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Your armor is not so great at keeping out the cold. Not that it matters, heat is mostly what hurts you, but no one is comfortable alone in the snow.
“Guardian?” your ghost asks, the first day, “Do you think there’s anything to find out there?”
You both know your vision of the shards of the Traveler, but what lies between it and you cannot be known. Not for now, at least.
You shake your head. You are still not sure how the ghost sees, or even if it does, but it knows your answer anyway. “There has to be something,” it says. You passed the last of the dead guardians some miles back. It took finding them worse than you did.
Their ghosts lay dead next to them, burnt out, useless husks.
The first war dog surprises you. Your gauntlets are the broken shells of what they were but you still have the strength to tear its head apart. Like it, you were built for fighting, but you were built better. You still have most of your guardian strength.
It feels good to kill it. It is Cabal, and if you cannot kill the things that broke your city at least you can crush this dog.
How good destroying it feels is a product of your marvelous intelligence, if not, perhaps, an intended one.
Then there are more dogs. In their number, they scratch and claw and bite you, each hurt a warning your ghost removes, but sometimes not quite fast enough. It screams at you to flee, Guardian, you do not have your life, you cannot die like this. It will not let you die like this.
You ignore it even as the pain worsens and the red returns to your sight.
Then, they are all dead, and your ghost no longer screams at you and you are kneeling in the snow, strength returning to your limbs but not enough strength. Not the strength you are used to.
If you were human you would cry and taste salt in your mouth, but tears do not come to you. Only silence.
“Guardian,” your ghost says, “if you die, I cannot bring you back.”
It wants to warn you in its repetition. Perhaps, it thinks, if I tell my Guardian enough times he will finally listen, and run away.
“I am a Titan,” you say. Your voice is a surprise to you. “We do not run away.”
“That’s all well and good,” it says, “and I do admire that, but you’re not going to be anything, much less a Titan, for much longer if you let yourself get mauled to death by dogs.” It paused in the air just in front of your face. “I hope you feel better though, you did kill so many.”
You find a gun later beneath a rock, near the corpse of a Legionarie. You did not kill that one. You wonder if it was turned on by its fellows.
The gun is empty, but it is something other than your fists. And you can still run, and scramble, and jump, if not as high as with the Light behind you. But you remember crushing their heads with your fists, and you know that you are not as powerless as Ghaul wants you to be.