Free Lords Of Existence (Book 8) by Ron Collins

Alistair had once taught him to believe.
    He found Yuli first, on the plane of Golden.
    Garrick had no convincing to do with him, as the mage had already lived through enough of a life that was predicated on Braxidane’s dictation. “I have no life to leave,” the huge man said to Garrick upon his offer. “The sooner the better.”
    As it turned out, Yuli was a better mage than Garrick, and better with the sword, too—though he had no patience and weathered no fools, and for that reason alone would never find his way to drive the larger doings of a plane in any but the most blunt fashions.
    They worked together to pull the vampiress Fei-ahn from Gostück.
    “Why should I follow you?” she asked him as she floated in her bloody ship of mage stuff. “Why should I care if the Lords of Existence do anything to us?”
    “It is the right question,” he answered.
    She waited while he explained his own story, how he wanted to destroy the planewalker’s ability to prey upon the weak. Her eyes narrowed when he told her how Braxidane’s meddling caused death and pain and destruction, how every planewalker in Existence could reach into a plane at any time and play these games. People have enough problems as it is, he said. And he told her of the dark hunger that Braxidane had planted inside him, a hunger that let him hold power and control over others but that only served to remind him of his own self-doubt, his own lack of confidence. And then he told her of Hezarin, and the power he held within him.
    And as he talked, Fei-ahn’s crimson eyes lidded, her jawline grew stern, and her lips turned contemplative.
    “Yes,” she finally said, letting her fingertips trail so seductively across the hollow of her neckline. “I have felt all of that, too. And I can see that no being in the Thousand Worlds can live freely if the
yahli-at-ba
can be as they are.”
    Garrick smiled at the word for “planewalker” in the Gostück language.
    Yahli-at-ba
was such a more apt title for a planewalker. It sounded so much more fluid than the coarser, more pedestrian language of Adruin.
    “We are the only ones who can defeat the planewalkers,” he said to her. “You see that, don’t you? Braxidane selected us for our isolation and for our independence. Our isolation made us weak and easily swayed, but our independence is our strength. While others see us as undesirable, or perhaps merely irrelevant, we—the strongest among us who are not tied to any single ideology—are the only ones who can even see the problem.”
    Fei-ahn’s smile grew strangely relaxed as he spoke.
    “Yes,” she said when he was finished. “I see that. And I see there can be no true freedom as long as the planewalkers exercise their control. We should all be lords of our own existence.”
    The three of them worked together to break an uprising in Tesharia before Lelio would come with them. She reminded him of Sunathri in so many ways. He liked that Lelio was a woman with other, longer names, as fitting her place as a princess of her realm, but he liked even more that she gave no quarter to those who called her anything beyond Lelio.
    Yes, she was so very much like Sunathri.
    He was different from them, though. Hezarin’s essence let him play in the flow as a planewalker would, but the champions needed to learn the other way.
    As every new member aligned with him, Garrick taught them each survival in the realm of Existence, how to build shells of magestuff that encased their being as they slipped through the flow, how to move, and how to sip from the waves around them to fuel their magic even further.
    Once it became easy for one to slip through the flow in their cocoons of mage stuff, they split off, each gathering more champions to their side.
    It was a rare champion who did not agree to join forces.
    Perhaps Braxidane selected his champions for their isolation, but that same isolation served to build resentment and create a yearning for self-determination that