The world shook beneath the Emperor’s feet, but he was not daunted. Above him in the sky beyond the monolith, two black holes swallowed the stars, debris and anything else that came into their reach, everything but this barren rock, and the monolith atop it.

They were perfectly positioned between the two Eyes of the Beast to be held quavering but still by the opposing forces of the black holes instead of being dragged away into one or the other. An impossible little moon, hanging in an impossible place, reachable only through the most powerful magic.

Yet the Aions had not only found it, they had built here.

The monolith stood almost a mile high. Its jet-black surface unscarred by meteor or dust, with all of the detritus of reality instead being dragged off into the black holes that held it here. There were markings on it, of course. Words in the language of the Aions that had not yet been translated, and many more that had, but the predominant feature of the jutting expulsion of polished stone was the line running down its center from top to bottom. It was not a wall, it was a door.

Every Aion vault that the Dominion had opened brought them closer to universal supremacy, new magics, new technologies, new understandings of the fundamental nature of all things, a day in a vault was worth a lifetime of study to any of the swarming researchers. Truthseekers, The Emperor reminded himself. They were not his, they were simply curious, and he was willing to finance and exploit that curiosity to its ultimate end.

Yet it was not them that toiled now, but the mages of the Dominion’s highest order, whole teams of them arrayed around the latest key that they had prepared to insert into one of the many gaping indentations secreted about the dark stone of the Vault.

It was an Eidolon. One of the many his empire and the truthseekers had called through in the last few years. One of the largest by far, a planetary annihilator before it had grown to even a fraction of its current size. Probably powerful enough now to carve a star in two.

They had it trussed up in lines of spellfire and coaxed it forward towards the hole that matched its grotesque form perfectly. As the monolith came into its perception, the Eidolon began to buck and bray, musical and disturbing in equal measure. It fought back against its handlers, the most powerful mages in the Dominion, if not the universe, and it would have broken free if the Emperor himself had not extended out his hand towards it and clenched a fist of his will tight around whatever tangled mess of synapses and instincts it used for a mind. Spasmodically it flailed, but the fight was gone from it now. The mages pushed it forwards, onward into the void that awaited it. The keyhole forged by the Aions millennia before this Eidolon had even come into existence.

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The magic within the Eidolon escaped in a gruesome flood as it made contact with the monolith, flowing out to light up all the sigils that surrounded its final resting place, uncovering more fragments of the prophecy writ in the stone. The ancient words that had driven the Emperor to all of this.

Born of a pyre ten thousand souls strong. When stars are right his home will die.

Hollow of heart; black hunger unending. Eater of light. Vanquishing kings.

Doom in hand; pour loose the sands of time. Ender of hope. Feller of storms.

Twinmaidens blood stains; on sorrowful soles. Fast claimed war’s domain. Glad of war. Glad of pain.

Beast eyes close for him. Vault’s gates open.

Starbreaker, thrice named.

Starbreaker, awake.

“Master.” A voice called to him, distant and low. Barely audible over the Eidolon’s dying screams. “I come bearing news.”

Valtoris turned his eyes from the vault reluctantly. “What?”

“The destruction of Croesia bears fruit.” The voice of the woman was metallic and echoing, her appearance entirely concealed in robes of black.

Valtoris turned his eyes back to the Eidolon as its power burned away to fuel the ancient machinery of the monolith. “The summoning there was intercepted by the Empyrean.”

“But the mage that summoned your eidolon survives.”

That was an unexpected development. “What of it?”

“His affinity has shown. Gravity.”

The consumption of the eidolon upon the pyre of progress was reaching its fever pitch, every mage in attendance forcing it forward into the stone with all their will as it screamed in existential terror. A voice like windchimes and nails on chalkboard and the charnel tear of a planetary atmosphere being stripped away.

She prompted him again. “What are your orders, master?”

“Hold.” Weighing his options, the Emperor spoke. “Let us see who this gravity mage really is before we claim him.”

The robed head of the woman bowed. “It shall be done.”