Starbreaker

“On each relic world Eidolons still roam the wild places. Of course they do. They have nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Their work is complete. They are death, and there is nothing left to kill.”

—Requiem For the Vanished, Luvid Hagen

His slate gave pretty clear instructions, but the maps were all shown on its two-dimensional surface, when the complex of tunnels and chambers inside the cliff-face was extremely three dimensional. There was no clear distinction between the chimneys through the stone that would have ladders and those that were simply bare and dusty rock, so while moving downwards was all too easy, moving up was hit-or-miss all the way. If I could fly, it would have been no problem. If mana infused my muscles, I could have leapt up and rebounded to the floor above without breaking a sweat, but to a mage with no particular enhancements to their body, and no spells to help me move around, just getting to my bunk is a challenge. And it was a bunk, rather than a room.

Despite all of the empty space in this ruin that he’d spent time wandering through to find where they’d sleep at night, his bed was fastened on top of another and lined up in a hallway with countless more. The tunnel was barely wide enough for him and the bed to stand side by side, if one of the lockers in between the bunks was opened then the passage became unusable too. It seemed like it was deliberately designed to make them as claustrophobic and uncomfortable as possible. Perhaps it was. Perhaps these were the conditions that they’d be sleeping in on Ardent ships once their training was done. With his bunk found, Sylvas checked in the locker to find the promised changes of uniform already hanging in place, along with a second pair of boots resting at the bottom that he hadn’t even thought to ask about.

The mess hall was a lot easier to find, if not easier to get to. The whole complex had been built by mages, for mages, so the usual concerns about things like verticality were absent from the design. Stairs and elevators didn’t exist, in part because of the age of the structure they were inhabiting here in the cliffs, but mostly because the people living there didn’t need them.

The punch earlier had been forgotten in the flood of adrenaline that followed, but it ached like a knot in his stomach now as he clambered and climbed his way down chimneys cut into the bare stone. It was just as well that he had woken in the infirmary so early, otherwise he probably would have missed dinner entirely.

He arrived in another pristine white space within the cliffside, with all the dust and crumbling stone held back by plates of that same material the ardent ships seemed to be constructed from. Even with the best efforts of the staff and whatever cleaning spells they had at their disposal, the floor did not remain white, red footprints trailed everywhere about the mess. The same regulation patterned boots. The tables and benches were all sterile planes of metal, devoid of any homey touches. This place was not somewhere to get comfortable. Nowhere on the planet seemed to be. The Ardent could have made it a comfortable place if they had wanted, could have set up filtering fields to keep out the rust-colored dust and built in furnishings to make everyone feel at home, but the intention was for them to be uncomfortable. Comfort would have encouraged them to stay put, when the only path to comfort was ascension, even the lazy could be driven on. Sylvas had seen it all, in his last life, before his world died.

“Oi! Devildrinker!” Kaya bellowed at the top of her lungs, making Sylvas and every other recruit nearby flinch. “Over here!”

Somehow, despite having been here precisely the same length of time as Sylvas, Kaya had already managed to slot herself neatly in amongst the other recruits. She was seated in the middle of one of the benches with others pressed in neatly at her sides. All eyes had turned to Sylvas, of course, with her drawing attention to him, but they soon returned to their conversations, all of which Kaya seemed to be at the heart of. Sylvas had known that she was easy to get along with once you got past the rough edges, but he had no idea that she’d prove to be so… sociable.

He made a detour to the kitchen where a depressed looking elf in a hairnet carefully assembled a tray of food for him, even adding a sprig of some herb on top of the heap of nutritional slop just for the look of it, then headed over to join Kaya. It was with no small amazement that he approached the packed table and saw people slide along the bench to make room for him. Perhaps he would find some camaraderie here after all.

“Why’s she call you that?” A slender fiend girl to his left asked him and for a brief moment, Sylvas flashed back to the memory of a forked tongue tickling along the roof of his mouth.

He blinked the recollection away. “The first time that I met Kaya, it was after a rather poorly considered night out with one of your kinfolk.”

“End up in the infirmary then, too?” The girl had turned back to her dinner with a roll of the eyes.

It was a fair assumption, but it still irritated Sylvas. “Well, yes, but just for my physical exam. The fiend that I had gone out with was there…”

“Still blacked-out.” Kaya cackled from the other side of the table.

There was a moment of hushed silence. “He outdrank a fiend?”

Sylvas opened his mouth to correct their misunderstanding, but it seemed Kaya was having none of it. “Even showed up to his appointment on time the next morning!”

Sylvas face nearly hit his nutritional slop when the fiend girl slapped him on the back. “Damn boy! I’ll have to take you out with me next time we get leave.”

There was some laughter, and a sense of general agreement from the rest of the table that they were looking forward to going out drinking with Sylvas, or possibly just looking forward to going out drinking.

By that point, correcting them all would have been even more awkward, so Sylvas just started picking at his dinner instead. It was less than appetizing. The dwarf to his left chuckled. “You get used to it.”

Sylvas forced himself to chew and swallow a mouthful before replying, “I don’t want to?”

That drew out another chuckle, even though Sylvas hadn’t been joking in the slightest.

An albino Najash beside Kaya leaned forward, it took Sylvas a moment to realise it was the same one who he had knocked out of the sky, and who had threatened him in the infirmary. “I hear you ran into little Lord Hammerheart.”

“The dwarf with the minions?” Sylvas was still dealing with the gritty texture of the food on his tongue. “I had no idea that he was nobility.”

That drew more laughter. The fiend at his side nudged him with a giggle that seemed far too girlish for somebody with horns. “He sure thinks he’s royalty.”

“Daddy’s mining consortium bought him a spot in officer training.” The Najash continued. “Needs knocked down a peg… or five.”

The knot in Sylvas stomach still ached. “Well I can assure you that after today, I intend to do as much knocking as possible.”

“Good on you, lad.” The dwarf at his side said, warmly.

It seemed that loyalties were not drawn along racial lines among the Ardent, that was a relief, as despite having been informed that humans were the dominant species among the Empyrean, Sylvas had to say that he had seen very few of them on Strife until now and if he was going to have to fall back on them for support every time there was a disagreement, they would have been heavily outnumbered.

There were a couple of humans at this table, but they looked as alien to Sylvas as any of the others. One had metal rings fixed through his ears and a beard like a dwarf’s. Another had bright pink hair, buzzed in so short at the sides that he could make out inked patterns on her scalp. They might have been human, but their experiences living inside the Empyrean were so different from everything that he’d ever known that he didn’t even know how to talk to them. The pink haired girl caught him staring and flashed him an insincere smile. All of her teeth were made of gold. Alien.

Attention was drawn back to Kaya by a belch. “I was just telling these soft Empyrean folks that their days of topping rankings were over now the real competition has arrived from outside their borders.”

Sylvas did his best not to flinch again. He had hoped to keep his status as an outsider a secret and do some private study to catch up on any customs and behavior that currently escaped him, but it seemed that Kaya felt honesty was the best policy, even if it painted a target on their backs.

The Najash snorted, “I keep telling her, the Empyrean recruits are the ones to watch out for. We’re here because we’ve got to be. They chose to be here.”

Kaya waved her hand as if she could knock the words away, “Load of krahg! I grew up sleeping on cold steel, eating cold steel, breaking ore with my bare hands. This lot couldn’t bend a girder if you held it for them.”

The dwarf at Sylvas side barked something back in dwarvish that had Kaya on her feet and roaring more untranslatable words right back at him. The dwarf had thrown himself up to meet her eye to eye, bellowing right back, then the two of them slumped back down onto their respective benches and went back to eating as though nothing had happened. The fiend girl giggled, “Dwarves…”

She had leaned in close like it was a whisper, and Sylvas had felt her breath tickling his ear. For a brief moment he was distracted enough to eat his dinner without the unpleasant experience of tasting it.

The albino najash watched Sylvas with narrowed eyes, but said nothing to shame him, even though it must have been abundantly clear from his slow spreading blush what had happened. Instead she just shrugged her shoulders and turned back to Kaya. “You’ll get your chance to prove it tomorrow, one way or the other.”

“We starting out with another big scrap at dawn?” Kaya looked entirely too excited by the prospect. Sylvas had gotten some measure of revenge on Hammerheart and his lackeys, but he imagined that his dwarf friend was itching for some payback.

“No, we’ll be starting lectures.” Her sharp teeth snapped shut after the word. “Anyone who can cast a spell can fight. Not everyone can make it through three hours of Instructor Hagen’s Tactical Introduction.”

All around them there was groaning. Echoing even beyond their table, as the whole room caught on to the class being mentioned. Ironically, the fact that it was so reviled by everyone else made Sylvas quite excited to experience it. If only so that he could share in the communal complaining.

The meal came to a relatively abrupt end after that. In spite of the quality of the food and the ongoing conversation happening around him, Sylvas was able to shovel it all away in record time, catching up to Kaya even though she was well ahead of him thanks to her earlier arrival. They rose all together as a table, fully intent on walking together as far as they could to their respective bunks, but that plan was thrown out of the window as all around them little white shields suddenly burst into existence. Sylvas actually tried to touch one meant for the person next to him, only for his fingers to pass through the sending harmlessly. On his second attempt he heard Instructor Vaeleth’s voice speaking into his head. “Change of plan children. Live combat drill. Now.”

Sylvas gawked at the message, but the other recruits were already setting off for the exit. “Seriously?”

“Eidolons don’t wait until its convenient.” The fiend girl who had been giving him confusing feelings called back over her shoulder.

He looked to Kaya for support, but she was hopping along towards the door trying to pull a boot back onto her mechanized leg as she went. “Come on, boy. Two chances to kick culgh in the same day ain’t an opportunity to turn down.”