“How do you kill a world? Is a world even a living thing that can be killed? In the abstract it would seem the answer is no. It is simply a sphere of solid matter in a vast expanse of emptiness. Yet there are worlds we know to be dead. And creatures that we know to be capable of killing them.”

  —The Eidolon, Albrecht Magnus

  With a massive push of mana, Sylvas pulled the death-trap back out of Cold Storage and dropped it on Malachai.

  The orb of destruction burst out through the planar rift already lashing everywhere. Great flares of death mana erupted from it, swooping out in every direction, making decrepit everything that they touched. Rust bloomed, joints gave way, and the stairs up to the gantry from the side where Malachai and his surviving minions lay crumbled. Sylvas didn’t look at what it was doing to Ironeyes. He couldn’t stomach it. But he kept a close eye on how it would treat Malachai.

  His ghosts swarmed out to shield him, and rebuffed the first and second flares to reach out to him, but even as he scrambled back to his feet, Sylvas could see that they were weakening. The screaming faces that made up his haunted protection grew more and more contorted with each touch.

  The skeletal construct was suffering far more of the brunt of the death spell than the mage who’d created it. Bleached white bones turned to yellow with each strike of it, while the magic that had empowered the construct now blazed brighter than ever before, pushed beyond the limits of what even a complex enchantment could hold.

  It pushed itself up, moving forward to put itself between its creator and the death that he’d created, but Malachai stopped it with a raised hand. Over the roaring sound of the death-trap carving away at reality, Sylvas couldn’t hear a word the necromancer was saying, but he could see him throwing back his head in laughter. Reaching up a hand, Malachai touched the black orb and just as swiftly as Sylvas had dumped it back out into reality, it vanished.

  Sudden silence washed over the room, all was still, except the necromancer’s laughter. “You tried to use it against me? I made it!”

  Yet against all odds, Sylvas saw a pale Ironeyes painfully rise to his feet, hidden from Malachai’s sight by his own bone construct. He could get a clean shot at the man from behind, if Sylvas could just hold his attention. “Well, it didn’t seem right to go carrying around your magic to throw at someone else later. I thought I’d better return it.”

  “Oh, I’m much obliged,” Malachai replied, his voice still giddy to the point where it was a little unsettling to hear. “But you need not have bothered. I have enough power here that I’ll never want for more. And I’ve barely scratched the surface yet.”

  The way that he said that didn’t make Sylvas think he was only talking about the source of mana. “So you already know about the necromancer that built this place?”

  For a moment, Malachai looked oddly delighted, then his eyes misted over and his pallor went paler. It lasted only a moment before it passed. “Know him? He is right here, right with me.”

  That explained everything to Sylvas. The ghost of a dead necromancer was still haunting the Citadel, and Malachai was using him. Something that Sylvas knew couldn’t bode well for him.

  “Anyway, as pleasant a challenge this was, I believe it is time we brought this to an end.” Malachai raised a hand, then thrust it forward. “Try to die clean.”

  The bone golem was propelled up and across the chamber by ghostly hands, tossed at Sylvas like a child passing a ball. He had to leap back to avoid being crushed underfoot, and then the fight was on. Four blades spun and swept at him as he staggered back, throwing up orbitals when he could to deflect the blows, but mostly surviving on luck alone.

  Kaya and Bael were still somewhere, if he could backpedal far enough, they’d be able to wade in, to help him turn the tide. He just needed time for them to find him.

  But right then, Ironeyes took his shot. A bolt of lightning discharging from between his weathered, ancient hands that burst so bright and loud that Sylvas thought that he’d died again for a moment. Yet to his dismay, even the speed of lightning could not outpace the speed of the dead. It dispersed harmlessly like a storm across the surface of a fog, crackling and swirling around Malachai and his army of the dead, but never actually coming close.

  The only positive was that for one brief moment, Sylvas caught a glimpse of his second foe. Superimposed over Malachai’s features in the thunder flash, he made out the ragged bearded countenance of the wizard who once was. The wraith of the dead necromancer, glowering back at him with hollow eye sockets.

  This was not going to be easy.

  The bone golem spun, sweeping all four blades at Sylvas in quick succession, adjusting up and down so that he had as much chance of dodging all four strikes as he did leaping through a whirlwind. So instead of trying to escape it, he pounced forwards, piling on as much weight as his body could bear. He hit the construct of bone like he was a wrecking ball, punching right through it and out the other side. The scattered fragments of ribs and vertebrae rained down around him as he landed. The impact of it bending the walkway in half before he could shed his weight once more.

  “It doesn’t matter. I can make it again.” Malachai was beside him. He’d teleported. With so much mana at his disposal, there was barely any difference between the types he needed to convert to make such a thing possible. The scythe was still in his hands, the wraith was still wrapped around him like a blanket. Just being this close was enough to make Sylvas heart stutter. It wasn’t fear, it was just death. Being so close to death made his body falter. “I thought you would be more impressive. Once I understood your affinity and your spells, there wasn’t much more to the puzzle.”

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  Sylvas’ body was cold and sluggish as it struggled to meet his demands. He was trying to move, trying to put some distance between them, but it was all happening too slowly. He fumbled at one hand with the other as his knees started to give out. In the distance, he could hear Kaya yelling. He could feel Bael casting some new ward to hold off death for a moment longer. Even Ironeyes, withered as he was from Sylvas’s act, was down there somewhere, conjuring some fresh bolt of lightning, but the difference in power was just too great. The infinite resource of the world-soul made it impossible for anyone to beat Malachai. He could just drown them in raw power.

  It wasn’t the first time that Sylvas had felt helpless, looking up at an opponent so much stronger than him. Even as the scythe was drawn back and began to swing. “I had hoped you might be a challenge.”

  Sylvas reached up to him with a quaking hand and took hold. The fire mana drawn from his gauntlet already coiling into the shape he’d made it, the words that he’d heard Hammerheart speaking already on his lips. They meant many things in the aion tongue, but all of them shared one common thread.

  “Burn!”

  Inside the shield of ghosts, there was nothing to save Malachai from the inferno Sylvas had just unleashed. His own hand burned with the heat, but he did not let go, even as flesh bubbled and bones blackened. The necromancer realized too late that he was under attack, he staggered back, trying to pull free of Sylvas grasp, only to drag his enemy along with him. Sylvas would not let him go, and from Sylvas hand spread flaming agony.

  In his attempts to break free he hit the barrier. In his attempts to pat himself out, he flipped over it, falling out of sight and ripping himself free of Sylvas grasp.

  But even so, it yet wasn’t over.

  Sylvas rose to his feet now that the overbearing presence of death was no longer pushing him down. He looked at the ruined mess of his hand, his right hand, with which he’d pulled down the Crimson King. The mana channels within it still glowed. Even the sigils carved into his blackened flesh could still be made out.

  Peering over the edge and down below, he saw that Malachai was smothering the flames with the chill touch of his ghosts, all while he readied a spell of such murderous power that it would wipe all of them away. Sylvas knew he could pause and cast a shield, hoping against hope that some clever solution might finally come to him, but even so he was doubtful that such a thing existed. With the shard of a world-soul fueling the necromancer, there was no way that they could stop him.

  So he had to do something different.

  But what? Sylvas asked himself as he looked up at that piece of world soul hanging over them like a malevolent god. It looked so solid, but it wasn’t. To his second sight, it was blinding, so intense and full of mana that it made his own condensed core look like open air. But it was not a solid object, it was mana manifesting a solid form. He felt Kaya and Bael close onto him. Nearly close enough to stop him as sudden understanding bloomed within in his mind.

  He couldn’t let them do that.

  Raising up his blackened right hand, he began to cast. Sylvas didn’t need anyone to tell him how to break the soul of a world, he knew. Not because of what he’d seen before when his home-world died. Not because of the things that he had read about world-souls since joining the Ardent. Not because of any rational reason. He simply realized how to do it. The primitive animal part of him that he’d been crushing down before to hide from his grief and pain, the part of him that felt. It knew how to destroy. It knew the power he had at his fingertips.

  He could feel it echoing back as his power rose. That hidden secret thing that he’d never been able to touch before. The piece of the puzzle of magic that he’d never seen a word written about. Before, he’d only touched it when he was near to death, but now he knew where it could be found, not beyond the outer horizon of desperation, but inside him, where his sorrow burned and his anger boiled.

  He cast Gravity Spike into the shard of the world soul with the last ounce mana he had in his core, and like so many carefully built things put under too much pressure, it shattered at his touch.

  The explosion knocked everyone else down. It knocked the gantries down, it ripped the walls of the chamber designed to contain the shard and left the whole station devoid of all power. But none of it hurt Sylvas. He had spent the very last drop of his mana, reaching up to kill that soul, and he should have died in turn. He should have slipped into blissful nothingness as he had when he overexerted himself before. Instead, all of the death mana that he’d just unleashed plunged down into the emptiness he’d made inside him.

  He hung in the air, suspended in the flux of pure power pouring into him. More than he’d ever touched before, even when using the etherium that powered the summoning.

  It was wrong, twisted, mana that didn’t fit him, and it hurt. Everywhere the death mana touched was burned. Everywhere it spread through his system shriveled up. All the way down to his core where it poured down into the very heart of his being. The crest on his chest exploded into tiny pieces, raining them down to join all the other destruction he had wrought. It was too much for even that sophisticated enchantment to counter.

  Gravity no longer existed on the Mournhold. Every system had died along with the shard, but with the tiny spark of mana left inside of his orbitals, Sylvas was able to pull himself down towards the only thing that would save him.

  Malachai.

  He lay still amongst the rubble, even as the debris began to float up around him. He was burned, and he was broken by the fall or the explosion, or the sudden severing from the source of his power. Sylvas laid a hand on his chest and felt no heartbeat. The crest he wore pulsed, keeping him from decaying, increasing the chances he might be salvaged. Sylvas could do better than that. His system could not hold death mana, couldn’t use it. It was killing him. But here was a system in desperate need of it.

  Just as he had when he saved Kaya back on their first day in the Ardent together, he pushed the mana out of himself, and into Malachai. There was so much he didn’t think that they would ever reach the end of it. By the time the transfer was done, they had drifted back up into the midst of the rubble and ruin, only held together by Sylvas feverish grip on the other man. The orbitals around them died, one by one. The tiny sparks of gravity mana being drawn back from them into Sylvas core, to keep him alive now that all that death was gone. The funny thing was, he knew he had suffered awful, terrible damage. But there was no pain. Death left no pain behind.

  But even without the pain, the exhaustion came, and the weakness and the fading too. He closed his eyes as the deeper dark encroached around the edges of his vision, and he fell at last into a dreamless sleep.

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