Starbreaker

“Cut away the parts of you that are weak. Cut away the parts that care. Let your weakness bleed away. You are more than this.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

He lay in his cot the night before Affinity testing. Even Kaya’s usual sociable mumblings had been slow in coming since the death of the fiend.

Enore. Her name had been Enore. I’d only learned it two days after her passing.

His desperation before had been born of anxiety. The deep-rooted need to prove himself. Now it was something else. He didn’t need to pass affinity testing so that he could keep up with the class. He needed to pass affinity testing so that when Hammerheart swaggered out of the Brig, he could kill him.

It wasn’t about vengeance. He kept on telling himself that. He wasn’t out to kill Hammerheart because he’d killed one of Sylvas friends. Just like he wasn’t training to be one of the Ardent to seek revenge for his world. It was just practical. If Eidolons were an existential threat to everyone living in the universe, then the logical course was to fight them. And if Hammerheart – who had already proven that he was willing and capable of killing Sylvas – got released then there was no question that he would try again. Sylvas had to be ready to defend himself, and if that meant he had to spend another week in the Brig himself after all was said and done, then he’d take that delay to his education as a worthwhile investment in procuring his safety.

Over and over, the image of Enore burning replayed in his mind. Her face burning away, just like Mira’s. The two women, both dead because of him. The curse of eidetic memory. Every detail was right there, ready for him to draw it back up for further study. Lockmind was truly a double-edged sword. But he did all that he could to use the edge turned away from him in the days that followed.

The Ardent honored their dead. She was buried out in the desert, not by magic, but by hand. Sylvas and the other recruits had worked to dig out a hole deep enough that the first Eidolon to come upon her wouldn’t dig her out and feast. The Ardent wanted to remind the other recruits that death was the price of failure. They didn’t need to worry about his morale. Sylvas felt singularly motivated.

The lectures and lessons of the days that followed passed in a blur, committed perfectly to Sylvas memory, of course, but without any part of them being interesting or useful enough to his current predicament for him to really give a damn. The reading list had already been committed to his Lockmind, all that remained was to sift through it and form his own opinions. Something that was vital to his understanding, but completely unwelcome when it came to the Instructors who wanted rote repetition.

All that mattered now was affinity testing. Not Introduction to Conceptual Magic, not Eidolon Trait Identification, not Advanced Combat Stratagems. The affinity that he received after testing would determine everything. It would give him his spell list, its rarity would mark him as a grunt or a specialist, and most importantly it would determine how well he might fare in a fight with someone of fire affinity who had leaned heavily into close combat techniques.

With the right affinity, he would survive the deadline of Hammerheart’s release and use the hostility the other man showed to him as justification for the lethal force he intended to unleash.

All he had to do was wait until evening – what the others called morning on Strife – enduring the snores of Kaya and all of her ilk in the tunnels that surrounded him. It was a testament to their exhaustion after each day of training that they managed to get any sleep at all given the volume and intensity of the snoring going on. Kaya alone could have woken the dead.

It was thanks to that deafening noise that Sylvas was entirely taken by surprise by the intrusion of an officer into their bunk halls. Hammerheart’s pet elf stood with his arms carefully tucked behind him, as if worried that touching anything might contaminate him. Sylvas only noticed him because he had coughed very deliberately.

At once, Sylvas dropped from the bunk and into his best approximation of a fighting stance. He had read all he could in the manuals on Ardent close combat techniques, but practically everything was rooted in the expectation of affinity magic that he currently lacked. Yet the elf made no move to attack, or even to get out of reach, instead he jerked his chin up, beckoning Sylvas to follow.

It might have been an attempt to lead him into an ambush, but Sylvas had been practicing with his second sight since receiving it. Comparing the patterns and swirls of chaotic mana to the perfect images of it that he had trapped in his Lockmind. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but he felt confident that if there were a caster tucked around the corner waiting to attack, he’d know it.

Cautiously, he followed the elf out of the deafening snore chamber and a short distance towards the common areas of the under-cliff complex. “What do you want?”

The elf looked offended, then perplexed, unsure of his own words, before finally answering. “It is my desire to offer you an apology.”

Sylvas blinked. “What?”

It seemed like the elf had a whole speech planned that he began reciting by rote. “The enmity which young lord Hammerheart bears towards you, I do not share it. You have bested me in arcane combat on multiple occasions despite the disparity in our power, and I take that to be a testament to your skill, or at the very least to my distraction. It is not a personal affront to me, it is a lesson learned.”

Sylvas stared the elf down. “Hammerheart murdered one of my friends while trying to kill me, and you think you can just apologize and it will go away?”

“Returning your companion to you is beyond my power, as is making any sort of meaningful recompense given our current circumstances, but speaking only to my own part in things, I feel great sorrow over the events that have unfolded. Were it in my power to turn back the clock and undo what has occurred then I would do so, and you can rest assured that moving forward I shall no longer be associating with the dwarf in question.” He let out a sigh, the most human he’d behaved since this whole visit had begun. A hint of a normal person finally shining through. “He… I had no idea that he would go so far. Or rather, that he was so far gone, already.”

“I don’t blame you for what he did.” Sylvas began, watching as the elf’s tensed up shoulders immediately dropped. “But you saw what kind of person he was, and you were weak enough to follow him, just because it might get you some advantages.”

The elf froze in place once more and Sylvas fully expected an angry outburst, but instead he said, “I… you’re correct, of course. I must do better.”

Just to see what would happen, Sylvas held out a hand. To their mutual surprise, the elf took it and gave it a somewhat limp shake, affirming, “I will do better.”

With his conscience feeling clearer the elf stepped back, and Sylvas turned towards his bunk. “See you around…”

“Baeldrothan.” The elf replied with a little twinge of the back that told Sylvas he was used to bowing when introducing himself. Maybe everywhere in the Empyrean wasn’t so alien after all.

“See you around Bael.”

He slept after that, feeling oddly comforted by the idea that even if Hammerheart was a complete psychopath, at least the rest of the officer corps were rejecting him for it instead of applauding him, the way that Sylvas had suspected they would.

What the others considered morning arrived all too soon. Sylvas dreams had been haunted by Enore ever since her death. She was integrated into the fall of Croesia, burning alongside his world. She was lurking in the shadows of the tunnel complexes of Strife, tunnels that had the cold flagstones of the orphanage, and when she lurched out at him, half her head was already burned away, and all that remained was smoke rising to choke him. Last night, the dream had been softer. She had been smiling at him, intact. They had danced, not like the fiends in the nightclub had danced, but like the nobility back home had done, finery, slow waltzes, soft music and softer smiles. When the music had changed, she had become Mira. And when she had become Mira, he had snapped awake.

His eyes were wet when he rose, and he wiped them clean fast before any of the other recruits could see. He had been in too many situations like this in his life, where a hint of weakness might have everyone around him turning on him. He wasn’t going to let that happen here.

Without so much as a word to any of the others heading off to their classes, Sylvas got dressed and set off for Outbuilding Four. He couldn’t allow himself any distractions. He couldn’t allow anything to get in his way. Hammerheart would be back out before the weekly testing slot opened up again, if he didn’t find his affinity today, everything was over. Everything he’d strived for since he’d been discovered in the orphanage would end if he couldn’t find his affinity. Not to mention, his life.

The bald-faced dwarf was there, looking as bored and unfriendly as the last time that Sylvas had seen him. He looked up from his slate with the usual desultory sneer. “Back again? Don’t know why you’re bothering. Either you’ve got what it takes or you don’t. I don’t know why they’re so soft on you kids. I’d already have been out on my ass back in my day if I failed testing. Second chances? Huh. Ain’t no second chances in the real world.”

Sylvas had a great many things that he wanted to say to that man but he managed to resist every treacherous word that tried to sneak out. “Is the chamber free to use, sir?”

The dwarf instructor scoffed. “Go ahead, waste your time.”

Sylvas placed his palm on the cool material of the door and it responded, sliding aside, letting him in to the dimly lit room once more.

All the artifacts were arrayed around the chamber in exactly the same pattern as the first time that he’d been here. Nothing had changed. Nothing except me. Last time he had studied everything with desperation, he had tried to draw on the different affinities of mana that were here, he had strained and dragged and did the exact opposite of what he knew that he had needed to do when he first set out to cultivate a core of mana. He was not going to let desperation rule him this time. He was not going to spend his whole time in the chamber reaching outwards when the true solution to his conundrum was inside him all along. Where he was didn’t matter. What sources of mana there were didn’t matter. Affinity was about him. About his magic. His core. His paradigms and embodiments. It all came down to him. So he walked to the very center of the chamber, lowered himself down to the floor, closed his eyes and let the universe speak to him.

At first there was no answer. Then he felt, distantly, that same echo, that same vastness that he’d felt before. Something out of sight and out of reach that had to be his affinity. But this time he did not reach for it, he did not push and strain to get to what was held away from him by the cosmos. Instead he breathed deeply and waited for it to come to him. Letting his senses flow with the mana as it circulated his body, just waiting for the connection to be made.

He sank deeper into the meditation. Deeper down into the dark. Leaving all sensation behind. Until there was nothing but the cycle of mana through him and a head empty of all thoughts. The answer was inside him. The mana is his core contained traces of every kind, so one of those affinities had to be his. He pushed his mind down, deeper and deeper inside, down into the dark place where thoughts couldn’t go. By his will, and force of will alone he pushed his mind inside the core of mana at his heart, reaching for the very center. The midpoint of his core, the midpoint of his self.

What little of the world outside he could have perceived, he forgot. There was nothing but the burning truth of the mana encompassing his thoughts. The weight of it, the shape of it. Some part of him was still rational, somewhere far beyond where he’d gone to now, and it sought a pattern, a shape, some sense to what his will was colliding with at the center of himself.

He had gone too far down to hear any sound from up on high. His thinking self, his rational mind, they meant nothing at all down here in the realm of power and primal forces. If there was a shape at the heart of him, he could not recognize it by the time he’d delved deep enough to touch it, but whatever was there flared out at the touch of his will.

It was the force that had held all his mana in check when his circles had barely a whisper of strength and he’d poured ever more inside himself. It was the reason that mana had come to him so easily when others had to struggle and strive for it. Everything that he was, could be explained away with this thing, this shape, this affinity.

He surged back up from the depths with the affinity flaring at the core of him, spreading out to burn the impurities of the mana in his core away. Beginning the process that would be perfected with his third circle creating a filter to keep any of this wrong mana from entering him again. He had always visualized the mana inside him as a glowing ball of white light, but it was consumed from within by this speck of darkness that he’d found at his core. A dark so deep that he hadn’t even been able to see it before he touched it.

With a jerk, he was returned to his body, to his rational mind, to a cacophony of alarms sounding all around him. With a shock at the sight before him he tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t. It was as if his body weighed ten times what it should, he couldn’t move an inch.

All around him there was destruction. The white paneled walls of the chamber had been twisted and contorted, peeling away from the metal beams behind them, the various artifacts assembled here for testing had been tossed around and shattered.

The camp must have come under attack while he was distracted, bombarded by some enemy, but he couldn’t sense any hint of an eidolon nearby. A more secular enemy then, the Empire, or some pirate raiders really pushing their luck. Some curse must have been locking him down, keeping him from rising to the aid of his brothers in arms, but whatever shape the spell took eluded him.

Fire spread from one toppled pillar, water from another, but they did not spread wildly as they should have, instead they came to Sylvas, creeping across the floor and then being drawn up into long slow spirals around him. Every fractured fragment of an artifact did the same, tumbling in circles as they drew closer then drifting up into orbit. The floor beneath him had buckled, the plates of it twisting up like the petals of a flower trying to close around him while he sat in meditation. Even the door was mangled out of shape in its hole, the metal twisted all the more violently for not being part of something as big as the wall.

Everywhere he looked there were spirals, not just the detritus rising to circle him but in the twisting of the wall-plates and in the mana itself. The mana flowing from him, being drawn into him, had been invisible to him before because it was too dark for him to perceive it as anything but a hole between the other particles, but now that it took on the same spiral shapes it was impossible to miss. His affinity had done this.

Thunder without lightning sounded, and the door was blown into the room, colliding with the twisted plates of the floor before bouncing up to join the other shattered remnants of the room in orbit around Sylvas. The bare-faced dwarf Instructor stormed in yelling. “What in the nine hundred hells have you done to my testing…”

Then at the sight of Sylvas, he seemed to lose his voice. His mouth still moved, but no sound came out. Until finally, he managed to make a sound something like a squeak and said, “Gravity affinity.”