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// i. of radiant geometries
Mara watches.
The cycle turns, and tightens like a spiral. Beautiful in its simplicity. It turns thrice: for balance. For coplanar perfection.
The Queen, her brother, and her Wrath. A King and his two sisters.
Simple mathematics. Mara watches the formula continue to unfold.
She brushes aside HH objects and steps across proplyds without thought, and looks into the belly of the cosmos. Mara trails fingers over the familiar shapes of Pallas and Vesta, dances along the lines lashing the Belt into dense webs, moving along the space between spaces. Lightbearers are blinding shapes cut from radiant fire, dotting the Reef; the Taken their negative, dark and stifling things absent of all light. Her people between them, comfortable shadows traced in starlight, flickering like sunlight in a pool. The Blind Well, aptly blinding. The echo of Riven’s Heart, sharp and simple darkness like teeth, closed with delicate precision around the pulse of the Dreaming City.
An egg in the teeth of a predator.
(The jaws close, and the egg is shattered. But if the egg is a bomb and the teeth are a sword then the sword strikes the bomb and the bomb goes off.)
(Perfect simplicity.)
A Lightbearer named Crow holds a terse conversation with a Corsair, whose spine is stiff with reflexive discomfort that even immeasurable amounts of training and experience cannot hope to hide.
Crow is carefree, severed of all ties, save that of his death-engine. Naomi. What a name to choose. Even unknowingly, he still puts his life in Mara’s hands. This is the way of things; this is who he is, chasing her shadow eternally. But at least this time, he is free to hunt down his secrets and curiosities by his own light. It eases her guilt. Not all, but some. There are certain shapes : points that cannot change.
But their paths can, and Mara wants to watch his unfold.
// i. pith
Uldren Sov is languidly twirling a knife between his fingers as he speaks, weight shifted to make a coiling line from ribs to thigh, mouth curving up in a sharp smirk.
It’s a tried and true intimidation tactic. The trio of Guardians are all visibly grasping to keep their trains of thought on track, and Jolyon has it in him to feel a slight scrap of pity for them as he watches this travesty of a meeting unfold. He is entirely sympathetic to how it feels to take the full brunt of the Prince’s… charm. For all the things the Lightbearers are immune to, it feels fitting that a simple wink and a smile are not on that list.
Uldren is sending them to chase their own tails, and his satisfaction as the Guardians take the bait is dangerously infectious. As he shares outdated intelligence on inconsequential Wolf movements with the nth group of Guardians sent by Petra, he paces slowly, measured and sinuous like a predator animal. Against his better judgement Jolyon feels that calculated display of power wash over him, too, bathing him in the Prince’s dubious charisma.
Jolyon cradles the Supremacy casually, balancing the heavy and unwieldy rifle in his arms effortlessly through ages of practice, and he shifts so that the barrel gleams bright and deadly. A pointed statement. The hooded Guardian eyes him warily but with marked interest, gaze lingering, and Jolyon thinks, ah, so this is what it’s like.
“What are you smiling about?” Uldren asks after the trio leaves, and he is scowling at their backs now that the pretense is over.
“Nothing,” Jolyon replies. Uldren’s pointed scowl fades into general annoyance. Jolyon lets his smile widen. “It’s just funny to get confirmation that there isn’t a single being in the system who’s capable of resisting you when you’ve got some damn fool idea in your head.”
// i. hyaline stitches
They make it to Hygeia, eventually. They make the first jump in the remains of a skiff so battered that it falls to pieces rather spectacularly as they “land,” and Crow can’t help but let out an unceremonious laugh after Naomi brings him back, pushing up out from under rubble like he’s surfacing from water.
(The next landing goes a little better.)
The thing about Hygeia is that there are people here. Cybele had been flooded with Fallen, warring against scraps of Hive trying to establish a foothold, and Bamberga had been much the same. But Hygeia feels alive in a different way, and as they continue their meandering journey, Naomi describes each threadbare discarded House banner they pass as it once would have been, dyed bright and flown with pride. It makes something deep in Crow’s core twist with pity.
On Hygeia, Crow sees other Guardians for the first time. A trio sprint past him, whooping and laughing, and they mount their small, zippy craft mid-stride in calculated, graceful movements. He has an awkward conversation with a painfully kind Warlock about service to the Vanguard or something like that, and he finds newfound appreciation for Naomi and her calm, immediate acceptance of his reluctance to leave the Reef. He watches another group dance ridiculously as some kind of escape pod comes screaming in from orbit, and uproarious laughter echoes across the canyons when someone is crushed by the landing, and hastily brought back.
He avoids them. All of them.
It’s odd. He’s gotten used to his own death — there’s something liminal and perfect and strange about it, something that pulls at terrible, morbid curiosity in its most literal form — but to see others hurl themselves into the jaws of that ever-present dark feels alien.
It feels like this should be his alone.
// ii. pith
The Supremacy— this passage gets any tighter and he’s going to dent the barrel— and Uldren’s hand yanks him further, further, until it’s dark and silent save their breaths, and the starlight dancing under Uldren’s skin.
Shh, Uldren mimes silently, placing one finger against Jolyon’s lips.
A cacophonous stomping echoes through the thin plate walls around them, and above them a Captain roars search orders. Several pairs of feet scatter across the deck. Seconds later, a Vandal jumps down onto the other side of the grate from them, wire rifle humming, head swinging back and forth as it searches.
Uldren is pressing them both flush against the wall. The Supremacy digs into Jolyon’s shoulder, but he pays it no mind. Uldren’s finger is still resting against his lips, and their noses brush. The wall at his back is unyielding, and Uldren’s armor and leathers feel strangely pliant by contrast.
Jolyon feels the pad of a thumb press against his lips, then. Tracing slowly. He can feel Uldren’s breaths more than hear them now.
He lets his bright eyes close. For fear of them giving him away in the dark, he tells himself. No other reason. Uldren’s lips curve up in a smirk against his own, light enough to be an accident, measured enough to be purposeful.
Jolyon keeps his eyes closed, for fear of them giving him away. No other reason. (Uldren kisses him again.) No other reason. (Again.)
// ii. hyaline stitches
“You’ve got a telemetry error,” Crow points out. He isn’t snooping; the flashing message is impossible to ignore. ANSIBLE CONFIGURATION OUT OF ALIGNMENT, it reads.
“I know,” Till replies, and he rests a hand on the flank of his ship, as if he’s comforting a creature. Or perhaps himself. “I expected it.”
One of the most important things Crow has learned about Till over time is that his thoughts are shaped with beautiful and stunning simplicity, like geometries woven from silk-fine threads. Till hates secrecy. He thinks plainly. It is the antithesis of everything that ordinarily draws Crow’s attention, and it thrills him. When Till says something like this, the vagueness is almost never intentional, but Crow’s hunger for what’s between the lines is, as always, insatiable. It becomes a hunt, a waiting game; Crow seeing how long he can push Till to hide what’s unsaid, so he can relish the sated curiosity when Till finally tells the whole story.
“Is there a big, ugly monster for us to cut down at the other end of it?” Crow asks, skimming his fingertips along the craft as he starts to slowly step closer to Till. “Heard one of those Barons showed up on the far end of the Shore again. We could kill it and see if your telemetry fixes itself. Never hurts to try.”
“The one who nearly killed your Ghost last time?” The frown doesn’t disappear off of Till’s face, per se, but it does change form into one more exasperated. “Excellent idea. Are you immune to learning your lessons?”
“Absolutely,” Crow purrs. “A little death never hurt anybody.”
“I don’t need your flippancy about death today, Crow,” Till says, and he looks away with deep-seated exhaustion in his face. “Petra’s summoning me me.”
“How long?”
“Six weeks.”
Crow finishes his slow walk, and his fingers bump into Till’s where he’s still resting them on the pulse of his ship.
“You’ll be alright?” Crow asks, and pulls genuine sentiment out of a deep well he guards carefully.
“You wouldn’t be worried about me, would you?” Till smiles, but it’s wan.
“Of course. You think you should trust anyone else spotting for you?”
“I’d never,” Till replies.
There it is. A quick flash of that vague thing Till hides. Not quite a secret, because he doesn’t give it the same lack of guard as he does everything else. But it’s something, and Crow savors it every time he gets a taste.
“I don’t know how you survived without me before we met,” Crow says loftily, teasing.
The wait will only make the payoff sweeter.
“I didn’t,” Till says, and doesn't meet his eyes.
Sweeter. Like honey laced with wormrose.
// iii. pith
Uldren falls to pieces under Jolyon’s hands. He is painfully careful. Methodical, like a field-strip. Meticulous, like worship. Jolyon kisses the starlight trapped under his skin and vows to take whatever he can get. It will hurt later, yes — he knows this as certainly as he knows this system orbits Sol — but these memories will be worth that pain. The way Uldren sighs his name, the sharp luminosity of his eyes in the dim light, the pliant curve of his mouth. He commits it all to flawless memory.
“I’d go to the ends of the universe with you, Jol,” Uldren murmurs, and Jolyon thinks, ah, there it is.
For Jolyon Till the Rachis, it is more than enough.
“And I’d go with you,” he replies, pausing to kiss the Prince his lover and belovèd, “because I’m the greatest fool who’s ever lived. But I’m also a handy shot, and if there is one thing I know, it’s that you’d find the worst trouble at the end of the universe and get right in the middle of it.”
Uldren laughs and pulls him close again and they don’t talk much anymore after that.
// i. per aspera, sic itur, ad astra
Jolyon watches a handful of Guardians throw themselves into the oncoming tide of Scorn trying to salvage their strange Ether ritual, and pushes away the tempered impulse to cover them from his perch. Instead, he finishes loading the last clip into his last magazine.
Petra’s digitized footsteps are not soft. She doesn’t need to hide. Not as she approaches the ansible on her end, and not in anything else she does. She’s been stunningly well lately, he thinks. Burning with a fire he remembers only from long, long ago. It seems this utter, eternal hell of a war suits her.
“You’ve been distracted lately,” she notes, after he’s finished giving his field report. “Everything alright, Jolyon?”
He shrugs in response.
“There’s not much to say.”
“I know you’ve been talking to— to Crow.” Jolyon meets her lone eye with challenge. She sighs. “Don’t look at me like that. I think it’s good. I think… I think at least one of us should.”
“Yes,” Jolyon replies. “One of us should.”
“Don’t—” Petra slams a palm into the field table she's standing next to, and the feed shivers and tears. “—do that, Jolyon. This is a- a fucked-up situation and you know I miss him as much as you do—”
Jolyon leans forward, and knows that even a hundred thousand miles and a chronal anomaly away, the look on his face is the reason Petra’s words get lost in her throat.
“If that’s true,” he says, evenly, “then we all miss Mara as much as you do, Petra.”
// ii. per aspera, sic itur, ad astra
I am running in the Dark and it clings to me like so many hands reaching out with claws that split apart into a perfect Mandelbrot set. Static fills my lungs and I cough up a river of Light that drowns me and as I drown I can’t get the rich brown dirt out from under my nails and it stains dark crescents into the tips of my fingers.
There is a man with me and I don’t recognize him anymore and I have never been more terrified. He tends the garden of carefully arranged Cabal, fat round heads poking out of the earth like overripe fruits. One of the heads turns to me and its eyes are nothing but a blinding void and it speaks in deep words like battery acid.
—THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF LIFE++
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. A shining white-gold Vex Minotaur wearing a Techeun’s robes puts a gentle hand on my shoulder and looks me kindly in the eyes and speaks again.
++WHY HAVE YOU COME TO CLAIM IT—
But I can’t, I can’t answer, because every time I try the man looks at me and smiles and another secret grows on him like a parasite. Claws constrict around my throat but I don’t know whose claws they are. They stroke my vocal cords with a threat plainly stated in a thousandfold voice.
There are overgrown hollow circuit-trees surrounding the plot and as the wind sighs through them it sounds like an Eliksni lullaby someone sang to me once but I can’t remember who it was and it terrifies me that the knowledge has been Taken to be shaped into another parasite. Words and names melt together until all I can see is BRAINSTAIN BRAINSTAIN BRAINSTAIN the alert flashes on the central console as we fly quicksharp maneuvers through this ring of ice and rock on a path we’ve flown millions of times before. The Harbingers gleam as they impact against that enormous dead hull and I count four, three, two, one, and the screams of an entire species rip through my head as my kith and kin are destroyed and I live each of their deaths in the span of microseconds.
Superheated metal glows red like blood on asphodelia suspended in the vacuum of space as Saturn’s gleaming ring splits in two with a piercing keen and I stare up at formations in the sky that should not exist. Rain falls in precise geometric patterns and the bronze-clad gardeners collect it on broad leaves like tongues. There is someone next to me whispering things into my ear, secret things no one else knows, and I cannot hear them. I watch as the garden grows into past and future split by deep ravines of present. A hand that is not mine gently sweeps flower petals off of my rifle and strokes my brow with a lover’s delicate touch and then settles to rest around my waist. It is unfamiliar and it is heavier than a neutron star. The air is still whispering words in lilting Ulurant and like this I am lulled to sleep, swaddled in secrets I do not understand.
When I wake, I am alone.
I tell Petra I still dream of the Garden.
She says she’s dreamt of it too.
I tell her, not like I have.
// i. twofold hapax legomenon
“You fell apart, and then the whole world followed.”
Crow says nothing. He does not know what to say, much less how to say it.
Gently, knowingly, Jolyon cups his cheek in one hand.
“I don’t need an apology from you now,” he says, and strokes Crow's cheek with his thumb. “I needed one then. You destroyed a part of me and thought nothing of it, and I lost you in so many more ways than thinking you died alongside Mara.”
“Jolyon,” Crow whispers.
“I don't want you to apologize,” Jolyon repeats.
Crow is silent. There is nothing he can say; there is nothing he should say. With time and patience and pained explanations, he knows his life from before. He knows what he did of his own volition. He knows what he was baited into doing, by Riven and fate and the siren song of willpower and ego. Jolyon is right: there are no words he could offer to heal the scars he caused in another life.
But he can learn.
He touches the back of Jolyon's hand, lightly, and as he trails his fingers down to Jolyon's wrist, he turns to brush his lips against the warm palm still cupping his cheek. Jolyon kisses him, slowly, sweetly, and for a moment there is nothing else: no history, no future, no Light or Darkness or brazen threats. Just the soft pressure of Jolyon’s lips on his and the memory of more, wrapped in the soft darkness of night on the Reef.
Jolyon strokes a thumb across his cheek, and then across the knotted scar between his brows. Crow lets Hygeia’s dubious gravity pull his cheek solidly into Jolyon’s palm once more, and asks, “Are you going back to sleep?”
“No. Can I hold you?”
“Yes,” Crow whispers back.
Jolyon pulls him close, and together they breathe.
// ii. of radiant geometries
Mara picks a point, and unfolds it to create a line. She unfolds the line to form a square. She unfolds the square to create a cube. She unfolds the cube to create a tesseract. She regards the tesseract from the fifth dimension, collapses it, reconstitutes it back into a line, and views it from the first dimension.
Boring. She reconstitutes the tesseract, walks along one of its edges, and considers nothingspace.
Three points on a line. Light and Dark and the imperfect terminator between them.
A City thriving, a City sickened, a City cursed.
A logic infinitely recursive in its sharp-edged shapes, a logic of curves in space and hidden seeds, a logic of simple endless war.
A King, and a brother. A witch, and a Queen. A knight, and a Wrath.
Simple shapes that she has held in her hands as they tumble through realities, inextricably linked.
The question, though, is of a different fabric. It hangs formless and unanswered, barely regarded, because the question is as dangerous as an answer. Mara regards the question, and it forms in modalities somewhere between epistemic and deontic. No matter; if she faces it, the power of its secrecy is broken.
What did – does – the Secret-Queen gain from His death? What is there to gain, by their rules, from so powerful a death not reaped by your hands, not tithed to you?
And, more interestingly: when will He, by way of definitions and love and death and paracausal machinations, be sewn back unto the fabric they all occupy?
Uldren’s gotten his turn, after all.