Epilogue

On a warmer world, far away from the Nexus, and the black holes, and the war, and the pain, something like birds flitted by. Not eidolons in flight, not shikari on the hunt, but creatures that had evolved so far from all the known worlds that, apart from being capable of flying, there was very little that could be used to compare them to anything. Their wings were crystalline and transparent, prismatic, casting light beneath them instead of shadows. They were beautiful. Something nobody had ever seen. Even now, knowing everything that he knew and having gone through all that he had gone through, there were still surprises.

Sylvas reached up a hand and swept the clouds out of the sky. He would let them come back and rain all over the place tomorrow, but for now, Rania was breaking new ground at her dig, and he didn’t want things to get muddy.

He ached a little as he settled back into the fold-out chair beside their tent, and it took him by surprise. He had assumed that with all the changes that he’d made to his body over the years, he’d live forever, but it seemed that age was still going to catch up to him eventually. That was a problem in some ways, but not enough of one that he had to worry about finding a solution. Not yet anyway.

Kaya was here, somewhere on the planet, rampaging about and looking for trouble or fun. Not staying, but just visiting, the way she often did when Sylvas relocated to another planet. Like she had to re-assert her claim to his friendship every time that he moved. Malachai was considerably more relaxed about things. They were still friends, but weeks could pass without them hearing from one another, then some little sending spell or missive would arrive and set off a flurry of communications all over again. 

For the longest time, Sylvas had tried to stay busy, to turn all of the power that had been granted to him into a tool to make the universe a better place. In the early years, when the Empyrean was still recovering from the Great Incursion and the Dominion invasion, he had plenty of places that he needed to be. Places where he had to throw his weight around and force civilization back into shape by raw will, but by the time that the work was done, he realized that he was becoming an emperor. 

He had vanished the very next day, and nobody really had any right to complain about it because he wasn’t an elected official, or even a citizen of the Empyrean anymore. There was some time when people looked for him, of course. Every time there was any sort of problem, they threw up their hands and wished he were there to wave a hand and make it all right again, but then they dealt with their problems themselves, and Sylvas finally relaxed enough to start visiting populated planets again.

He had been in retirement for longer than he’d been in service now. Wandering around, seeing what there was to see in the great, big, wide universe. Reading through the libraries of the Veilbohr Institute. Eating meals in Hector’s restaurant when they swung back by the core worlds. Helping Vaelith as she tried to learn how to be at peace, on quiet worlds just like this one.

There weren’t a lot of aion ruins left that hadn’t been picked over by one empire or another throughout history, but when there were, Rania was always the first one to get the call. Nobody had her expertise. Sylvas didn’t go with her to every dig, but when the digs were on a tropical world like this, he found it hard to say no.

Every so often, there would still be something there, some relic that the aions had left behind for them, that they’d expected would come in useful in one of the endless scenarios that they’d planned out for the distant future, but most of their technology throughout the universe had gone cold and dark at the same time the Nexus vault powered down.

Feeling nostalgic, are we, darling?

He smiled up at the wide lilac sky overhead. “I’m not allowed to think back to the last day I was actually useful?”

She slipped out of him so easily he barely noticed. She was free now, to leave or return as she pleased, riding around in an eidolon body. The fact that she chose to spend most of her time with him never ceased to amaze Sylvas. 

“Oh, please, don’t be morose.” She planted a kiss on his cheek. “I can think of several uses for you.” 

Sylvas chuckled. “If you pop out and try to spring that on Rania again, I think she might actually kill you.”

In an instant, she was back where she belonged, tumbling back into his mind. 

Let her try. I have the almighty Starbreaker to protect me.

“What makes you think I’ll be on your side?” He laughed out loud.

Back in the old days, when he expected monsters to come leaping out of every shadow, he never would have let someone come hiking out of the tree line into his camp without a spell ready to protect himself, but he was getting sloppy in his old age. The hooded and robed figure emerged into the blazing sunshine unhindered. The Watcher, as ageless as she had been through every one of her visitations throughout his life.

“I wondered when I’d see you again.” He smiled at the woman like she was an old friend.

Her voice echoed, oddly metallic, as it always had been. Almost identical to his own, albeit a good deal higher. “My visits have not always been well-received or well-timed.” There was a momentary delay before she added, “From your perspective.”

“Well, you’ve picked a fine time for it today.” Sylvas chuckled, conjuring another chair beside him from Cold Storage.

The shrouded entity looked from him to the chair and back again, as if weighing her options, then she sank into the stupid folding chair with a little huff. 

After a moment, she turned to face him. Inside the shroud, her face looked as human as his, strangely familiar. Just as Rania had predicted, his appearance and the aion’s matched. Her voice even sounded like his. “You fulfilled your purpose.”

“The aions can rest easy knowing that their plan worked.” He settled back in the chair with a degree of satisfaction. “When you get back, you can tell them.”

She blinked. “The aions?”

He stared at her for a long time, trying to work out what her angle was. “You’re an aion, aren’t you? Come forward in time to make sure that I turned out the way you wanted?”

“One cannot travel forward through time. There is too much instability. Your knowledge of the future would invariably change that future, preventing it from coming to pass.” She said it with a certainty that made Sylvas throw a great many of his theories from over the years directly out of the window.

He wet his lips. “Then who are you?”

“I am a descendant.” She said it as if it were more than a descriptor, like it was a title. 

That was considerably more interesting. If she was descended from the aions, even if they’d crossed species lines to make her, that meant that there were still some of them out there somewhere until recently. Rania would be beside herself with excitement. “There are still aions out there?”

“No,” The Watcher corrected him again. “I am your descendant. A descendant of the Starbreaker.”

That put an end to his spiraling thoughts about searching the cosmos for aions pretty promptly. All of this time, he had assumed that he knew who she was, what she was, and now he was confronted with an unbelievable possibility.

It would be a bizarre lie, if it were a lie, something so unbelievable that there would be no point in concocting it. She said it with the same gravity as she announced everything, her expression entirely inscrutable. But now, as he stared at that expression, he didn’t look at her as if she were an alien from ages past, or a robot built to convey their message, or anything else. He looked at her as if she were a person. He saw his eyebrows. He saw Rania’s pursed lips. The similarities were minuscule, but there were just so many of them. “You’re my daughter?”

She didn’t seem amused exactly, but after so long with Bael and Malachai and everyone else who refused to let anything show on their face, Sylvas felt like he could detect something like a smile at the corners of her mouth. “There are several more generations between us than that, but essentially, yes. Your…our family’s mantle is passed down. A burden for one in each age to bear.”

Sylvas sank back into the seat and took a long pull on his drink. This was quite a lot to take in, even for him.

Realizing that he wasn’t going to say anything, she carried on. “My ascension will come in the morning. I will become the keeper of the power. The bearer of the eidolons. To be the ocean that collects all those that spring into existence and give them safe harbor as you do now. To steel my courage, I thought that I might revisit your life. To see your struggles and your overcoming of them.”

“All this time, I thought…” All of the previous trains of thought that had been running through Sylvas’ mind had derailed. All of his prodigious intellect, all of his years pondering the last mystery in his life, all gone to waste. “Huh.”

She had travelled back through time to visit her legendary ancestor, to learn from him and find purpose, and that was all he had to say for himself. “Huh, indeed.”

He cleared his throat and tried to act like the legendary figure he was supposed to be. He had no experience of being a father figure, at least not yet in his life, but apparently, that was going to change, and when it did, he was sure he’d be grateful for this practice. “Well, did you get what you needed? Are you ready for tomorrow?”

The Watcher stared out across the listless tree line. “There is a great responsibility in this, and I have always considered it to be unfair that it be foisted upon one of us, just because of our ancestry.”

Sylvas nodded, already wondering at the choices he would eventually make. “That is pretty unfair.”

Once again, he couldn’t have said what it was about her expressionless face or posture that made him think she was holding back a laugh, but it was still there. “Given your experiences, my problems must seem very small in comparison.”

“I just made the best decisions I could.” He had never been comfortable talking about his glorious victories or achievements, given just how many people had dropped dead while he was off achieving them. He knew that he had chosen the right course, and with more time and hindsight, he had only become more aware of that, but that didn’t make his guilt so easy to shrug off. “I’m pretty sure that you’d have done the same in my place.”

“Most people would not have…” She seemed slightly mystified. “You understand that you are considered heroic for your actions? Even in your own time?”

“Then I suppose the question you have to answer is: do you want to be a hero?”

If she reacted at all, Sylvas would have said that this had made her frown. Most people didn’t think of themselves as heroes. Or if they did, there was probably something wrong with them. Trying to view her actions through the same lens as she had viewed his seemed to be warping her perception. “The position in my time does not involve so much struggle. I would essentially serve as a jailor…a keeper of the eidolons. Have access to power that others do not. Perhaps bear children to take up the mantle when I pass, if I so desire, though there is no real obligation in that respect.”

“That definitely sounds like a better deal than I got,” Sylvas replied. “But if you don’t want it…then don’t. Find another way.”

She sat in quiet contemplation for a while. “I think that I do. I think that… I can do this.”

He reached over and took her hand. It seemed to shock her. That he was there, that he was real, that they could touch. He supposed it would be strange for some figure from a history book to reach out and take his hand, too. 

With a squeeze, he let go, and they settled back into companionable quiet for a moment, before curiosity got the better of Sylvas again. “So visiting the past doesn’t cause any problems, but visiting the future does? What if I decide not to have kids after this conversation?”

“You will not.”

“I won’t?”

“Your sense of duty is too great to have your station abandoned, and you have already realized your mortality.”

He smiled at her. “What if I don’t want to burden my great-great-great-granddaughter with a situation so difficult she had to go back in time for a pep talk?”

“You are missing several more iterations of ‘great’, but as I said, you will not shirk this final duty to the future.” She spoke the next words with the certainty he’d come to expect from her. “And neither will I.”

Rising to her feet, she looked into the lilac sky, and there was definitely some hint of a smile on her face. On Rania’s lips. “We will not meet again. Thank you.”

Sylvas smiled quite openly back at her. “I was happy to help.”

“You were not,” she corrected him. “But you did, all the same. And I think that is more admirable.”

She faded slowly from sight, leaving Sylvas alone once again. But it wouldn’t last. It never did.

In a few minutes, Kaya would come bounding through the shrubs, yelling about some nonsense or other. In a few hours, Rania would call him to the dig to help move something too substantial for hands and too delicate for anyone else’s magic. In a few days, Malachai would send a message about some matter in court that amused them both. In a few months, the Veilbohr Institute would invite Mira to lecture. In a few years, Hector would ask them all over for dinner. Vaelith would show him a new exercise regime. He would wake up some morning in his own bed, listening to his children giggling in the other room. 

The universe would go on turning, and life would go on.

The End

***

Thank you so much for reading Starbreaker: Volume 6 and the Starbreaker series! This brings Sylvas and the others’ adventures to an end. Thank you so much for joining and supporting me on this journey. If you enjoyed this book and series, please consider leaving a review of the book on your platform of choice. Reviews are one of the best ways to support me and my work.

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