Chapter 7

“Unmentioned in all of this is the troubling statistic about circle breaches. Having to contend with two different types of mana makes managing containment more than twice as difficult. Simply managing twice the usual number of affinity types would not account for the percentage of containment failures that occur when a multi-affinity mage attempts to advance. It is the chaotic result of the two affinities combining and contesting space that causes the troubling 18% higher rate of catastrophic failure.”

—Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Part Two, Curgal Groenen

Hector was there when Sylvas next woke up, still a little surprised to be alive and whole. 

Rania was there, too, but that was less of a surprise. She was rapidly becoming a constant in his life, and, in particular, the parts of his life when he was clawing his way back to consciousness. Hector was standing in the doorway of the cabin, grinning like a maniac and wiggling his eyebrows. In a stage whisper, Hector announced, “Morning, loverboy.”

Sylvas eased his way out from the tangle of Rania’s arms, remembering at the last moment before the blanket pulled away to check he had clothes on. He pressed a finger to his lips and followed Hector back out, past the occupied mess where everyone else seemed to be more invested in drinking than eating, and along to the cockpit where they’d have some privacy.

“You dumped me in the hospital, and they stitched me up,” Hector said, with an ongoing grin as the door slid shut behind them. Sylvas hadn’t even known that there was a door—it had always been open the whole time they were on the Folly. Maybe it had been a new addition with the repairs. “Couldn’t find you anywhere, so I went and got my ship back up and running.”

“How did you find us?” Sylvas’ voice came out sounding rough, as if he’d been asleep for much longer than he realized. A lot of things felt different after the sleep. First and foremost, he no longer seemed to be dissolving from the inside out.

“The Empyrean doesn’t know where you are, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hector was leaning against the console as casual as could be, just like old times, but there was an edge to his voice that sounded less like him and more like his eidolon. Just a little bit snappy.

“I don’t care what the Empyrean knows.” Sylvas tried not to let his frustration come through. “I’m just trying to work out where I didn’t cover our tracks.”

Hector chuckled. “Turns out, bribing criminals on Glamrock is really cheap.”

“Saizen wouldn’t give me up.” Sylvas paused, then corrected himself. “Well… he’d give me up in a heartbeat. But he wouldn’t give up two of himself.”

“Two?” Hector cocked his head to one side.

“We lost one in the… I should apologize to the one who’s still standing… how do you even do that?”

Hector brushed past that subject as quickly as possible. “It wasn’t Saizen, just some of the usual scumbags who told me about you meeting him. Then it was just a matter of tracking which direction you went and looking for exploding planets.”

Sylvas’ mouth fell open. “You snuck past the Dominion fleet.”

“Easy if you know the right spells.” The other man shrugged.

“Into Dominion territory.”

Another shrug, as if it was all entirely casual and forgettable. “It’s only an act of war if they spot you.”

Sylvas couldn’t quite let that part go, not yet. “So you know that they’re moving to attack the Empyrean. That fleet was…”

“I put it together. Yeah.” There was a brief lull in the conversation. “You want to catch me up on what the hell you’ve been doing?”

Sylvas was still hung up on the last detail. “Wait, so you knew that the Empyrean was about to be invaded, and you still came after us?”

“Do you think you’re the only one with eyes in the universe?” Hector rolled his eyes. “The Empyrean knows what’s coming our way. You needed the help more.”

Sylvas blinked. “The council didn’t try to pull you back? To defend the core worlds?”

“I… might have been ducking their calls.”

“They must really regret letting all their covenant mage intelligence operatives run wild without oversight…”

“Oh yeah.” Hector chuckled. “After this… yeah, it’s going to be interesting.”

“The Aions had a plan for the eidolon incursion.”

“Project Starbreaker.” He noticed Sylvas staring at him and explained, “I borrowed those Seeker files you left with the Ardent. That helped track you down, too.”

“I’ve got the location for the Nexus.” It seemed that this was going to be one of those conversations that raised an endless number of questions that they really didn’t have the time to deal with. “The device that the Starbreaker is meant to use to wipe out the eidolons once and for all.”

Hector’s smile had never looked anything but sincere to Sylvas, but as he spoke now, he smirked just a little more than was really needed. “I take it you think you’re the Starbreaker?”

Sylvas flinched. “It’s our working theory.”

“All the prophecy parts lining up?” 

It took Sylvas a moment to realize that the reason Hector was smirking and ribbing him was that he was uncomfortable about the whole fate and ancient prophecy situation, not that he was doubting Sylvas’ word. 

His shoulders loosened. “If you squint a little.”

Hector chuckled and clapped his hands. “Okay, so we need to get you there. Where is there?”

“Oh.” Sylvas cast the star map to the Beast’s Eyes black holes out between them.

The spy let out a long, low whistle, like a bomb falling from a great height as he studied the map. “So just… right at the heart of the Dominion, then.”

Sylvas tried to shrug it off. “We’re already behind enemy lines. We can…”

Hector pinched the bridge of his nose, his smile faltering for the first time since he’d dragged Sylvas out of bed. “It’s the most reinforced and guarded stretch of space in the universe. This isn’t going to be a ‘sneak in’ kind of job. More of a ‘you and what armies?’ – armies plural – kind of situation.”

Straightening up, Sylvas met his gaze. “We’re stronger than armies.”

“Even we’ve got limits.”

Sylvas knew how to avoid an argument well enough, and he could sense a brick wall rapidly approaching that he had no intention of smashing his head against. It was easy to predict without any paradigm to help. There was a comfortable rhythm in talking with Hector, something he hadn’t even realized that he was missing while the man was hospitalized and crispy fried. So he switched direction. “About that…”

“About what?” Hector was still smiling, but his eyes narrowed.

Sylvas tried a discreet approach to the subject. “There isn’t a lot of reading material about covenants.”

“Because covenants are meant to be a secret,” Hector replied slowly and carefully. “Is this about Kaya and the eidolon she’s trying to integrate, because you don’t have to tell me. This is how it always goes. One person gets a covenant, then everybody around them wants one, and it snowballs into…”

Apparently, the subtle approach wasn’t going to work. Sylvas blurted out, “I bound another eidolon.”

“Yeah, in Kaya. She’s got a Tier-5 or 6 metal affinity one? Still haven’t caught up on the full story, but she gave up most of it. Terrible at keeping secrets.”

Sylvas tried to nudge him back in the right direction. “A Tier-7 eidolon.”

“No, it’s definitely only 5 or 6. Nobody has bound a Tier-7 eidolon in covenant.” Hector gave a shudder, mostly for show. “They’re just too strong. They’d rip you apart from the inside, even if they didn’t mean to.”

“We aren’t talking about Kaya.” Sylvas didn’t mean to raise his voice, but it seemed like the words he was saying just weren’t getting through to the other man. “I bound a second eidolon.”

Hector rolled his eyes. “It’s a one-and-done deal. If you somehow bound more than one, the conflicting mana affinities would clash and kill you. Even trying to bind one with the same affinity as you already had wouldn’t work because you’d…” He trailed off as he met Sylvas’ stare. “This isn’t a hypothetical conversation.”

Sylvas tried to push forward despite how impossible everything apparently was. “The affinity clash isn’t happening because I’ve implanted a world soul in place of my old mana crystals. It lets me access the full spectrum of…”

“Solves one problem. But then there’s the problem of… you said a Tier 7? Why isn’t it completely overwhelming you? The only way we can form covenants is by balancing their power against our will. Something as powerful as Tier 7, whatever affinity it was, it should be doing massive damage to your body. You should be in pieces.”

Despite his mounting concern, Sylvas managed a wry smile. “I should be dust. It’s an eidolon of destruction with an annihilation field surrounding it. But my other eidolon has some sort of blood aspect that keeps healing me.”

“But why aren’t the two eidolons fighting? They should both be after…” Hector grabbed hold of his head as if he were worried it was about to burst. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. I mean, if anyone was crazy enough, it would be you, but I still don’t understand why you’d even want to…”

“I didn’t.” Sylvas corrected the conversational course again. “I didn’t want to. It was an accident, the same as when I formed my first covenant. We were both trying to destroy each other, and that aligned our…”

“Poor eidolon probably thought it had gotten an easy win. Slip in the back door of the mage kicking it in the ass, and exploding him from the inside out.” Hector’s smile had taken on a manic quality at some point during this conversation, and now it was finally starting to slip. “Then it gets inside with the bomb, and the place is indestructible.”

“I… I don’t know what it is thinking. I don’t think they… think. Not the way we do.”

“Raw instinct, raw emotion, yeah?” Hector patted his stomach absent-mindedly. “Cookie was never going to be winning any academic scholarships either.”

There was another momentary lull in the conversation, an opportunity for Sylvas to announce that he was just kidding, and all the known laws of magic weren’t slowly being eroded by his ongoing survival. He needed more information. “So you’ve never heard of anyone…”

Hector shook his head, slumping back against the consoles as if he was trying to melt into them. “There aren’t enough of us for there to be stories or rumors. We barely even know one another exists, unless something like the Empyrean High Council comes along and forces us to. Whatever you’ve done… I guess you’re the first.” He let out a wheezy laugh. “Congratulations?”

Sylvas set his concerns aside. “Maybe the theory is right. Maybe I’ll still explode later.”

“Makes being stuck in a spaceship with you a lot more exciting?” The little joke was all it had taken to get him back to his usual self. Sylvas couldn’t resist smiling. To see the other man back to his normal self after all the suffering he’d been through gave him a little spark of hope back that he hadn’t even realized he’d lost.

Hector pushed himself to his feet. “Well, no matter how badly you’ve messed yourself up, I hope that you’ve still got some fight in you. We’re back in Empyrean space, and we’ll probably be hitting the rear of the Dominion fleet in”—alarms started screeching all over the ship as they were forcibly dragged out of null-space and back into reality—“now. Apparently.”

The screens around the front of the cockpit were filled with ships. Hundreds of them, maybe more, it was impossible to tell at a glance, with all of them in motion and fighting. The Folly had been pulled back into real-space just behind the battle lines of the Dominion, but their arrival had not gone unnoticed. Swarms of fighters surrounded the warships, acting like point-defense systems for their larger and more sluggish cousins, but it seemed that they weren’t entirely vital to the ongoing conflict, given the dozen or so that came streaming back towards the Folly.

A sending spell flashed on the screen, and Hector casually answered it. An armored Dominion pilot glowered back at them from the slick black interior of his fighter; contempt was dripping from every word that he spoke. “Unidentified ship. This is an active war zone. Retreat or be destroyed.”

Hector’s apparently bottomless enthusiasm was undaunted by the threats. “I’d be delighted to head home. If you lovely people just want to open up a hole in the battle line for me to fly through, I’ll be on my way.”

The pilot seemed to catch up to what Hector was saying quicker than most would have. “You’re with the Empyrean?”

His grin just seemed to go on getting wider and more predatory the longer the conversation went on. “Well, currently, I’m all on my lonesome, but if you open up that gap I asked for, I’ll be with the Empyrean in no time.”

The line of communication was cut, and the fighters began their attack approach. Hector looked askance to Sylvas, as if he were shocked. “Was it something I said?”

He pressed down on a button on the panel he’d been leaning on, and his voice echoed back through the ship. “Battle stations, kids!”

Sylvas took a step towards the weapons and then paused, eyes darting to the silver circle in the middle of the room. He looked at Hector, who gestured to the controls with a chuckle. “Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

Before you start fretting, darling. The eidolon’s mana has been integrated into our own. We are safe to fly.

His feet didn’t touch the ground between where he’d been standing and the control circle, and the moment that he was inside and his mind was flooding out into the Folly’s systems, it felt like coming home. He was going to have to ask how the hell Hector managed to get the ship fixed up so well, so fast. If they survived the next few minutes.

Flinging the Folly sideways with a slap of his will, the first volley of shots from the enemy fighters passed them by, but it didn’t take long for them to adjust their approach and their aim. That was when he threw mana into the engines. 

He had been flying other ships for some time now, but even in the royal yachts and flagships of the different factions they’d encountered, none of them could compare to the purr of the Folly’s engines as it launched them forward ahead of the tracing shots trying to pin down their position.

Conventional logic in this situation would have been to stay as far away from the enemy ships of the line as possible to make sure that all of their overwhelming firepower couldn’t be turned their way. Use the enemy fighters as interference and chaff to keep the real danger at bay. Actual conventional logic would have been to turn tail and run as fast as possible from this whole situation, but they were here now, and they needed to punch through the enemy line to get back to the Empyrean, and whatever Hector had planned.

Instead, Sylvas drove them forward towards the enemy ships. Whipping the Folly forward with such acceleration that the spells that provided artificial gravity strained, and everyone onboard was flung back towards the engine block. Everyone who couldn’t manifest their own gravity.

They spun in a barrel roll as they passed by the enemy fighters, not to evade their shots, which were still trailing miles behind them, but because Sylvas was filled with a zest for life. The Folly looked like a box with additional attachments thanks to its dwarvish design, while the enemy fighters had a sleek appearance that should have been paired with them being the fastest thing in the sky. The irony of them being too slow to catch up to this flying box amused Sylvas, so he did his little roll and mocked them, just a little.

More of the fighters surrounding the warship that they were currently diving for broke off to intercept them. Sylvas was delighted to discover that he could instantly cast a gravity shear again without dissolving half the spell circuits in the ship, so the shots that they did fire off deflected. 

The fighters were all converging on their location, trying to drive him off course by occupying the space that he was headed for. The sides of a ship were an easier target than its nose, so knocking him offline would give their clumsy shots a better chance of making contact. It would have been tactically sound, if he hadn’t been willing to ram right through them.

Gritting his teeth, he strengthened the shear and pushed the engines even harder. Any moment now, they would collide. Then he felt the presence in his mind, someone else connecting to the ship’s systems – the weapons systems specifically – and he felt the chill of death mana flooding through and out.

The fighters that had all been converging at the highest speed they could muster suddenly drifted rudderless and dead in space. Without pilots, they were just space junk to be navigated around.

Distantly, filtered through Mira, Sylvas could hear the conversation on board. Kaya hooting, “Nice shooting!”

Malachai stoically replying, “My thanks.”

Sylvas corkscrewed them around the cluster of dead fighters and plunged on towards the enemy fleet, only pausing for a moment to reach back and detonate an inverted gravity spike amidst the clustered dead ships so that they scattered out into the path of their pursuers. 

He realized with a grunt that it hadn’t been the eidolon Strife he’d contorted into the spellform for the complex gravity spell, but the new one. The Crimson King was now so integrated with him that he could use it to cast. Mira had been busy while he slept.

Darling, it is amazing how much more I can get done when I slave your brain to my own and use our combined processing power.

He chose not to think about that too much.

Yes, good. Keep that head nice and empty for me…

The fighters in pursuit had managed to avoid the sudden detonation of their compatriots’ now-empty ships into their paths, but their steady stream of fire was now beginning to trace dangerously close to the Folly’s engines. Sylvas had a thought and then immediately put it into action. 

Both the Crimson King and the eidolon Strife could be used as mediums to cast through, instantly. He fired off two gravity spikes simultaneously. The concentration required was a little tricky and blinded him to what was happening in the exact moment of casting, as all his attention was diverted, but the results were hard to argue with. 

Two little black darts fired from the rear weapon arrays of the Folly, almost invisible in the darkness of space, and when they were amidst the enemy fighters’ formation, they detonated into tiny black holes. They were weak enough that they likely wouldn’t have done more than cripple one of the fighters in normal circumstances, but with all of the other fighters to mash together, the death toll was almost absolute. One ship came limping out of the fireball of colliding fighters, and one of Malachai’s lethal spells washed over it before it could do anything more than that, leaving it drifting dead just a little ahead of the rest.

Now they only had to deal with the entire fleet of warships, and they’d be home free.