Fine.”

“Kaya, repairs. Mr.… Saizen? Navigation.”

Malachai drew himself up to his full height. “And me?”

“You’re point-defense.” He gestured the necromancer over to the sensor array. It was easy to imagine how they could be reversed into projectors instead of receivers with a little force. “Kill their fighters.”

“Probably wise,” Sylvas said as he took his place at the relevant console. “I was going to use him as a bomb. Throw him onto the warship if they got too close.”

“Oh, that’s good!” Hector clapped his hands together. “There’s our backup plan.”

Malachai’s expression never faltered. “I’m not entirely delighted to be used as munitions.”

“I’ll take communications.” Rania took a careful hold on the console, as if afraid it might buck her off. “See if I can’t listen in on their chatter.”

“Thank you, beautiful stranger, who I hope to be introduced to later.” Hector grinned at her, and she couldn’t help but smile back. That was the power of his grin. Even in conditions as dire as this.

Especially in conditions as dire as this.