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Chapter Text

This is what it means to be a Guardian.

She burns. This close to the Sun, it’s only some resilient madness of the Light that keeps her fieldweave from igniting. She moves from shadow to shadow in slides and crouches. To shoot the white-hot Cabal troopers is as easy as a heartbeat. It is her only communication to the universe now, and therefore means nothing. But to go from shadow to shadow she must breathe deeply, evenly, must count her own heartbeats. Back in the world not spitting fire wait Ikora, Hawthorne, somewhere, Eris — she steps forward toward them. 

This is what it means to be a Guardian, as she walks closer to the Sun than any child of Earth before her. It means to move from scorching heat to besieged shadow. It means to fight despair at any moment like she fights the fire, constantly and mercilessly. She will leave this place, but this place will not leave her. The patches of shade are so small. 

When she drags the Dawnblade out of the air, the proximity almost blinds her. She feels the atoms rip as the sword slides free. The wings combust a Psion and a Cabal around her by virtue of existing, singeing through a shield half-unfurled and a cyclopean eye.

This is not what it means to be a Guardian. This is an external expression of an internal process. This is toothy metaphor.

The Warlock learns on the Almighty what Hawthorne will learn: that to be a Guardian is to take one step after another in the firestorm. 

Naturally, it is a lesson which must be learned over and over. 

Chapter Text

there were the waiting days. the Sea of Screams has dead places, stagnant crusts of salt without legend or rumor, and those are when Toland searched for Osiris and wrote messages with his fingertips on smoke canvases that will be more than smoke when they arrive in the Tower. All he was then was loose-leaf pages, sonnets dropped from his own records 

there were the courtly days, when he found the terrible oily gulf that is Savathûn’s court. the mother morph is preoccupied with her alchemical children, talking blindly of neuter Taox and her engines (these will be my engines, mine, sibling, just mine). Toland drew golden webbing around his shoulders for comfort

there was the regard, the attention of the three bright eyes. there was an in-drawing of breath through the mother’s mouth, a thaumaturgical seeking that pulled at the space between Toland’s molecules where, like the colors in a photonegative, she could see the gray remnants of the Light. She tasted the Sun and found it burned her. She tasted the Void and found that it increased her.

Toland could not be sure whether he had bowed of his own accord or not. this had never been of great concern.

there was the folding, the shutters smacking together one by one on the atomic level. there were Savathûn’s encrusted, entumored hands shaping the prison for him. Toland’s awareness folded, small and smaller, more and more orderly, until the box that was himself suffocated on top of him, and maybe fingertips on the inside of the crystal, and then there was the crystal 

Chapter Text

You cannot tell them.

You feel the truth in your molecules, in the slight sideways shake of the center of your cells.

You say: “A weapon will save you and a weapon will destroy you.”

You say: “My will is not my own,” but you can find loopholes, gentle eddies in the governance of you through which can flow new energies. “Have you seen the sovereign roll in the riches?”

This is vague enough that Guardians will piece it together into tens of new theories, most of which will be wrong. This keeps you safe.

They say to one another, “That mission was really … relaxing?” They agree.

You say, “The walls are not enough.”

They wonder.

They say, “Maybe these dragons aren’t the same as those dragons.”

The filigree on the gun does not matter. Only the mechanism of the gun. You say, “A gun is a conversation made of only one word.”

In the other world, you say the same things. You return/go for the first time to Io and Nessus and Titan. You hope that your repetition will be comforting, because it speaks of survival in both the time before the attack and the time after.

You yourself do not know the nature of the attack, or know it in one time but cannot articulate it in the other, or have been denied permission to discuss it and therefore to think about it. Your words are not your own. Time is pinned to space is pinned to what is left of your flesh with glass needles. But you know. The more vague you become the more universal you are allowed to be, and it is in the nature of the orbiting worlds for universality to become specific in the end. You exhale hope the Guardians cannot see.

You say, “Take this for your fight,” and they do not wonder which one.

Chapter Text

Eris Morn sensed another version of herself in the maze.

Like looking in a mirror, it had a flatness that suggested she was not facing a copy conjured up by the Dark. Stranger things might have happened here, in the caves marinating in the stench of the Hive as they carved their nests into the regolith, but this was not a double. Any competent maker of traps would have had to create something more convincing. The reflection sputtered with Light as she did, Guardian-stuff calling out at the cellular level and then fading. The person’s Light had gone out.

Alone, Eris had begun to scale a black cliff slick with water, which she thought might lead her to the surface. What ambitions her fireteam had had when they arrived! Toland the Shattered would be able to lead them through the maze, so that the rest of them could concentrate on the killing. Eriana had trusted him, and now — the team had scattered, too overwhelmed to even reach the point where they would have really needed to rely on arcane pathfinding, and none of them had prepared for this.

Perhaps Toland had. The distant Light had felt like him, had conjured up the smells of the books he carried, or the rangy way he braced the spinal gun against himself. Eris looked up at the cliff in front of her, the golden light shining at the top. Nothing skittered in the shadows. She had seen Guardians share Light before, effortless merging of signatures that tugged at one another like strings.

She had not expected to experience this, so to do so in such a surprising way was galling.

Eris Morn began to climb.

Toland had spoken to her in clipped and quiet rages on streets from which he had had been exiled. He had presented a Warlock bond to her in the caves like he was doing something forbidden, as if he had expected her to survive when the others had not.

She hardly had words for this. Was it hatred? Was it the kind of obsession that had led Toland to the Hive in the first place, a disgust so intent upon its subject that it turned into dependent love?  

Her stomach turned. She had heard that love could do that, too. Not much purpose to it if it felt the same as sickness.

Breathing hard, she commanded herself to climb a few more handholds, to listen for noises other than the dripping water and erratic, fetid wind.

In some impossible tugging sixth sense she felt Toland the Shattered die on the rampart spikes of his terrible curiosity. The part of himself that was not Light at all spiraled into the impossible gray geometries of some mad maelstrom. Eris found the next handhold and wondered if she should hold her knife in her mouth to free her other hand, then kicked off and tumbled herself over onto the next wet ledge with the knife held shining up in front of her. What a way to learn that she was loved. Maybe it meant something that this tunnel was sloped slightly upward, or that the golden glow from its crystals and sporish dust was strong. Maybe the surface was nearby. (It had been four hours since she had last seen Eriana-3.)

Maybe Toland had nodded, recognizing the mirror of himself, before he died.

Chapter Text

“To whom are you least loyal?”

“What?” The crackling of the ripped webs in the wind from the open side of the hallway had been too loud for Eris to hear the words.

Toland dragged long fingers in the muck coating the egg. Twitching gray slashes of static cut across his forearms. A reconnaissance, an experiment – both at once. He spoke as if he wasn’t quite paying attention, as if he walked light-headed and hungry.

"There are breeding pits filled with protein and tar.”

Eris folded her hands against her sleeves. “There is clear air on the Tower balconies.”

Suddenly Toland’s arms bled orange to the elbows. He twisted, dug around inside one of the last remaining eggs of the Titan brood. “This is an adaptation.

These would not be possible without the gravity and humidity of this world. The Wizards have been working. These are the children of Titan.”

"Our foothold here is hard-won,” Eris said.

The slimy mass Toland pulled out of the egg was curled and only as long as his forearm. Eris recognized the bare skull of a thrall, heavy and translucent. Tell Sloane, she remarked to herself. Tell Sloane that Toland visited her demesne, too.

"Give it to me,” Eris said, and killed the last of the brood herself, and silently gloried in a revenge like a deep breath, and Toland watched. Eris heard the muttered words clearly this time.

"To whom are you least loyal?”

Chapter Text

There were rumors of Osiris, and one day Amanda asked Eris whether Toland had been like a Warlock, before, and Eris turned the thought over and over like a stone in her hands.

Amanda meant this: Was a wandering mind essential to Warlockness? Did Toland the Shattered ask strange questions? Did he seem to drift light in his armor? Did people trust his answers? Was there something in the way he used his Light that called to the Dark? Would they, if they saw these things in Osiris, know that he had fallen?

Eris answered this way, to herself: The first time Toland had kissed her, reality had been sloughing off of him like dead skin.

Eris answered this way, to Amanda: “Change comes gradually as the Light slips. Toland walked across coals to meet his change.”

Amanda furrowed her brow.

“Seems to me Osiris did the same thing.”

Eris did not answer. It was difficult for her to consider answering, when such a direct statement pinged around into so many branching questions in her head. She nodded slightly, though, and saw that Amanda understood the terms of her agreement.

Chapter Text

Savathûn had given the Hive a cutting bureaucracy. Her knights would not stab on sight in her thronerealm, but past sight they watched for lapses in syntax, slumps in affect, glances that implied one thousand different references and politenesses. Eris Morn walked between the trip-wires of their regard. Some knights flinched back at her silent remarks, because of their subtlety or audacity, but most stood at indifferent attention, spell-sworn, edged in black skin rough as volcanic rock.

So it was something of a shock to see the sloppiness of the self-appointed errant emissary, once she finally made her way to his guarded quarters. Toland the Shattered (and put back together in different forms, bleeding at the edges, shattered and re-made and re-broken and – ) sitting on the edge of a black table, steepled his fingers.

Eris knew the ritual for this. First, definitions: “What do you do?” The verb was vague enough to be a trap, specific enough for the response to define a new set of terms with which they could play.

Toland the Shattered disregarded the tradition with a lazy lean, as if about to collapse back onto the desk. A thin white smile implied bruises and bites.

He spoke with Guardian slang, shocking her with homesickness. "I wake up. I placate the screaming orbs of destruction. I go about my day.” Figured that he would be able to ignore the Hive even while sleeping in their holes and consuming the fruits of that particular underworld –

That, Eris reminded herself, was why she had found him.

Chapter Text

“Who taught you how to do this?”

The speaker is a new visitor, an Awoken Titan with strings straggling across her lap. Commander Zavala rearranges the scarf folded beside him. The group is sitting on a balcony today, full out in the sun. Birds have returned to the city, dark dashes sketched in the sky the level of the Tower. The Guardians had been talking, the rise and fall of voices now coherent, now vague like bird-song.

“Resit Alaia, a weaver who provided for the Tower,” Zavala says. “Cryptarch Adonna taught him. We started to talk more often when I became Vanguard Commander, and we would sit out in the sun just like this.”

Not a bittersweet memory, not a vigil by a grave; ironic that of all the old Vanguard, Osiris had been the one who returned. The other Titan nods, fumbles a stitch and digs short fingernails in to rework it.

“Count the stitches, Commander, he would tell me, when the Wall seemed like it might not hold. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

Chapter Text

“It’s been a long time since she’s been in a race for the fun of it. Think this will draw the crowd?”

“One does not need to prophesy to see the grand sweep of the hills, the fall of the snow. The same seems true of this celebration.” 

“Ain’t that true.” Amanda Holliday let her voice trail off as her gaze wandered from the dark figure beside her to the gray-edged mountains beyond the Farm, then to the Sparrows idling on the new track. Someone pumped the pedals, spiked boots gripping slotted metal while the engine roared. 

Amanda organized most of the races herself, but this time she had placed a stalwart Frame on flag-waving duty and given herself and Eris plenty of time to find a good spot among the crowd at the start/finish line. In one gloved hand she held a thermos of tea, piping hot and made with city supplies and Zavala’s inside information. Ikora liked chamomile and mint, no sugar, at the end of a long day. 

The Frame dropped the flag. Amanda was lost in the flashing colors of the Sparrows, the engine sounds she could pick out one by one — that’s my work. That’s Eva’s. That’s Shera’s. It was a five-lap race, and they jostled — quick around turns not made for Sparrows but for feet, quick and sliding around the corner between the chicken coops and the cryptarch’s, opening it up on the wider road down past the landing zone. Sparrow engines howled. Guardians cheered and waved, loud despite mouths muffled by scarves against the falling snow. Beside Amanda, Eris was quiet but tense with the deep, loyal focus of a sportswoman, raising hunched shoulders every time the purple Sparrow flew by. 

Five laps went by, five laps in which Amanda thought not about the near-loss of the City and the brittle new-Sparrow-smell of the Tower but instead about heating coils and fuel mixes and taking wide turns; five laps were over too soon. Ikora had drawn the crowd. More and more Guardians pressed in toward the finish line or spread out along the track. 

It ended, of course, in the way Amanda had known it would end. She had arranged the race because she knew that it would be worth the time to run it because of this ending. The purple Sparrow shot through the finish line first as if it was headed for the forest and didn’t plan on stopping. The rider reacted fast, though, digging in on the right side and fishtailing around in an efficient kick that slammed her to a stop. Other riders skidded into a gregarious pack behind her, Guardians dismounting to give one another triumphant whoops and in-jokes that doubled them over as soon as their eyes met. Ikora Rey walked through the crowd, giving a pat on the back here and a wave there.

Of course, she knew that Amanda had arranged the race as a show of morale, to prove that the Vanguard was undaunted by its long campaign against the Cabal. Of course she beelined to Amanda, who handed the tea to Eris even though she hadn’t expected to do it and gave Ikora a collision of a hug instead. Eris handed Ikora the tea and received a fond smile and a lingering look in return. 

“True prophecy.” Amanda gently knocked her elbow against Eris’ arm. 

“True,” Eris murmured.

Chapter Text

Of all behaviors that had become strange to her, the whispered prayers were not on the top of the list: it was the forgetting, the careless scavenging of weapons of the Dark, that set Eris on edge. To hear a Warlock whisper “Eriana-3,” in Eris’ presence because they felt that some spirit might linger around the balcony but did not see fit to talk to the living woman about it was a lesser sin.

Still, when she heard her own name whispered, by a Warlock no less, the effect was more of startlement than reverent benediction. This Warlock, the one who had cleansed the heart of the Black Garden, should know better.

She also knew enough to almost read Eris’ mind.

“It isn’t worship,” Kass said softly. An actual Hunter stood beside her, but did not seem inclined to pay her respects. “It’s memory. Do you ever feel like another person is with you, watching you over your shoulder? Even though maybe you’ve never met them? Some call that prayer.”

“My fireteam was lost to the Light,” Eris said. The wound will not be as raw in three years, will not even be as raw when she stands on the vault-deck of the Dreadnaught with Ikora Rey’s and Mara Sov’s plans in mind. Now, though, the ghosts of which the Warlock spoke were so close that they could not help but pass through her mouth. “There would be nothing left to which to pray.”

The Warlock did not reply, although her painted brow furrowed as she considered it.

The Hunter remained masked, but her voice was crisp, clarified. “Respectfully, Crota’s Bane. There is a belief that the Light contains memories of all Guardians, from their rise to their last death. In this way, even those who face the Hive never truly lose their connection to the Light.” She says it as if she has rehearsed it, gone over it with Kass or someone else, and the words turn a bit less sure and more natural at the end.

Eris is unsure how to reply; if she dwells on this she will remember Omar’s screams in enough detail to make the sunny Tower walk go black. She cannot afford this. Instead, she tips her head at the two Guardians in confusion and dismissal at once. Politely, they go.

Not many are so polite. Eris has learned to see a particular type of rejection in which Guardians whom turn away from her forget that she exists. No scorn or care with which she presented them could be heard, after that; it would fall into their dismissal as into a black hole. These two were different, even though she could not sense whether or not any Light from them lingered. They remembered her, and maybe they remembered her fireteam truly as well.

“Are you unhappy that no one weeps at your empty grave?” Eris said.

Toland hooked his ankle behind Eris’ leg, idly swinging his foot back and forth and pulling hers with it. Behind him, Eris could see the sweep of Saturn’s rings and the stars beyond; her once-and-again companion was corporeal enough to sit on the edge of the console in front of her jumpship seat but not enough that she could not see patches of green-tinted stars behind his shoulders.

“After the Red War, many bright and newborn keepers at the alter of the Light found themselves curtained in the darkness.” Toland idly waved a hand in the direction of the stars. “The spirits of the past were obvious in that Vex world, but all else … swallowed up by the sea. The Guardians do have a habit of not taking opportunities offered to them.”

“You’re jealous …” Eris pulled back. Instead of stiffening his foot Toland went limp, shrugged forward onto her lap with one leg thrown over the arm of the chair. Catching him in an equally listless embrace, Eris continued her question against his ear. “…of Osiris?”

He shook his head just slightly. She could imagine but not see the curl on his lips. “Feh. He has always had shrines.”

“No one expects you to return to the Light, least of all yourself.”

“A cutting and honest observation.” His face pressed against hers, but his voice was muffled as he spoke into her cowl, and she knew it was an effort at deflection they both recognized as transparent. He tended to confuse less subtle with more honest, but she appreciated the effort. He expected her to easily speak his language, and he was right. “Yet you still serve that which you cannot see.”

“We are not so different from the Guardians, in that way.” The response was too easy, but she was beginning to feel that he was actually serious about feeling left out of the Guardian pantheon, despite all evidence saying that he would not and had not gathered a cult the size of Osiris’ Brothers and Sisters … “Osiris does not want his cult. And there are Guardians who remember you.”

Toland drew back to look at her. Yes, there had been people who wore weapons made of living bone and skin, people who pored over what was left of his journals, Guardians who watched but did not repeat his crimes for fear of Vanguard punishment.

“Still, I would be oh so curious to know what happened to them when the Light was gone,” Toland said. “The ring of spears has broken down.”

Eris shifted to tuck her hand under his leg. She could feel a prickling, like dead nerves, but not the warmth of skin or breath when he spoke against her mouth.

“Let us watch how they rebuild it.”

Chapter Text

Dearest Eris,

Let me tell you about death.

I saw my body on its back in the black dust. The Deathsinger grew disinterested in it quickly and tracked my spirit instead, but that chase was disinteresting to her as well, and she turned away from it to peruse her demesne.

The Cabal show this ambivalence to the City’s defenses. Consider the blackening body I saw in the Pit, curled and thinned to its last remaining parts. Consider the infectious Hive, the optic nerves stringing themselves into new passages and the lacunae opening in bone like the Moon’s old scars. Consider the Earth from the sky, the few lights! Those mechanical lights which are also eyes, which consider the Tower nation with the flip of a coin.

Your decision has been made already?

Tell me, if you might, whether you see your own death so clearly.

Chapter Text

Many species recite legends about shapeshifters and parasites. This is what Taox told Aurash one night, when a storm blew glow-bulbs off their stalks and high into the dark wind tossing around the towers, and the engines chugged in steady rhythm. Every planet around Fundament nightmared about the gloomy consequences of raising another species’ child, said Taox. 

Aurash was cocooned in blankets and growing pains, almost asleep for the night, holding still against the healthy ache of youth. “What if we are changelings?” 

Taox knew where this was going, although she also marveled at the commonness of the princess’ fantasy, and at Aurash including her sisters in the story. Sathona and Xi Ro slept in fine, warm nests on the other side of the room, Taox’s arm-span away. 

“Then you will discover your true family, and choose it or this one, for joy or ruin,” said Taox. She had not heard a story of this type in a long time, but knew how it should go. She was an engineer, not a storyteller; perhaps the sisters trusted her because she did not pretend to mother them. 

Aurash turned over in her little cocoon to look at her sisters. Their skin gleamed almost the same color as the silk blankets. 

A dream-answer, Taox thought, but an answer nevertheless.

Millennia later, Nokris thrashed awake from muddy, violent dreams in which past mixed with future. He dipped his claw into the ice and ran the slush between his hands to remind himself of the persistence of the particulate, of how real it was and at the same time how it was melting away. He performed ablutions and checked in one slow, sweeping blink that his brood-troops were fanned out in battle lines across the pole of Mars. These took less than a millennia and more than a day. 

“I dreamed I had an ominous aunt,” said Nokris. On his morning he sat on a low and translucent throneplane with one foot on Freehold, the other on the lowest slopes of Olympus Mons. 

“Don’t trouble yourself about dreams,” said Xol, curling to hide its rancid belly at a less vulnerable angle. “And besides, she never tithed. So, she died.” 

Chapter Text

Even with all of his ghostliness, Eris could still scare Toland now and then. This time, she gave herself the role of specter he usually adopted and appeared to him as he stood on the edge of Rasputin’s core. Even incorporeal as he was, he was unwilling to stand vulnerable on the catwalk. It had been so easy to know where he would go.

“We do not all fear as we once did.” The foggy byproduct of Eris’ teleportation drifted green and shadowy around her. “We are not all as brave as we once were.” 

Toland had been terrified of Rasputin, once. Now, they looked at one another and ignored one another with equal weight. Toland was immune to blasts from orbit; Rasputin was immune to mere English. Rasputin’s newfound alliance with the Guardians had enabled this more mild truce as well. 

“He has satellites everywhere, watching, watching, watching …  ” Toland did not turn around. His head was bowed, not in a sign of deference to the warmind bunker but in a petulant hunch like a vulture. “Those guns, pointed out toward the universe. They would do little more than ripple the storms of Jupiter if they hit, but Earth itself … 

“He won, Eris. Rasputin became the protector of Earth as much as the Traveler was, and now he chooses what to do with this new pinnacle. Guardians are forever refusing the power handed directly to them, injected right into their bones! Humble fools.” 

Eris raised a hand, swirling the fog around her. “You speak as Nokris did. Do not confuse the Sword Logic for another type of power.” Ana Bray is neither humble nor a fool. 

“Rasputin and the runt Xol were neither allies nor enemies. They shared space, shared tenancy with rent due to the skeletons of the scientists who mapped Mars. Nevertheless, Xol lost and Rasputin won. This is a challenge.” 

She struggled to understand why he was trying to conceal his argument. “It may be a challenge to humanity as well. The Vanguard fears.”

“And Savathûn does not.” Toland turned, walked the few steps back across the gantry and into the doorway where Eris lurked. 

“I see,” she said. “And that is why you stay under her wing.” 

This time she turned her back to Toland, and took his place in front of Rasputin. The lights of the Warmind did not change their gleaming for her either. How would it change the next war? Would Earth be the next planet framed between the coils of the mile-high acceleration guns? The Vanguard thought so. Ikora thought so. 

Eris would not push Toland further. Savathûn or the thought of her, even the god-version of her he imagined might lift a claw to acknowledge him, would comfort him. Here in the bunker, plans surely pinging from one side of his mind to the other like the signals in Rasputin’s core, he was frightened enough already. 

Chapter Text

Just as the Hive swarmed the server room, Kass began to understand what Rasputin wanted.

She squeezed the trigger, knocking a hulking frozen Knight backward. More skittered between the nearest columns. The weapon fired with metallic pops, like bronze against bronze, ancient and volatile. Her Light, bolstered by the other two Warlocks around her, swept through her in a gentle shock that made her hair stand up. The Storm, in this electrified place, was ready.

She swept her hand out toward the two nearest Knights and summoned the lightning. Forks of fire jumped between her and the servers, reminding her of the damage they had inflicted on Rasputin already while trying to forge the spear. He had suffered enough…

His mind inhabited the sparks of her power. His voice was not the same she had heard over the primate radios connecting the satellites. Here, Rasputin spoke more clearly, as if Russian and static had become Kass’ native tongue.

(Except her native tongue was the storm, and Rasputin said …)

I can withstand this.

Kass engulfed the two Knights in lightning. Sparks jumped from her hands to the servers.

Rasputin said, I have gained what I wanted. The worm is dead. Ana is safe. Her family’s work has been preserved. I have been preserved.

Kass lifted off the floor. Thrall swept in, a numberless crowd cold with rime, and she channeled the lightning into their pitted bones. The thrall exploded in a white cloud. 

Your people, the Guardians, are not the only protectors of the solar system. 

One of her teammates threw a grenade on the other side of the room, sending another cascading conversation of lightning jumping between Rasputin’s synapses and her. The bunker had been damaged by their earlier efforts. Rasputin had felt the heat alarms go off and burned and slammed safeguards down around himself and started to rebuild. He did not need comfort, only to know the hum of processes running. Repair was still a sign of life. 

A guardian could survive that much. 

Chapter Text

Ana Bray lay staring up at her Ghost.

Red dust blew across her visor. Some of the cold had sunk into her back, the padded armor on her arms keeping her limbs warmer than her core. Ghost, she knew, and pushed the word like putty around in her head. She knew little else. Why here? Why Mars, the name of the planet as certain as the name of the drone that floated, just out of reach?

She raised her hand. The Ghost drifted down to it, central light blinking like an eye. Ana pinched one of its conical sections between her fingers, then shook it.

“Hello.” 

“Eyes up,” the drone said gently.

“They are.”

“You may be a bit disoriented.” 

“Yeah. What part of Mars is this?"

“Freehold.”

Ana sat up. In front of her, red plains stretched out, softened and confused by the dust. Behind her, buildings and black machinery perched like animals with bent legs. 

“How did we get here?”

Assess the situation. Look for every explanation. Assume nothing. She could not be sure there was a good reason to ask about the drone first. 

The flanges twitched. The eye-light lowered, as if the Ghost was abashed. “My friend, this may be confusing to you at first, but I want to make it very clear that what I am about to tell you could get us in more trouble than we already are. Mars is a hostile planet. We are alone. We have each other — and I have been looking for you for such a long time. I’m so glad to find you that I … wanted you to have this. But please, understand that it might make our lives harder.” 

Ana leaned forward. The Ghost sounded so sincere. And that combination contradiction and embrace — we are alone but we have each other — settled around her like a warm cloak. She could feel that it was true. “Go on.”

“Make our lives harder as in probably get a moderate to severe yelling, as well as possibly encountering monsters bigger than the usual monsters. I tell you this in secret and in trust, Ana. Do you want to know the answer to your question?”

“Yes.” Always. “How did we get here?”

“I came here because the Light brought me here. I am a servant of the Light, brought to raise Guardians to fight the Darkness.”

Ana considered at least one question for each emphasized word, discarded them all for now. 

“You’ve been dead for … a long time. Guardians don’t usually know who they were before they died. Do you remember?”

“No. But I’m beginning to think you do.”

The Ghost sighed. “Something like that.” 

“Tell me.”

Her name badge shimmered into existence, projected from the Ghost like a hologram. She recognized the name, but not the face. Her left hand drifted up to touch the helmet keeping her safe from Martian winds. “Okay. Shelter first, then, questions. A lot of questions. My friend.” 

“Always. I was wondering about the installation behind you, before I found you.”

“Me too. Maybe if we can start asking the same questions, we’ll be all right.” 

Chapter Text

Life is a delicate thing.

“I thought you were dead.” 

“Yeah. That’s what happens when someone fakes her death.” Ana Bray folded her arms and put her back to her equipment. 

Outside, projectiles splashed toward a thrall infestation on a distant red hillside. If the glass broke …Commander Zavala pulled his thoughts back to the present. Let her posture. The Vanguard Commander could take it.

“One message. You sent one, and then the next time I see you, you’re interfering with Rasputin more than the Vanguard ever did,” Zavala said.

“I saved him. The Guardian stopped the worm. We keep this area safe because of what we, and Rasputin, did. Is that not worth it?” Ana’s voice rose. Just like the threat from outside, he could take that too. A Hunter paused on the steps, surprised to see the Vanguard present and unwilling to walk up any further. 

“Not if you disrupt years of protocol in the course of —”

“Protocol based on an incorrect understanding! It was practically myth, the way you all spoke about Rasputin. I knew him.” 

Zavala couldn’t help raising his own voice. “I thought I lost you!”

“With the way we were when you left, most of the time I thought you couldn’t possibly miss me.” Her jaw was clenched, her eyes wide. 

He stopped. 

She was right to be angry. It felt like millennia ago that they had argued before Twilight Gap. It felt equally distant that they had talked before Xol was discovered on Mars. And in all that time, had he ever really thought about what it had cost her? What had it cost Camrin, who had balanced her place in Owl Sector and her girlfriend’s safety? Surely Camrin had known who Ana was, eventually. Somehow, he had been too focused on the Tower (how Titan — so focused on keeping the walls up) to sympathize with them.  

Zavala had thought Ana was one of his failures, in so many different ways. His fear had made him angry, and if there was any hope for the two of them to reconcile now, he would have to extend a hand…regardless of whether Rasputin was a savior or a threat. 

He let go a held breath. “Now that it’s all over, I see that I acted … badly. I’m sorry I stood in your way.”

She was taken aback, blinking for a moment while she decided what to say. The Hunter behind them soft-footed down the stairs.

 “I appreciate that, sir,” Ana said.  

Next time, you tell one of the Vanguard what you’re up to. Zavala acknowledged his protective bitterness, then resisted the urge to get in a parting shot. It wouldn’t help. 

Life is a delicate thing. In Zavala’s age-old experience, knowing that was part of what being a Guardian was. Impossibilities become commonplace, until Zavala sometimes forgot that for most of history, they were impossible. As an Awoken, he was doubly impossible.

All the more reason to value the sort of bond that had kept humanity going for all of recorded time. Life was a resilient thing. He glanced backward, and saw that the Hunter had given up trading with Ana for now. Zavala would leave soon, would give Ana the space he had known she needed. Maybe, like Suraya Hawthorne, she would find a new way to liaise between civilians and Guardians. Already, the Clovis Bray research had offered new weapons and tech. 

“I did miss you,” he said, quieter. “I had grown unused to people being gone for good. Twilight Gap and the Red War both taught me different. But I am glad, now, to have discovered that someone I thought gone was not lost.” 

“We’ll both try to keep it that way,” Ana said softly. 

“Between you, the Guardian, and Cayde, it’s a wonder I can keep track of anyone at all.”

“Was that a joke? Honestly, please, it’s hard to tell.” 

Zavala smiled. When Ana returned it he saw the tension ease away from her. He turned away, letting her and the Guardians return to their work. 

Chapter Text

Eris Morn rules only the empty halls and the worm system and the one lonely ghost. Nevertheless, she rules, and takes control of the Dreadnaught but refuses to turn it into a weapon.

The worms grow but not into leviathans; the cycle of eating continues as life does but thralls ration their hunger and knights begin to consider new songs.

The power in the Court flows to her. Guardians visit to see her, to feel her. Her presence wafts in the green-black fog. Their tithe is still violence, is still gunfire and exotic lightning, but it is also teamwork and friendship, laughter and memory.

And the other ghost —

Eris Morn walks half-in and half-out of the world, her eyes bright, her hair bared, her horns glimmering with conjured, poisoned emeralds. Toland the Shattered is a weather system, a bodiless scathing will, until Eris draws power back to both of them.

He stands shocked, Warlock coattails heavy around his legs. He waits, amused and curious, examining his own hands. Until Eris appears to tell him that she has lowered one plane into another. The curtain was always sheer on the Dreadnaught, translucent as the band across Eris’ eyes. Toland shivers, and asks her what she commands.

She explains it coldly, giving him the gift of through information, while he approaches. She knows the wheels that spin behind his eyes. She demonstrates the permeance of reality by embracing him, her arms around his shoulders. Obviously, says the brush of his dry cheek against her ichor-smeared face. Obviously this is the way we will learn the world, say his hands against her stomach. Finally, says all of her — all this magic and power, and she has never been as relieved as she is today. And his mouth is against one of the horns sprouting on the back of her head, although she cannot feel it, cannot tell whether it is keratin or jewel against his tongue.

Chapter Text

“What’s so bad about Gambit?” 

Kass pushed a tangle of spicy ramen into her mouth just as Guile-11 asked the question. He kept playing with his chopsticks, waiting for his human companion to finish.

Kass shook her head. Best not to say. Best not to let even the name of the Dark out. 

“You new here?” On Guile’s other side, Jenev pointed a chopstick at him, one of her filed nails digging a curl of pale wood out of the ramen shop’s cheap utensils.

“I work mostly with Amanda.” Guile’s voice was, as usual, calm with a tinge of arrogance. Yellow canine teeth spiked the back of his jaw. “So, no.”

“Huh.” Jenev sat back.

Although Kass had been on a fireteam with Guile once or twice, she still didn’t know him well, and now that she wore the cowl of a priest in one of the Traveler temples in the cloth octant, she thought it was unlikely that they would both be out in the field at the same time again. She didn’t recognize the sharp-clawed Awoken at all.  

Jenev said, “Drifter talks like a Warlock sometimes. I’d think you’d like that.” 

Kass shook her head. 

“People say it makes Guardians use the Darkness,” Guile said, “but I don’t see how it’s any more dangerous than practice-killing in the Crucible.”

Fine. “These Guardians command Taken to go after the other team,” Kass said. “And the Motes themselves are made of something that … if it isn’t Darkness itself, it smells like it. Don’t those arenas smell like death to you? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” 

Jenev considered it. Her expression went far away, then caught again on the corner of the bar closest to the half-open gate. “Going up against somebody like Uldren, I’ll use whatever I can get. Days are different now. The curse in the Dreaming City … we’re all a little darker now, even if we don’t want to be.”

“That just means we need to fight the Darkness more,” Kass said, then stared into her bowl. They would think she sounded like a zealot. Maybe she had become too cloistered. Just because she didn’t want to touch the Taken more than she had to didn’t mean the Vanguard were wrong about Gambit …

Jenev’s thoughts seemed to have been following the same path, although from a different angle. “The Vanguard would stop him if they knew some of it, but they’re broken, now, too. Guardians for Guardians, I say.” 

“Or Lightbearers,” Guile mused.

“Exactly.” Jenev dug into her own ramen. 

Guile turned toward Kass. He hesitated to speak, but she could see those teeth again, his jaw working as he considered and reconsidered. “That Derelict looks like it’s about to fall apart. Won’t catch me up there until he explains his engines.” 

When does anything really get explained? They kept talking about exotic engines, and Jenev chimed in about connecting firing coils to Sparrow rigs, and when Kass left the Tower for the night she hardly tasted that death-char reek of Motes at all. 

Chapter Text

Suraya asks with veiled accusation, as if looking for more payment for the bounty system they’ve arranged. The Drifter tells her the scars came from a mountain lion, furious and rare.

Saladin asks with unveiled dislike, couching the question in what he assumes. The Drifter tells him the scars came from the sharpened wooden stakes at the end of a warlord’s compound, proof of a quick exit. He asked his Ghost not to heal them (indeed, to rip them open anew) to remember the close call.

Kassius, the Guardian who killed the Taken King, asks with cold Warlock curiosity. She had to work up the courage, and the Drifter wonders whether she thinks she’s hiding that. He tells her the scars came from a pair of pikes at Twilight Gap, the best and terrible symmetry of a Fallen with two precise pairs of hands and nothing to live for but practicing war.

Jenev, the Guardian who wagered her Gambit wins for a kiss, asks with her sharpened nails barely touching his cheek. He asks her: What if I told you it was an arcane ritual? What if I told you, if you tugged the black-and-jade mask off any Shadow, they would have the same marks? He remembers blood sheeting across his face, and later, black flakes dissolving into red slurry when he tried to wash the dried blood out of his hair. Jenev watches him and tells a comforting lie.

Chapter Text

Lord Saladin Forge did not fidget. His deliberation remained measured, his conviction as old and sure as his title. When he found himself tapping his fingers against his armor, he knew it was time for action, not distraction.

Nevertheless, it proved difficult for him to ask Ikora, Zavala, and Shaxx to meet him at her pavilion. Cayde’s death floated beside them like a Ghost, vulnerable and insistent. 

“First, my condolences. I see in the faces of the Guardians what Cayde meant to the Tower, and to you. But even in this time of grief we must remain vigilant.” Saladin glanced at Zavala. The word would bring up memories of Shaxx, old laws to which Zavala had always held strong. “The Drifter you have welcomed into the Tower cannot be allowed to stay. He’s a Lightbearer who swears no service to noble cause. From what I have heard, he may be as old as the Iron Lords themselves. I can’t claim to know his face. But I know the look of a warlord when I see one.” 

“He is in truth what many Guardians baselessly feared Eris Morn to be,” Ikora said.

“Yes,” Saladin said. ”This Gambit will create an army of Guardian-addicts, looking for blood. It isn’t organized, like the Crucible. It’s too much like real war. Too much like it was when humanity feared everything.” 

Ikora stared at him hard. She knew he would be remembering the first fall of Felwinter’s Peak, and Ghosts at the side of Warlord Segoth, and the Cabal’s war dogs unleashed. Hardest of all was for Saladin to meet Shaxx’s eyes.

To his surprise, Shaxx was the first person to defend the Drifter. “So far he has stayed out of the way. The matches are organized and observed to an acceptable standard.”

Unusually vague phrasing from Shaxx, Saladin noticed. The suspicion must have shown on his face, because Shaxx continued. “You’re right to be vigilant.” 

“The Drifter thinks much is hidden from us when it really is not,” Zavala said. “It isn’t just the gate drawn across his hallway that allows him a false sense of security.” 

“In reality, Cayde just tried to fix it and ended up with it stuck half way down.” Ikora laughed. It was a soft, sad sound, but her persistent smile warmed Saladin. 

Saladin sensed that he had pushed both subjects as far as Ikora wanted them to go, and nodded. 

Ikora turned to look at him more directly, with honesty and care in her tone. “We will be careful. And we will let you know if anything goes wrong.” 

Afterward they exchanged pleasantries and condolences, peeling back the layers of the Vanguard’s grief. Saladin tried to listen well. He tried to push back images of Lightbearer armies, of bear skins stabbed with titanium needles and hung on the walls of crumbling castles. It had been a cruel time, and the Tower made Earth a better world, and even the idea of the Drifter calling himself a Lightbearer instead of choosing a Guardian class unsettled him. What was once a way of life had now become gauche and presumptuous. Saladin did not doubt the Drifter knew that, too. Maybe those tone-deaf Shadows of Yor, flirting with darkness to see its easy smile, would be drawn to him, and Shaxx would come pick them up one by one.

He let the theory comfort him. Ikora’s presence meant he could file it away with the other mysteries of Warlocks. Before the Iron flag flew again, he planned to ask Efrideet’s opinion, too. 

His fingers tapped, one against another. 

Chapter Text

From the journals of Ikora Rey

After the reawakening of the Traveler, Guardians reported increased instances of tangibility of the Light. They talk about it more and more as if it is a material with dimensionality and mass, not energy but precipitation. Motes of Dark, the Blind Well, and perhaps the exotic effects in the forest around the largest broken shard of the Traveler are evidence of this increased permanence or weightiness.

The Light has always been a presence. It insists upon itself, even while the Traveler is silent. The loss of the Light itself illustrated that with the silence in its wake. But these effects, like a Rift, were personal and impermanent. Even the energy generated by the Court of Oryx did not permanently coat those walls, and was not either pure Light or pure Darkness.

Now …

Gambit’s banks, supposedly outside the purview of the Vanguard, have been particularly useful in my studies of these more physically permanent manifestations. Motes melt like steel, and the energy of the Darkness is funneled away to … what? The Derelict? Its workings remain secret beyond the ready room.

They won’t be for long.

Guardians talk more and more of hoarding Light or Dark, keeping it like a dragon keeps gold. Or do we simply look at the Light differently now that we lost it once? Perhaps this is an effect of the Traveler’s strange awakening.

Considering revising On Circles in light of the architecture of the Dreaming City. Just need to find the time.

Chapter Text

Can’t just say some things. Spider and I can’t just talk about what you do with the Ghosts afterward but I seen he hangs his. It’s gaudy. I used to leave pieces of the shells on the floor. Somebody’s boot hits a little piece and they wonder about it, worry it under their foot a little, pick it up. Worry a little more, about what colors they’re wearing and whose hall they’ve been drinking in.

Can’t just explain some things unless you were there. The first time I saw that Iron Banner fly it gave me a fright, but turns out the wolves don’t come here. Used to be the wolves weren’t just pictures on a wall. They smell like wet dog, have shoulders up to your ribs. One night Iron Lords got after our gang with wolves and guns. Lightbearers do better against guns. For wolves you best shoot a couple mercenaries who thought they’d be all right coming along without Ghosts. Their limping will distract wolves fast enough, as long as you don’t shoot ‘em dead. Just emblems now, I tell myself, and Saladin doesn’t come around here.

It ain’t polite to say we’re all one decision away from the Collapse again, although I think you all hear it. Yes, you do. That echo in the back of your head that says you’re Risen for a reason. It’s tempting to see the beauty in the wind, but really? It’s all just cold air.

Got some people asking what’s next. What’s the story for old Drifter? What’s the end game for this long Gambit? Can’t just say some things, sister. You’re a smart one. You’ll see soon enough.

Chapter Text

Ikora Rey has spoken to Petra Venj and visited the Blind Well; she knows about the Sky and the Deep, although she does not know which has taken Eris. Crota’s Bane has become a master spy, a master in the Hidden. The information she passes back is precise and correct and carefully curated: what Eris Morn knows, the others need to keep in mind, lest something unseen jump them in the night. Ikora imagines she reads sadness in Eris’ words and then wonders whether she invented it because she wants to detect any emotion at all. Where would she find sadness in code words arranged according to a cipher? Is it comfort or bitter drink to know Eris is also working for Mara Sov? Nevertheless Ikora composes her own messages, on one of the days when Zavala is exceptionally cold and the Guardian is away. Come home, she writes, and never sends.

Chapter Text

Eris held the spark that had once been Toland like she often held the shard of Ahamkara bone: carefully, aware that each wish had its price.

“Is this the shape you wanted when you left us?” she asked softly. “Have you been exalted?”

“You are dying,” Toland said, not unkindly.

“As I have been for long years. Still, I negotiate between the Queen and the Hidden and the night sky full of swords. I ask again. Is this what you wanted?”

She could not feel the spark against her palms. Once she had held him when he was human, warm skin and beating heart. All Light-made, all stitched together in gold, of course, but more human perhaps than either of them were now. Or had she become moreso as he became a ghost?

“I have learned the song. I have learned that the singers were mere servants. But now …” Toland’s echoing voice trailed away.

“You fear you have become a servant yourself,” Eris said.

“Oh, to glory in the possibility! To serve the ancient queen … but. Yes. As usual, you are right about the action. The true trouble is, merely … I fear.”

As usual, Eris thought, our truths emerge splintered. She could not soothe mad fears, did not want to.

“I will not ask you to sing to other worlds with me again,” Toland said.

“It has been long, strange years. Sometimes I feel I have become the song,” she said, and bowed her head.

“Lucky squanderer,” Toland said. Static prickled against her mouth. She shook her head and let him sit close, and the warmth was almost human, the embrace almost tangible. All truths, splintered and mild and second-hand.

When she left she felt energized, not as if anything had been squandered at all, and she carried that energy to her secret work, and she carried Savathun’s death in her pocket.

Chapter Text

“I don’t want it,” Jenev said.

The Drifter stopped spitting out words like a bad taste. 

Jenev unholstered the gun. The Last Word, this thing of golden light that had fallen into her hands while she still had the slime of curse-worms on her gloves. “I’m not going to give it to you, either. But I’m not gonna be using it. Gifts from mysterious folks what left some Light-trail in the Hive tunnels? I don’t trust it.” She watched Drifter’s parted lips, wondering if she could tell a frown from a smile when the laugh always erased everything that came before. “I’ll lock it away.”

“Can’t say that ain’t a relief.” His gaze went far away, as if he heard footsteps around the corner. 

“It’s good business. Cause I can see this going one of two ways.” Jenev slammed the Last Word back into place, ready to lock it up already. It felt alien and old, but then so did Malfeasance.

“First way, that man thinks I’m signaling loyalty to him. When I want to know what I’m signing up for and he won’t tell me, won’t even show his face … he has one less acolyte and I have a bad-to-okay day, depending. Second way …” She moved closer. Drifter was about her height, and knew what he was about; just after she pressed her lips against the scars on his cheek he turned and kissed the edge of her mouth. “We profane this. Use the Last Word to rally the Taken, the last thing that man would have wanted. Light, I missed you in that pit.” She pressed her palms against the side of his face, pressured his skin with her nails. 

“I told you to be careful,” — spitting words again. He met her eyes, held her.

“And that whole time I thought those Hive aren’t too different from us, building weapons together — ”

“It didn’t turn out the way I thought —” He pulled in a deep breath.

“No."

They looked at each other for a while and then Drifter reached for the Last Word, his fingers lingering near the gun at her hip. She watched avarice, fear, and something that might have been a smirk chase each other across his expression. For not the first time, she thought that he had a cold mouth but warm eyes. His hand floated, wavered, then snatched back as if the gun had burned him.

Jenev breathed deep. “Second way, we use this gun and it’s right for a while, we’ll be bad guys.” Jenev formed her fingers into a barrel and a trigger and pressed it against his chest. He reddened. Didn’t it make her shiver, to think of pushing the mouth of that empty gun against his skin and turning this deadly rivalry into a game for lovers? Into something harmless? She trailed her finger up to his chin, rested it on his bottom lip. “… and then we die like Callum.” 

He sighed, then snatched her hand up and kissed her palm. The hunger in him still made her cheeks burn. This was his truest face, all the time — that slavering starvation in his eyes. He bit down on the base of her thumb, wetness darkening her glove, then pushed her hand away. 

“In fact, I thought this mission was something else.” Jenev forced her tone into certainty. Business. She could switch from coy to threatening as fast as the Drifter could. “I thought it was Darkness calling us down there. Everything about that story was Darkness, except the end.” 

“A lot of stories are like that.” He turned partially away, his expression darkening. “Be careful. I mean it.”  

“I will.” She paused. “I don’t want it,” she said again, softer. 

“I don’t want to go,” Kass said.

“I appreciate your honesty.” Ikora leaned across the table in her quarters. Two cups of tea sat between them, untouched. The door, decorated with woven strips that matched the color of Ikora's cloak, was firmly shut. “I wouldn’t call you back to duty except if I felt it was dangerous to send anyone else. I trust you to do this clean, and that’s more than I can say for … the Guardians who think Gambit is a secret.” 

Kass shook her head. For the past six months she had lived in a red-ribboned, high-columned temple in the Last City, learning rituals. She could almost repeat them without thinking, now. She made literal ideas which had always been in the back of her mind: to turn toward the Traveler and acknowledge that she was alive, and in place, and which comforted her. She could almost forget the sound of the gun echoing when she shot Uldren Sov as he lay on the floor, confused. 

She had been so certain execution was the right thing, at the time. Light against dark had been simple: she had destroyed Oryx for the good of the solar system and she would destroy Uldren. Then, the more she thought about it, she more she realized the two weren’t the same. Not because of what Uldren had done: whether or not he was guilty was not under Kass’ control. Her own actions had been, and she had acted coldly, and she had regretted it. 

After that, what could she be certain of any more? But she could take some of Ikora’s certainty for her own. She took a deep breath, feeling the flow of the Light. It streamed gently toward the Traveler, eddied strong around Ikora. “Shin’s gun is connected to Gambit?”

Ikora explained it to her, all the history between Shin Malphur and the Drifter she had learned from the Guardians who informed her. “I know it sounds like a dark ritual. But it seems, it may hide powerful light.” 

Ikora’s voice soothed Kass, as it always had. Kass identified more with Ikora’s scholarly side than with the Crucible champion, but she understood Ikora’s quiet certainty in a way that she rarely understood another person. 

“I’m not even so concerned about touching the dark any more,” Kass said. “I explored enough Hive tunnels before. I’m just not sure that … I can make a choice …” It pained her to speak those words, and even as she thought they fell into place true, she was uncertain that they in fact explained what had sent her into gentle, self-imposed exile. Was she repulsed or guilty? Why was it so difficult to tell the difference?

Ikora stood and moved to her side of the table, then put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Those questions are exactly why I trust you not to do anything rash. You aren’t tempted by the dark, Kass. But sometimes, you’re afraid of it.”

Fear. Yes — She turned. Ikora knelt and Kass embraced her, cheek to cheek. Ikora’s robes rustled where Kass balled her fists against the Vanguard’s back. They held each other as tight as if they would fall, then squeezed and let go. 

Ikora sighed. “I think we both needed that.”

“I’ll go,” Kass said. “And bring you what I find.” 

The Vanguard had been so lonely, Kass knew — Cayde gone, Eris gone, Zavala trapped behind walls of his own grief. She would do this to show Ikora she wasn’t alone. 

Ikora leaned back. “And after that you go where you will. I trust you to know what is right.”

Chapter Text

“We could build somethin’ together, ma’am.”

“I’m going to need you to leave.”

“You sure? Neighbors aren’t strangers. You sell weapons, I’ve got glimmer and Guardjans to use ‘em.”

“One set of Risen is quite enough.”

“That set is gonna stop coming. You know Risen. Immortality gets to their brains! No attention span. And when they stop, you’ll need a new source of income.”

“Get out of my shop. And if you ever walk by here again, make sure you have your shoes on.”

Chapter Text

“She never really left us.”

Dûl Incaru’s realm presented itself as a land of sharp-edged black rocks crushing against each other. Parts of the Ascendant Plane exuded muzzy softness, but the energy of her made even those into momentum. The snap and hiss of eruptions echoed outside the walls of her chamber, outside the pacing circles of her costly, well-fed Knights. Now the sound of Savathûn’s rustlings added to the susurrus as the Witch-Queen circled, half-corporeal, inspecting. 

“Are the Fatesmiths to your liking?” Dûl Incaru whispered.

“The kill battery charges.” 

Dûl Incaru could see her queen and her mother in snatches; a wing here, a dark green plate here that might have been armor or chitin. Savathûn held her own thronerealm around her like a cloak. The intersections between planes crackled. She processed in a circle again, making the Knights nervous.

In her desire to maintain their patterns and in a fit of bravery before her mother Dûl Incaru asked her question. “Of whom do you speak?” (She chose the ancient and elevated affect on purpose; she had some drops of royal ichor.) 

The mirror shards on which Savathûn reflected into the Ascendant Plane stilled. “Know this. I had a teacher who betrayed me. She has been lost in the long history of the Hive, but I never knew the moment of her death, which means that she might not have had that moment. In this way, this uncertainty, she lives still. Sometimes when faced with uncertainty I think of her, and how her presence does not touch my rule even though it is a specter in my thoughts. This lets me realize all of my fears are false. She encourages me still. Remember this, the next time you die.”

Savathûn folded the cloak of her world up around her and therefore disappeared. 

Dûl Incaru flexed her hands, anticipating the next armor shell she would feel beneath her claws. She wondered, sometime in the no-time of the loop in which she lived, what uncertainty her queen had been facing. 

Chapter Text

Along came a Hunter, loping quiet through the pines. Early spring rain dripped from branches and needles, soaking the springy moss that carpeted the ground. The Drifter didn’t hear the Hunter approach. He sensed him in the Light instead, a sharp call from Sun to Sun, and looked up from the corpse of a nine-foot-tall Colossus. No one should have been out here.

There was no reason for them to be, not while the sun was going down, and not this far beyond the patrol beacons. Drifter could barely see his hands in front of his face, but he could sense the intruder. The Hunter wasn’t planning to stop. Typical Guardian—curious until they saw the corpse had already been picked over. The Light knew something the man did not. Drifter couldn’t risk having a person this strong see that he was out here, alone, picking off Cabal that the Vanguard might want to track.

“Good eatin’ on one this big,” said the Drifter into the humid dark.

The Hunter’s feet finally made a sound as he stopped short and noticed. “What are you doin’ out this late?” 

“I could ask you the same thing.” Drifter straightened up. He shook the jade pieces in his hand, pried from the decorative strip over the Colossus’ functional back plate, so the Hunter knew he was taking something. Less visible would be the much taller silhouette of the glaive he had used to pry them out. Tucking the weapon under his arm and leaning on it would make him look almost as in control as when he was on the Derelict’s gantry. It was good to let this kid know what was about to happen.

Still the Hunter (young, green, brave) didn’t know what the Light could really do. Drifter felt the sparks of Solar fire wanting to come to life in the Hunter’s hands. He’d be a power one day. Connecting directly to someone’s Light wasn’t something all Guardians could do, but Drifter did it and other Solar users were particularly attuned. Right now, the sense that was raising the hairs on the back of the Hunter’s neck was not like human instinct at all, not really; it was an eldritch tug up into the void. Something in this Hunter spun the Solar System around. 

And that thing knew Drifter wanted to kill it.

“You really eat those?” The kid asked, still six paces away. The deeper darkness under the Colossus didn’t quite fall over him.

“Come here.” Drifter gestured with the hand full of jade.

The kid, no longer worried about being noticed, scuffed over. “I was just farming.” He had a shoddy pistol on his hip, one of those too new to be well-made and too old to be well-maintained. 

“You see this?” Drifter opened his gloved hand. The jade pieces would fall if he didn’t be careful. In the dark the Guardian would have to lean close. “I’m keeping them for a new project. Cabal come and steal our resources, nobody’s gonna complain about me stealing ‘em back.”

“What project?” 

“A new bow.”

“Right, right. For Gambit?” The kid folded his arms and rocked back into one foot, mimicking Drifter’s stance without the support. 

“Yeah. Right. Look …” Drifter pulled the head of the glaive out of the ground, ambled across the needles, leaned close. “You’re not gonna tell anybody about this.”

“No? Why not?” Now, this kid was real new. Drifter didn’t recall ever seeing him in Gambit before. The EDZ wasn’t a soft place, but it wasn’t the toothiest either. So maybe he was brand new, and lost, and with all that banked power like the coal in a train that hadn’t ever run yet. Or he was a spy. It didn't much matter which.

Drifter tucked the jade into his pocket.

As soon as he withdrew his hand again, he conjured a Solar whip. Blackened bits of glove flaked off his hand, chased by neon sparks that left pinprick afterimages. Yellow curves snaked across the forest floor, igniting stray, dry needles. Solar Light smelled like fire, oxygen, ozone, one after another in quick layers, good basic elements of life that made the Drifter’s mouth water.

“You use the Light?” Kid said, as if on cue. “I mean, I knew you could, but, we never saw  …”

“I said you weren’t gonna tell, kid.”

Drifter scooped underhand, fast, and aimed the whip crack right under the kid’s chin. 

He was young, but he was still a Hunter, and he reacted fast enough to dodge a bullet. The end of the whip blurred half an inch from his helmet. He would be blinded, long enough. 

A startled, vibrant piece of the Hunter darted up into the sky. Drifter lassoed it with the magma whip, then slapped the whip burning down across the boy’s shoulder. 

The kid clutched his hands to his chest.

Drifter reached the glaive out calm, slow, a mosey in the woods in the evening, and hooked his ankle. The Hunter fell forward, still protecting his chest with one hand, slammed onto the pine needles, and threw the other hand out in a feeble grasp for the Light.

Poor kid. Didn’t he know it didn’t always come when you called it?”

Drifter brought the whip down. One lash across his back, another trailing it across the back of his legs. His armor tore and caught fire in precise stripes. Too fast, Hunter-fast, and the Guardian was trying to turn over. Needles and dust kicked up, bringing smells of fungus and mud.Drifter let the whip fall for a second and stepped forward. The Hunter tried to kick him off balance over his shoulder, but— timing, kid. Gotta learn to lean into the timing. He never had time to draw the pistol. Drifter leaned down on the glaive with both hands and one foot and pushed it crunching, resisting, tearing through the Hunter’s armor and through his shoulder and through his Ghost, who he had cradled in the fall with oh-so-human instinct, and through the leaf-litter.

The Ghost core popped, little whispers of silver Light flaring out as it died. 

Kid lived for a little while knowing he was dying. His legs thrashed, and again Drifter let himself fall naturally, slamming his knees down on the Guardian’s back and the arm he had flung out. Little yellow fires burned all around the clearing, brightening the Cabal’s shadow. 

“Solaria,” Kid croaked. Ghost’s name, probably. Yeah, this one would have been a hero. 

“Hush,” Drifter said, and conjured a Sun-knife with the last of his Solar flare. He cut the Guardian’s head from his neck quickly, nervous, the last of his Light going out. It faded from him like from anyone else, the Light taking its strings back so the puppet couldn’t tug any more. 

Drifter stumbled back from the body, patting his pockets. Good, no, the handful was all there; the jade pieces had not fallen out. He didn’t like to use brute force, but the use of the Light had felt good. He could so clearly imagine himself cleaning the Cabal to eat. But he didn’t need to eat his kills any more, and besides, where would he put the left-over meat? 

He went back to work prying the jade pieces out. With the Cabal emperor’s agent coming to the Tower soon, the Drifter needed to give his loyal Guardians incentives. He’d thought of naming the bow some side-long insult to the Cabal, but it felt too petty. Hush was a name many would read, but only he and the dead man would understand. 

Chapter Text

There is a Warlock on Nessus who does not go to the long tongue of the golden barge. He waits by the entrance, his features lost in the swirling stars behind his helm. When Jenev hops down from the tongue he’s taking careful sniper shots at Vex, one shot for each milky glow and shatter of heartglass. 

“You can do better than this,” he says softly.

She turns her back to him and scans the troops below, the Guardians on errands. “He asks for tithes,” she says. “Glimmer for gear.”

“Ha! So it walks like a scam, talks like a scam.” As he speaks he moves closer until his chin almost touches her shoulder, then back again. “Bold of the ol’ royal loon.” 

“He wants to survive the end,” Jenev says. She steps backward until her broad back hits the sniper’s. She can’t quite feel the harness that carries the sniper rifle when it isn’t in use, not through her own gear and cloak. “Can’t see why,” she says, for the benefit of her audience. 

“He’s stealing my marks, but not all of them. Different currency. You willing to keep an eye on this game for me?” He fires. The rumble of the barge’s engines almost cover the resulting electronic screech.

She feels the kickback and leans into it. Someone on the lower deck starts talking to the voice that comes out of the hacked frame. 

“Yeah, I’ll keep watching what he’s offering.” She rolls her neck, leans the back of her head against his. “See if it’s competitive against your Prime works.”

He chuckles. “It won’t be. Calus thinks he’s a big deal, but the Vanguard don’t care about his little party as much as they do mine. Miles of gold don’t make a small time crook a king. Even if he does have an army.”

“Did. The Cabal are as scattered and disorganized as the rest of us,” she says. She aims down the sights of her pistol, but it’s a smooth and lazy scan, not an intent to fire. 

“Funny how Earth seems to do that to people. Treat yourself, hotshot. Go lick the wine from the emperor’s fountains.” The man dressed like a Warlock’s tone is sneering, more so than the emperor’s, and indulgent, less so than the emperor’s. If Calus’ tone is rotting sweets, his is poisoned meat. “Maybe give me a taste when you come back.”

Chapter Text

“Breathe in ... and out.” 

 Bird song and city chatter filter softly around the columns and curtains of the temple of the Traveler. Most of the red-robed people sitting with Kass are not Lightbearers. They cannot feel the currents she does, the red and gold lines of power she can see without her eyes, flowing from the Traveler to its chosen and back. She wonders what they do see, and then is lost for a while in the meditation, until someone calls her name. 

She opens her eyes. It should have been more difficult to come out of the meditation. Should have more of a difference between the Light and the world. But it’s no use to dwell on that. The high priest on the low stage between cream-colored columns is still counting breaths. She spares just a bright Awoken glance for the woman standing by the side of the courtyard, under one large, red awning. 

Kass has not seen Eris Morn in a year.

Kass stands up smoothly, winds her way between other people meditating cross-legged on the stone, and holds out her hands.

Eris accepts an embrace lightly, like a bird ready to fly from the hand. Kass draws her behind the column. Just steps away from the courtyard, no longer swaddled in curtains, the sounds of the Last City are louder here. Beyond the wide, shallow steps of the temple are cloth merchants and food carts, crowded together in narrow halls.

“If I had been meditating well I would not have heard you,” Kass says.

“Then be thankful that you did not, or that the Traveler spoke between us.”

“Thanks to the Traveler.”

“Now, no more talk of what might have been. I bring a warning.” 

You always do, Kass is tempted to say, but a quip would not be kind. Many people see Eris as a messenger or more than a messenger for the evil forces of the Hive.

“Watch the moon,” Eris says. “Old things are stirring. New things are sparking like fire from the anvil. You and Ikora are the first to know, but you will not be the last.” 

Kass glances back at the rest of the congregation. They’re close enough to hear. Even if they do not understand, they will know she is having a somber conversation, and surely Eris intends that. They’ve never quite forgotten that Kass is the hero of the Red War, but nor do they always insist on remembering. She doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t need to. 

The high priest says “Breathe in ... and out.”

“What do you need me to do?” Kass asks. Eris smells like old dust and the nests of the Hive. Only now does Kass notice the new chains around her cowl. Perhaps the gold is Awoken-made, a gift from the Queen. 

Eris presses a green-black feather into Kass’ hand. If it’s from a bird on Earth, Kass doesn’t recognize it. 

“Whatever else happens next, you have this,” Eris says. 

In the Light the feather is mundane; magic cannot tell Kass where it came from, whether the bird was alive when it was taken. The high priest says “Breathe in ... and out.” A deep-voiced crow grumbles in the rafters over the peeping of the songbirds.

Eris teleports. Air snaps back in around her, green sparks dashing themselves against each other and against a healing rift in reality. Kass is left holding the feather, left with a perception of lightness and leaving, left with sensation suddenly turned to memory. Was Eris even here? She pinches the quill of the feather lightly, smooths the vane. Wonders whether it is a weapon, a part of a spell, or simply a trinket. What is coming? What does Ikora know? Kass is slowly returning to the life of the Tower.

She may have to accelerate that return.

The high priest says “Breathe in ... and out.”

Kass does. 

Chapter Text

In the Sea of Screams, a woman bleeding ichor from her eyes finds a wandering ghost. 

The bleeding woman shoves the ghost against a sharp-edged shard of black reality. The broken pane is reflective like glass. In a flash she’s holding a throat instead of a tangle of lightning, and Toland the Shattered’s heels kick against the glass. 

“What did you tell the emperor?” Eris snarls. It has been a long time — weeks — since she walked here last. Many Guardians have looked to new temptations in the meantime. “I know he called for you.”

Toland says, “I know you work for Mara, and she —“ A hesitation in which Eris knew Toland was refusing to admit Mara frightened him. “She guards herself. Why would I pledge to another sovereign who does not even know the shape of the world?” His three eyes narrow. “The Deep is mystery to him, the Sky a delicacy. I’m not low enough to answer to Calus, especially when he sends those chattering Ps—“

She stops his words with a kiss. He melts down into it, soft and desperate. It has been a long time since he saw her and had a body at the same time. When she pushes him further up the wall he scrabbles at her to keep her close, his expression slack with loss. 

“Tell me what to do,” he says against her forehead. 

It’s more frank than usual, and the pain in her knees eases, replaced with a lightness. Choices flash through her mind. His mix of subservience and power is useful, and neither of them had admitted how much they missed the other. 

She lowers him until he’s standing. Turns her head to crane her neck, to show him the strip of skin not covered by her cowl. He kisses her lightly at first, then suckles the edge of her jaw. He tilts his head to always look up at her as she leans in, and he works from her ear to her throat. His mouth is warm but not hot, sensation muted in the realm a half-step removed from the idea of bodies. Still, she’s lost in the worship of his mouth against her. For all the lightness of his kisses he holds her with an opposite steely certainty, clever Warlock hands on her hip and the back of her neck. She presses hands like claws against his shoulders and never once, not then, wonders what substance he is really made of now. It takes him somewhere between a breath and forever. 

“Keep going,” she says.

He finds her pulse on her neck and licks. 

“No, I,” She bunches his clothes against his collarbone to help herself focus and to make him freeze. Sighs deep. “Keep quiet. Tell the emperor nothing.”

“You know I will not,” he says.

“Do I?” She says. 

He leans away from her, tilting to look at her one and one-half eyed like a strange bird. Gives her a look of mingled hurt and skepticism. Impaled on his regard, she misses the short time ago when he did not show the ghost of his body. 

“Look,” she says, and draws a piece of ceramic from her pocket. She thinks fondly of her desk scattered with crystal, cloth, feathers, and these. 

He doesn’t need to tell her he recognizes the mark. “Nor have I forgotten,” he says.

Should she have made a talisman for him? He who is not dead and not alive, who was taken from their mission by his own mad ideas, who was the first but in no world would have been the last to become food for the broods? 

“Calus is not worthy of us,” she says, and does not tell him that something is coming that may be. Calus threatened to kill what has already died, but Eris is mortal, and she does not plan to die while she is asleep. 

“On this,” he says, “We unquestionably agree.”

When she returns to the workbench she turns each talisman over and over in her hands, trying without any magic at all to imbue it with her memories of her fallen friends, wondering, never certain, whether the fifth marker is Toland’s or her own Ghost’s. 

Chapter Text

There was a time of writing letters. Eris and the Guardian would receive them in the Tower, and, if she twisted the magic right and drank tincture of queensfoil in her tea, Eris could send them back to Toland.

Many letters were not sent.

This one was.

You know I adore you. Or, perhaps, it pleases me to think you know, because it pleases me to think you are all-knowing. “Dearest Eris,” you write to me. And I am forced to see that our connection means nothing. 

It exists. It proves itself like the terrible sword-logic, but it fills no bellies, runs no machines. I have treasured your body and your loss of it. 

I treasure you in parts, to uselessness. I treasured the flora in your gut, but what good did it ever do them? It could not save them from whatever minuscule tides might drown them. Solace me in uselessness. It is, at last, what we need. 

She sent it with nervous anticipation, but not so nervous as she had expected. He had already made his own feelings clear. Through words on a private channel, letters from the other side, the emerald bond he had given her before the Hellmouth, like a warning upon warnings—she knew. She was not afraid.

That night he appeared to her in void-shadow and tattered strips of geometry. He spoke against her ear in possessive and comforting words, which would not save her.

Chapter Text

Eris Morn pressed her face against the warm plastic of her sleeping bag. She had created a nest in one of the prefab modules downhill of Sanctuary, for the nightless nights and dayless days of the many-times-reborn-Moon. Behind a locked door, she placed a rug and the sleeping bag and a blanket she wove herself. Smells of moon dust and Hive skin and the hot-oil-burn of passing Guardians’ Light stirred slowly in the air like the steam over stew. 

Eris could not count on sleep. Even in the darkness, it often tempted without satisfying, and the light and sound from passing Guardians disturbed her. Now, the moon brightened to bone-white for two weeks of daylight. 

In order to sleep she tried to force the existence of Santuary into a pleasant shape in her mind. Finally, Guardians again walked safely on the Moon. But their time would be limited. The black Pyramid, more ominous than any of the teeming Hive, waited. The skin on her back prickled often, as if something watched her. No, reminding herself of the world would not help her sleep. 

The only presence which helped her tonight was Toland’s, a balm from outside the world. She sometimes called him to talk in the evening, in the hope that his often vague and self-centered proclamations would lull her into boredom and then into sleep. At least he understood, as no one else did, exactly who and what she had lost beneath the Moon’s surface. He had stayed, and now hovered near the open door. Shutting the door and locking him out, or sleeping alone in the dimness with only thoughts to mind her, were equally unpleasant options. 

She curled her hands under her chin. Black ichor pooled between her knuckles. It would dry overnight and flake off in the morning, if she slept.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

“A truth or a lie?” Toland said from where he hovered in the doorway. 

“Perhaps something of both.” 

“Once upon a time, there was a soothsayer.” Toland answered immediately. 

“Nothing soothes here,” Eris intoned into the blanket. 

“A doomsayer, perhaps?”

“There is certainly enough doom.”

“Or a seer, who knows both.”

“Yes.” 

“A seer sent her knight into a Tower to kill an evil princess.”

Eris pulled the blanket over her face to shield her eyes. 

“The knight found the castle beautiful and terrible. She climbed the many stairs, slew the many guards. At the top she met the princess sword-to-sword. Many clashes, many screams echoed down from the spire. The knight faltered. But when she thought of for whom she fought, she rallied again, and drove her sword into her opponent’s eyes. The screams of her attendants were a tragic song, and beautiful…”

There was more to the story. Dimly Eris thought that only Toland would dwell on the beauty of the lamentations of the Hive. This, the familiarity at the very least, lulled her. She would not hear the ending, but was reassured, in part by the lack of a lesson. Snatches of words curled around her as she slept. The song … return to Sanctuary … a glimpse of the Earth…  

Chapter Text

The other members of Jenev’s fireteam told her afterward that the Pyramid spoke to them in their own voices, from toothy-smiled faces identical to their own. It hadn’t pulled that trick on her. No one could offer her an explanation as to why, although perhaps because they had not dug so far into the stories of their past lives, the Darkness could not have conjured them so clearly. Jenev had seen a woman in a long coat with a hunting rifle on her back, her hair short and ragged instead of braided into a neat crown. Her voice was more ragged too, quiet and husky. She said the same words they all heard—salvation dropped like a stone into a pool. Jenev laughed. 

The sound echoed, even though the view of the Black Garden she thought she was seeing was wide open. She’d never been to the Garden before. 

“Salvation from what?” She managed. Sure, she had taken the hand of the darkness when it offered her room and board. But salvation! What an empty promise. She had seen better dramatic dialogue spoken in Ghost theaters. 

“You laughed at it?” In the Tower bar Cal leaned close over their drink.

“It was funny.” Jenev buried her smile behind her own glass. Maybe a little of it was a nervous smile. Maybe they all knew the laugh had been nervous too. 

Some Guardians talked about running. Some Hunters hadn’t been seen for a while. Some Warlocks packed their bags for the moon. Some Titans went down to the City to check the old walls. Some people did different, according to their lights.

Jenev did not know why the Drifter had not left. She knew why she hadn’t:

A conversation in the old church with the leaves falling, orange and brown. It had been almost a year since she had talked to Devrim. They used to be friends, at least battlefield acquaintances, and she leaned against the cold, stone walls and asked him what he thought was going on on the moon.

“We need to get rid of those Hive,” he said, with the air of someone talking about shooing rabbits away from his crops. “But if they come closer … Marc says he’s going to stay in the City, so I’m staying too.”

That, not the Drifter’s inscrutable game, was what kept Jenev in the Tower. Devrim and Marc, oh-so-human, would not run and would not take their love as an excuse to run. Jenev wouldn’t either. Not yet.

So she smiled while her friends talked, and she did not regret having laughed at salvation. 

Chapter Text

The Guardian placed in Eris Morn’s hands the heavy, slick-wet skull of Ir Airâm, and the skulls of her apprentices. 

Beneath the fast-rotting skin, Eris could see the runnels the song had carved into the jaw and palate. Lines like veins fanned out in each groove. She lifted one skull by the horns, the chitin curved just so against her palm. 

“I do not know whether we have done something good or something evil,” Eris said. 

In the shadow of the Pyramid, what did it mean to be able to tell?

The Guardian left with strong words and a straight back. Eris walked to her workshop and closed the portal behind her. Her footsteps echoed in the corner of the Scarlet Keep she had claimed. Perhaps the red was dimmer to human eyes; for hers it shone like fresh and shallow blood. Animals dressed in red like this were a warning against poison. The whole tower was a warning, the Hive telling themselves to fear and terrify, their hackles always raised to the unseen presence of the thing below them. 

Automatically, Eris moved to her workbench and placed the skulls on the cloth. Later, she would clamp them for disassembly. Now, still lost in the idea of poisonous reds and depthless blacks, she circled to the rune wells at the side of the room and checked that each had held. Their blue fire meant no one had entered here without her permission. She had learned the technique from the Court of Oryx, and killed thralls to make the wards. 

One who had permission was late. 

She returned to the bench and had begun drifting her fingers over the awl by the time he appeared. Toland the Shattered approached the table not as a sprite but as a man, lightning-edged and translucent. It took work for him to appear like this. She had not seen his face in so long, and doing so now made a complicated lightness in her throat. To re-create his body from memories in which he had never been fond of it was telling. He appeared this way as a favor, and he appeared this way perhaps so that she could see his expression—

Drawn, grim, the three eyes wide and haunted. Scarred skin like the surface of the moon. 

This was not surprising. He had many words to hold in. When he and Eris had concocted her plan to give the Deathsingers to the Guardian, they had been as curt and professional as any fireteam. Something had happened, from the years since she had seen him last, to their desperate and lost meeting on the ascendant plane, to their quiet residency on the moon. She was still not certain what it was. But she knew the skulls were the catalyst, and why. 

“The Guardians have emerged from the depths once again,” Eris said. 

“Victorious as always,” Toland said. His disembodied voice echoed. “They sneer at the titles I give them, but all are true.”

Eris ran her fingers over the fabric on the table instead of meeting his eyes. “I admit I suspected you would not join me in this endeavor. It was a Deathsinger who took you away from us. Do you not still revere them?”

“You speak of Ir Yût. Her beauty paved the way for these young ones. The spines behind her neck…I wanted to go, Eris.”

“I know! But to go where?” She spun to face him. “To leave us behind?”

He stepped back. His hands rose just slightly, but he did not make to defend himself. “To part the veil. To discover more. To be safe. Yes. In my curiosity was a kernel of fear. Where do we ever find safety in our endless lives?”

The Pyramid waited in the canyon. “I know that. But we must not let fear guide us.”

“And so we sever the song, and spread discord, and harmony in its wake.”

“A pity that the two must go hand-in-hand.”

The silence was heavy. Finally he said, “May I touch it?”

“I will be watching you.”

“So you will.”

He caressed the skull. She could not describe it any other way. He smoothed the forehead and the base of the horns and then, with a physician’s clinical touch, tapped one one place in the grooved mouth and another. He appeared deep in thought. Just tell me, Eris thought furiously. For once, I want you to talk.

With a thump and rustle of heavy clothes he dropped to his knees in front of her. All false, she had to remind herself. All deception. The shift from clinical to passionate was like a wind against Eris’ face. 

“I wanted everything she could give,” Toland said, inquisitively, as if surprised by his own confession. “But I find it little trouble to give her to you.”

“I will test you. Are you certain?”

“Yes.” 

Eris touched his hair. This, too, felt only as solid as a strong wind. “Ir Airâm could have been the Hive’s future. She taught others. Their song gave them strength and stole it from their enemies. Someone as strong as Crota could have risen here, if we had not taken what was theirs.”

“Speak her name again. It is yours now. You have conquered her.”

“The Guardian did.”

“I do not …” Toland said absently, and stopped. When he looked up at her the eyes were not wide with fear but with a slack awe. “Dearest Eris.”

Oh. Ah, so this is what he had come to confess. A change of loyalties, yes, but that was a surface concern for him. He wanted to be someone’s herald, granted the protection of the queen. 

She knelt. When they had both been Guardians this had been one of the strange things that attracted her to him: how quickly he could change from authoritative to collapsing-weak. His anchor and his give matched hers. 

Gently, she fit her hand under his jaw. Where the Deathsinger had been carved he was smooth, not warm but as distinct as a patch of rain. 

“The song hurt.” He tipped his head over to nestle into her palm, closed all of his eyes. 

“If I protect you,” she said. “If I sing immortality to you, you must show kindness to the Guardians. Help them.”

“Yes.”

“And that.” She raised his face to make him look at the Pyramid over her shoulder. “You must keep your wits about you for that. If it steals you from me there will be no coming back.”

He opened his eyes. “The lines between darkness and light can be crossed. But with their avatars arraying for war, it is hard to deny the lines exist.”

She had been thinking almost the same thing when she spoke to the Guardians.

“Swear to serve me.”

“Yes. I swear on the skull of Ir Airâm.”

She let go Toland’s jaw and pressed her fingers through his hair to the back of his neck, forcing him down. “Every touch… makes me think of knives in flesh.” She spoke through gritted teeth, remembering Omar. Even with all of her proclamations, some emotions she kept close and shouted in her heart, and this was one of them. “One day, perhaps, I will embrace my friends again. But you … wind and shadow. And memory.”

He pressed his forehead to the floor between her knees. 

After a moment she said, “You have passed my test.”

She felt his spine relax and stiffen under her hand—all false, all memory, all metaphor. All enough, when he rose and she withdrew her hand. Both of them looked back at the half-fleshed skulls. Consider: Loyalty. Submission. Judgement. Decision. The grooves in the throat where the song dug in. 

Consider. 

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

“Chaos, huh?” The Drifter trudged up the hill to Eris Morn with his hands held wide and low. The signal of innocence made obscene contrast to the pistol at his waist and the sniper rifle on his back. 

“You,” Eris hissed. 

He stopped feet away. His boots raised clouds of dust. “Now, what do you think I’m here to say?”

Eris knew of this man who harnessed Taken, who lived like a shabby warlord instead of disappearing into the City as a civilian who happened to have a Ghost. “I will not play your games.” 

His mouth twisted. “Not what I expected, I admit. They were right who said you were canny.” He looked around at the few Guardians forging at the lectern or passing on the road. “But people are going to forget you fast. Everybody gets their time to be a fad and then, you’ll be alone here again.”

Eris stiffened.

“You want this place bustling with life? A Gambit arena here would make it happen. A few Taken here and there aren’t much compared to your Nightmares, are they? And it makes Guardians happy. Lifts your spirits. Helps them remember you.” 

“I repeat myself.” Eris scowled and twisted the onyx beads around her wrist. “I will not play your games.” 

The Drifter laughed, hearty and loud. “Guess you did know what I was here to say. Let me put this another way …”

A Guardian flared into existence behind him, and Eris recognized her. Eris could ignore the Drifter’s greasy face in favor of the gold-winged figure behind him. Kass, the Guardian who ended one thousand possible disasters, trotted to the Drifter’s side and loomed. She stood tall for a human woman, and carried herself with a square-shouldered assurance. 

“Is he bothering you?” Kass said, wry and energetic.

“Yes,” Eris growled. 

Kass tipped her scarlet helmet off into her hands. The Guardian just looked at the Drifter. That was a look like the surface of the sun: people warned against it as a fact of life. From far away it burnt; close, it would be annihilating. 

The Drifter raised his hands again. Symmetry, Eris thought. “It begins as it ends,” she said.

“Yeah, they say you talk like that, too. Listen, us freaks need to stick togeth—“

Kass vaulted uphill, between the Drifter and Eris. Eris hardly saw her move. “Leave. Now.”

Eris can’t hear his mumbled response, but she saw the swagger as he walked away and transmatted in a swirl of polluted-looking gray and black. Kass almost flew up the hill. 

“Sanctuary,” Eris muttered, and opened the portal. 

“What was he talking about?” Kass flurried through the portal. 

Eris Morn knew Sanctuary did not offer what its name implied. Instead, a conduit to the Darkness punched straight through the mountain, and wasn’t she used to her sanctuaries all being tunnels with monsters at the end? Shouldn’t she have gone to her nest in a prefab module instead? But Sanctuary was closer, and the module was so narrow that Kass would have to sit touching Eris’ knees or her shoulders with her own, and Eris was not ready for that. 

So Eris folded her arms and stood with her back to an ominous, red-spiked wall. “I did not tell him. I told other Guardians, the ones who asked me.” And Eris told Kass. How she lived in the gray between Light and Darkness for too long, “Not by choice, but by force. Chaos reigned, and I embraced it.” And then, “Perhaps it is the only thing worth embracing.” 

“None of that … “ Kass began. Stopped, started again. “Nothing in what you just said tells me how you feel.”

“I feel rejuvenated. This chaos is not new. It does not hold the name of the Darkness close. It does teach me that I fought against even greater forces than I could imagine. That is … dizzying.”

“If anyone knows this, it is you: recovery often opens up new problems.”

“I hate it.” Eris crossed her arms. “But that does not mean it is not true.”

“It’s hard for you, being the conduit for that thing.”

“But I am best suited to it. I am used to it. Someone else would find it surprising, would react in moments where what is demanded is to show not one emotion. The Darkness cannot sneak up behind me, Kass.” And I will not let anyone else do the same. 

“I worry for you. Be careful, please.” Kass began to reach out a hand, pulled it back. 

Her words were so similar to Toland’s. Except that Kass was not a terrible example of the consequences of giving yourself to the darkness. She was the opposite, perhaps too interested in keeping her hands clean to see the ways they had been dirty all along. 

“Do you have the talismans I gave you?” Eris said. 

Kass slid the shining gauntlet off her hand. Inside, the golden talismans curled around her wrist on their onyx cord. She offered them.

Eris could not touch her. Horrors, mud, scabs—touch felt like she was covered in things and needed to scrape them off. She could not afford to waste the time the terror would occupy. But she could take the loop of the offered bracelet and hold it, and see the understanding in Kass’ expression as she held the other side. “I will not leave you. You know this. I have had one thousand chances, my friend.”

“Then take no more—“ Kass pleaded. 

Eris shook the talisman. “We must journey. We must discover. It is intrinsic to us. Well.” She smiled, weighed whether Kass would like the joke, took the chance. “It is intrinsic to Hunters. Perhaps for a Warlock, it will take more work.” 

A small smile for a small joke. A jot of warmth, a fortress within a terrible fortress, a tug on a cord, a closed loop. A meeting in a war zone. No conclusion at all. 

Chapter Text

The Drifter is waiting.

He knows the feeling of quiet seasons. Of fat seasons where there is enough food and the roads are quiet. So it has been lately, punctuated by that disturbance with the Vex gate in the foyer. That made him think about what he would do if he was stuck with his back to the wall. Forget living rough: what if he couldn’t leave the room? If Vex filled up the doorway, there would be several choices.

These days, Drifter has an army and so many alibis. It’s a good deal, he compliments himself. The first wave of the army is the Taken. Let Knights and Primevals slay the Vex, their blind viciousness serving a purpose Oryx never imagined.

The next wave are the Guardians. He has Dredgens, loyalists, regulars now. Let them die their deaths for him. Somewhere in all that chaos, he can slip out.

It’s a good plan. It stops the fear from creeping too close. The fear is a wolf at the edge of the fire, and Drifter postures and yells and wears its skin to keep it away from his dinner.

And waits until the quiet season is done.

“Hello?” Iris hovered outside the door of her own Guardian’s room, almost certain of who had locked her out but determined to see proof. There was a duct she could use to get in through the ceiling, but it had been a good evening out at the debate, and with her mood bouncing like this she had it in her head to see the proof. It was the principle of the thing.

The Drifter’s Ghost transmatted into existence in a fall of bright red lattice. The latch clicked, but the Ghost didn’t move. 

“Yes, thank you,” said Iris. The other Ghost’s red stare created in her a mix of fear and pity. She saw it so rarely. Its shell was patchwork, re-made as many times as a Guardian’s body, except that in this case, every time showed.

Iris lowered her volume. The hallway behind her was empty, so no one would overhear, but she felt it appropriate. “You don’t have to just open doors for him, you know. Are you happy doing this?”

The patchwork and fused-metal and old rust Ghost stared at her with its red eye. Then it darted up and down. The red trails in its wake left an infinity sign slowly fading into the air. 

“You’ve been doing this forever? You’re in this forever?” 

It made the infinity sign again and pushed the door open. It spiraled through the messy room. Takeout boxes and backpacks and trailblazing gear were scattered around the narrow room. Iris was not unused to this, and in fact it warmed her core to think of her Guardian’s passion for long journeys out in the EDZ, days of tracking Fallen troop movements and scouting prospective landing sites for Guardians. She could just barely see Jenev’s closed eyes over the blankets she shared and the Drifter’s arms around her shoulders. He wasn’t sleeping; his face held none of the smoothed-out false innocence hers did at rest. He watched both Ghosts with bloodshot eyes. 

The nameless Ghost settled on a high shelf, sitting with its back to her in just the place she most preferred to sit herself. She alighted on the small pillow Jenev had purchased for her shortly after their partnership began. Settling into the silence of the room helped soothe her mood, but only so much. She couldn’t help but think of how many staring eyes would remain open in the dark after she closed hers. So many of the Ghosts in the crowd with her today would be settling down with their Guardians, going to sleep. 

Still nervous, Iris flitted to the bed and sat on Jenev’s knee, as much as a compromise as she could make to be close to her Guardian and far from the Drifter. Everyone had different ideas about how to protect their Guardians, she supposed. 

She would not try again for a long time to get the staring, broken Ghost to communicate. 

Chapter Text

Ikora Rey wears her wings like a shawl, the long wrists up around her head, the flight feathers brushing her shoulders and collarbone. She carries great horned owl wings, rounded and soft. Silent and fast. The itching had been going on for weeks before the Conclave meeting, where Osiris’ empty place felt like a gunshot wound. It was wrong to exclude him, she worried, and wrong, she discovered later, to feel the buds of wings on her back. Down snowed across her skin. 

But Osiris had not served the Tower as he should. She loved him and he was stubborn and blind and not as smart as he thought he was, and she missed him and the wings sprouted. Her feathers are striped like tiger fur, and look deceptively rounded for how fast she can move. 

There had been little question that she would be Osiris’ successor. The only one truly surprised by the wings was her.

Commander Zavala’s long wings are white in most light. In color and shape they match a white-tailed kite: long and narrow, with a patch of bronzy blue like a cloak over the shoulders. Their unfurling was, like Zavala wants most things in his life to be, straightforward. When Saint-14 stepped down from the Vanguard’s station Zavala felt an almost instant sensation of discomfort under his heavy clothes and armor. 

Unbound, his wings show a slight sheen of Awoken-blue. The movement of white light under and between the feathers is almost undetectable, since Zavala does not encourage staring.

But he himself stared, washed over with the sensation of brine and gritty sand. His first rebirth had been on a beach. His next would be in the sky.

The prickling on Cayde-6’s chassis passed for shame, at first. Of course, he wouldn’t tell that suspicion to anyone, not the least at Andal Brask’s funeral. He left early. Moved from bar to bar for a while, then back to the Tower, knowing he had won. Hunters had two moments of shame: losing the Dare and growing the wings.

Exo wings do not match any known species of birds. They grow slowly and sometimes come in patchy, as if the world is struggling with the magic of metal and oil more than with feather and sinew. Like organic wings, Cayde-6’s wings anchor from his shoulder blades to his lower back. New metal muscle and sinew grows around him while he staggers back and forth in his room, unable to stop moving and unwilling to call for help. When his wings are finished the feathers, dark blue glinting with black, jingle like wind chimes.

Later, he loves his wings. Guardians love his wings. But what a trade: wings for freedom!

(Years later, Eris Morn would crawl out of a low-roofed cave with bat-wings dragging in the regolith. Not a Vanguard, no, but something new and infected and terrible. Something gauche, having been handed robes of office in a pit of snakes. She would hunch these wings over her and wrap her arms around herself and not think of flying as anything beautiful or inspiring. She has been in the caves too long, and does not know what she is. She will.) 

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“Say, what do you know about the song?”

Two Guardians have placed themselves in his path. Oh, Toland deigned to talk to them; happy was the spark of white light to give wisdom to these stacks of cursed or blessed blood and bone. But he suffered some with more interest than others, and these two were fleeting as leaves in a stream. One launched his sparrow off the boulder where Toland perched. Over and over the rockets roared, this way and that, the man bored with his friend’s acceptance of the patrol. It was becoming irritating.

“I know many songs,” Toland said. “The squeaks thralls make in their sleep, the victory ballads of the Iron Lords, the newest experiments of the Deathsingers ...”

“Okay, right.” The Guardian spread his hands, first to get Toland to stop talking, then in a wide sweep as if conducting an orchestra. He could be at a party, trying to remember a song with his friend. Behind him, toward the crimson spire, Hive gunfire screamed and burst into wet sparks across the mare. “Do you know the one that goes like this?” 

He started to hum, the notes wobbling and cracking.

It was a simple song, martial and hearty. By the third note, Toland’s irritation had faded. 

This was the first sign something was wrong.

Without a body, he could not feel physical ache and exhaustion. Instead, an emotional drain settled over him, the landscape of the Moon becoming dull and hateful, devoid of safety. Only by looking at the Scarlet Keep could he truly tell he was losing colors, the world going to gray. And he didn’t care. What was there left to do here, anyway? What had he bothered to live a second time for? 

Perhaps the Guardian had noticed something wrong, but he had hummed for seconds more afterward, and that was enough.

Too tired to be furious, Toland lost consciousness.

— and consciousness was all he had, after all, so the waking was terrifying. He saw Eris recoil from his screams. He tried to turn over, tried to ball his fists against the cloth-covered table and curl in on himself, but he could not. More screams, grating on his own ears. Darting to the side like a Ghost felt morbidly insufficient to the disorientation he felt. He had woken up on Eris’ workbench, in sight of the Pyramid.

“Treachery.” His voice sounded hoarse — and why should it? — but he tried to remain steady. “Betrayal. Insurrection —“

“Accident,” said Eris. She leaned on her elbows and loomed over him, her full, pale lips quirked. 

Her lack of worry gave him permission to take a breath. He sat among books and tattered cloth, sigils and beads, and felt like the color had been restored to the world. 

“That fool Guardian revealed a weakness I would not have thought to test,” Eris said. “At least he had the sense to bring you to me.” 

“What was that cursed memory? A trap for me?” 

“Not for you.” She smiled, tolerant. You aren’t that special. “For anything of Oryx’s brood. Savathûn sets mines for her brother, even in his death. She has begun to infect the Guardians with her vile song. I, too, fell under its sway for a time, before I knew its purpose. It attacks certain Hive. What it does to Guardians is … unclear. But for the Hive, it bends them to her will.” 

“Anything spun of Ir Yût’s song will be pulled into the maelstrom.” His voice still felt too tremulous for his liking. 

“Yes.” Eris ran her fingers along the beads that hung over her forehead. They were a memorial for him, he knew. The two of them had talked about that much, but not about how she saw the Nightmare of his Guardian self as compared to the spirit he had become. 

“So, I am still governed by her will,” Toland said. “Amusing, if dangerous. Lucky that a foolhardy Guardian was the one who unleashed this spell, and not a true enemy.”

“You are still hers.” Quick disappointment in Eris’ eyes. 

He laughed. “I am my own, and belong to those who would find me useful.” 

Eris shook her head. “Guardians will hear of this. They have a weapon against you now, to … take you out of time. They will use it in jest.” 

“Yet you recovered me.”

“With spells like a rift, and like a cage, and like a portal. I mapped the boundaries of what you have become. Your body, your mind. It was … educational.”

Toland could not shiver and would not have if he could; would instead have met Eris’ eyes and waited for her to finish her thought, to declare scientific interest or old trust or new intimacy. Without a body, he had fewer options. To sit there, flickering, would do disservice to the work she had done. 

She spoke before he could, and turned away. “Blind, I can see you as you once were.”

“Then imagine whatever politeness you would like. A bow. A tip of the helm.”

She showed him just a sliver of her face. “Go now. Haunt as you like. If the song strikes, you know now you must escape it. I cannot build you wards, or shields. The song touches us all. I am afraid it touches the Guardians the most, although they can hardly hear it. It rings in my ears. Poison, you said! Venom, that is what it is. Something waiting in the blood until it takes hold. And you, so bloodless, are the first one caught. Perhaps this will help both of us in our research.”

“Our debts cannot be even, but consider this a guarantee of payment. I owe you, Eris. And I take the arrears of life and death quite seriously.”

With this he found he was in possession of his usual faculties, and darted away.

Eris had been right. Guardians did use this knowledge in jest. Patrols became chases. Where Toland had been calling to visitors out of the void, he now found himself cornered by the whims of his enemies.

Did they not know how valuable this knowledge was? He had discovered such a key element of the Witch-Queen’s deadly architecture by accident, by process of elimination. If he had not ascended, he would never had have the chance to determine by what mechanism infected Hive and made whatever hidden change it might be making in Guardians. 

A tradeoff, then. In exchange for giving the Guardians a means to silence him, he discovered a new angle on one of his favorite topics. He reluctantly admitted this was among his favorites to study: himself. 

Chapter Text

“I have a mission for you.” 

In Commander Zavala’s office, Jenev Furnon felt trapped. The air seemed to scratch at her skin. Servants and bootlickers should be standing here, not her. Everything oozed privilege and lies. The world outside wasn’t this clean, wasn’t this safe. The noble Vanguard acted like a fool for trying to pretend it was.

Yet here she stood, on the opposite side of the desk from the Titan commander, because he had caught her looking at a memorial. 

“Me?” She laughed at him. “I ain’t never been in a Vanguard office in my life. You see I’m a Dredgen. Why me?” 

“It’s obvious you’re a Dredgen,” said Zavala. “But the Drifter is helping us now. Plainly. Without pretense. And I suspect you haven’t left the Tower yet for a reason, just like he hasn’t.” 

Jenev squeezed the back of the chair. “What’s the mission?”

“Wait. I am not finished. I picked you because I saw you standing by the place a piece of the Almighty hit the Tower. You were curious, but I also saw more than idle curiosity. See, I’d been wondering about you for a while.” He raised a hand to stall the comment he saw on her curled lip. 

Watching me? She had been going to say, and figure out what to say afterward when she got there. She had plenty of options — offended, flirty, impressed — each with its own use. 

“First, you’re Awoken. Second, you’re a Hunter, so no one else is assigning tasks to you. Third, you felt something when you looked at that place where the Tower had been damaged. And that surprised me. Showed me a depth to you I hadn’t considered before. So I wanted to offer a chance to begin to understand that, in the way a Vanguard can. By sending you out to the field in a routine mission that will prove your mettle to both of us.”

“I don’t need to prove anything.”

“So you don’t. Then, what do you want? Answer that, and I’ll tell you about the mission.” 

His silver eyes met hers. He wouldn’t be moved, that gaze told her. Fine. She didn’t need him to. 

“So my reward for playing some personality game with you is to go do more work? I’ll pass.”

Jenev turned. Her heavy Gambit boots clicked on the polished tile. 

“I think you’re lonely,” said Zavala. 

Just as she had in front of the Winnower, Jenev laughed. “Me?” She swept back toward the desk. That was rich. A real joke. She hardly even slept alone. 

Zavala didn’t move as she leaned over his desk, taking possession of his space, close enough to kiss. She drew out the twin snake pendant, and still his eyes didn’t stray from her face. The jade dangled in front of his mouth. “I’m just peachy,” she whispered, and whipped away to resume her march out of the office.

He had succeeded in making her feel awkward, simply by not responding. Her back prickled. The office was too long, but she did know how to hold her posture so that she walked out with dignity. 

Finally, he spoke. “Just because you are social doesn’t mean you aren’t lonely.” Zavala’s voice was rough. Trying to gain sympathy, Jenev thought. Trying to say he gets it, as if there was anything there to get. She kept walking. 

His voice boomed. “You were looking at that memorial and thinking about the things you would regret if the Tower fell. Losing your old friends. Your old patrols. Your heritage. You used to care about all of those things. And now you’ve traded them away for a Gambit that makes you feel a little less lonely.”

Impressive. The Titan Vanguard could be mean. 

“I am offering you a chance,” Zavala said, “to find a new source of meaning. To solve a problem you may be uniquely suited to, in the Dreaming City. To use a business term you’ll understand, I think your current life is a bit … monopolized.” 

Jenev stopped. So what if she did take one mission? Not to run, but to forge. That’s what Guardians do. And maybe to make some money while she’s at it. The Dreaming City was stuck in a time loop: surely someone must want something smuggled in, even if their little bit of novelty will disappear at the turn of the dragon’s tide. Surely some other Awoken will be as desperate as some on Earth are, and Jenev will be able to make herself the one way they can get what they need. 

Was she lonely? She hardly ever talked to her old fireteam. Dredgens weren’t friends—they competed too much, took matches too seriously. For all they looked raucous, they were as cutthroat among themselves as they were among outsiders. The Drifter was often busy with Contact, and besides, what she had with him had never been intended to create some feeling of fulfillment that lasted after the moment was gone. It had always been playful, always immediate, always fleeting, chasing the perpetual now. 

“I’ll think about it,” she said over her shoulder, and walked out.

Often, when Jenev found herself alone, she went to see Devrim. He was reliable and earthy and always in the same place, even if that place was a war zone. He was doing work she believed in, and had a family to go home to when he was tired. 

She stood in the dusty, ruined sanctuary of the stone church, her arms crossed, wondering whether Zavala was right. 

He was wrong about what drove her. She was sure of that. She wanted safety, not companionship, and had found that companionship made safety more likely. And at the same time she wanted to be thrilled, as many Guardians did — to do wild, difficult work and die for it and come back exultant with victory that had, after all, been easy. 

Iris floated beside Jenev. She had recently chosen a plain blue shell. Iris hadn’t spoken since their meeting with Zavala. Jenev presumed it was because they both knew the Ghost’s opinion already. Iris’ ideas about being a Guardian were more conservative than Jenev’s, more slow. If she listened to Iris, Jenev thought, she would never do anything interesting. She’d never have joined up with Drifter or the Dredgens, never have discovered her own past. 

“It’s not that complicated,” Jenev told the Ghost without preamble. “I just do what I want.”

More dust showered down as a Guardian leapt toward the sniper’s nest, paying no attention to Jenev. She considered the church again — the remains of the stained glass, the thick, cool stone that had seen invasion after invasion of increasingly strange kinds. 

Although she was an Awoken, Jenev had always considered Earth her home. She had been rezzed in the EDZ and found little to separate her from humans. Other Awoken spoke of a kind of third sight, an awareness of the Light and the Dark that did not feel like they felt to humanity. Their descriptions had never rung true to Jenev. If she had some connection beyond a political one to the nature of her people, it was long dormant. 

Yet, once, she had met the queen. Once she had been told she was an old, old Awoken, and perhaps more human because of it, not yet washed in as much of the radiation that had changed the others. Any role she had held in her second life had been irrelevant to her Guardian life for a long time. Perhaps knowing that, never feeling connected to her fellow Awoken, had left her searching for something she could not name. 

But, so what? Revelation did not pay.

But why not go to the Dreaming City? It was one job. That might pay, and it would give her something to do while Drifter was running Contact and the Dredgens were chasing armor. 

She looked around the church again, peering through the empty arches out into the grassy, ruined lawn and the war beyond, and realized she was looking for names on graves. 

Zavala was partially right, but he thought she was softer than she was. She wasn’t lonely, but she didn’t like being alone. 

“Fine,” said Jenev. “You win.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Iris said cheerfully. 

Chapter Text

“Io reeks of Light yet. Your bold Guardians stride its halls. I do not need to.”

“Not to confer with me?”

Eris Morn stood on a crumbling slab in the Ascendant Plane. Long had she argued with herself that she shouldn’t go there. Her work with the Tree was too critical for a moment away, the Witch-Queen too close for Eris to want to touch her territory. But she had been so lonely, just as Toland had been when he had written to her years ago. So finally she had gone, one lonely scholar seeking to pull from another what he may not have to give. Would it be a cycle of generation or drain? She ached to find out.

Still, Toland could not visit her. Laws of reality bound him. When Eris gently accused him of neglecting her, she expected an equally gentle and restricted answer.

“I would break the world open for you if I could,” said Toland, who could not.

“It is with your words as it is with the Hive: when I hear them I feel my spirits sink, yet in the sinking comes a comforting familiarity. Always, there has been something wonderful about the swarm.”

Toland did not chase her mix of horror and affection down to the core. Sometimes he did; sometimes the two of them mingled memory and present, love and fear, to form the backbone of their discourse. Today, he focused on the mission. “Whisper to me of the Tree.”

She did. She sat in the dust, lit by Toland’s spark of awareness, and drew the curving branches, the shimmering boughs, the form that wavered, like a distant planet, out of sight at the tree’s crown. She watched Toland dart to and fro with the movement of her hands, and thought of what he had once looked like.

“Thank you,” he said. “As we once mapped the Pit, perhaps this understanding of the primordial garden will help us map both the Darkness and the Light.”

“And if you had to choose a side,” Eris looked up. “Based on the cartography of growth, decay, cosmic roots under cosmic dirt … which would you choose?”

He stilled as much as he could, silver sparks dripping onto the gray lines of the map she had drawn. “Whether the Hive shun or embrace the Deep, whether the Guardians cultivate or stifle the Lights, I proclaim the same.” His voice was dusty, brittle, convinced but weak at the seams. “The side I choose is yours.”

Eris took in a breath deeper and more comfortable than she took on some days. The angles of her tired body no longer seemed so rusty. “Then treat with me, dearest, craven Toland. I know where you haunt. Draw for me a map of the Moon’s Pyramid.”

“I will.”

Chapter Text

There are older peoples than the krill, on Fundament.

Not much older and no more native, Taox knows as she stands beside the mound with her fingers interlaced. Fundament is the wreckage after a storm already, species thrown together and dashed apart. And the closer they look to your own species, the easier it is to know what kills them, so krill fight krill, and everyone else fights everyone else.

The barrow held a dead killer, or a dead diplomat, or whatever other things one might choose to call a dead ruler. 

She had taken a boat out to the barrow for inspiration. An engineering problem she could not immediately see her way around. One of her technicians walked idly around the other side of the barrow, her spines just barely visible above the muddy dirt. Taox did not expect any direct knowledge to come from the old site except perhaps for some reassurance that it had not been flooded yet. A few tendrils of green seaweed have opportunistically taken root on the dirt. Taox does not know whether they do so naturally or whether she is seeing evolution before her eyes. Many things are a mystery, to the krill. 

The barrow does not provide inspiration. Just when it starts to provide morbidity (we will all be like this, or worse; we will die without graves) she wrenches her thoughts back. I can adjust the lightning flow in this spot, to reduce strain on this spot, which can be used in this way to solve my problem. Yes. Idle thoughts, even grim ones, help.

Millennia later, comes the Osmium Traitor. Living memorial, mind dug open like dirt for a grave, her memories replaced with an echoing string of curses. Savathûn’s puppet she is, and every time one dies, the queen creates another. 

Savathûn herself watches the Guardians kill this traitor and takes double satisfaction. Once from imbaru, once from her bitter anger at Taox who almost sold her, Taox who loved and left her, Taox, the only creature in history who ever really made Sathona feel like a child. Bitter humor, held on for the lives of civilizations. 

Just like Guardians. Each time one dies, the queen creates another. She will not allow Taox’s name to die, and in the way of the Hive it does not matter whether this is torture or honor.

Another Osmium Traitor rises, living, unthinking tomb to Taox. 

Chapter Text

“You just … stopped being a Guardian?” said the Ghost.

Kass looked at Iris over the top of her glass. The mid-Tower restaurant was breezy, brown curtains open onto high windows. The Hero of the Red War was waiting for her friend, and Iris’ partner was at the bar, so the two had gravitated toward one another. Although Kass hadn’t talked at length to Iris before, she found the Ghost’s conversation pleasantly straightforward and thoughtful. The Light washed through this place, and always Kass had to guard against it, or the presence of another Guardian would consume her thoughts, and the fire would follow. 

“I retired to a temple,” said the Hero of the Red War, “and then I came back. Would you like anything?” She gestured at the table. Offering Ghosts food was accepted politeness, and a bit of a joke, and she knew the smile that came with it softened her regal demeanor. 

Iris drifted closer. “I’d love to hear about the temples. We don’t spend time with civilians.” 

The Ghost’s thoughtful tones calmed Kass. “Some of them were surprised I’d stopped being a Guardian, too,” she said. “Some people treated me with neither deference nor disgust. Some thanked me, and I am grateful to them. One priest said I shouldn’t be there. That I was abandoning the people of the Last City by not fighting across the Solar System. I couldn’t, just then, tell him that I was still working on reining in my Light.” There had been other reasons, too. She would tell this one, noble lie, because she did not yet want to talk to Iris about Uldren.

“I’m sorry, about your Light.”

“Don’t be. I became a conduit, and sometimes there are cracks. The Traveler does what is best for each of us. My walls are strong enough to hold this. That was the belief that endeared me to most of the teachers and speakers, in the end. The ones who did believe.” 

“Some of them didn’t??”

Kass laughed. “Well, it would be hard not to believe in the Light. But there are plenty of people at the temple who go there for a reason other than worshipping the Traveler. For family, or to try to separate from their pasts, or for money when they can. And each place is different. There are three major temples, and countless small ones.”

“Which one did you go to?” 

“This was a small one. I liked the low ceilings, and most of the speakers.”

“So you must have known these people pretty well. You stayed with them for more than a year.”

“Almost two years. But no, I wasn’t there for a community. I was there for the Traveler.” 

“I thought temples collected food, and alms, and helped refugees.”

“They do. Some of those people we helped, I know their names.”

“And the priest who didn’t like you?” 

“I told him it was safer for all of us for me to stay among them. He didn’t believe me at first, but … there was one night where I couldn’t hold it. The Light. I set fire to the sheets on the dorm room bed, and put it out the instant I woke up. He didn’t hate me less after that.” It shouldn’t have happened. She had thought it had been over.

Iris laughed. 

“Did you know they mention Ghosts in some of their prayers?”

“I didn’t.”

“We often thank the Traveler for Ghosts.” Kass looked at her own Ghost, hovering beside her. He quirked his flanges in gentle acknowledgement. “Your taxonomy of stars, your messengers.”

“My Guardian isn’t .. very attentive. It’s nice to hear some people are.” 

“The table is open. Ikora will be here soon.”

“Oh.” For a reason Kass did not understand, this unsettled the Ghost. Their conversation afterward was polite but short. 

When Iris left, Kass’ own Ghost settled on her hand. Kass finished the oath quietly to herself. “Your protecters, your second chances. We think you in circles, in orbits, in the past, present, and future.”  

Her Ghost followed her gaze to the Traveler. “I’m glad to be back in the Tower,” he said. “I’m glad you can be.” 

“Me, too.”

Chapter Text

"Where are we going?" A thrall asks.

A knight whets the edge of his stone sword on his chitinous forearm. Both of them happened to come to the gunport on the tombship at around the same time. The stars are cast faintly green outside. The knight has wondered whether this is an effect of the cosmic dust in the area or the influence of the tombship itself. The thrall assumes the latter. Everything, after all, is Hive, and everything is green-tinted in the long corridor of space through which they have been traveling since the beginning of time.

The knight is old, his skin dry and thick. He remembers the last conquest, the raven's ships falling burning from the sky.

"Where?" The thrall asks again, full of glory in the the insistence and the shiny, wet carapace of youth. 

"Oryx knows," says the knight.

"When?"

The knight chuckles. "Oh, it does not matter. I will not get there. You might. The spawn of your span might, if you're lucky. We go until we're stopped, grub. And then more of us go."

"Why?"

"To show we can destroy anything that could destroy us."

"But if some of us won't get there ... because it takes so long ... we have to take our teeth and claws to time, or else there's nothing to fight out here."

The knight finds this confusing, and does not answer, but grumbles wordlessly and looks out the vaulted window.

The thrall decides to live forever, or at least until the ship arrives somewhere.

Chapter Text

“Did you know the Pyramid was here?”

Without nerves, it was impossible for Toland to be startled. But the nature of the Hive’s necromancy was to preserve the essence of a soul, so he still felt the fear and surprise, even if it didn’t show. He wandered the moon in the guide of a tangle of lightning, finding what Guardians he could. Eris (Eris, every letter of the name forever marked by her) snuck up on him. 

“This is an unexpected rendezvous,” he said.

She stared, the green fire in her hands seething, her words heavy with unknown questions atop the one she had already asked. “If you have any loyalty to me, answer truthfully.”

And he did have loyalty. Just days ago they had created a weapon from the skull of deathsingers together. He could not and did not think of it as mere convenience, or professional necessity. There was too much between them for that, even if both of them resisted getting too comfortable. Eris was not comfortable with anyone, these days. Toland understood this feeling, if for different reasons.

So, truth. 

“No,” he said. “I had no need to trek paths Guardians had not already walked. Whether that be the World’s Grave or the Mare Imbrium, I follow the living, not the dead.” No use talking to the dead. They never answer. 

Eris sat down on the rock in the shadow of the old colony and folded her hands on her lap. “These plains are full of slaughter. At least they are not full of lies.”

Toland was telling the truth, and knew that to assert it would only make him sound like a liar.

Eris wasn’t finished. “I have stopped living in those tunnels, although I did not for a long time after I walked out of them. ‘Do not fall to that which you have already overcome.’ It is easy to advise others. Far more difficult to understand what it means for myself. So.” Again she stared at him. “Did you willingly leave us to die, when we six went down into the Pit?” 

The question was a whiplash, another unexpected idea. Had he? In his own memory, it was unclear. He certainly had not planned for the mission to fail. It was Eriana’s mission, and its success or failure were hers. He had simply found an addiction he couldn’t shake. It was not in his nature to be direct, not even to himself. 

“Guardians wallow in immediate desires, failing to contemplate the greater design,” he said. “But Guardians do one thing better than all other life humanity has yet discovered in the universe. Guardians win. They are defined by it, assured of it. From this, all the rest of our actions follow.” 

“The Moon is not a place of victory!” Eris snarled. 

“Yes, we had just suffered a terrible loss. Brave Wei Ning defied fate most of all, and still fell. But we were so full of fervor. Eriana’s plan was solid, well-researched. Between her and I, everything should have worked.”

Eris took a deep breath. “That is not an answer.” 

“Why would Eriana have needed me? Her mission was noble revenge; mine was craven curiosity. They just happened to share space.” He had wanted so badly to become truly immortal. Consumed by the fear of death like a starving man was with the idea of food, he supposed, and attracted to the escape the Hive represented. “Selfishness. Not malice. Both times. I became something great. I thought you would win with or without me.” 

“And lacked tact enough for your ambition to become charming.”

“Perhaps that would be my next ambition, if the Guardians made it worth it.”

Eris gave a short, low laugh. 

Toland hadn’t intended to be funny. But he suspected he knew what she was thinking. “I am an arrogant man, Eris. I do not shackle myself to lost causes on purpose. That mission was the greatest sign of ignorance I have ever shown. And I am thankful you are still breathing after it.”

“You gave me a bond, for protection,” Eris said. “And now …” She rotated one of the beads on her headdress. “I carry a memory of you. A sign that I did not let go of what you all were, even though I did not fall to the despair of those memories.”

“No. You never fell. Rise, Eris. Your dark work shines a light.”

Anger again. “And who shines a light for me?” 

This time it was his chance to level the weight of an invisible stare. “Let me tell you of the victories you have brought. The Crimson Brood scattered, the Hellmouth empty of kings … A walk, perhaps. A map of what you have already wrought.” Toland was good at flattery. He also did not waste it. 

Perhaps Eris balanced these two facts too as she reached out a hand, although he could not take it, and turned her eyes toward the Pit. 

Chapter Text

Ikora Rey watched the Drifter test out his new game. She stood in the shadows, arms folded, judging the moral weight of something that felt increasingly arbitrary. Gambit was changing. So what? The Darkness itself had come to feed.

“Acceptable.”

The Drifter turned to her with a jade coin dancing over his fingers. The green light and black shadows looked viscous, bloody. “You want to try it out?”

“Who’s to say I haven’t? You aren’t the only one who can hide behind a mask.”

“Keep me on my toes like this and we might dance yet.”

“Why are you even doing this any more? Shin Malphur is not inclined to snatch up your Dredgens. Or so it seems.”

“Things are different for all of us these days. And I gotta eat.”

She caught his eyes, searching for the truth behind the words. She wondered what would have happened if they had met at a different time, if she had been able to make him into a real Guardian. For now, she hoped Eris knew what she was doing when she worked with him.

After all, Eris also talked to the Darkness itself.

“You have Vanguard permission to do that much.” Ikora folded her arms.

He held her gaze for too long, then turned to walk into the depths of the Haul. “You know where to find me, if you ever get tired of that tame Crucible.” He waved over his shoulder.

She didn’t need the last word, but the competitive want for it swept up like a fire, and as quickly banked. It left a soft melancholy in its wake, like the stillness left by a giant ocean creature’s tail, and when that too left, she was simply tired.

Chapter Text

A snapshot: Someone steps on a stick. No one jumps. Not even Euclid. Four loaded-for-bear Guardians and not one of them looking head-height. Auburn, Euclid, Yarrow, Kass, spread out through a stand of pines. Geomag Stabilizers buzz faintly in thick needles. Blue-green fog from a hazy afternoon reflects in a still, reed-lined pond. 

“Got one,” Kass says.

Three heads swivel. 

“That’s five, two, four, and another two.” Yarrow facilitates. It’s a competition, but at the same time it doesn’t matter. The game is the count. The point is the four of them, middle of nowhere, counting birds. 

Black wings flash away. Everyone sees it and takes in the stillness and the movement in their own ways. Quiet chuckles, quiet thoughts. Even Ikora wouldn’t hear all of them as the fond stillness is passed around. Geese flying overhead stay in formation, ragged patches of smooth passage. 

“They say there’s a new Crow in the EDZ.”

The Hunter and the Drifter are sunning themselves by the old reservoir. Broad-brimmed hats and bare legs, white sunlight on the water. Awoken-silver traces ripple under vibrant skin. 

“That so?” Jenev glances at the Drifter with calculated lack of care. 

He scratches under his headband. That’s his way, isn’t it? Meet disinterest with disinterest, but all the same she can almost feel his hair under her hands. “You won’t be around to keep an eye, I figure. All that in the Reef, the Dark ice on that moon … “

Both of them always assumed the other would leave eventually.

“No,” says Jenev. “He’s Awoken. I’ll see to him.”

She doesn’t care about the Crow. The Dredgens have little use for the Crow unless he bothers them. She cares about the way the Drifter kisses her palm. She cares about seeing him in the morning. Been long enough now she just might. 

Chirraek is interrupting something. They say so, when they walk out from the between-spaces and into some of the shallowest of Moon caverns. The place reeks of the Scarlet court. 

 Eris and Toland look up from diagrams and maps and sheets of music: the beginnings of the Deathbringer. 

“And what of it, record-keeper?” As he speaks, Toland signals to Eris to wait. 

She has stood up, reached for a spell. 

She’s quick, Chirraek notices. 

“Oh, you intruded on me once. Our accounts have now been settled,” Chirraek says. “You’ve caused me very little paperwork, really. The passage of a spark in the night? Negligible. This one, though … “ They meet Eris’ eyes. "Broods have come to be because of your depredations, did you know?” 

Chirraek’s grudge against Eris Morn is no more or less than that against any great killer.

Meanwhile, Crota’s Bane bares yellowed teeth — she’s missing one in the back — and hisses. 

“Oh, go back to your work,” Chirraek interrupts as if pushing a curious child away from their scrolls. “I won’t stand and chatter at you like some. There’s no time. I’m simply checking in. And expressing my displeasure at the loss of the Deathsingers. The lineage of them, the additions and subtractions of power … inconvenient.”

Chirraek wonders if the former Guardians see it for the wry humor it is or suspect no such thing exists behind their eyes. Before Eris can sling a spell they slip back out of the world, back to deeper tunnels and wilder halls. They certainly hadn’t enjoyed Toland’s interruption of their work, back when the wisp had bothered them in their own throne world. No, that hadn’t been practical at all. Taking scant seconds for this visit hadn’t been either. But a little bit of payback had been satisfying. 

Chapter Text

“Did your people tell you stories, when you were a child?” Caiatl asks. 

She leans back in the throne rescued from her mutated homeworld. After the first round of ritual she invited the Guardian and his council back. A polite gesture, and a second chance to bow. Her father might have offered the guests the riches of worlds, but from the look on the commander’s face she suspected he wouldn’t have accepted them. The set of his lips and the tension around his eyes spoke of a warrior who threw himself against one too many walls.

“Many of us do not remember our childhoods,” the commander says. “We were forged for war. But this question has not escaped us.” He gestures to one of his party. Three had come, this time: the commander, the masked one, and another. This third shuffles forward. 

“Listen here,” says the third. “This ain’t — I don’t — they told me to be diplomatic, but it was Zavala who told me, and he leads by example.” 

Caiatl laughs. “You set a fine example of respecting the ritual with words and in the sky, shipmaster. Now I recognize your voice where I didn’t know your face.” She doesn’t mind Amanda showing a little fire. What would fighting these Guardians gain any of them, anyway? The whole conflict was a bone tossed to her councilors, a whetstone to grind both armies against until the Hive arrived.

“Good,” says Amanda Holliday. “So what I’m saying is I have stories from my mother and her mother. We can trade. We can listen. Zavala and Osiris can hold some big guns. And it don’t mean we like each other.” 

“You’re right!” So often Caiatl thought of the emperor's mythkeeper Ahztja and the thousands of stories she had learned from conquered worlds. Now, her own mythkeeper held the stories of Torobatl. “But then why are you doing this? You know very well we have conquered all the places from which we have heard stories.” 

“Think of it as just another part of the ritual.” Amanda answers quickly. “Let me tell you about the Trickster.”  

Chapter Text

A hole opens up in the world and the Guardians fall through.

Eris Morn watches Override through the scope of a sniper rifle. Golden charms and green-black feathers hug the barrel. In what she had thought her future would look like, the Moon colonies were not still standing, nor the empty skeleton of the Scarlet Keep on the horizon. No, she had been going to burn it all, and scoop up the ashes and fling them in a victory dance.

But it had not been so, through choice and happenstance both. Revenge no longer sparkled so brightly. Nevertheless, she wished something else could have come in its place other than the shouts of the Pyramids, the whisper of the Tree, the fingerprints of the Witch-Queen on all of Eris’ enemies and time.

One Guardian lingers outside the vortex. Eris comms her. “Enough. I have seen what I need.”

“And?” asks the Ghost.

Eris could lay down the gun but does not, as the distant figure doesn’t. The Guardian prowls the empty arena.

“If Savathûn moves through the Vex pathways enough, she could find the Black Garden,” Eris says. “She could find where it all began. I will study the Vex portals on the Moon more closely. Even if the Vex are simply barriers between us and what truly matters — the end of the Darkness, the disproving of the sword-logic.”

To another Guardian-Ghost pair she might not have spoken those words aloud. Almost regrets she did when the Ghost replies: “Disproving? We don’t need to argue it in the academy to know it’s wrong.”

The Guardian’s crimson helmet, decorated with charms, tips. Eris leans her head against the gun. “Astute. Once, I believed Savathûn and I danced the exact steps the sword-logic dictated for us: killings and revenge, reprisal as loyalty. Who else agrees to meet at such closely-held times, for such powerful reasons? Enemies and friends. Lovers. Adversaries. She and I needed each other to give one another meaning.” Eris’ lip curls. She makes an effort to relax her shoulders, cannot.

For the first time, the Guardian speaks. “But lately, she’s been something else.”

“Yes. There is a weakness in her that is also a strength for both of us.” Saying us to mean herself and Savathûn feels ugly and ironic to Eris, but she has practice in conviction, in a firm voice, and speaks like she’s calling troops to battle. “To break the sword logic we must prove whether or not we need each other in such a grasping, misunderstood way. We will be clear to her. In that game played in the Garden competition was an invention and a choice, not the final shape.”

“So, you’re saying we invite her to be friends instead of weird, codependent enemies before she can get to the heart of the universe and wreck what’s inside?”

“Yes,” says the Guardian, quickly. She stops circling the vortex. Looks up as if she can see where Eris is standing.

“And if not,” says Eris, “we snuff her out.”

Chapter Text

There is a sliver of a place in the Ascendant Plane where the Moon overlooks the Earth.

Rather, there are many such places, and this is not a safe one. No place is safe here, the definition of “place” itself too malleable. Each cliffside is a succession of cliffsides. Yet, this hideaway is mapped in some way, and the weapons that ring it are those which Eris has made for herself.

Eris and Toland sit curled like vines around trees. The back of her leg presses against the back of his. Other lovers have been lost this night and she remembers what it was like to be like them, stolen and transformed. Here her vision is almost perfect, the Earth a blue-black jewel shot with silver, in ripped-curtain true color. Here he conjured robes he last held in blood-and-nerve hands before his exile, cinched at the bond and cut in vampiric angles at the throat. She never knew him back then, indulges in what she knows are sophomoric fantasies of lessons and trysts and loving mockery if she had been. Indulges in his vanity.

Chapter Text

One good thing that came from having ‘grown up’ as a young Guardian during the Ahamkara wars was a proportionate sense of scale.

“He’s not that big,” Eris said once during a meeting on how to slide a blade between the ribs of Crota, Eater of Hope.

She thought at first that the silence was offended, that Wei Ning hadn’t deserved to die for something “not that big.”

But Eriana wasn’t looking at her with grief.

“Ah, right. Dragons,” Vell said finally.

Toland, who normally took every opportunity to go on about the grandeur of the Hive, even hesitated. Raised his hand off the table as if he was about to pat Eris’s. Thought, for once, about what he said. “I suppose, compared to an Ahamkara, one might call Crota ‘not that big.’”

Vell and Omar found his wounded tone hilarious.

Chapter Text

The Drifter has two fish on a spear and a moonshine burn in his belly, all of which mean he’s less annoyed than usual by the sight of the Ghost circling the perimeter when he gets back to camp. Still never gets used to the things, making him feel like he’s being watched, but at least this one is familiar. Wind hisses in the trees while he sets the spear by the cold remains of the campfire.

Jenev had been set up in a Hunter’s cabin for weeks before she called him, saying she was on her way back to the Tower and wanted company for the last miles. They’re close enough to see the Wall, but the cold feels uncivilized, wild.

It’s warmer inside the low cabin. Drifter pauses at the door, letting it shut behind him. The single room is large enough for three, but bare. Jenev has filled up one corner of it with blankets. She’s sprawled out, asleep, tired and trusting her Ghost. The latter sobers him some. He’s frightened for her. Who knows what that machine reports back to its meddling god — but he’ll eat his bandana if the safety isn’t cozy enough to tempt. It’s warm enough inside to be almost comfortable, and a scuffed skylight picks out brown fur and red cloth and the blue of her body. Silver veins glow and fade along her lean arms. She opens one silver eye at the sound and nestles deeper, pulling a fur back over her shoulder.

You’re sure lucky to feel so safe out here.

I might be lucky to see it.

The Drifter does not think of himself as a lucky man, so going further with this line of thought is uncomfortable. Instead he considers leaving the fish for a while and easing down into the nest of blankets himself. Listen to her breathing and the wind in the trees for a while, part of him says.

Other parts of him hunger for different needs, less emotional (fish) and more. Later, she’ll pull him back into the cabin. While he’s been with other people in the intervening time, as she surely has, it’s her he’s missed for weeks.

So he gathers patience and fear up in a bundle held close to his chest, and goes to cook the dinner he cleaned down by the river.

Chapter Text

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The Drifter had helped build many of Osiris’ mechanisms, by the end, so it was natural he would attend some of the Vanguard meetings about getting the master Warlock back.

Still, Ikora grew impatient with the meetings, with sitting around a long table in the former Speaker’s quarters and coming up with plans that never worked. Zavala brooded, Saladin prickled, Drifter prodded, Saint boomed (and always managed to say something to help morale, even if he didn’t understand the theory, and was the worst off of all of them). Ikora shut her eyes and fiddled with the tablecloth before forcing her hand to her knee.

That day, questions flew back and forth. Could Osiris be trapped on the ascendant plane? Could he be in Savathûn’s unknown throne world? There were equations to find out, specifics of displacement and resonance and ontological gravity, and those had angles and debates.

Ikora had considered going off on her own to find answers, but every lesson the Light taught lately had seemed to indicate stay together. Make friends.

Strange irony that her latest feat of unexpected togetherness had been with the Drifter. No, they weren’t together. It was just that he had kissed her after bandaging up a wound, and that she liked how easy it was to tell he wasn’t serious or pining or hung up about it, and that she didn’t relax enough.

So, the next time someone raised their voice about an attempt that would not work, Ikora took a deep breath. Steadied her thoughts and lay them out in a neat order like study cards on a desk. Reached out to the Drifter next to her and squeezed his thigh, bunching the thick, warm fabric and digging the heel of her hand into flesh. The touch clarified and grounded Ikora. Beneath the tablecloth, no one could see her move.

To his credit, the Drifter didn’t move, either. Breathed out real slow while Ikora talked, offering concrete direction, concrete advice. A muscle twitched once under her hand like a horse flicking a fly.

When she let go, she caught a glimpse of warm surprise in his eyes. Didn’t allow a trace of her smile to show, either, but for the rest of the meeting she knew just what to say.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Rhulk watched the Caretaker die.

My Witness, this gift you have given me will not go to waste.

The invaders would not get farther. The mouths of mazes and guns all pointed at them. 

In the meantime, he held a worm and looked through one of thousands of camera-eyes embedded in the threaded stone. Threaded with what? It does not matter. Threaded with power and purpose. The Winnower gave so that I might partake, and one day I will give back. You gave to me before I even knew your name. How can anyone repay that? 

The worm’s soft skin gave way slightly under his claws. The bellies of the frogs in the swamp had felt soft in this particular cold way, back before that self-satisfied, overgrown krill had encased the Pyramid. When he got the Upended working again, he would obliterate her as he had done to last week’s frogs. 

The worm squealed and turned its three small eyes on the end of its bulbous head as he squeezed it. It was an extra. Without access to the Hive any more, he had no use for it. 

The Caretaker looked threaded, too. With the way it froze in mid-explosion, the branches or filaments spiraled crookedly out of it. That substance did not usually reside in Scorn bodies. Never had Rhulk seen it in all of his experiments, and there had been plenty of Scorn opened up on an onyx table. Was the table threaded, too? 

One Guardian lingered at the bottom of the stairs, examining the Caretaker. Her helmeted head swept up and down, maybe recording to take the images back to their pathetic, wet planet. Rhulk was so tired of getting his feet wet. Once, the swamp was a fine hunting ground, but the Pyramid turned damp, and — he picked up a dry foot and shook it at the memory. Only phantom water splashed off. The cold sank into his body when he touched his foot back down. What had he been thinking about?

His fingers caught on the spine of the worm, and he considered prying the scales from around it and skinning the worm for the satisfaction of the peel. The worm wriggled. Rhulk tucked its tail tight under his arm, making the squealing louder but the movement less obtrusive. 

The Guardian kept examining the Caretaker. When she reached up, trying to touch the branches that had exploded out of the creature’s back, they dissolved before she could stretch to her fullest. 

A failsafe? So the Guardians cannot find out how it was made from how it dies?

Rhulk didn’t install the tree, he was sure. Some of the Caretaker’s energy came from Lubrae’s Ruin, and the Guardians used their crude ignorance to both take advantage of that and to fall beneath spiraling black missiles. 

The Witness is honest. 

Rhulk squeezed. The worm squealed. 

Rhulk examined the underside of his right forearm. What’s under there?

A failsafe, maybe, or a kill switch. The last line of security.

The Guardians are merely distorted with distance, and when he finds their bodies burned by gunfire or crushed beneath a fall of (threaded) stone or smothered in Darkness, they will be so small. 

With his right hand free, the extra worm almost wiggled out backwards from under his left arm. He gripped its tail tight and swung it in front of him, blocking out the view of the crumbling Caretaker. The Guardians left. Nothing remained for them to learn, there. (If you made a kill switch for this lowly creature in your great plan, my Winnower, tell me only that you have seen fit not to exempt me.)

The worm wriggled. Rhulk squeezed. 

Chapter Text

The Disciple happened upon an effigy-satellite of the Emperor Raven.

Rhulk was a Disciple; he did not have minions. He could not send the worms crawling out over the skin of the Pyramid in their millions. So, when he detected something of a collector's item in a doldrums between galaxies, he opened an airlock and spent an annoying eternity scooping it in.

It was made of gold foil and batteries and it squeaked a repeating message. Rhulk didn't know the language. He only recognized the cries at all from eavesdropping occasionally on the Hive, out of boredom. The birdlike design on the outside helped, too.

What a curiosity. The Taishibethi were long gone. They had sent this out into the world to find other life, and it had found them far too late. Or forever too early, perhaps. Rhulk might have swallowed their planet for clout.

As the effigy was not Lubrean, Rhulk saw no reason to keep it.

Chapter Text

Jenev traced the silver light of the Milky Way to the treeline, then followed it down to the blue glow of her Ghost’s eye.

A sliver of setting sun lit the forest and the galactic arm in blue and pink. The patrol had been quiet, the weather lovely. Jenev didn’t even plan to set a fire in the grassy clearing, trusting her Ghost and her own senses. A Hunter could filter out the birdsong and leaf-rustle to hear the particular flatness of a human foot, to hear the sharp-edged snap of false wind transmat made. Tomorrow, if she hiked hard, she could have enough time to wash the smell of the trail off at home and be in a Tower nightclub by the time crowds formed.

Iris looked up from her book as if sensing the attention. “You know I love you, right?” 

Jenev was cutting meat off bone. “And? Usually, when people say it like that, they follow it with one of those hard truths nobody likes.”

To her credit, Iris didn’t ask why Jenev found the affection suspicious.

What do you think I did wrong today? Siding with the Drifter? Taking money from two-bit smugglers? Trafficking egregore? 

One of the Ghost’s flanges rose. “No. Nothing else.”

“So why now?”

“Because the night is beautiful,” Iris said. “And I think we can agree on that.”

“We can,” said Jenev, and liked that she meant it. It was a small thing. When it came to things she had in common with her Ghost, she would take what she could get. 

Chapter Text

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Chapter Text

Eris can tell Toland is afraid. He flits back and forth across the black-and-white tile. His hums, his false starts, echo the droning wind that fills the vast voids of the Ascendant Plane. On either side of the three people on the tiled floor there is an immeasurable white-and-navy gulf. Where Toland once acted as if he deserved to ingratiate himself into Oryx’s court, standing on the cusp of Mara’s strikes him uncharacteristically silent.

“Well?” Mara says. The queen of the Reef stands before a table littered with shards of glass. Each shape she glues or puzzle-piece-clicks into its neighbor creates a corresponding connection in the material Dreaming City. She has asked Eris to help.

And Toland has asked Eris to rend the rift between himself and the queen.

Eris supposes that will have to happen naturally. 

For now, she scoops the lightning-wisp up. She tugs him close to her chest, against the riveted leather armor. 

“My queen,” Eris intones. “We ask entrance.”

Mara is under no false impression that it is Eris who needs to ask. Her eyes flash like a cat’s as she looks at Toland. 

“This one is most dangerous when preaching supplication,” Mara says. “But I suppose he can be trusted with pan-dimensional glass.”

“In our last meeting you showed force,” Toland says. “This time, delicacy. A true ruler balances the knife called tact.”

Mara scoffs softly, almost fondly, and picks up another thick shard of glass. Eris moves to help her, Toland a memory of warmth in her hands. 

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Eris Morn sat in her reclaimed Moon habitat and enjoyed her victory. Chamomile tea, brought so far, steamed in the mug in her hands. What sign would she find at the bottom of the cup? Her bare-metal habitat cocooned her with charms and blankets. A door never meant to hang open had dug a deep swipe into regolith. Eris sighed. With hard-won discipline she told herself how she felt: I have won. I have taken my long-sought revenge. 

Crota. Oryx. Her fingerprints marked the destruction of each Hive ruler. Now she had banished Xivu Arath, a less direct blow than the first two, but still a final strike. 

And Savathûn. Oh, Savathûn and her ludibrium. Eris held Savathûn’s Ghost as collateral, and what an impossible statement that would have been when Eris first heard the Witch-Queen’s name! Eris and Savathûn had played their cards against each other, not Whispers but something with higher stakes.

Eris resettled her tense hands around her tea. She breathed in the scents of chamomile and sugar. Don’t focus on the game. The pieces have been put away. See, there they sleep.

The Guardian had been right to claim Xivu could not be defeated by fighting. Ikora, too, had been well-meaning, when she was wary of Eris taking Oryx’s throne. She had been right to worry: the power had made Eris want to take more power. But Ikora also had a right to worry, Eris thought, in the way the people who looked at Eris herself with suspicion did not. Ikora had held a Hive worm in her own hands. The Warlock Vanguard had earned enough trust that Eris let Ikora worry for her. Guardians who had suspected Eris of being a Hive agent from the moment she returned from the Hellmouth had not. 

The power of the tithe-taking had insisted on itself, the way the sword logic claimed it did. And yet, Eris had known exactly how to resist it because she had planned out step by step what meeting Savathûn again would look like. She had been able to resist it because, despite every Guardian who suggested she might have a grand and cruel plan, she did believe in the value of Ikora’s quiet libraries in the Tower. She believed in the peace humanity had carved out and in the determination of its enemies. Eris Morn had never wanted to join the Hive, even as she took from them more and more of what she needed.

Her plan had been in support of the Light all along, and she would not be ashamed of having a plan.

Instead, she had gained her last victory for her fireteam. Scale-clad, dripping with ichor from her eyes and with tithe-blood in her magic, she had become physically unrecognizable to her old friends but utterly reshaped by her love for them. Their Nightmares no longer disturbed her sleep. (She glanced at the beads around her wrist, the technique Sai taught her.) She loved her lost fireteam in memory. Killing Savathûn for her tithes and sundering Xivu Arath from her throne world had been the culmination of the Raid against Crota.

Finally, the long quest was over. 

Instead of her fireteam she had Ikora and the Guardian. Even Savathûn, Xivu Arath, and Immaru had helped Eris take her vengeance. 

Six, who ascended out of a Pit. 

In another world Eris could have taken the Dreadnaught. She had felt the dead ship as she held Xivu Arath’s soul, all of its empty catacombs and dust-caked armaments. Had she, in that moment of rejecting all of that power, won the Flower Game? Had she stepped outside of its bonds? Did one player leaving the board simply leave room for another to step in? After all this time?

The Guardian would see those flowers in the flesh soon, when the portal opened. 

Eris can take the vacancy and leave it again.

Eris sat and enjoyed her victory. She thought of how she had felt firing the Crow’s Light-imbued gun, and smiled. She thought of the heavy swing of the sword as she had wound up, and the green burst and old-coin smell of Savathûn’s blood, and smiled.

Her mind was quiet and open like an eggshell. Dust moved in waves and devils across the surface of the Moon. Eris’ books sat with her, her candles, her cards. She finished the tea, its warmth in her mouth. The dregs held no portents at all. 

Chapter Text

The practice was done, the drills over, the rewards earned. It was 23 days until Eriana’s Soulbreakers would storm the Moon alone. Eris Morn asked Toland the Shattered to fight her not because she was unpracticed but because she wanted to. She wanted to see the runes painted on his armor in the green their fireteam was named for. She wanted to follow the rhythm of his steps. 

They found a garden that climbed up the side of the wall near the Tower, the new shoots and old soil in defiance of the alien wilds. Eris cut Toland’s shoulder open with a hooked Hunter knife. He slit her hamstring almost faster than Brya could dull the pain, and stood above her, and reached a hand down.

“A planet out of orbit,” Toland said. “What will astrologers read in it?” 

Eris grasped his forearm. When she stood, her shoulder collided with his wounded one. Guren hadn’t touched the cut. Eris took what body heat she could. She faked a slap that would have taken advantage of his wound. He slid outside her guard, fast and thin. 

Knives flashed. Eris had been used to fighting Fallen and Ahamkara. Human scale was disorienting, but only temporarily. They fought to a draw. They grinned tightly at each other like they were both on the winning team after a Crucible match. 

“The astrologers will have to chart your orbit too,” Eris said.

They lose. The whole fireteam loses the bout that matters, down in the dark where their Ghosts can’t help. Eris sends other Guardians to get her revenge, reconciles with her memories of loss, and after eight long years she knows it is the right time to take her revenge personally.

Tomorrow, she will take Savathûn’s tithes and banish Xivu Arath.

Today, she takes something from Toland the Shattered that is not exactly revenge.

She summons him from the Ascendant Plane using an equation of Ley lines and deathsong notation and goes after him like a cat chases a string. It’s ridiculous. White sparks slide under her thin, sharp claws. She pounces across the ritual circle on hands and knees, because she is full of the joy of the tithe and the mouth she has can’t smile. Meanwhile, she knows he can disappear. She’s seen him do it to Guardians. She knows the sound of it. For her, Toland darts and dodges but doesn’t leave her. There is a note somewhere sustained forever. Eris screams and laughs and burns energy off, into Ahsa. 

Toland laughs quietly. “You remind me of Sai Mota. She initiated most of the games.”

Eris grabs him. Her claws go through the white and jar against the floor.  

“You remind me of nothing,” Eris intones. “Of none of them. You are yourself given or taken. Foolish, curious traitor — ”

He makes a sound like fat sizzling in a pan. She lashes him to the floor in a cage made of runes. Imagines him spider-webbed there in the body he left behind and laughs and for a moment forgets all her spells. He says nothing, expresses nothing with the body that could have been a quirk of weather or a bloom on a cactus. She lays on the floor and looks at him, angry but more curious than angry (they share this) and listens to the silence. She is a Hive queen and he is a trinket in her fortress, a creature kept as a trophy of one of her conquests. 

She opens the trap. He floats to her and is a weight on her scaled chest, dropping her onto her back. She turns over and slaps him to the ground again, sleepily.

“I’m going to end what started on Fundament,” says Eris Morn. 

“Reshape the stars, dearest Eris.” 

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Throne World frogs were first identified in the Pale Heart approximately three days after the defeat of the Witness. The Hidden surmised the frogs had been brought there by the Lucent Brood, by accident or on purpose. Being an entirely paracausal landscape created by a mixture of Guardians’ memories and the Traveler’s terraforming, and, having existed for such a short time as the Pale Heart had, the definition of invasive species in this situation was unclear. The recommended reaction to the frogs was, therefore, to wait and see how they adapted. A committee was formed to discuss possible future environmental management, including introduction of the frogs’ predators, namely swamp snakes and great horned owls. Ikora had also encouraged the Hidden to tag frogs. 

“There’s one,” said Euclid, pointing down the sand bar. Sand grains clattered off his chassis. Far above, on the top of the sunny cliffs, was the Hunters’ camp and the recreation of the old Tower.

The Hero of the Red War flicked her half-gaze to the rather large frog in the surf. One Ghost darted in the air. 

Old made new made old made new, thought Euclid. The grassy overhang on what had been the Vanguards’ ready room looked now as ancient as the Ishtar Academy. The Tower inside the Pale Heart was different from the ruins of the real old Tower. It even smelled different, all green sap and petrichor. But, the Light considered this version somehow definitive. Odd. Euclid and Kass had seen what that meant for Cayde.

What did it mean for Euclid? 

Euclid and Kass walked with measured paces toward the frog, angling to keep their shadows off it. 

The silence between the two Warlocks was comfortable, but the location was not. Even the beautiful sandbars were uncanny. Euclid reached down and scooped up a handful of sand and salt. The tan grains stood out against his robes and his metal palm. Like many things in this world, the grains of sand were made of memory. They had been formed from pieces of objects, chopped up with the clean butchery so eerily reminiscent of the Witness’ Final Shape. The grains of sand were unusually large, more like pebbles. As he turned them over he could pick out the spines of a War Beast, then stone eyes, then the tines of a Ghost. 

In the final battle, he had watched Kass’ Ghost channel the Light. Ghost had lived and died and lived enough for both Kass and Euclid. What little left of Euclid there was: Yarrow had shrugged her strong arm up under his shoulders in order to keep some important panels from peeling off. Euclid mostly remembered the pain in his head, toward the end, because his Ghost Constant had not been there. 

“I miss the Traveler,” Euclid said, knowing the words were apropos of nothing, old nerves rattling which he’d thought were firmly screwed in. “The old Traveler. But it was never inclined to speak one-on-one, hah.”

Kass matched his tone smoothly, as if they weren’t stalking toward a frog like kittens. “No. But through visions and birds and …”

Ghost flitted into existence at Kass’ shoulder, his eye light dimmed in comparison to the forever-noon false sun. Kass reached out a hand and Ghost cuddled into it with attentive affection.

“And here we are, talking about the Traveler inside it. What — Oof.” Euclid stepped into the waves, splashing, and grabbed the frog. His fingers fit just under its wet limbs. Holding it felt like holding a turtle, except that the antennae buzzed. “What odd gossip. What I mean by missing it is, I hear about that feeling of connection to the Traveler that Cayde had, but it’s alien to me. Cayde said himself he interrupted the grieving process, but, meanwhile, he had proof that the Traveler had loved him.”

“I want that proof, too.” Kass looked down.

“I don’t.” Euclid gestured with the frog. 

Kass raised her chin again. The sunlight caught on a white strip of bark in her striated eye like noon might catch on the blade of her sword.  

“It’s more that I’d like to have experienced it,” Euclid said. “I’d like to have been able to, to tell Taeko about it, hear what irreverent thing she would say. Taeko, she said to me, Cayde might not have been that different from what her fireteammates became. Batteries for the Light. Except on our side.” 

The frog’s legs stoped wiggling. Its antenna drifted, as if it was curious about the differences in the air this high off the ground. 

Kass held both her hands out for the frog so Euclid could fish a band out of a pouch. 

“I know,” Kass said, and asked about Taeko, and they talked happily of her while they clipped the band on and entered its number in the database. The frog pedaled its legs and did not croak or chirp.

Euclid’s thoughts drifted while they worked. He was needed on Venus next; Failsafe had detected oddities among the Vex. Euclid suspected he knew exactly what awaited him there: the unknowable, times and identities repeating, quantum froth bubbling up alongside Warlock egos. But that was next. This, the beach made of jumbled memories and the water clear as stolen crystal — this was now. Kass handed Euclid the frog. 

He put the insect-amphibian down, feeling and hoping for and dismissing the familiarity of having something small by his side, something friendly moving out of the corner of his eye. The frog hopped across the sand toward the land past the sand bars. Euclid wondered, with a warm curiosity, where it would go. 

Chapter Text

Why do you make things difficult? Your father Oryx has killed for millennia and fed his worm to excellence. This is why his Dreadnaught glides through the Sol System so smoothly. His Wizards have stayed to the teachings of the Deep and do not practice heresy. This is why they work their magic so potently. His brood mothers produce their quota of thralls. This is why they sleep safely in their hidden halls. Why do you defy the patterns which have sustained the Hive throughout our long journey through empty space? Come back to us, Nokris. Put aside the selfishness that hurts you. The only other option left to you is exile. Move more easily, with us. 

Chapter Text

“Look upon this form and see the nature of the Deathsong,” said Toland, bleeding a pool out onto the cold, green-black tile, and Eris wondered whether she should kill him. 

Ir Yût lay on her back, dead. Eriana waited for Eris at the doorway. Eriana didn’t care what had become of Toland. Her shoulders were set, her hands on her rifle, a ranginess in her long legs; she wanted to move. No matter only three of their teammates were left.

“What have you done?” Eris muttered to Toland. “Was this your plan?”

Toland laughed. In the labyrinth it became a terrible, dusty sound, ping-ponging off weathered bone and stagnant water. “No.” His remaining eye looked haunted. Ir Yût had cleft him down the middle, the Song drawing a line between armor, flesh, and something ghostly. His voice was steady despite the mess on the floor, the cheek she could see through a crack in the Ram still flush with blood. Where his heart should have been was a faint outline of white light, his left arm and leg sparking outlines like maps of a nervous system. 

“How …?” The trigger was solid, reassuring. Familiar, Tower made. Can he fight Crota like this? How would I even kill him, if it was the Light thing to do? 

Toland watched her hand. The still-living cheek quirked up over a smile the helmet obscured. He had that tone in his voice, the one that made her feel like he could read her mind.

Toland said, “I am so eager to find out.” 

Chapter Text

The Pale Heart has dispassionately, thoughtlessly, healed Toland of wanting to die.

Oh, the curiosity is still there. The keen wonderment beats in a heart tangled with lightning. Looking out over the Traveler from the HELM, awash in pink light, his body is a braid of flesh, magic, chitin, and that silver spark. 

Eris, too, is curious, reaching out an armored hand to feel that Toland does indeed have a heartbeat beneath the seething abstraction of his body. Her face is hidden behind a helmet, as if she had never been anything but a Hunter. Sitting there, watching the Guardians’ victory (the airspace around the Traveler still, the Light emanating from it in gentle clouds) everything and nothing has changed. 

It is his will, perhaps, that has changed most. He can imagine a future in which he controls his own destiny, not giving his body to the Hive and his responsibility to the Young Wolf. Every letter he wrote, every hint without a full answer had been a dereliction of the responsibility the Traveler had once gifted him. To have participated in the fight against the Witness was to have reclaimed it. 

Maybe Guren had said what he did because the Traveler played long games.