Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When I first was introduced to Warframe , I didn't expect much in terms of story content. I was mistaken. Again and again, the folks down at Digital Extremes have surprised me with the depth and quality of their plot. No matter where you travel, every personality is unique in their own way, the in-game lore is richer than you'd think, and the ambiance of the locations, from the neon-soaked grunge of Fortuna to the windswept Plains of Eidolon, inevitably became more than I could resist.

What follows is an anthology collection of stories, quests and incidents scattered across the Origin System.

Because reasons.

Enjoy! 

Chapter Text

Inspired by focus farming on Adaro, Sedna

Tyre considered himself moderately intelligent. He knew his numbers and could count to a sum of eighty – ninety, if he’d been keeping track with his fingers. He knew mechanisms well enough not to stick a coolant cell in backwards, and could clean and maintain his rifle without discharging the power pack into the floor, unlike so many of his tube brothers. As such, Tyre been given a greater share of responsibilities aboard the cargo barge Scarab, responsibilities like seeing that the cargo was properly loaded and making sure that the aft loading doors were sealed before they launched into the hard vacuum of space. Gedge had held the job before him. Gedge had gone floating out in the belt along with last quarter’s payload. Tyre was determined not to make the same mistake.

Beneath his feet, the Scarab’s engines were decelerating. They’d passed the fourth planet and were heading into the belt, slowing thrusters, making sure they were on course for Eunomia Station. It was an old word, Tyre mused, leftover from the time of the Creators and as alien to his tongue as the terms the bridge crew spoke amongst themselves. Words like trajectory and gimbals and synchronous orbit. These things were not for him, but he liked to hear them anyway. He would often come up to the bridge when not on duty and simply stand near the back, watching the stars flicker by. And as long as he stayed out of the way, Jea would not throw him out. They’d been birthed from the same batch, he and her, deep in the watery womb of the seventh planet. When she’d been given the Scarab to command, Tyre had followed her. When he’d proven himself marginally less likely to space the crew by confusing the decompression lever for the docking handle, he’d gotten a good position, too.

And now Tyre watched the stars, trying to expand his mind enough to contemplate them properly. It never worked – they were too abstract a concept, and the distances involved too great – but he kept on staring. The stars were pretty things, untouched by the grease which often smeared his hands and coated the Scarab in a thin, oily film that no amount of mopping could scrub away. Tyre liked shiny things, and so he liked the stars most of all. His hand absently strayed into his pocket.

“Eunomia Station ahead, ma’am,” the navigator announced in a gruff cough.

“Open a channel. Let’s see if they remembered the schedule this time,” Jea responded, standing behind the navigator’s chair with one hand on the headrest. She insisted on being addressed by the archaic title, eschewing the more common “Captain” for any and all shreds of dignity she could pick from the bones of a forgotten empire. As always, there was irritation in her voice, irritation at having been sent to haul ore instead of being sent to the front lines. Tyre had never understood the problem. The Scarab was a simple ship with a simple job. And simple things were good.

“Eunomia Station, this is the cargo barge Scarab requesting clearance to dock,” the navigator complied, keying up the comms with a heavy burst of static. Tyre was impressed; the man had pronounced the station’s name not once, but twice in as many minutes. He rolled the syllables across his own tongue, silently trying to mouth them, but as always they tangled in his lips and burbled forth as gibberish. The language of the Golden Lords was too hard for him to speak, so Tyre made do with listening to others pronounce it instead.

“Eunomia Station, I repeat: this is the cargo barge Scarab requesting clearance to dock,” the navigator repeated when the silence from the comms began to stretch, but there was no response that time, either.

A deep pucker appeared on the sagging flesh of Jea’s brow. Her skin there was pale and mottled, the Decay setting in at an early age, but not yet advanced enough to steal the lucid sparkle of her eyes. Her lips twisted, showing far too many brown, crooked teeth for the motion to be an entirely unhappy one. Tyre knew why. If the station had forgotten the pickup schedule again, Jea would enjoy slacking her own frustrations by ordering the docking crew whipped. If they’d forgotten to prepare the cargo on top of forgotting the schedule, she’d toss a few out into the black for her gunnery crew to take potshots at. No doubt it would almost make up for the delay.

“Barge Scarab, this Eunomia Station,” the comms squelched. “You cleared for dock.”

Jea leaned back, disappointed. The Scarab angled slightly as they came around, slowing thrusters even further. Eunomia Station was built inside an asteroid, tunneling through its iron-rich guts in search of ferrite and other mineral wealth, hollowing out the center and leaving behind a thick carapace of rock to serve as both protection and camouflage. Tyre saw the docking bay up ahead, a warm square of light against the comparative blackness of space. A rusted gun boat chugged by to starboard, turrets swiveling like eye stalks. Jea saluted it mockingly.

The orange forcefield parted over the Scarab’s nose as they edged into the docking bay, engines chuffing noisily, and settled into the drab, painted square designating their usual space. They were facing the wrong way for Tyre to see much of the hanger, but there wasn’t much to see. He trumped down to the cargo hanger and shouted to a few of his fellow tube brothers because that’s what important people did; they shouted at other, less important people. He walked to the aft loading doors and opened them wide, hydraulics grinding. Tyre frowned at them. They weren’t supposed to sound like that. He thought of Gedge and the spaced cargo, of the airlock failing to seal. Maybe it was grime or space dust. He resolved to lubricate them before they left – before Jea was taking potshots at him.

Outside on the docking concourse, lift loaders rumbled past hauling trailers of pale, dirty ore, no doubt on their way to the mills and primitive refineries located deep in the belly of the facility. Yes, that was the word, Tyre decided, and was proud of his vocabulary. Grineer things were primitive – not the gleaming, golden things left behind by the Creators. Tyre wondered about them just as he wondered about the stars, at least until his poor head began to hurt. They had lived so long ago, further back than Tyre had the numbers to reckon. They made shiny things, he thought. Not like Grineer.

Just outside the Scarab, crates had been piled on the docking floor to await loading. It was a big shipment this time, Tyre noted. Thirty to forty crates at least. Jea would be happy. As happy as she ever got, anyway. Tyre sidestepped a lift loader as it thundered past on a cushion of air. His tube brothers swarmed over the crates like bees, slinging them onto the loader with a crash. Tyre checked the manifest, but decided it would be a waste of time trying to count while everything was moving around and before it had been properly stowed. He lifted his voice to shout over the noise, ordering the others to put the crates against the back wall of the Scarab. Yes, you could pile them up, but no more than three high – Tyre held as many fingers up to illustrate, repeating the gesture several times – and no, the middle of the floor wouldn’t work, they had to go inside the lines he’d so painstakingly chalked out on the floor.

Though he never touched any of the crates, it was exhausting work getting them into place. By the time all of them had been stowed, Tyre was thinking of his pod and a mug of hot grog, if the galley cook was in a mood to be generous. He tested the straps holding down their cargo and grunted, satisfied. Forty crates had been logged on the manifest, but only thirty two had made it onto the Scarab. Jea was nowhere to be found, no doubt wringing the foreman’s neck over the whereabouts of the missing eight. An error in the numbers was an error on her record, and that simply would not do – not if she wanted to captain a galleon at some point. Tyre suspected that his ambitious tube sister would be awhile. “Business negotiations” were always a fun distraction, or so she’d told him once, fondling the scaling knife she’d acquired from a dead Ostron. The thin, flexible blade was meant for pulling the bones from fish. Imagine what else it can do, she’d said, grinning at him.

Tyre grimaced internally. Blood was shiny, but it was not pretty. And it left a nasty mess.

He checked the crates one more time, then decided there was ample time to oil the loading door, too. Tyre didn’t bother checking the maintenance lockers onboard the Scarab. Jea was a decent captain, but she was also cheap; the lubricants on hand were thin and poorly refined, filled with nearly as much grit as the oil sands from which they’d been sucked. Eunomia Station had better supplies, and no one was going to mind if he helped himself to an unattended canister. He wandered the concourse, dodging an incoming skiff whose mush-brained pilot almost smeared him against the wall, and angling his course towards the far end of the docking bay, where the grease jockeys kept their tools kits and heaps of spare parts. Five minutes later, Tyre found the half empty can of 30-weight exactly where he’d figured.

He didn’t pick it up right away, however. Finding himself alone, he put his hand into his pocket again. He’d picked up the small, flinty chunk of Azurite during a stopover on the Plains of Eidolon some cycles back. Jea had been arguing with someone whose name he’d forgotten, if indeed he ever known it to begin with, and Tyre had slipped outside. After the oily, humid air of the Scarab, the crisp wind had entered his lungs like crystalline shards of glass. Far in the distance, he could hear the mournful, unnatural howls of the Lost One carried to him on the wind, and so he was mindful not to stray too far. The vein had been exposed halfway up a rocky knoll, gleaming softly in the moonlight – moonlight that had not always been there, but now shone bright and cold and pale, casting woolly shadows across the Plains.

On Eunomia Station, Tyre fingered the lumpy geode in his palm, angling it so that the dingy light shone through the rock and caught, scintillating, somewhere deep inside. There was an iridescent blue flash spackled with pinpricks of silver. Tyre moved the gemstone back and forth, enchanted by the play of light and thinking of stars. Shiny, shiny stars.

He was so distracted, he almost didn’t notice the change in the air. Almost. A prickle ran the length of Tyre spine and bunched between his shoulder blades, a primeval warning that he was being watched, that something was not quite right. Clamping the gemstone in his fist, he whirled to face the threat, expecting Jea to be creeping towards him with that misshapen grin on her face. The docking bay was not empty… but it was too still. Too quiet. Tyre looked around, unable to shake the feeling on the back of his neck. The ham-fisted pilot, the skin of his face uneven and sagging with advanced Decay, was standing near his skiff and a knot of dock workers were clumped by the Scarab. There were more, but none of them seemed to be reacting to the danger Tyre felt.

Tyre squinted, watching them. His tube brothers had gone unnaturally still. Not talking, not moving. Not doing anything but standing in place, slumping forward over their rifles and loaders, even slumped on each other. A nasally snore erupted from the skiff pilot, his hands swaying limply at his sides, and Tyre gawped at him in confusion. They were all asleep, he realized. But that didn’t seem possible. One or two certainly, but the whole docking bay? At the same time? What was more confusing is that they all seemed to be doing so upright. Tyre looked closer and thought he saw thin, glistening filaments propping up their bodies, each one the color of spilled blood.

Tyre was about to shout, but then he saw it drop from an overhead vent. It was tall, slender, and quite obviously female – but that was about all Tyre was certain of. He couldn’t tell if the fleshy sleeves and skirt were the clothes it was wearing or if they were part of the thing itself. Dark horns crowned its visored head, like the wild beasts that stalked the overgrown jungles of old Earth, or the demons that prowled at the edges of nightmares. Quiet as a shadow, it straightened and moved towards the nearest of the sleepers. In one hand, it held a long blade.

In one quick motion, it – she, Tyre’s brain babbled senselessly – flicked the sharpened tip across the pilot’s neck. Blood spurted silently, fountaining from his open jugular, and he collapsed without ever waking up. No screams, no startled cry. Nothing. The only sound in the entire hanger was the solid flump of his body going to the floor. Tyre clapped both hands over his mouth to muffle the noise of his scream, nearly breaking his teeth against the azurite clutched tightly in his fist. The horned devil swept towards the Scarab and the cluster of his tube mates, all of them woefully oblivious to the peril they were in. The sword arced, a prismatic curving moon, and the sleepers went tumbling to the floor.

Tyre wanted to cry out, but the noise stayed glued in his throat. He was unarmed; he’d left his rifle atop some crates inside the Scarab’s cargo bay. And even if he hadn’t, it was doubtful he’d be able to unsling it. Fear drenched his senses like a cold bath. He couldn’t move. He could barely breathe past the moist, greasy press of his hands. Above on the gantry, Tyre saw movement. A group of soldiers came into the docking bay, chatting in guttural voices. The dark thing went very still. Tyre was certain they were going to see it, certain they were going to snap their rifles to their shoulders and-

-the dark thing lifted a hand and waved it, almost as if caressing the air. Blood-red sparks cascaded softly from her fingertips, expanding around her hand like a cloud of dancing, alien fireflies. The soldiers came slowly to a halt. Their chins drooped, their eyes closed. In seconds they were asleep as well, their shoulders propped together for support. The demon gathered herself and leapt up onto the gantry, easily clearing the ten-meter distance. Tyre’s squeal of dismay suffocated in his palms as two more of his tube brothers went tumbling to the floor. Blood pattered rhythmically to the floor, dripping from the metal lattice of the gantry as the demon hurried through the door and out of sight, heading deeper into Eunomia Station.

For a long moment, Tyre did not move. Grineer were grown and birthed from their tubes fully developed, and did not experience childhood in the literal sense of the term, but Tyre remembered stories from his first few years of life – when his older tube siblings would taunt and bully, keeping him awake and sweating in his pod long after the rest of the galleon had gone to sleep. They’d told stories of the Void, that dreaded place beyond reality, and exotic ships where feral, starving Kavats roamed the empty halls. They’d told stories of the Lost Ones, wisps of pale evil that floated about the Plains at night, desperately searching.

When Tyre’s body finally jerked into action, it was only to open the nearby maintenance locker and hurl himself inside. His breath filled the damp interior, inhaling the thick odor of rust, oil and spilled fuel. There was no light and no slats to peer through. Tyre’s heart pounded against his ribs, counting out the seconds. He’d hadn't thought himself a coward, but the idea of the dark thing slinking through the station, slaughtering the inhabitants while they dozed in a sudden, unnatural sleep was too much. He could not face it. To face it would be to die. And so Tyre clutched his precious fragment of ore and waited.

He did not move, not even when it returned ten minutes later and opened the locker where he hid. A breathless noise of fear escaped Tyre’s lips when he saw it standing there, that bloodied, darkly prismatic blade held loosely in one hand. Its tall, curving horns framed the yellow light of the hanger bay, giving it an almost otherworldly halo. And it was otherworldly. Black and shiny as obsidian with thin, winding insets of bone white, Tyre could feel it staring at him thought the polarized lenses of its helmet. He stared back, mesmerized. Every curve of its armor was weirdly organic, the dark, deadly, fleshy thing. A word danced through the cold morass of his mind, a word in the language of the Golden Lords, a statement of both reverence and fear. He reached for it, but it skittered away. It didn’t matter what the thing was called, Tyre decided. It was going to kill him and that was all there was to it. He hoped it would put him to sleep, too, so he didn’t feel the pain.

The thing moved slightly. Its hands, Tyre noticed, were the deep blue of a moonless night and as the fireflies began to gather, he thought again of the stars. The blade tilted, shedding droplets of blood onto the dirty floor, and Tyre held out his hand, fingers uncurling to reveal the lump of azurite.

“Shiny,” he said simply. “Like you.”

The dark thing paused. Its horned head tilted, regarding him in silence. The moment stretched. The fireflies winked out of existence. Tyre did not move as it- as she reached out with her empty hand and held it over his, not touching the gemstone, merely hovering over it. Their fingertips brushed. Hers were cold, but not frozen. Not cruel. The underside of her palm was shot through with gold, the gilding of a forgotten age.

The word came to him clearly then.

Tenno.

The dark thing mutely turned away. Tyre watched her go, watched her walk through the forcefield at the far end of the docking bay and simply float out into the vacuum, where she was picked up by an odd looking little ship. After that, he was left alone in Eunomia Station with only the dead for company. He did not bother looking for survivors, knowing there wouldn’t be any. Tyre sat down on the floor of the locker and held the piece of azurite to his chest. Exhausted and shaking with adrenaline, he tried to ponder what was left for him to do. He could not pilot the Scarab. The words and numbers needed to run the navigation consoles were beyond his ken. The neatly stacked crates of ferrite seemed so pointless now. He dozed and woke, and waited for something to change.

When the small, beetle-like skiff pulled into the dock an hour or so later, Tyre did not move from his seat. The ship was unmarked; he wondered if its crew would beat him, either to test his fortitude before accepting him as one of their own, or to extract whatever information they needed from the station’s lone survivor. Tyre wondered what he would tell them either way.

The Grineer female approached him slowly, a pistol at her hip, obviously wondering if he was dead, too. When Tyre blinked at her, the female walked straight up to him and looked down into his face. Her pewter-colored lips were edged with the mottled brown of Decay, but her one good eye sparkled with good humor. She cracked a grin and stuck out her hand.

“Hey, there,” she said cheerfully. “A friend of mine said you might be lookin’ fer a lift?”

Chapter Text

“Operator, you have a message in your Inbox,” Cephalon Ordis reported cheerfully.

Bobbing with his legs crossed in meditation about a foot off the floor, Nezha did not open his eyes. If he’d had another name before the Second Dream, the memory of it had not returned to him, and so Nezha he remained – after the Warframe standing at his back, a still and silent protector.

“It is important?” he asked quietly.

“Ordis does not know,” the Cephalon responded. “I do not read them.”

Nezha doubted this very much. He had no proof, of course, but he suspected that Ordis surfed through his Inbox on a regular basis – not out of malice, Nezha knew his dear companion better than that – but out of an almost comical sense of anxiety, searching for that elusive bill of sale indicating that he’d been sold to Maroo for a handful of endo. Nezha repressed a silent little smile.

“I’m not going to sell you, you know.”

Ordis let out a burst of static that almost sounded like a guilty splutter. “What makes you think I’m look- erm, worrying about that?!” the Cephalon yawped, his waveform dancing. There was a long pause. Then, mournfully, “…You’re not going to, are you? Sell me?”

“Never.”

“Not even for Ducats? The Void Trader’s prices are exorbitantly high…”

“It that who the message is from?”

“Yes,” Ordis replied miserably. After a moment, he added, “I would fetch you a good price.”

Nezha opened his eyes, pale Void-light shining deep in the back of his pupils. His physical form may have sat in the Liset, holding steady just outside of Saturn’s first lagrange point, but he was not there, his consciousness expanded far beyond the five mundane senses. Half a kilometer away, the ringed planet orbited slowly, attended by an entourage of twinkling ice chips and gleaming, cosmic dust.

Nezha could feel the planet against his thoughts, aware of the pressure its immense gravity exerted on the fabric of space. The vacuum was not dark, it was not still, and it was not quiet. Storms of electrically charged particles billowed past the Liset in waves, every mote bristling with the jagged scrape of radiation. Not deadly, not dangerous, but present all the same. He could hear it, too, the sound of the great planet howling like a perpetual wind, infinitely chaotic and at times eerily high pitched. And below it all was a rhythmic pulse, so regular as to be almost artificial, the presence of the Void tapping away at the very edge of reality.

Nezha took a deep breath, savoring the simple act of drawing the Liset’s cool, metallic air into his own, living lungs. The physicality of the act grounded him, allowing him to pull his mind back from the Void. He unfolded his legs and stood.

“Not even for Ducats,” he said to Ordis. “You are worth far more to me than that.”

Ordis’ waveform brightened and took on a slightly deeper shade of blue. The Cephalon was preening. The sincerity of his relief was so intense, that Nezha couldn’t help but place a reassuring hand on the console. With his other, he activated the holo-projector above his palm, scrolled to his Inbox, and opened the latest message. As he’d already gleaned, it came from Baro Ki’Teer. He couldn’t decide if that boded well or not. The man had been helpful during their struggle with the Formorians, but that “help” had come with a rather annoying price tag. Nezha wondered what favor was on sale today.

A prerecorded transmission opened above his palm and began to play.

“I have a rare opportunity for you, Tenno,” said Baro, wasting no time with his usual, unconscious arrogance. “It’s come to my attention that there may actually be a tomb on that forsaken little rock you call Mars – and tombs mean treasure.”

Nezha lifted an eyebrow. There was a barely concealed sneer in Baro’s voice, but Nezha couldn’t tell what or who it was directed at. It was usually quite easy to locate the object of the man’s derision, whether it was a generic Warframe or second-rate gear. This time, however, Baro was making a conscious effort to keep such conceit to himself – and all but failing at it anyway.

“Unfortunately, my usual relic hunters are superstitious idiots who refuse to disturb this so-called “sacred” place,” Baro continued, fingertips flaring apart, then lightly pressing together again. “You, Tenno, are far more pragmatic… especially when it comes to Ducats, am I right? I would like to solicit your services in this matter.”

That much had been expected. What came next, however, took Nezha by surprise.

“I will be accompanying you, of course. I can’t expect you to know the different between treasure and mere rubbish,” Baro sniffed. His fingertips drifted apart again. “I’m sending you the coordinates for a rendezvous. Do try to respond in a timely matter, Tenno, whatever your decision.”

The transmission collapsed back into his Inbox. In the stillness that followed, Nezha found himself thinking. He had awoken twice in his life, once to his Warframe, and once to himself. Thousands of years after the Downfall, the world around him had been strange, alien and unfamiliar. He and the other Tenno had banded together to face it. They’d constructed their own relays, their own conclaves and places of refuge, building alliances with some, making enemies of far more. Mercenary work was not new to the Tenno and Baro’s request was not an unusual one. It was, however, odd in some way that Nezha couldn’t place. While Baro tended to exude the aura of some exquisite glass thing, there was steel in his spine and cunning in his fluttering fingers. He could not have repeatedly entered the Void and returned unscathed by mere luck. Why, then, would he require the services of a bodyguard?

“Well, Operator? Will you begin this mission?"

“Make ready, Operator,” said Ordis. “We are nearing the rendezvous.”

The coordinates Baro had provided lay at the very edge of the highlands, where the deeply fretted landscape dropped several kilometers to the vast desert which dominated the planet’s northern hemisphere. More precisely, he’d indicated a particular spot along the rim of the Isidis Basin, a 4-billion-year-old impact crater splashed between the two opposing geographies.

Nezha sank into the somatic link and waited, feeling the Liset began to decelerate. A moment later, the docking cradle spun open, exposing him to a wall of shimmering heat and grit tossed up by the lander’s engines. There were no hostiles in sight. His HUD darkened, compensating for the intense glare, and Nezha demagnetized the cradle. For half a second, he was in freefall. Half a second after that, he tucked his knees to his chest and somersaulted, landing in an easy crouch as the Liset arced away into the hot blue sky.

Nezha stood up. The wind snagged at the long sugrata flowing from his helmet, their weighed ends clattering softly against his Warframe. To his front, the rocky ground cleaved away from him, revealing knobby minarets of sandstone and a sunbaked vista looking out over the basin. He was alone but for the furtive skitter of a desert skate.

Nezha opened his HUD and rechecked the coordinates he’d been given. Horizontally, he was right where he should be. Vertically, he was still one hundred and eight meters too high. Nezha walked to the edge of the plateau and peered down into the shadowed depths of the canyon. A moment later he jumped, landing with an enormously heavy thud that belied the size of his Warframe. When he rose from all fours, he found Baro Ki’Teer staring at him and looking unimpressed. A reprogrammed Osprey unit hovered placidly at his side.

“I do hope you checked to see where I standing before you leapt down here,” he remarked.

Nezha regarded the man in silence. Baro had kept the pointed helmet concealing all but the lower half of his face, but the high, restrictive collar had been replaced with a loosely wrapped viridian cape that’d been pulled up in the facsimile of a hood, shielding his neck from the hot Martian sunlight. Gone was the bulky ensemble he typically sported during his visits to the relays. He now wore something dark and tight, not unlike the Transference suit to which Nezha had grown accustomed. Angular chest and shoulder plates sparkled blue-green in the heat, and there were several expensive-looking rings on Baro’s fingers. He had not, Nezha was dully amused to note, sacrificed much in terms of style.

Baro turned on his heel. If he was perturbed by the Tenno’s habitual lack of response, he didn’t show it. “Well, come on then,” he said shortly. “I don’t want to spend any more time on this desolate rock than I have to. I can feel the filth and grit in every breath.”

There it was again, the disparaging sneer. Nezha’s sharp eyes watched him. Baro’s center of gravity had changed ever so slightly, unconsciously aware of some new weight low in the small of his back. The Tenno trailed after him without a word. It was not difficult to see where the man intended to go.

The temple facade was about half as high as the cliff into which it was carved, and Nezha realized he’d been standing atop it only moments before. A palisade of columns lined the dusty walkway leading to the open mouth of the temple, the cobbles nearly obscured by windblown piles of sand. An enormous blue banner hung to one side of the entrance, ratty and sunbleached with age. Another lay crumbled on the ground directly opposite. Imposing though it was, the temple projected an air of sadness and neglect, of something that had once been important, but now lay forgotten.

Ahead of him by about five paces, Baro turned his boot on a loose cobble, not enough to take his balance, but enough to make him reach for a nearby column. Blocks of stones shifted, and a cascade of loose sand tumbled over his fingers. Disgusted by its dry, slithering touch, Baro’s plush lips began to curl.

There, there. That’s right, shake out the sand, but remember, not all of it…

The voice was soft and consoling. A mother’s voice, Nezha reflected with an ache. Baro snapped his hand away from the column as though it’d bitten him. He stared at his open palm for a moment, then dusted the grains from his skin with an abruptness that almost bordered on frantic.

“Tenno, that voice... did you-” Baro cut himself off. “No, nevermind. Come.”

He turned away quickly and resumed his course down the walkway. Nezha stood still in the middle of the columns, looking up at the temple facade. He’d heard the woman’s voice, too, but could not fathom where it had come from, unable to discern if it’d been a rogue transmission picked up by his comms… or something else entirely. They were alone in this desolate place; his radar and motion trackers confirmed as much. Nezha tipped his head to the side. There had been something odd about that voice. Something deep and distant, reverberating softly as though he was hearing it from someplace far away – if indeed he’d “heard” it at all, for the words had seemed to come directly into his mind.

Ten meters ahead, a gelid wind sighed from the mouth of the temple, beckoning them inside.

“Oh, my. You’re even good as a nightlight.”

The words were openly mocking, but lacked the sharpness of malice. Nezha let them pass, slowly rotating his head to look around the dusty antechamber. Gauzy spiderwebs hung from the ceiling like curtains, stirring in the gravelly sigh of wind that rushed out of the darkness to meet them, so shriveled and hoarse, it took very little imagination to fancy it being exhaled from desiccated lungs. If Baro had been struck by a similar thought, he did nothing to show it. His snapped his fingers at the Osprey and it flared its lights, forcing the darkness to retreat. They pressed deeper into the temple. The floor was made of the same neatly cut, sandstone cobbles as the promenade, but in most places the sand was heaped so thickly that it scarcely mattered. Here and there, entire sections of the walls had collapsed – or had been left unfinished.

Nezha pushed his consciousness out ahead of them, extending his awareness beyond what was available to him via Warframe’s expansive sensor suite. It was easier now, this newfound power, and it strengthened with each passing day. All around he could sense the pale touch of memory, the hopes and fears and desires left upon the Void like soft fingerprints. The air here was heavy, drenched in the shadows of remorse. Nezha’s feet crunched over the remains of faience pottery, blue as shards of broken sky, as the walls around them slowly came to life.

Baro gave the paintings a cold look. “As you can see,” he said tartly, “this desolate rock is the former home of a colony of backwards-thinking sun worshipers worth about as much as the sand around you. Nothing. The Grineer took pity on their miserable existence long ago.”

Nezha turned towards the man. That shadow is upon you, too, he thought. It was as if the blackness of the temple corridor had reached out from its slumber, worming beneath Baro’s flesh like the purulent tendrils of the Infested. In his chest, a seething knot pulsed like a tumor. You are sick with it.

“Ah!” said Baro, brimming with false enthusiasm. “Now that’s what I came to see.”

Nezha swung his implacable gaze back to the temple. The corridor ahead of them was thick with spiderwebs, but beyond was the gleam of precious gemstones, of electrum and lapis lazuli and deep, deep gold. Baro slowed to a halt, eyeing the webs, and Nezha choked back a laugh. Chubby spiders lounged on the strands, each one easily as big as his fist, with eight bright pink toes The Biz would have thought them adorable. Nezha could easily see the big man stowing one of the creatures in an apron pocket.

In one smooth motion, Nezha stepped forward and hooked one hand through the webs, parting them with a visceral tearing sound. One of the spiders fell on his shoulder and sluggishly moved up the back of his neck. Baro made a high-pitched noise of protest.

“Tenno, it’s on your shoulder. Oh, my stars it’s moving. K-kill it!”

Nezha said nothing, letting the arachnid crawl up the side of his helmet without disturbing its progress. Baro shuddered visibly and tucked his arms and elbows close, apparently trying to make himself a small a target as possible as Nezha swiped and clawed at the webs, clearing the passageway. More spiders dropped onto the sand. Baro anxiously danced aside.

“Disgusting, horrible creatures. You let any of them touch me and I’m docking your fee!” He said in a shrill voice.

With a grand gesture, Nezha indicated the path he’d made.

After another agonizing moment of indecision, the Void Trader darted through the gap, swatting at imaginary things on his clothes. Nezha followed him with the slow, deliberate steps of a predator stalking oblivious prey.

The corridor ahead split around a large block of stone. Here the ground was relatively free of sand, making it easy to discern the wealth of artifacts heaped against the wall. Baro knelt and immediately began sorting through the hoard. Standing over him, Nezha watched in silence. The air here was thick with the scent of dust and dried flowers, of precious myrrh and black, sticky incense. Nezha's head tilted, observing the trinkets that Baro was picking up and sorting into haphazard little piles. Some were obviously valuable, like the golden circlet hung with crimson lobes of jasper, but most were conspicuously plain: handmade carvings in the shape of scarabs and sandskates, bundles of flowers clumsily tied with string. Shriveled husks that had been once sweet, succulent fruit. There were also several large urns.

“Burial vessels!” Baro exclaimed. “They will contain precious relics.”

The pile of artifacts toppled, withered petals crumpling to dust beneath Baro’s questing fingers, and Nezha felt a disturbing stab of unease. The Void Trader laughed. “There, there,” he chided the Tenno, amused. “You’re not defiling a tomb – you’re helping create wealth!”

The Warframe gave him a look that didn’t even require a face. Baro merely smiled his condescending smile and went back to his plunder, ordering the Osprey to unfold a large cargo net. As it did so, Baro popped the cap on a tube of balm and applied it to his lips, then started piling gold and other valuables into the center of the net.

Well, there was more than one way to skin a kavat.

Nezha reached up, pinched the spider crouched at his nape, and gently lifted it off his Warframe. Moving with exaggerated slowness, so that Baro would think any disturbance merely the touch of the wind, he lowered the creature until its lurid pink feet latched onto the Void Trader’s cape – then released it and went back to studying the simple artwork. It was obvious the painting was meant to convey some kind of story, but Nezha did not recognize the language any more than he recognized the kneeling figures.

The silence hung uncomfortably. After a long moment, Baro looked up to see what had caught the Warframe’s attention. “Those are nothing but a bunch of nonsense about their so-called God King, Inaros,” he said flatly. “I assure you, Tenno, the only thing “heaven-sent” here will be the price these relics fetch at auction.”

He lobbed a heavy golden bangle atop the rest of the valuables – then erupted into a startled shriek as he finally noticed the tarantula pawing at his shoulder. Baro surged to his feet, swatting frantically at his person as the alarmed spider scuttled down his cape and attempted to huddle between the folds, causing the Void Trader to go into epileptic spasms. He clawed and hopped and jerked until finally, having no luck at flushing the monster out of his cape, he resorting to hauling it off over his head and flinging it away. The shimmery garment landed with a plop. A moment later, the spider darted out from under it and raced into a gap in the wall. Baro’s hand twitched at the small of his back.

“Tenno!” he shrieked accusingly.

Nezha gave him an innocent look. He didn’t actually say ‘Who? Me?’ but it was written all over his posture. Baro swatted at his neck again, presumably where something furry may or may not have brushed his skin. The air around them stirred.

Hush, my little dune. You don’t need to be sacred. Shake out the sand and I’ll tell you a story.

Baro went stiff. He shot Nezha a reproving glare. “Tenno, what is this? How are you doing that?”

Nezha looked deeper into the tomb. Despite the close proximity of the voice, they were very much alone. The cobwebs stirred and fluttered. Long ago, the sands of our colony were cursed, soaked in fear, the woman continued. The Golden Skymen would come and take our children away. Young and old alike cowered before them, afraid to lose their most beloved.

Nezha cocked his head to the side. It was very little to go on, but somehow, in an instant, he knew. The Golden Skymen. The Orokin that were. Frightened children brought before the withered and diseased. Nezha grit his teeth, feeling acid in his stomach. He was Ten Zero; he had not needed to face the mountaintop theater, but Teshin’s words – and the vision of that lonely place – haunted him still.

But then he came, the Fear Eater, the skykiller! He was called… Inaros!

Baro seized hold of Nezha's wrist. “Tenno, stop this!” he ordered sharply.

His grip was tight.

He was shaking.

A dark wind sighed through the tomb, so deep it was almost a growl. The brazier at Nezha’s back suddenly flared to life, filling the corridor with fire. Baro’s grip tightened even further, swallowing what might have been scream. Nezha eyed the crackling flames with a preternatural sort of calm, observing how they danced on the sandstone walls, shadows twisting and leaping, until the glyphs almost seemed to move.

Inaros began not as our King, but as our enemy, a warrior of the Golden Skymen. But for each child the Skymen took away, Inaros grew ever more angry – until one fateful night.

More braziers ignited further down the passageway.

The invitation was an obvious one.

Nezha appraised the corridor in silence, weighing his curiosity against whatever it was he was likely to find deeper in. After a moment, curiosity won out. He took a step forward. Baro clamped down on his arm. “We came here for relics,” the Void Trader hissed, “not your Tenno soma-Void-resonance… thing!”

His voice was thin and upset. Nezha gazed at him without speaking. Most of Baro’s expression was hidden behind his helmet, but his tanned skin had gone pale and his lips were flattened into a thin, bloodless line. He was not far off in his assessment. The Void was strong here, filling the tomb with its latent presence, and the voice was merely an echo, a record of past events imprinted on the Void like the mass shadow of a distant moon. That explained how Nezha could hear it, but lent nothing towards an explanation of Baro’s distress – or how he even heard at voice at all, as it should have been far beyond his ability to sense. It occurred to him that Baro’s repeated exposure to the Void had opened certain neural pathways, just as it had the cursed children of the Zariman, but even so… it was obvious something else awaited them in the depths of the tomb.

Nezha waited another beat before resolutely striding forward.

Baro’s clutching fingers reluctantly slid off his arm, but he stayed close behind Nezha as he walked, alert for any sound or movement that might indicate the prelude to an attack. Sand slithered. Nezha flicked it a cautious look. Had something moved above the roof of the tomb? Baro crouched, retrieved his cape, and quickly wound it about his body again, almost as if the airy garment would serve him as a shield – if a purely psychological one.

The corridor turned, then opened into a massive antechamber. Nezha tipped his head back until his gaze was finally able to meet the ceiling, vaulting nearly eighty meters above their heads. The cavern was a natural formation, but here and there were signs of human hands, like the worn sandstone steps climbing a hill in the center of the grotto. More grubby blue banners were draped from the ceiling, shielding potential visitors from the daggers of sunlight stabbing through a gap in the roof. Beneath those tattered awnings stood a massive statue, one arm raised towards the ceiling, but Nezha was still too far to make out any detail. A low, guttural tone resonated through the tomb.

Another child had been taken and the villagers gathered in a mourning circle, weeping… until they heard a small voice, the woman’s gentle voice continued. With her came the ghostly imprint of lilies, of sweet varnish and the warm glow of an alabaster lamp. It was the child, returned! As he approached, the people gasped, for they saw he was drenched in blood. His father rushed to the boy and embraced him – and saw that he had no wounds. “Whose blood is this?” the father asked, and the boy replied, “This is the blood of the Skymen. This is the work of Inaros.”

Ah, thought Nezha. The Yuvan child had stood before the mirror, naked save for the gold dust on his skin – and the crimson blood of the Golden Lords, beings of peerless beauty inhabited by rotten souls. Nezha climbed the stairs, lost in the echo of memories not his to remember. Baro’s shoulder brushed his as the Void Trader crowded close.

“That story… it’s more than just a myth, isn’t it?” he murmured. He gazed up at the statue. They were close enough to be in its shadow now, close enough to see something familiar in the planes and angles of its body. “Tenno, do you think… do you think the story of Inaros was drawn from a Warframe?”

The woman’s voice continued on.

By the sand and stars, the Skymen raged. They set upon Inaros with their armies, but none could prevail, for he commanded the sand. He commanded Death. And so they left us and took with them our fear. On that day, Inaros became our King, ascending into the sky in a whirlwind of sand to watch over us from his throne in the sky.

Baro let out an angry scoff, but the sound was oddly muffled, as if he’d tried to smother it in his throat. He was looking up at Inaros with a pained expression on his face. A sigh of wind gusted into the chamber, rippling the shabby awnings. There were no tomb offerings here, no burial urns hoping to share the afterlife with their God King; his worshipers had been too leery of penetrating the sanctity of the inner chamber. There was, however, a massive stone sarcophagus at the statue’s feet. Nezha approached it slowly. It was a magnificent work of craftsmanship, inlaid with gleaming tiles of gold and carnelian. The suggestion of physical form was only a vague one, but it was there, visible in the wide shoulders and folded arms.

And so for years we lived without fear, said the woman, but the sands of peace are ever shifting. Years later, a plague came to the desert. The Infested. With all lost, our people gathered in the mourning circle to prepare for the end, when suddenly a storm rose about them! A colossal, spiral storm of sand, piercing the sky!

Nezha trailed his fingers across the splendid lid of the sarcophagus.

“These desert people… were they a wealthy civilization?” He asked Baro quietly.

They were the first words he'd uttered in over an hour. The Void Trader jolted at the sound of his voice. “No,” he said at last, looking at the vast wealth of gold and precious gemstones, the labor of hundreds of hours. “No, they were not. For some elusive reason, their artifacts have only recently become fashionable.”

Nezha waited for the rest, darkly certain he knew what was to come.

Our people called out to the sky: Inaros! And as they huddled in the eye of the storm, the plague was swept away… never to be seen again. Our people went out into the desert, hoping to catch a glimpse of their beloved Inaros, but all they found was his glorious metal body, broken and still, lying in the sand.

Nezha bowed his head. Even though it had occurred centuries in the past, the knowledge was like a fresh wound. It was a rare thing, the death of a Tenno. His brothers and sisters were few, and the loss of one of their own was always deeply felt. Had the Lotus mourned this child? Was she even with them yet? Perhaps it didn’t matter. In her stead, the people of Mars had laid their savior to rest with every honor they could muster.

They gathered his body to keep it safe from thieves and raiders, and entombed it… knowing that one day, Inaros would rise again. Our people had no need for fear, my sweet little dune, and neither do you. Take these grains and keep them under your pillow. Inaros will watch over you.

“Lies,” Baro choked. “Nothing but lies!”

The statue of Inaros moved with a desiccated creak.

Nezha jumped back. Grains of sand poured from the ceiling. Cracks daggered through the sandstone and with an unsteady jerk, like a machine grinding on dirty servos, the statue stepped down from its dais. But it was no machine. Deep within its core, Nezha could sense a condensed bead of Void energy. Not alive, not in the traditional sense of the word, but sentient all the same. In one hand it held a polearm carved from the same sandstone as the chamber. Not sharp, but heavy and deadly. Nezha’s hand swept behind his back and grasped the hilt of his Guando, drawing the double-bladed staff over his shoulder.

“Ki’Teer! Get back!” he ordered loudly.

The statue swept at Baro with a growl. Nezha expected the Void Trader to be knocked flat, but Baro neatly pirouetted to the side, avoiding the swipe that would have knocked him ass-over-ankles down the stairs. The statue took a step after him, casually allowing the polearm to slide through its hand, lengthening his grip on the weapon. Nezha leapt into the air just Baro’s hand went beneath his cape and drew a primed Lex from the holster in the small of his back.

Nezha brought the Guandao down on the statue’s head and expected it to crack. Instead, the rubidium blade turned aside with a sharp chink. The statue reached for him. Nezha kicked off with both feet, arching clear of the danger. He was in the air when Baro opened fire. Bullets smashed into the statue’s head with unerring accuracy, but ultimately had no more effect than the Guandao. The Void Trader began backing up. He slapped his gauntlet with his free hand and there was an answering chime. Nezha landed on the far stairs.

The thirteen-foot statue pivoted towards him with alarming speed, swinging the polearm so hard the air around it seemed to split open. Nezha leapt again, narrowly avoiding the heavy blade as it crashed into the banister, breaking off great chunks of stone. He slashed the Guandao’s primary blade across the statue’s wrist as he tumbled to safer ground, but even with his Warframe’s unnatural strength, the weapon only left an ineffectual scratch. The effigy of Inaros was more than just stone, more than just the sum of its parts.

Baro’s reprogrammed Osprey whizzed into the room, rotors angled for maximum velocity, and loosed a barrage of laser fire into the statue’s back. Inaros turned with a roar. Nezha stabbed his Guandao into the sand and reached around to unhook his chakram. The band of light around its circumference flared. Half a second later, it ignited in a conflagration of lazuline flame. Nezha hurled it across the chamber, the deadly ring orbiting so fast it seemed a solid, burning comet. It struck Inaros in the side and kept flying, opening a deep gouge in the effigies’ insectoid waist.

The chakram arced around the chamber and returned to Nezha’s hand, drawn by the will of his mind. There was gunfire from somewhere near the stairs. Nezha watched as several rounds hammered into the wound he’d just opened, splintering the cracked and broken stone. The Osprey circled around to target the same area. Inaros whirled after it. Fire blazed in the center of its helmet and a lethal shaft of energy spiked through the Osprey’s core, setting its components ablaze. The rotors locked, then shredded apart. It spiraled into the side of the chamber and exploded in a burst of melted shrapnel.

The effigy slowly turned back to face them.

Nezha hurled the chakram again.

This time, the whirling disc slashed through Inaros’ neck. The statue took a few staggering steps, then the helmet completely separated from its body. Inaros keeled over onto the sand and was still. Nezha caught his chakram as it whirled back towards him, not taking his eyes from the pile of crumbled rock. A moment passed. Then another.

Behind him, the sarcophagus split open with a brittle crack.

Nezha cautiously shifted his gaze to look. A seam opened down the length of the casket and the two halves slid apart, moving on unseen hinges. Seconds later, everything had gone still. Nezha straightened, his stance slowly becoming more relaxed. The chakram continued to hum against his palm. He regarded the tomb protector with a wary eye. The battle had been easily won, but only by the grace of the Void. Whatever had compelled the thing to move, it had also rendered it impervious to normal weaponry. Neither blade nor bullet had even made a dent in that sandstone carapace. A common intruder would have found himself lying dead upon the sand, reverencing Inaros with blood.

But not a Tenno.

Such an outcome must have been deliberate, but even still…

Danger weighed heavily on Nezha’s thoughts, dragging cold talons through his mind. In the distance, he could hear the dirty chugging of an engine. Footsteps shimmered against the Void, heavy and bruising.

“Ket klem!”

Nezha turned around. To his surprise, a ragged deployment of Grineer heavy gunners, lancers and bombards were pouring into the chamber, numbering a score or more at least. He wondered how and when the Grineer had picked up on their scent. It was doubtful that the Liset had been detected on approach, and Nezha didn’t have enough information on Baro’s personal craft to make a judgment regarding its stealth systems – or the relative skill of its pilot. The Grineer could just as easily have detected them on a routine sensor sweep, drawn by the tell-tale signature of Void energy. Either way, it mattered little. Nezha calmly moved his center of gravity into his naval, cold blue flames licking between his fingers. Thirty feet to his right, Baro whirled to face the sound of the Grineer.

“No!”

To Nezha’s shock, the Void Trader immediately stumbled back. Gone was the controlled, economic sense of grace he’d possessed earlier in the fight. Half a second later, Baro tangled his boots together and fell. He frantically pointed the Lex at the intruders. “You won’t take me! You won’t! Tenno, do something!”

He clumsily opened fire. Most of the rounds went wide. Only a few opened the Grineer’s suits with a hiss of escaping air. Baro scrambled back on all fours. The latent pressure of the Void darkened, stealing the heat of the sun and becoming a maelstrom that licked at Nezha’s mind in short, jagged barbs. The abrupt sting of fear was so potent, he could do little else but act. He sent the chakram hurtling into the Grineer and broke into a run, seizing his Guandao as he passed. Two lancers went down in a fountain of blood. The chakram curved, beginning its return arc. Nezha caught it one-handed as he plunged into the Grineer. Limbs flopped to the desert sand, shot through with violet tongues of radiation.

The Void spasmed. The woman’s voice returned, no longer consoling. No longer gentle. This time her voice was full of terror. They’re coming. Quickly, in here! Don’t make a sound, Baro. Here – hold these grains tight. Inaros will protect you.

The impression of a dark, cramped cupboard slashed across the Void, but there was no time to succumb to the visions pressing at the edge of reality. Nezha twirled the Guandao, peeling flesh and severing bone. Gunfire chattered. He knocked the bullets aside. In his stomach, there was a hollow pit of pure knowing. The Void darkened even further, reacting to the union between past and present. Behind him, Baro screamed out a curse, his voice thinning, echoing alongside the tremulous prayer of a frightened boy stumbling over the name of his god.

The sound of his mother’s voice rose to match.

What do you want? No! You have no right!

Grineer butchers growled a response in their mushy, discordant tongue.

Nezha shifted his grip on the Guandao and swung behind him, opening the belly of a nearby gunner. Ropy intestines sluiced out at his feet. The woman had possessed no weapons capable of doing the same, nor the training required to make use of them if she had.

There was the snap of a mechanized bolt. Nezha pivoted to face the sound and found himself staring down the barrel of a Ogris rocket launcher. He sprang into the air to avoid its fire. Missing him completely, the cluster of missiles slammed into the sandstone wall of the chamber and exploded. There was a blast of heat as the expanding pressure wave caught him in the back, hurling him unceremoniously to the ground. Nezha skidded, putting one hand out to control his tumble. Chunks of rock, some large, some small bounced off the skin of his Warframe as the wall collapsed. His shields flared, liquid bright against the dust, as a slab of sandstone the half the size of a Dargyn clipped his shoulder and slammed his right half into the ground, pinning everything below the hip.

There was no pain, only knowledge of the impact. The perverse legacy of Orokin hubris felt nothing so mundane. Both within and without, however, Nezha’s ears rang with the agony of the woman’s voice.

No – no, it’s just me. There’s no one else!

The chatter of gunfire tore through the Void-

-and everything grew terribly still.

Somewhere in the distance, the sound of Baro’s Lex continued to hammer away at the silence, desperate and defiant. Four shots later, Nezha heard the slide blow back and lock. He wrenched against the debris, the Warframe’s enhanced visual suite piercing the smog of dust. Still on his back, Baro had retreated against the side of the chamber. The butcher standing over him fell aside, a hollow-point round lodged in his throat. Another eagerly jumped in to fill his place. Widely regarded as suicide troops, butchers did not carry any weapons beside their trademark cleavers and this one was no different – save for the streak of malice that compelled him to abandon the blade in favor of wrapping both hands around Baro’s throat. The Void Trader choked as hard, knotted fingers closed over his windpipe. He dropped the empty Lex, clawing uselessly at the Grineer’s armored wrists, but the butcher was twice his weight and half again as strong.

There wasn’t enough air in his lungs to scream.

Nezha dug his fingers into the boulder, splintering everything directly beneath his fingertips, but the bulk of the stone remained intact. The angle was too awkward to gather the force required, not in time to make a difference. His Warframe was strong, but not all-powerful. Panic seeped through the discipline and rooted in his chest like poison.

In the back of Nezha’s mind, he felt the touch of sand.

Warm sunshine falling on cold stone.

All at once, he understood.

He flung himself from his Warframe, dropping the empty vessel in a heap and hurtling his consciousness up the stairs. The sarcophagus lay open at the top of the hill. As Nezha rushed forward, moving between the folds of the world, he saw glorious bronze Warframe lying in repose, arms crossed over its chest. It was badly damaged, wounded by the struggle that’d taken the life of its Operator, but still mostly intact, a gleaming carapace of bronze and dark, glossy obsidian. Inaros, the Protector. Nezha pushed his consciousness into the Warframe, a broken, empty shell-

-and brought it back to life.

Images flashed through his mind.

The Infested.

The Plague.

Liquid forma dribbling between fingers that’d once carried a bloodied child home unharmed.

The stench of tears as beautiful children were bartered, appraised and turned to empty vessels. All the innocent who’d suffered from stubbornness and pride. The Golden Skymen had sent him to enforce their will. Once, he’d been their sword. Now he was their scourge.

The desert sands were his to command.

With them, he would scour flesh from bone.

With them, the unworthy would be forced to kneel.

Nezha lurched from the sarcophagus; the Transference circuit had been damaged, but the Warframe still functioned. And besides, he didn’t need the circuit any more. At first the unfamiliar limbs felt alien to him. Somatic rejection spiked for a moment, but they were not so different, he and the Tenno who’d given his life to protect the innocent. What was the desert sun if not a burning halo?

>Transference at 95%

>97%

>99%

>Somatic control established.

>Selenic lensing locked.

>WAR PLATFORM ONLINE.

In a hurricane of sand, Nezha tore across the chamber, the Inaros frame channeling his Void energy into new forms, into patterns he’d never visualized. The nerves burned with the intensity of connection – yet once again, there was no pain. Only knowing. He could feel every grain of sand that surrounded him, sense the lifebeat of every insect sleeping, feeding, or scuttling in the walls of the chamber. Nezha called to them, and felt them answer.

In less than a second, he was upon the Grineer strangling the life from Baro Ki’Teer. With Inaros’ strong hands, Nezha seized the butcher’s head and twisted, wrenching bone and cartilage with a muffled crack. The butcher’s gnarled hands fell slack and Baro sucked a ragged breath into his lungs, convulsing in a moment of pure, desperate instinct as blood and spittle ran from the corner of his mouth. His helmet had been knocked askew. He lifted trembling eyes to the Warframe standing protectively over him, metallic skin glistering in the hot sunlight.

“In- Inaros?”

Scarabs erupted from the walls. They swarmed over the Grineer troops, chewing holes through their suits and burrowing inside, seeking mouthfuls of tender flesh. Screams shook the sand from the ceiling. Nezha took that sand and shaped it, weaving it around it him in a deadly, spiraling storm. By the handful, he sent it forth to devour. The terrified Grineer broke into a run, but in a moment, the remainder of their number had been culled, leaving Baro and the Warframe alone on an altar of bloody sand.

Nezha looked down and stretched out a gleaming hand.

Dazed, Baro slid his fingers into the Tenno’s grip, his lacquered nails chipped and broken from clawing at his attacker, and let himself to be pulled up to stand. He wobbled unsteadily, lightheaded and weak from lack of oxygen. Nezha touched a finger to Baro’s jaw and pushed, gently tilting his head. There was a thin stream of blood oozing from one of his ears. He needed a medic, and soon.

Baro looked up at the towering Warframe, biting his lip to keep it from trembling. Capillaries had burst in his eyes, stippling them with spots of blood, but the malachite orbs were staring at him in astonishment.

“Tenno…” he croaked, one hand fluttering to his wounded throat.

He swayed on his feet.

Nezha silently moved his hand to the Void Trader’s arm.

“Tenno, I…” Baro swallowed painfully. He tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, looking at the cerulean banners and the blistering glow of the sun beyond them. “I tried so hard to forget.”

His voice was thick with emotion. Nezha couldn’t even tell if the admission had been meant for him at all. He gazed Baro without speaking, sensing his anguish and inner turmoil. “Inaros never came that day,” the Void Trader continued in a cracked whisper.

He closed his eyes.

Tears flushed from the corners and down his cheeks.

Nezha found he had nothing at all to say. The wound was too deep, and had festered too long to be soothed by something as banal as mere words. Nezha understood that feeling. Understood it very well. He looked around at the empty tomb, feeling the echo of those who’d come there to pray, as Baro had once done in vain. Inaros couldn’t have saved his mother; he hadn’t been there to listen. But things were different now. In the end, the protector of Mars had saved its last son. Struck by a sudden moment of inspiration, Nezha slowly went to one knee and pulled his fingers through the sand, gathering a fistful of it into his palm.

Baro watched him mutely as Nezha stood up-

-and offered him that handful of golden sand.

Baro’s eyes filled with pain, melting slowly into pure gratitude. Another flush of tears rolled down his face as he held out a hand and allowed the Tenno to gently pour the grains into his palm. Much of it trickled through his fingers, but at the last, Void Trader closed his fist and held tightly to the rest.

“We’re done here, Tenno,” said Baro huskily. “Let’s go home.”

All at once, it was clear to Nezha why the Void Trader had requested his services. He hadn’t needed a bodyguard; he’d wanted someone along to ensure he didn’t have to face the past alone, even if he could never have planned for the way that particular dagger had been unearthed and shoved into his gut. That was what Baro had really been searching for among the shifting sands. Not riches. Closure. He’d needed it for a very long time.

They walked out of the tomb. Pausing at the rockfall, Nezha did not abandon the Warframe destiny had bequeathed him, did not break the dream he sensed that Baro needed so very desperately. Touching each of the boulders, he dissolved them into sand and gathered his previous vessel into his arms. Baro had recovered enough strength to walk unassisted, though his knees shook with every step. Together, they left the antechamber the way they had entered it. In the corridor beyond, the braziers were still burning. Firelight gleamed on gold, and despite the distasteful task, Nezha had never failed to satisfy the terms of his employers.

Shifting the weight of his usual vessel, Nezha went to gather the net – and its valuable cargo – into his fist. Baro stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Leave them,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t care about the money anymore. These few grains of sand are all the treasure I need.”

They left the offerings at the mouth of the tomb. Baro did not speak to the Tenno again, not even as they boarded the Liset and left the Red Planet behind. He sat in utter silence, bruised and trailing sand from the folds of his clothes, as Ordis hastily piloted them to the nearest relay. He did not say goodbye and Nezha did not press him for conversation, silently escorting him through the concourse and into the care of a waiting medical team.

For months, that was the last he saw of Baro Ki’Teer.

In due time, however, Nezha found himself at the Larunda Relay. Today, he’d eschewed his original vessel for the one entrusted to him on Mars. He had a particular destination in mind, a particular purpose for wearing the gleaming bronze Warframe. There was no trace of impairment in his stride. Inaros had been fully repaired and Ordis had made absolutely certain that the Warframe’s deep bronze skin had been polished to a mirror-like shine, reflecting every nuance of the flames burning to either side of the concourse. Today, he bore the mantle of the desert.

He found the Void Trader at his kiosk on the 2^nd floor, surrounded by the usual knot of eager customers and financially challenged onlookers. A rig jockey from Fortuna was nearest to the kiosk, his heavy augments scratched and battered from labor, grasping a leather purse as though it contained his every worldly possession – which, given circumstances, was probably exactly what it was. Nezha loitered at the back of the crowd, listening to the haughty tenor of Baro’s voice as he conducted business with the man. The Void Trader was only short with lookie loos and people who couldn’t pay, after all. Moments later, the rig jockey moved away clutching his purchase. Nezha slipped through the crowd. Seeing him approach, Baro abruptly smiled, not a condescending twitch of his lips, but a genuine expression of warmth.

“Tenno, you honor my people with your Warframe,” he said, his chin dipping forward. There was a note of fondness in his voice, a sincerity that had been absent during their previous interactions. He beckoned to Nezha. “Come! I think you’ll appreciate what I have today.”

There was a golden chain around Baro’s neck, supporting a tiny glass vial filled with Martian sand.

Nezha smiled.

He stepped forward to have a look at the Void Trader’s current inventory.

“Operator... are you certain you can afford those prices without putting me up for sale?”

Chapter Text

We can’t build a relay on spit and hope alone.

That’s what Cressa Tal had said to him once. And yet, as far as the Grineer commander was concerned, there was no problem in the universe that couldn't be overcome with enough of those two ingredients. Push until your bones cracked, then get up and push a little more. The Tenno had sought no special favors when they’d accepted the ragtag band of defectors into their relays; these Grineer had been different, and the Lotus had only desired to preserve the flower struggling to bloom from a mire of filth and decay.

Cressa Tal had repaid that gesture with loyalty, vowed unto Death. Not that death would be an impediment to her. More likely, the female Grineer would simply roll up her sleeves and drag her own carcass back from Hell, carving the way with a knife clamped in her teeth.

Nezha was dwelling on that image as he made his way through the concourse to the elevator at the far end. Unlike the handful of other relays made solely by Tenno hands, the Larunda Relay had been built in conjunction with Steel Meridian, who had supervised most if not all of the actual construction. Everything gleamed in the blazing orange hues of pyrus, a metallic alloy prized for its durability, though the defectors seemed to have a special love for it beyond its material strength. Fires burned in every niche and alcove, and the ornamental trees favored by the Tenno blazed in rich autumnal hues. Here and there, open vents pumped shimmering columns of heat into the concourse. It was not an unwelcome sensation. Nezha wished he could feel it with his actual skin. Skin he hadn’t even known had existed until a mere two weeks ago.

Not for the first time in recent days, Nezha pushed back a surge of vicious annoyance. He was here on business, and it would not do to dwell on what couldn’t be changed.

The East Wing was as crowded as ever. Beings from across the Origin System thronged the corridors: orbital miners, Ostron merchants, Grineer defectors, even a select handful of Corpus Traders who’d been granted special permission to conduct business on the Relays, all under the watchful eye of the Tenno. Like Cetus, all were welcome – so long as they obeyed the peace. Blood would be repaid in blood, but as of yet, none had dared test the limits of the Tenno’s silent, eerie tolerance.

The gathering parted as Nezha walked. Some rubbernecked at him, others bowed in respect. Most dropped their gazes to the floor and kept them there until he’d passed. Nezha knew what they were thinking, what left the touch of fear on their skin. Were he and the others noble warriors fighting against cruelty and injustice, or opportunistic mercenaries exploiting their superiority for wealth? Nezha saw no reason to fragment the two; shadow and light did not exist independently from each other. For some, the Tenno were a beacon of hope. For others, they were harbingers of destruction. Nobility alone did not pay for the resources necessary for existence, nor could mercenary work fully honor the legacy they’d wrested from the grasping, golden fingers of the Orokin.

Never again would they stoop to the beck and command of another.

From now on, the Tenno forged their own path.

What that meant was up to others to judge.

A moment later, Nezha arrived at his destination. Steel Meridian had appropriated a large storage room as their enclave, part base of operations, part embassy to any who wished to speak or do business with their leadership. The door slid open with a whoosh, and Nezha stepped inside. The chamber was comparatively dim and shabby compared to the rest of the Relay, filled with disorganized piles of scrap, cylinders of fuel, and squat banks of machinery connected by heavy cables. The air smelled of fire-hardened steel and rusted iron, burnt wires and thick lubricating oils. The Warframe did not breathe; its “lungs” were shriveled pouches filled with pustules and Infested neurodes enhanced with a network of Orokin sensors that interpreted chemical particles as scent… but Nezha had never been so profoundly aware of them before. Somewhere in the back of his consciousness, he felt his Operator try to draw the scent into his own, living lungs.

The somatic link barked a warning.

Nezha slammed his drifting consciousness back into his Warframe, fingers tightening on the handle of the case he was holding. For a beat, he was perfectly, utterly still – then he slowly resumed his path through the enclave, drawing more than a few looks. A rift had opened in his consciousness, a schism between his Warframe and its Operator, and it was getting harder and harder to reconcile the two.

The Lotus had known.

Ordis had certainly known.

And yet they had withheld that knowledge from him.

Resentment surged in him, and again he forced it back down. Decades of discipline made the struggle easy to compartmentalize; the vainglorious Dax soldiers who had trained him would be pleased.

He found Cressa Tal at the very end on the room. She was typing into a console, but turned at the sound of his approach. “Ah, Tenno!” she greeted him, her face splitting into a grin. “What do you have for me today?”

Nezha held out the case by way of an answer.

“Oh, hoho! I’m impressed – but then again, maybe I shouldn’t be. Here, hand it over.”

She took the case from him and sat it on the console, popping the clasps that held it shut. Inside was a wealth of irregular, crystalline cubes of ore nestled between protective layers of foam. Cressa Tal lifted one up and whistled.

“Damn, Tenno. Them’s the good stuff and no mistake. This would’ve taken months for my people ta’ to scratch it outta Phobos! How’d you get your hands on it so quick? Nah, don’t answer that. Better I don’t know in case somebody comes sniffing.”

There wasn’t much danger of that. The valuable haul of rubedo had been liberated from the blackened guts of an Orokin derelict and Nezha doubted anybody was going to come looking for it anytime soon.

Cressa Tal carefully put the ore back in its case and closed the lid, sealing off the radiant, vermilion glow. She turned back to Nezha, but the Tenno wasn’t looking in her direction. He had one more delivery to make. This time, however, his services hadn’t been bought. There was no contract, verbal or otherwise, that had compelled him visit the hazardous jungles of Old Earth. He’d undertaken this one simply because he’d been asked.

Stepping down from the platform, Nezha retraced his footsteps, angling his course to the side of the room. Cressa Tal went to call after him, then closed her mouth and decided to watch instead, her gaze deceptively sharp. Tucked between another console and a Dargyn engine that was being gutted for scrap was a pillow fort of inflated blunts, with another thrown on top in lieu of a roof. A pair of glowing yellow eyes inspected Nezha as he approached.

“Clem,” said the eyes.

The scrappy little Grineer had ensconced himself in makeshift pillbox filled with ration packs, boxes of ammunition, posters and assorted knickknacks. It was, in essence, a thriving mini-mart over which Clem was the sole proprietor, trading his collection of items for other, more interesting items. A smile tugged at Nezha’s lips. His real lips, not the taut, shriveled mounds of skin clinging to a mouth filled with too many teeth, the perverse reality secreted beneath an eyeless helmet.

“Clem clem!”

Nezha could not translate the Grineer’s limited vocabulary as easily as Darvo, but he could read Clem’s tone well enough to know he was being greeted. Quite enthusiastically, in fact. His secret smile grew a little wider as Clem picked up bundle of maprico-flavored ration bars – a perennial favorite of the Ostron traders that frequented the relay – and offered it to him through the slot in his pillbox.

“Clem?”

That one had been a question, accompanied by a small tilt of the Grineer’s head.

Would the Tenno like to trade for something?

Nezha reached into the bag at his hip. Made of the hide of a takin, a goat-like creature that inhabited the foothills of the Plains, Nezha had acquired the buckled pouch from a vendor in Cetus – his first of many purchases, once the people there had grown accustomed to his presence. He primarily used it for lugging the ore and precious gemstones Ordis required for his foundry, but it also served him well as a credit purse when certain purchases required him to bring large sums to the Relay. It did not happen often, but when it did it was usually the Void Trader’s fault, his rare and exotic inventory far from being sold on the cheap.

Finding what he wanted, Nezha held out a flowering plant, its muddy, tuberous roots swaddled in a wet scrap of cloth to keep them hydrated. Clem’s yellow eyes brightened like headlamps. He reached out and eagerly took the flowers. It had not always been so, but centuries of evolution in the dark, mutant jungles of Earth had given the orchid a phosphorescent glow. Not rare, not valuable, but hard to acquire due to the perils of the surrounding environment. Clem snatched a cracked beverage mug from somewhere in his fort, the bottom already filled with a handful of soil. After the flower had been planted, the Grineer proudly sat the mug on his “windowsill”.

“Clem!” he announced happily, tearing the neck off a H2O bulb and gently watering his prize. Watching Clem perform the simple task, his chunky fingers moving with surprising care, Nezha felt something tighten in the back of his throat. Even with Grineer, evil was not born. It’d been created.

“I was wrong about you, Tenno,” said Cressa Tal softly.

Nezha rose from where he’d been crouched on the floor, regarding the female Grineer in silence. He did not ask what her opinion of him had been before this moment. He suspected he already knew. Cressa Tal hollowed her cheek, sucking on a tooth. “Ya know,” she began slowly, a grin forming on her lips, “I know we discussed credits for that shipment, but I think I got something better.”

She turned to a pile of crates in the corner and dug around for a moment, littering the floor with dried bits of straw – an effective, if primitive alternative for those that couldn’t afford kinetic packing gel. “My people have been workin’ on this for a while now. Took us a while to get the firing system down, but anyway…”

She withdrew a bulky weapon from the crate, ceramic parts gleaming like polished bone.

“Here,” she lobbed it at Nezha. “Check it out!”

Nezha caught the weapon one-handed. It was enormously heavy for its size. A mere footsoldier would be hard-pressed to even lift the beefy shotgun, let alone handle the immense recoil generated by its deadly quad of barrels. Nezha regarded it for a moment, then wrapped his fingers around the stock and lifted it to his shoulder. Despite the weight, it was surprisingly well-balanced. He curled a finger against the trigger.

“We took the original Hek and polished the loading ramp to make it smoother, then shifted the breechblock waaay back,” said Cressa Tal, jaunty as the best of Ostron hucksters. She clapped a hand on the cylinder jutting from the underside of the barrel.

“Just pop a gas cylinder in there – standard mix, nothin’ fancy – pull the trigger and BANG! This thing will spew hot shrapnel up to ten meters! The prototypes were shreddin’ through bursas at half that range, so it’ll do great at tearing Corpus thugs a new asshole. Give that trigger a squeeze!”

Nezha remained motionless.

Cressa Tal smirked at him. “Don’t worry, Tenno. It ain’t loaded. Ain’t no chance of you poppin’ holes in this goofy little idiot.” She flicked a thumb at the pillbox.

“Clem!” said Clem indignantly, clutching his plant.

Nezha flexed his finger. The trigger was stiff, but had only a short amount of play, depressing only half an inch before there was a subtle tick deep within the mechanism. Nezha held it there for a moment. Feeling it. Memorizing it. He pulled the trigger back the rest of the way. The shotgun gave a weighty click.

“Smooth as butter, am I right?” said Cressa Tal. “My people are calling it the Vaykor Hek.”

Vaykor Hek.

Glorious Inferno.

“There’s only one right now, but I want you to have it, Tenno,” Cressa Tal continued. “I know you’ll put it to good use. This war’s chewin’ up the weak and defenseless, and we’re the only ones standing in the way.”

Nezha lowered the shotgun to waist-height, switching his attention to the Grineer commander. She did not flinch, holding his sightless gaze without fear. Nezha felt his throat began to tighten again, strangling the emotions trying to clamber out of his chest. The shotgun was a tool of death, and yet, something about it was fundamentally different than the bulbous, greasy instruments of suffering usually made by the Grineer. The Vaykor had been created for a new purpose, a new creed.

Over Cressa Tal’s shoulder, Clem had grown bored with the gun show and was fussing with his plant. There were brown patches on his ungloved hands, the same deep, festering rot beginning to encircle Cressa’s roguish grin. It would be years before the Decay affected more than just skin cells, but even so, these Grineer – born with a glitch that allowed them to disobey – who were capable of self-sacrifice, of kindness, mercy and humor, were doomed to a host of degenerative diseases that would ultimately take their life. The cloning process was failing; the original blanks had been flawed, artisanally crafted to be obedient and dull-witted, sterile laborers robbed of the right to procreate life. Struggle as they might, they could never escape the yoke the Orokin had tightened around their necks, any more than the Tenno could escape theirs.

Nezha moved the shotgun over his shoulder, the magnetic nodes embedded in his back taking over and clamping the weapon to his back. He pressed his palms together and bowed deeply at the waist.

“Thank you,” he said.

Cressa Tal smiled at him, the dingy, overhead lighting reflecting in her good eye. Somehow, her gaze seemed inexplicably warmer. “You can thank me by fetching some more of that rubedo,” she said. “I’ve got an operative that won’t say no to your help, if you’re still offering it.”

Clem sprinkled his flowers with water, releasing their milky, indolic scent into the air. Nezha let it wash the bitterness from his heart. Maybe they couldn’t escape the yoke, but with enough spit and hope, they sure as hell could elope with the plow.

“Give me the coordinates,” said Nezha.

Clem poked him in the thigh with the maprico bars, offering him a little snack for the road.

Chapter Text

Director Harr Igan hated space travel.

He’d never been able to stomach that moment when the rail churned to life, when the electromagnetic fields descended over the skin of the ship and sent them hurtling into the black, magnitudes faster than the speed of light. Frozen acceleration, elongated into infinity.

Harr’s stomach always reached his destination lightyears ahead of him. At best it meant an appalling bout of nausea. At worst, it meant vomiting his guts onto the deck. None of Harr’s colleagues experienced rail sickness to such an extent; his own daughter was blissfully unaffected by it and often made four or five jumps a day, depending on her calendar. Harr couldn’t even imagine it. He preferred using the slower wyrm drives whenever possible, even if it meant adding extra hours to his schedule – but an extra two weeks? That kind of delay would have been as ridiculous as it was unacceptable, and so he’d reluctantly given his pilot leave to take them through the Venusian Rail.

Even now, in his twilight years, he’d never quite gotten over how big they were.

A full 13 kilometers from end to end, the Orokin-era construction hung in space like a golden sword, unaffected by solar winds or gravity, or even the passage of time. The forma electroplated onto its hull was as deep and glossy as the day it’d been forged. A handful of Stanchion-class cruisers and rail tractors were clustered nearby, but none were queued to jump. The solar rail was wide open. Harr took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself. At the very least, travel via the Orokin rails was smoother and less discomforting than the jagged pop he experienced when using the smaller, less efficient models built by the Corpus or – Profit forbid – the chugging scrapyards banged together by the Grineer.

In any case, the matter was an academic one. Orokin technology had been studied, dissected and lusted after for generations, but none of the newer constructions could match the Golden Rails for speed and distance, regardless of how many billions of credits the Company poured into them on a yearly basis. Whatever sorcerous technology gave them their immense power, it had died with the Orokin.

“Ready, sir?”

“Spare me the stupid questions, Rhys.”

The pale tongues of energy leaping between the rail’s arms began to glow, building up a charge. Gyros started to clock, dynamos began to spin; an ayatan sculpture in everything but name and function, monuments to an empire of dead immortals. Harr planted himself in his chair and clutched at his armrests. He didn’t close his eyes. Closing them always made it worse. A moment later, the yacht surged forward on a cosmic jet of light, the rail producing more energy in a single moment than the sun did in a day.

Harr felt that familiar moment of weightlessness, of his brain floating inside his skull, of the atoms in his fingertips slowly drifting apart. As always, his anxiety did nothing to help the rising discomfort. He’d heard stories of overclocked, poorly maintained rail tractors. He’d even witnessed the grisly results for himself on one occasion. Musculoskeletal damage. Cerebral hypoxia. Retinal hemorrhaging. Acceleration trauma was a killer, and it could happen aboard even the most luxurious of pleasure barges. Harr clamped his back teeth against the emerging nausea, cursing the Board, the solar rails, and that doddering old fool Alad V most of all. He’d had to cancel a shochu tasting and two second quarter audits – one with the head of Anyo Corporation – to make this trip.

His soft fingers tightened on his armrests-

-and just like that, the blaze of light dropped away as though it’d never been there at all. The jolt of deceleration was very slight, but it was still more than enough to hurl Harr’s stomach up to shake hands with his tonsils. He swallowed it back down with a mouthful of watery bile.

A few hundreds kilometers ahead of his yacht, Jupiter loomed huge, its surface banded with clouds and eternal, whirling storms. Here the sun was pale and dim. Harr could see it at the very edge of his viewscreen, barely larger than a marble. He forced his fingers to unclench, breathing to calm the dangerous squeeze in the back of his throat. The scopolamine patch he’d slapped behind his ear was starting to itch. Harr gave it a quick scratch, then forced himself to leave it be. Long experience had taught him that peeling it off so soon after a jump, let alone with another looming on the horizon, was never a good idea.

“Bring us around to Valefor – and do it slowly,” he said sourly. “I need a minute.”

“Should I radio ahead?”

“Don’t bother. The imbecile knows we’re coming.”

Of Jupiter’s seventy nine moons, only four were large enough to be spherical, and of those Europa was by the far the smallest, a desolate ball of water-ice and patchy brown silicate. Harr took a cautious sip of water as they descended through the moon’s thin atmosphere. Below them, the glacial plains and pressure ridges were the color of almond marzipan basking under a cold sunset. Here the glaciers were dotted with the shattered wreckage of an Obelisk cruiser, an embarrassing testament to several billion credits in lost equipment and personnel. Salvage operations had been in full swing for months, but so far the Company had only recouped a quarter of the loss, with returns decreasing every day. In addition to the fragmented infrastructure, seared electronics and difficult surface conditions, outgoing salaries were taking a hefty bite out of their profit margins. Harr made a mental note to speak with the Board about using labor out of Fortuna, especially those about to go into repo. More than likely, they’d take an 82% wage decrease in return for a postponement – maybe 90%, if they were smart.

“Personal Log: remember Fortuna at next week’s meeting.”

They flew over the broken Obelisk and a handful of Grineer galleons partially buried beneath the snow. Eventually they, too, would be picked apart for resale, but for now the vomit-yellow carapaces lay untouched, the husks of giant beetles that’d crawled into the wastes to die. In moments they were no longer visible. Darkness closed in around the yacht as they passed Europa’s terminator and flew into the deep black of night. Harr watched the temperature gauges fall even lower.

“Balmy night,” Rhys commented.

The kid’s idea of “balmy” was a deadly -170 degrees centigrade. Harr suppressed a snort. He was feeling marginally better now, and not a moment too soon. He took another, larger sip of water and recapped the bottle. He couldn’t imagine why Alad had sequestered himself in the absolute middle of nowhere, but the Valefor Mare was where the Board had told him to go. Looking out into the darkness, Harr hoped he hadn’t been too flippant when he’d said that Alad was expecting them. The man was twitchy enough in broad daylight and being shot down by a pack of trigger-happy ambulas’ was not as remote a possibility as Harr would have liked.

“Get on the comms and find out where we’re supposed to land,” he said.

Ryhs flashed him a sly look. “Change your mind?”

“Just do it, Rhys. I don’t pay you to be a smartass.”

Technically he didn’t pay the kid at all. While he himself was unmodded, Ryhs was still paying off the debt his father had accrued working out of Proteus Orbital Mining Company: zero-G hazmat upgrades, class-5 hydraulics. The full package. Harr didn’t know if the old man had been brain-shelved or not, nor did he particularly care. Ryhs was a solid pilot and a semi-decent valet. The boy would work it off eventually – if he could lean to keep his mouth shut.

The comms chimed and a message began scrolling by. On a coded channel, no less.

“They’re telling us to break off and turn around,” said Ryhs.

Nice try, Alad.

“And you can tell them you’re just going to fly around in circles into they give us a landing coordinate,” Harr told him shortly, folding his arms. There’d been ample opportunities for Alad to schedule his calendar, and Harr was utterly out of patience with him.

Ryhs forwarded the message. Less than fifteen seconds later, he got a response – far quicker than Harr had anticipated, having expected Alad to leave him out to dry for as long as the prick thought he could get away with. Ryhs squinted at the line of code, then shrugged. “Better suit up, sir,” he said, dimming the yacht’s lights. “You’re going to be walking a bit.”

After a few minutes of careful maneuvering, Rhys set the craft down in a patch of snow. Standing in the yacht’s small airlock, Harr lowered the boxy helmet over his head and felt it pressurize, adding the universe and everything in it to his list of profanities.

“Need any help?” Rhys asked him over the comm.

“Boy, I’ve been putting these suits on longer than you’ve even been alive,” Harr spat, double-checking the huge metal cuffs. The metallic taste of recycled air had already begun to coat his tongue. “Open the damn door.”

“Remember, they said to follow the beacons.”

The hatch popped open with a rush of displaced air, and Harr stepped out into the darkness of the second moon. There was no wind, no weather, only the icy dark of oblivion. Snow and methane ice crunched beneath the EVA-suit’s chunky, ill-fitting boots. Harr furiously keyed the helmet’s enhanced visual suite and watched as more beacons flickered to life, their glow invisible to the naked eye – and nearly everything else, too. He tracked them up the ridge until they disappeared.

Murder would be too good for Alad V, he decided.

Slow torture would be far better.

Stepping carefully, Harr set out along the path. Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, was just coming up on the horizon, bathing the ground in ashen grey light. There were no clouds in the sky. Europa’s atmosphere was too minimal to support them and the vacuum of space seemed to hug unusually close as a result, the brutal cold turning the stars into crystalline daggers. Harr could already feel the blistering temperature against the skin of his suit. Life support was keeping it at bay, but only for a short time. A few hours, at most. Harr unconsciously walked a little faster.

The jumbled ridge climbed several meters, a fresh layer of powder disguising the deadly slick of ice just inches below. Harr stumbled twice before finally reaching the dark, folded opening of a cave. Five meters inside he found a heavy blast door. It was obviously of Grineer design, looking as though it’d been pried from the belly of a galleon and fitted into the passageway with a sloppy combination of solder and brute force. Before Harr could dwell on the oddity, however, the hatch burst open. Two military spooks and a handful of MOAs were waiting for him.

“This way,” the larger one told him shortly.

Harr was vaguely certain he knew the man, but couldn’t put a name to that thin, furrowed expression.

Beyond the door was a pressurized habitation bubble and Harr was urged to remove his helmet and EVA-suit before proceeding deeper inside. The air around him was as tepid as bathwater. Survivable, but not entirely comfortable. Harr shivered as he raked stayed wisps of hair back into his cowl. Beyond the grungy, prefab walls, the icy cold of Europa pressed in.

“I’ve come to speak with Alad V on behalf of the Board,” he stated crisply.

“So I’ve heard.”

The words was harsh and gravely, shimmering with the feedback of a replaced larynx. Harr remembered the voice better than the face, but still couldn’t recall his name. Either way, he didn’t like the man’s tone, or his utter lack of deference towards his betters. He held his tongue, however, leery of the potential for further delay. He wanted to rake Alad over the coals and be off this icy little pucker of a moon.

They descended into the warren of passageways. Everywhere was a combination of Grineer salvage and Corpus technology, the latter looking as though it’d been welded overtop in order to make the former functional. The gelid air tasted recycled. The scrubbers needed changed two weeks ago. Harr’s boots scuffed on length of plastic tarpaulin. Half the facility looks as though it’d been prepped for surgery. Thankfully his eyes had already adjusted to Europa’s gloom, otherwise he might have been feeling around like a blind man. The lights had been set to red, crimson as burning blood.

Harr was lead through several narrow, pressurized doorways into a long room cramped to capacity with banks of monitoring equipment and technicians. There was barely enough room to turn around, let alone work. Less than two meters ahead, his escort laid his hand on someone’s shoulder. The other man swiveled quickly; he’d been so engrossed in whatever he’d been doing, the gesture seemed to have startled him.

“Director Igan, sir.”

The smaller man’s lip curled. “I told the Board this little, uh, welfare check could wait!” His voice was a duality of contradictions, the syllables oddly enunciated, modulating between irritably high-pitched and unusually bass, like electricity thrumming through a downed wire. He turned furiously in Harr’s direction. “Do you have any idea what you could have ruined by coming here? Why tonight of all nights?!”

Harr affixed a polite look to his face. “You know it wasn’t my decision,” he answered in an equitable tone. “You’ve been putting the Board off for months. Half a million credits in men and resources? They’re very interested in where your funding is going, Alad.”

“None of their business, that’s where,” said Alad V tartly. Beneath the heavy coat of interlocking blue tiles, he was stooped and frail, and it took him a moment to dodder into Harr’s personal space. Harr resisted the urge to lean away from the viscous cloud of scent that clung to Alad’s skin; warm vinyl and white, florid poison. The back of Harr’s throat watered with fresh nausea.

“I’m on the cusp of a new venture here,” Alad continued loudly. “The last thing I need is you mucking up months of work! You’ve seen enough to satisfy the rest of the Board, yes? Go on now – shoo! I’m very busy at the moment!” He made a nervous fluttering motion with his hands.

As if it was going to be that easy.

“So far I haven’t seen anything except an abundance of plastic sheeting,” Harr countered.

“A domicile of convenience,” said Alad, waving him off. He wasn’t even looking at Harr, much to the Director’s private annoyance, and kept glancing at the monitor feeds, absently tugging and wringing his fingers.

“I take it the Grineer stench doesn’t bother you then?” Harr asked him. “No, I supposed it wouldn’t, considering your line of work. But surely there are better accommodations elsewhere in the system – for whatever it is you’re doing down here, exactly…”

Harr trailed off deliberately, knowing Alad was smart enough to fill in the blanks. Instead the vexing sonuvabitch actually chuckled at him.

“Mmmm, yes… you’d like to know, wouldn’t you, Director?”

Well, at least he was paying attention now.

“I would, actually,” said Harr firmly. “And since I’ve flown all the way out here, maybe you’d be willing to indulge me? You know the Board’s getting impatient with all the secrecy. I assume you’ve made a good deal of progress in this venture? Shame for you to have come so far, only to lose their backing now.”

Alad’s pale eyes flashed. “Well, then… I wouldn’t want to seem an ungracious host,” he said, clasping his hands together with a moist, rubbery little sound. “May I offer you a cup of kahve? You must be parched after traveling out here. I’m certain you skipped breakfast, too. Wouldn’t want any, hm, unfortunate accidents.”

Harr smiled a cold, plastic smile. “No, thank you.”

Alad almost smirked at him. Almost, but not quite. He gestured magnanimously at the computers. “Ah, well,” he said softly. “In any case, if it’s progress you want, Director, I’ve got something you might find interesting. Have a look at this.”

He tapped the console and a carousel of images resolved between them. Harr resigned himself to a long evening. He’d shared the Board with Alad long enough to know the man was only acquiescing to demands because he’d been boxed into a corner. Now that he was there, however, Harr expected he’d have to put up with Alad’s usual dog-and-pony show, which didn’t bode well for the headache starting to eat through his temples. For a moment, he sorely regretted declining that kahve. He took a step forward.

“And what am I looking at?” he asked.

“A demonstration of my, hm, ‘line of work’.”

Dog-and-pony show it was, then. Harr leaned closer to examine the jumble of images, many of them culled from grainy security camera footage. There were also several tables of sensor data; forma, rubidium, null energy emissions – things Harr didn’t understand or couldn’t make use of. He focused on the images instead. It was a grisly presentation, and much of it didn’t make sense. He saw Grineer piked on glowing shafts of light and Corpus taxmen crushed into mutilated tangles of bone and twisted, bloody vinyl, as if a black hole had simply opened inside them.

“Wonderful, isn’t it,” Alad chortled, “how efficiently they kill?”

“They?”

Harr’s voice was steady, much to his relief, but the annoyance he’d been hoping to inject fell utterly flat. Alad lazily rotated the images by way of an answer, one side of his mouth lifted into a smirk. This time the hologram showed a collection of beings unlike anything Harr had ever seen before. Each bore the opulence of Orokin forma, of technology not so much built, as grown.

Harr carefully, oh, so carefully, kept the shock from reaching his face. There’d been rumors of late, of the hollow soldiers in twisted frames, so beautiful that even the stars wept, but to be honest, he hadn’t given them much credence. It wasn’t as if such things concerned him, anyway. He was the head of Solaris Industrial Management, herding the wretched droves of rig jockeys and laborers to where they’d be of the most use. His sphere of influence did not include resurrected Orokin bogeymen.

Speaking of which, one stood at least seven feet tall, shoulders like a tank, arms and legs like ancient trees. In his fist, he held the pulverized remains of a Grineer skull. Another walked on rivers of lazuline flame. A third stood in a field of corpses, the air around her thick with toxins. Her victims had not died well, pierced by worming, questing vines that’d burrowed through their flesh and bloomed from the pulpy ruin of their eyes, each tendril crowned by a flower dripping with deadly golden nectar. Harr fought his rising bile, aware that Alad was observing him through the hologram, watching him with the same colorless, glinting eyes that’d so methodically dissected the carnage, jotting his disturbing observations down in the margins.

Harr tried to gather his wits for a comeback.

“Are these-”

“Real?” Alad cut in smoothly. “Or were you going to ask if they’re recent? I assure you they are. Did you forget to keep your ear to the ground – or did you simply prefer to, hmm, not notice? I’ve identified four of the Betrayers so far, including the little, ah, blossom that’s drawn your eye. She’s quite the spectacle, isn’t she?”

Alad gave the footage a long look. “They’ve been sighted all across the System,” he continued. “Their ‘loyalties’, shall we say, are questionable at best. They seem to attack indiscriminately regardless of faction, but one thing’s for certain.”

He brought up a chart showing the various planets and their nodes. Many were blinking a deep, dangerous crimson.

“Ara, Mars. Phobos. Europa,” said Alad, pointing to each one in turn. “These, ah- what were they called? – “Tenno”, yes, are drawn by strife and conflict. It seems that even Orokin blood was not enough to sate their palettes.”

He said it in a tone of amusement, as if the concept were some fascinating curio. Harr moistened his lips with his tongue. Beneath his cowl, his skin suddenly felt too small for his scalp. Hundreds of questions tumbled through his head, but he could not voice them, would not give Alad the satisfaction of knowing he’d been caught off-guard. He took a surreptitious look around the room, at the banks of monitors and camera feeds.

“Is that what you’re doing? Monitoring their activities?” Harr asked in a would-be casual tone.

One of the computers suddenly began emitting the sharp, repetitive tone of an alarm. Several of Alad’s technicians, who’d otherwise been studiously ignoring the conversation going on around them, abruptly sprang to life, wheeling chairs into stations and pulling up sensor feeds, fluttering the loose papers tacked to the walls. Alad whirled through the hologram, scattering pixels like luminescent confetti.

“Is it her?” he demanded excitedly. “Keyz, is it her?!”

At some point, Harr’s impertinent minder had slid into one of the chairs and put on a headset. Harr remembered him now: Garmen Keyz, belligerent son of salvage operator Tudk Keyz, ex-taxman and former security guard, infamous throughout the Corpus for never holding the same position for more than a year.

“Unknown, sir,” he responded. “We’re picking up activity in sector 4.”

A three-dimensional map blinked to life on the monitor, showing a craggy, twisting warren of what Harr assumed to be underground tunnels. A red dot briefly flashed into existence, then disappeared. A moment later, it appeared further down the passageway.

“Target’s moving,” Keyz confirmed. “We’re reading positive for Void energy.”

Alad elatedly clapped the back of the man’s chair as Keyz opened up the comms. “Attention all units: Target 1 has just entered Sector 4, moving west through Sectors 5 and 6. Power up all systems on my mark… 3... 2... 1... Mark.”

At least half of the surrounding monitors switched views. There were twelve in all, each displaying a shaky helmet cam and heart-rate monitor. Harr watched a team of men in silver EVA-suits go through an obvious systems check, all of them hefting Deras and blocky weapons painted in danger yellow. Harr recognized them for what they were. Spark shots, as they were colloquially known, were capable of delivering over two thousand amps via propelled needles. He’d seen men use them on the Orb Vallis for subduing the massive brindled kubrodons that roamed that snowy landscape.

“Comms check,” said a gruff voice, heavily modulated by his helmet vocoder.

“Comms show green,” Keyz replied, leaning past Alad to toggle something on the control board. A dozen cold, blue triangles appeared on the map, each of them tagged with a serial number. “Descend to the lower levels. Target’s still moving, heading towards the number 2 junction.”

Harr felt the tension in the air like a hand across the back of his neck.

This wasn’t a sudden, panicked scramble; these men had been waiting.

Alad had been waiting.

“What’s all this?” Harr asked tightly.

“This? This is history,” said Alad. “Come, come!”

He beckoned to Harr without looking at him, his reedy tenor grating on the Director’s slowly fraying nerves. Harr tentatively took a step in.

“It’s taken us nearly two months to learn her patterns,” Alad breathed. He’d gone back to anxiously wringing his hands, making his lurid yellow gloves squeak constantly from the movement. “This, ah, this place-” he gestured at the rusted, peeling walls, “-was a mining hub for the Grineer, right up until our little visitor chased them off. Their tunnels penetrate several kilometers into the ice, right down to the ocean. She returns here every two weeks to collect nitain.”

Alad tracked the blinking dot as it descended deeper into the tunnels. His men were taking a more circumferential route, moving parallel to the Tenno’s path and descending at a much slower rate, using what looked like a network of elevators, stopes and winzes to make up the difference. Were they attempting to cut the thing off, or simply shadowing it? At the bottom of the map, Europa’s dark, subterranean ocean beckoned to them both. Harr fought for something to say, but words had escaped him. He glanced at Alad out of the corner of his eye, saw the gleam of sweat on the man’s pasty forehead.

“Punch up three,” Alad whispered.

Keyz moved a toggle on the console, seemingly unperturbed by the moist exhalations on the back of his neck. One of the monitors switched over from a sensor feed to a grainy shot of an empty tunnel. The glacial walls looked perfectly smooth, almost slick to the touch, the ancient ice squeezed into fantastic shapes by the daily tug of Jupiter’s gravity. Harr was inexplicably reminded of Orokin coolant – if that viscous fluid could somehow have been rendered inert.

The silence began to stretch, broken only by the low, rhythmic beeping of the computers. Something moved at the edge of the camera and Alad leaned in, breathless with anticipation. In the pitch darkness of the moon’s interior, the camera saw only in shades of pastel, but that was more than enough to see it.

Undeniably feminine, with curvaceous thighs and a svelte, narrow waist. Alive, but not living. Humanoid, but not human. If anything, it was a relic of an era long snuffed from existence. How could something so flawless, so beautiful even exist? And how much would it be worth, Harr wondered? A billion credits? Two billion? He tried to wet his lips with his tongue, but it was like rasping them with sandpaper. Beside him, Alad was scribbling frantically into a data HUD, so fast the hologram could barely keep up.

The monitors fuzzed, momentarily dissolving into static.

Alad glanced at them sharply. “What’s this interference?” he demanded.

“Ion storms from Ganymede. Correcting the problem now, sir,” said Keyz.

The Tenno disappeared from the camera, but not before Harr noticed that she’d brought a small hoverlift with several stout, cylindrical containers rattling around on top. “You said it comes to harvest nitain?” he managed, trying to regain some traction.

Alad nodded distractedly. He tapped Keyz with the back of his hand.

“Bring up everything at the harvest site,” he said.

The monitors switched over to multiple views of to an underground grotto filled with abandoned machinery. Everything shimmered with a layer of crystalline ice, safety rails dripping with icicles as thick around as Harr’s wrist. Two thousand feet beneath the surface, and the Grineer had yet to reach the moon’s rocky crust. At the far end of the cavern lay Europa’s subsurface ocean, a dark, slushy mix of liquid hydrogen and salt water. There was no light in that deep place and against the starkness of the ice, the ocean itself was pure black, depthless as the fathomless dark that lay between the stars.

The Tenno emerged from the east side of the chamber, pushing the hoverlift ahead of her. She wasn’t in a hurry. That much was readily apparent. She moved with an easy, deadly grace, full hips swaying, crossing her tiny feet in front of her with every step. Harr leaned in to get a better look. No images of the Betrayers existed; even hard evidence of their existence was scare, with everything but their legend having faded from living memory. Harr had expected them to be larger, fiercer, something spawned from the hellish nightmares his daughter had awoken from as a child, not this exquisite doll.

“Overwatch, please confirm: sensors show the target has reached the harvest zone,” the comms squelched. Harr took a deep breath through his nose and tried to keep his heart rate down. The sudden noise hadn’t startled him. Definitely not.

“Overwatch confirms,” Keyz replied. He checked the three-dimensional grid on the monitor, where the dozen blinking triangles were about to coverage on the cavern. “Capture Team, slow your progress. Target has yet to enter the water.”

“Capture?” Harr whispered. “Are you out of your mind? It’s a Tenno!”

Alad gave him a lurid smile. “I know what the word means, Director.” He bent his face towards Harr, his eyes maddeningly intent and the sharp, sour sting of menthol on his breath. “I also know of devices with the power to transform a blast furnace into a tundra, to bring dead species back from extinction! Think of what the Tenno can- can give us: a new era of technology! No more picking at the scraps like dogs. No- no more wasting profits trying to piece together broken remnants!”

Harr desperately wanted to lean back, regretting ever having gotten this close.

“The Tenno- these, ah, these Warframes were the pinnacle of Orokin technology, a legacy so powerful it brought them to their knees! I’ve waited over a year for this moment and I’m not going to miss the chance!”

Harr regarded him with a kind of mute horror as Alad switched his attention back to the monitors. The Tenno had stopped at the edge of the ocean. Derricks and heavy winches stood mutely in the darkness, creating a tangled forest of metal and thick, blue-gray ice. The wharf, if Harr could still call it that, had been partially reclaimed by the water and much of the machinery stood in Europa’s shallow tide. The Tenno stopped at the water’s edge and lifted both arms over her head, lithe as a dancer, her body arcing away from them as she stretched.

Harr felt an uneasy pang in his stomach. The motion was so utterly, unbearably human – but the Tenno couldn’t be something so mundane, could they? Over the years there had been much speculation that the Betrayers were nothing living at all, but rather an enclave of thinking machines little different from the Sentients. Harr wondered which it was, watching as the Tenno bent at the waist and lifted several canisters from the hoverlift. Empty nitain capsules, just as Alad had said.

“What could it possibly want with those?” Harr demanded.

“The same thing we all want, I suspect,” Alad rasped. “Either they’re selling to anyone with enough, heh, stones to deal with them – or they’re manufacturing products of their own. And that isn’t good for anybody, now is it?”

Ignorant of being watched, the Tenno plunged into the icy waters and disappeared. Keyz touched his comm. “Target has just entered the water. Approximately t-minus five minutes until reemergence,” he announced. “Safeties off. Offensive formation Rita.” 

Harr tried not to imagine the Tenno stroking through the icy, Stygian waters, her supple body whipping back and forth like some exotic servofish. Nitain was farmed at the mouth of hydrothermal vents, where blind tubeworms and pale, eyeless crabs lived in utter darkness, under pressures that would crush an armored vault. Nitain mining had to be done via remote, typically with the aid of robotic proxies and several kilometers of fiber optic cabling, yet the Tenno intended to swim down there like an Ostron free-diving for pearls? Harr’s stomach churned, unable to break that kind of power into a number he could quantify.

In the upper left of the monitors, Alad’s capture team swept into the grotto, fanning out into a loose semi-circle. Harr barked a laugh. “You expect to take that thing unawares standing right in front of her?” he jeered.

Alad flicked him a coy, sidelong little glance.

His men shimmered out of existence.

Harr felt his face redden in anger. Alad was a member of the Board, same as him, but even so, he hadn’t expected the man to have that kind of clout. Even one of those cloaking devices cost a small fortune.

“I’m certain the Betrayers see in only two spectrums of light: visible and infrared,” Alad explained smugly. “I’ve studied security footage of a Tenno penetrating several, ah, data vaults inside one of our manufacturing plants. No alarms were tripped. Nobody even knew it was there until long after the fact. Those vaults were guarded by automated laser grids – invisible to the naked eye, but quite, ah, distinct, yes, when viewed in infrared.”

Harr directed a pointed look at Alad’s team, specifically their shoulder-mounted searchlights.

“Ultraviolet light,” said Alad simply. “Invisible to the Betrayer.”

“So you think,” Harr told him flatly, hoping he sounded unimpressed.

“So I know,” Alad replied. That coy little smile was back again. “Each camera is equipped with an ultraviolet emitter, and despite two months of surveillance, the Betrayer has remained blissfully unaware of them. Unlike the infrared cameras employed by those Grineer dogs.”

“Sir,” Keyz warned urgently.

The Tenno had emerged from the water, rivulets of waters cascading down her body and dripping from the twin tails of her helmet. Every segment of her was trimmed in Orokin forma; with her delicate, slippered feet and softly glowing eyes, she looked more suited to one of Ki’Teer’s extravagant parties.

The Betrayer carefully deposited her cargo onto the hoverlift, the phosphorescence of nitain visible through the canister’s small round portholes. She squatted down to reattach the webbing holding her prizes in place. Out of the corner of his eye, Harr saw something move on another monitor. Snow crunched. A cascade of ice slithered from a low-hanging pipe.

The Tenno’s head snapped around, golden dangles swaying with the movement. In the darkness, her eyes glowed like open pits. A moment passed, then another. The Betrayer tilted her head to the side, peering into the empty darkness. Searching, or perhaps sensing.

Alad’s hands knotted together, his gloves pulled tight with the strain.

The Tenno swiveled on the balls of her feet, squatting with one elbow propped casually on her knee. Her head rotated slowly, sweeping the hub from right to left, then back again. The only other thing that moved was the frosted purple fingers of her right hand, absently tapping a rhythm on the surface of the nitain canister. Harr tried to measure the distance, but found he’d completely lost track of the team. They could have advanced by inches or meters. He tried desperately to remember what that grimy conservationist had said regarding the operational range of a spark shot. Three, maybe four meters?

The Tenno’s eyes flashed a pale blue, sweeping from left to right, then back to deep amethyst.

Two seconds later, it happened again.

Still the Betrayer didn’t move.

Orange light blazed in the Tenno’s eyes and for a brief moment, Harr thought he saw a mask of pixelated trapezoids, searing through the darkness like fire. The Betrayer gave a sharp twitch, canting her upper body away from them. She rose from her crouch and stood, leaning into a hip and folding her arms across her sizable chest.

Laughter splintered through the grotto, audible even over the monitors. Gooseflesh raced over Harr’s scalp and down his back in a gush of cold sweat. It was no ordinary laughter, the sound doubling and tripling, echoing in the darkness as though many forms were laughing at once, each slightly out of sync with one another, so that the whole was jagged and discordant, like a tumble of crystalline shards.

Harr seized Alad’s frail shoulder. “She sees them, Alad! Get them out. GET THEM OUT!”

The Betrayer arched both arms over her head, fingers leaving a comet trail of purple sparks. Suddenly, she wasn’t altogether there, as though the penumbra of an eclipse had simply slid over her. Still there, but blurry now, part of the deep shadows that surrounded her. She laughed again and something formed between the shadow of her hands, something prismatic and dazzling. She hurled it ahead of her like a meteor, so bright Harr thought it would burn even the ice itself, radial spikes of light stabbing in all directions. A moment later, it exploded.

Alad threw both hands up in front of his eyes. For a few seconds, the sudden brilliance and twinkling reflections blinded them all, the comms lit up with a chorus of startled oaths. Harr was the first to blink the sting out of his eyes. The Betrayer was gone, but a frantic search of the monitors revealed movement near the roof of the cavern. The Tenno had jumped nearly ten meters into the air, tossing her legs up and over her head. The motion was difficult for Harr to see, like tracking a mote at the corner of his vision. His eyes just didn’t want to look.

Arching her body, the Tenno landed on her feet with a sound like breaking glass. Colors burst and splintered, and suddenly there were five Betrayers were once there had been only one. Moving together, each a mirror image of the other, the deadly carousal of images pinwheeled to the side and opened fire with guns that simply hadn’t been there before. Screams filled the cavern. Two of Alad’s men dropped, their cloaks sputtering out of existence as dozens of heavy-bore flechettes tore through their equipment. The quintuplet pinwheeled again, this time to the left. Another solider fell down dead, his helmet cam reeling in a fountain of blood. The shrill tones of flatlines stabbed through the monitor room.

“Open fire!”

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the moon, someone had recovered enough wits to realize they were under attack. Rifle fire seared the air between Alad’s men and the Tenno, passing through most of the illusions without harm.

“No!” Alad screeched. “I said I want her alive!”

It was doubtful any of the men heard him, or even cared if they did. Exotic gunfire chattered again; hard and metallic sharp, letting fly another barrage of bolts. Harr watched as the ultraviolet lights mounted to each man’s shoulder – the ones the Betrayer shouldn’t have been able to see – exploded in a rain of shrapnel. Laughter crackled through the frozen air as the Tenno pirouetted away into the dark.

Alad’s men bunched into a circle. Something gold flickered on the other side of grotto. One of the men opened fire at it, splintering the ancient stalagmite into dust. The golden thing darted away, its image refracting oddly, a kaleidoscope of illusions flickering between translucent planes of ice. Harr was inexplicably reminded of a hall of mirrors. He anxiously dug his fingers into the cold, segmented tiles of Alad’s coat. The older man viciously shrugged him off, seizing a spare comm unit from the console.

“She’s beneath the catwalk! Right there!” he shouted, watching the pulsing red dot on the map.

“Where? Dammit, I can’t see her! Give me a coordinate!” 

Someone pointed his spark shot in the direction of the derricks and squeezed the trigger, launching both prongs and their insulated copper wires. The passed through the mirage without harm and stuck in the side of a piece of machinery. Sparks exploded from the contact point as hundreds of amps of electricity throbbed through the wires. In the sudden burst of light, Harr saw the Betrayer launch out of the shadows, embers dancing on her chitinous hide, and slam both feet into the man’s chest, throwing him back with the force of speeding coil drive. He was shot dead before his corpse had even hit the floor, a trio of sharpened bolts – no longer than the span of Harr’s palm – embedded the middle of his chest, hitting him such force that his body was carried into the wall and pinned there like a butterfly to a collection card.

Dera fire lit up the darkness as another man went full auto, chipping ice from the derelict machinery as the Betrayed tucked her knees and threw herself into a perfectly controlled slide. The man tried to turn – only to catch the needles of spark shot directly in the back, his body convulsing as the deadly amperage fried his nerves to a crisp. His inadvertent killer frantically tried to disengage, snapping the filaments trailing from the weapon and pumping it for another shot, but not fast enough. On tiptoe, the Tenno twirled herself upright behind him and pressed both tiny, gun-wielding hands to either side of his helmet. A quick wrench – the wet, fibrous crunch of twisted bone clearly audible over the comms – and suddenly the only thing keeping the man’s head from sitting backwards on his shoulders was the crooked helmet itself, leaking air from a pressure breach.

Harr reeled away, one hand against his stomach, and vomited onto the floor, his guts heaving and twisting to expel a sad mixture of water and thin, ropy strings of bile. The spatter was a distant thing, submerged under the chatter of gunfire and breaking ice. Another monitor flatlined, then another. And another. Harr balled his hand into a fist and shoved it into his mouth, unable to keep from lifting his eyes back to the carnage.

The Tenno darted forward, shooting another man through the narrow slit of his helmet, then pivoting to sweep the legs out from beneath a second. The motion was blindingly fast, and so powerful the man actually twirled midair before she brought her heel down across the small of his back, driving him face first into the snow. His helmet cam whirled drunkenly, then showed a jagged spiderweb of gore dappled glass. The comms picked up one last wretched, bloody gasp – then all was silent.

Dead. They’re all dead, thought Harr hysterically.

The Tenno rose from her partial crouch, effortlessly poised on one leg, the other held so that the sole of her foot hovered against her inner thigh. A gilded heron standing in a marsh of bloody snow. Her head turned slowly in Harr’s direction, eyes gleaming, and the Director let out a ragged sort of whimper – as if somehow that terrible, elegant thing could see him, as if she was now pondering how to dispose of him next: blunt-force trauma or evisceration?

She twirled the weapons in her hands and laughed, terrible and crystalline, the fool who fiddled on the rooftop as the Orokin empire burned. Panic surged in Harr’s throat again. We- we should leave. It’s coming for us- for me next! That’s what he wanted to say, but the words got lost in his throat and the only thing that emerged was a moan.

“Sweet profit, would you get ahold of yourself before you piss the floor next?” Alad snapped at him. Except for his dilated pupils, so huge that his iris was only a thin, grey ring nearly indistinguishable from the white of his eye, the older man was disturbingly apathetic towards the slaughter.

Laughter again.

Clapping one of those massive guns to her thigh, the Tenno blew them a kiss before lifting her remaining weapon and shooting the camera out in a blast of static. One by one, the monitors went dark. Alad made a disgusted face. “Well,” he deadpanned. “That went to shit in a hurry.”

He irritably flung the comms unit back onto the console. It skipped off and landed on the floor with a clatter, narrowly missing the puddle of vomit at Harr’s foot. The Director gave it a blank look, unable to grasp Alad’s cavalier outlook on the situation. Had he even been watching that- that massacre?

“Ensure all that data is uploaded off-site,” said Alad. “I want another team ready to go down into those tunnels. Whatever she was using for ammunition, I must, mmm, study it, yes. Make sure you watch the sensors for that ship of hers!” He was typing furiously into his codex, adding to his notations.

He’d been watching, all right – with an intensity that was downright disturbing. Harr’s knees felt like jelly. He thought he might add a little more to that puddle, if there’d been anything left in his stomach to give. The noises around him seemed far away, or at the bottom of a deep well. Half a million in credits and resources. That’s what he’d told Alad.

Suddenly it seemed too small a sum.

It was over forty-five minutes before Harr was allowed to make the trip back to his yacht. He stumbled into the airlock, leaving pieces of his EVA-suit on the floor as he made his way to the cabin. Ryhs hastily took his feet off the console, trying to hide a clove cigarette behind his back, the spicy-sweet stench of it heavy in the cabin. Harr didn’t bother to scold him, ordering the kid to take them off the moon and out of the system altogether. He’d been expecting Alad to be neck-deep in weapon’s development – something akin to Glast’s animo project, something he was desperate to keep from the Board until all the patents were secured. But this?

He didn’t know what madness turned the cogs in Alad’s head, but if he could capture even one of the Betrayers, the man’s influence and financial clout would outstrip the other members of the Board by more than half! But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the images that had followed Harr into the plush luxury of his yacht, the sounds he kept hearing over the finely-tuned pulse of the engines. Again and again and again.

He’d believed in the Tenno, but he’d never thought to believe in their resurrection. To him, to the galaxy at large, they’d been specters relegated to the murk of a distant past. He shouldn’t have been surprised, though. Species long since thought dead had reappeared on the Orb Vallis. If those stupid pobbers had managed to hibernate these long centuries, why not the Betrayers, themselves little more than stainless steel rats gnawing at the wealth of better society?

Harr clutched at the back of his neck, thinking of that dull and gory snap. She’d done it so easily – and why not? She and others like her had once hunted the Seven to their gleaming judicial halls and opened their throats like common criminals, humiliating them in their last moments of life. They’d carved their way through ranks of Dax soldiers for the pleasure of that moment, men more perfect and better trained than Alad’s mercenaries could ever hope to be. The Corpus were not Orokin; even the long years had not seen them rise to the level of their predecessors.

What hope would there be for them when the Betrayers decided they wanted more than just nitain?

The yacht accelerated towards the Jovian Rail and disappeared into its glowing white heart. It was too much for Harr. By the time they’d reemerged at the edge of Mars, he’d fainted to the ground in a graceless heap, face-down in a glistening pool of bile.

There’d been something left in his stomach after all.

Chapter Text

O Fortuna

Oh Fortune

Velut luna, statu variabilis

Like the moon, you are changeable  

Semper crescis, aut decrescis

Ever waxing and waning  

Nunc obdurate, et tunc curat  

First oppresses and then soothes  

Ludo mentis aciem

As fancy takes it  

Egestatem Potestatem

Poverty and Power  

Dissolvit ut glaciem

You melt them like ice.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Spoilers

NONE

Set on the cusp of Tethra's Doom, the event that introduced the "Hijack" tilesets way back in 2014.

The rain was coming down sideways, hammering on the corroded metal buildings, and roaring down the gutters with the carcasses of drowned pobbers. As far as the weather was concerned, it was a nice day down at Pisswash Station.

Technically the site was designated as the Emesh Shipyard on all the nav charts – but nobody called it that, not even the pilots. Located at the western edge of the lowlands known to the Orokin as the Vendimia Planitia (nobody called it that, either), Emesh Crater was an ancient pockmark about 20 kilometers across at its widest point. The shipyard itself was a rusting, slapdash assembly bloating over the crater rim like an infected sore, a warren of hallways, factories, and assembly lines thrown together with no regard to overall cohesion. Wherever it fit, it went. The auxiliary docking platforms had been plugged in so low, only a scant forty meters separated them from the toxic yellow lake that gave the shipyard its name – and it was getting deeper every year.

Some of the boys had gotten together one night, tied half a condroc to the end of a cable, and tossed it over the side. When they’d eagerly pulled it back up some ten seconds later, the only thing left was a ragged tatter of bone and oozing feathers. Afterwards it became tradition to menace new recruits still dripping wet from the vats with the threat of a little dip, should they fail to toe the line. Stories persisted of an incompetent drudge who’d been thrown out for a swim and had to have everything replaced below the hip.

Prosecutor Shiv took great pains to foster those stories. He’d only paid out enough slack for that drudge to make it halfway down, just enough to get a chemical burn from the rising pall of fumes, but the threat of having your ass-cheeks melted together made for much better incentive – so that was the one he liked to cultivate. The drudge had made a bad weld; discipline had been necessary, but he looked down on brutality for brutality’s sake. A quick bob from the docking platforms had served the lesson well, feeding the zeitgeist of intimidation necessary for command, and the drudge had never performed poorly again. Shiv still saw her from time to time. They got drinks once in while.

Standing on that same landing pad with a full security complement at his back, Shiv tracked the Bolkor with his eyes as it circled overhead, engines belching. The craft was overloaded, thrusters straining as the pilot struggled against the weather. They should have sent a Glaistig, Shiv mused, but he understood the reason for the switch.

The big containerships could have carried several Bolkors with room to spare, but the drawback to being able to haul that much tonnage was that there was no more room for the cannons, forcing them to rely on an armed escort. Hiding the resulting flotilla was nigh impossible – and Vay Hek demanded secrecy above all else.

The Bolkor swiveled hard, coming down with thump that rocked the decrepit landing pad all the way to its struts. According to the daily manifests, there was nothing special about this particular drop. Even its cargo had been offputtingly marked as “sanitation supplies” in keeping with the Councilor’s usual brand of off-color humor. Shiv watched as the aft boarding ramp cracked open and several anxious-looking drudges disgorged onto the rainy platform, hurrying to activate the repulsors on a massive chunk of machinery squatting just inside the hold.

Blurg leaned in close.

“Why the cloak and dagger? Councilor afraid of ol’ Tengus getting the jump on him again?”

The Lancer chuckled at his own joke. Shiv didn’t bother dignifying it with a reply. The quip was in bad taste, but not necessarily off the mark. Vay Hek was afraid of someone interfering. Always the braggart, he’d been foolish boasting about the project on an open channel. Now it seemed as though he was trying to make up for past mistakes.

As far as Shiv was concerned it was too little, too late. There’d been too many rumors. Too many asteroid mines gone dark, too many comm stations carpeted in bodies, and it hadn’t been the Corpus. Alad V had brushed the Councilor’s ill-advised threats off with a laugh, and besides, the credit-grubbers killed with energy weapons, with electric batons and railguns – not cold steel. Shiv had seen the bodies.

They’d been killed with a blade.

It’d been clean work, too. Shiv had been impressed, even envious. Grineer soldiers weren’t trained on anything more impressive than a machete or cleaver. Swords took too long to master and most tube-born hadn’t the mental faculties necessary for such discipline, let alone the time. Crushing weapons – the hammer and the club – were easy to use, and much better suited the temperament of their wielders. Shiv fingered the haft of his polearm.

The amphis was a weapon meant to shatter bone, paralyze nerves and burst organs – but in the end, it was still a blunt instrument. He’d trained obsessively with it, balanced the poorly-manufactured shaft with modifications of his own, knew it better than his own body, yet it remained an itch that he couldn’t quite scratch. Blurg nudged him with an elbow.

“Word of advice: take your shit before the day starts.”

Shiv slanted him a deadpan look. He couldn’t see the big guy’s face, but he could feel the grin on his lips. “You are supposed to on duty,” he said, returning his gaze to the landing pad. “Pay attention.”

Blurg let out a short, barking laugh.

“On duty,” he snorted. On duty against what? Vermin chewing the wires?”

It was true to a point. Wedged deep in the belt on the lee side on Mars, a long-held bastion of Grineer supremacy, Ceres was quite heavily guarded. Shiv was not convinced it would remain so. He scanned the pollution-choked sky. Blurg rocked on the balls of his feet, absently checking the ejection port on his Grakata.

“Bet I could hit that drudge over there. The one with the- with the, uh… the hot stripes.”

Shiv directed a look to where the docking crew was connecting the Fomorian Core to the overhead rail, electricity snapping audibly against the rain. The foreman’s suit had been painted in bright, slashing lines the exact color of a gun barrel about to melt.

“Orange,” Shiv corrected. “The color is orange.”

The first punch almost broke Shiv’s jaw.

Almost.

Unable to avoid it entirely, he rode it backwards instead, allowing it’s momentum to drive his upper body into a spin that carried him out of his adversary’s reach. Even so, he tasted blood. He spat a glut of it onto the deckplate. All around him, the pit shook with jeers. They’d all come out to watch; the ballistas and the lancers, the nervous drudges and the Drahk Master with his charges snarling and baying at the end of their leashes. This match had been a long time coming, and nobody at Pisswash Station was going to miss the show.

Shiv’s opponent was a hulking mountain of tube flesh taller than him by nearly half a meter and at least half again as broad in the shoulder. Rumor held that he’d spent time in the pens of Saturn Six, nobody knew what for, and the crudely notched tattoos that marched up and down his rot-mottled chest seemed to bear that out. Shiv circled to the right.

He didn’t need those rumors to tell him that Krass had been assigned the role of Shield Lancer. The first indication was in the man’s immense size, in those thick slabs of muscle over heavy, augmented bone. The second lay in the way he carried himself; one foot firmly forward, posture slightly hunched. He kept his left arm tight to his body, while the right had been mobile enough, and agile enough, to have come careening out of nowhere the moment the match had begun – nearly knocking the teeth from Shiv’s head.

Despite that, he is weakest on the right side, Shiv thought. He’s used to guarding his left, to keeping an impenetrable barrier between him and his opponents. Approach from that angle will be impossible.

He sprang at Krass before the man could get too comfortable, launching a flurry of body blows designed to bruise ribs – but Krass kept his feet with stolid determination. Ducking low, he rammed his shoulder into Shiv’s nose. The crowd roared their approval. Shiv skipped backwards and wiped his face with a sweat-slicked forearm. Like his opponent, he was barefoot and naked to the waist. There were no weapons in this arena.

So, he is not susceptible to pain.

Most large opponents were surprisingly delicate once a solid blow had been landed – but not this one. Punching him had been like hurling a slab of raw meat against concrete. Entirely ineffectual, and the pain throbbing across Shiv’s knuckles warned him of alloy ribs beneath the damp, glistening skin. He furtively shook out his hand. Krass grinned at him. He was missing one of his front teeth.

“Come on, kill him!” one of Ballistas screamed.

Emboldened, Krass lunged at him, his longer stride easily chewing up the distance. Shiv held himself motionless. Krass was surprisingly fast for his size, but he was no warrior. There was no follow-up to his strikes. He was used to overwhelming opponents with his brute strength, to knocking their lights out with either the first or second blows. The bloody nose had been a small price to pay for this information.

He let Krass hammer at him with a series of punches that would’ve concussed an Eidolon – had any of them actually landed. Feeling a max-power haymaker go past his ear, Shiv could have swept him right then, but held off. He faded back, not letting the blows drive him into the wall, but instead working his way in a circle. Krass followed him in mounting frustration. Sweat sheeted from his body, the sour, meaty odor rising to Shiv’s nostrils every time he drew close. He was punching too hard, expending his energy too fast. Most big fighters were like that. The inexperienced ones, anyway. Shiv countered with a sideways lunge, driving his knuckles into the side of his opponent’s trunk. Lower this time. Nearer to the kidney. Krass dropped to one knee. The crowd screamed.

Winded but undaunted, Krass tried to tackle Shiv’s legs out from under him. Probably a favorite tactic. Shiv backpedaled out of reach. Krass staggered and nearly tripped, underestimating the reflexes of his quarry. Shiv was getting bored. He’d been looking forward to this bout, but the fight was turning cheap, a game of Keep Away for Ostron brats. It was time to end it.

Krass lunged at him again, and Shiv slammed a fist into the vulnerable hollow beneath the brute’s right armpit. Fingers going sluggish, the big man’s arm dropped uselessly to the side. Shiv stepped into the gap. Knuckles pointed, he hammered a series of blows into his opponent’s unguarded torso, first to the throat, then to the heart, then back up to the throat. Krass let out an inarticulate gurgle of confusion, unable to comprehend the sudden power behind the blows, believing his much smaller opponent to be devoid of any real strength – just as the Prosecutor had trained him to think, pulling his punches and feathering his strikes until this crucial, final moment.

Krass went down on both knees this time, and Shiv dealt a punishing blow to his temple.

The big man flopped bonelessly to the floor.

There was a moment of perfect silence – then a roar broke out in the stands, followed by another and another, until the rusted ceiling shuddered with the cacophony of two dozen Grineer screaming and stamping as one. Shiv spread his arms, tilting his head back so that the dingy yellow light poured into his eyes. It was less a gesture of triumph and more a simple declaration of victory. As usual, the fight had not been hard-won. He felt no sense of accomplishment, and now that the adrenaline was fading, that persistent feeling of bitterness returned like a chronic ulcer.

He’d never been bested in a fight. Not even close.

With the exception of the beleaguered instructor who’d trained him, and whose skills he’d rapidly outpaced, none of Shiv’s opponents had been in any way memorable. He’d faced every threat the Origin System had to offer, from Corpus machines to leathery Ostron warriors, as he humped the front lines from Earth to Saturn to Phobos. All of them had been chaff. Reaped and forgotten, like the unconscious brute they were struggling to extricate from the pit.

Shiv strode to the edge and hoisted himself out. Several lancers glared daggers at him. Shiv knew they’d been betting heavily against him, eager to finally see him on the ground, and they’d lost in a great deal in the usual clamor to exchange credits, ration packs, and grubby flasks of homebrew grog. The commanding officers permitted it for the most part, even joined in on occasion, until every few months when they staged a crackdown, confiscated crates of one contraband or another, and made a pretty show of running a tight ship whenever the high-and-mighty came around. It was all theater and everyone knew it.

Shiv lifted a towel from an overhead pipe and wiped the blood and sweat from his face. He participated in these makeshift versions of Rathuum to keep his skills sharp – and for whatever meager enjoyment could be coerced from the fight itself. As the years dragged on, there was less and less of both. He believed the Corpus phrase was “diminishing returns”.

Thumping the floor to get his attention, Blurg waved him over. The Lancer was sitting on an empty crate, munching on greasy fistfuls of fried cockroaches. The dry-roasted kind, Shiv noticed, not the gelatinous protein bars rationed out by the mess.

“Nice fight,” Blurg complimented him between mouthfuls.

Shiv shrugged. It’d barely even been a fight.

Blurg gave him an annoyed look. “Are you ever going to be satisfied?”

“When there’s something to be satisfied about,” Shiv replied, toweling the back of his neck.

The grimy deckplate felt wet and rough beneath the calloused soles of his feet. Looking down, Shiv realized he’d torn his big toe at some point during the bout and a sluggish ooze of blood was seeping from the nail bed. He sat down next to his shift-mate and propped the injured foot on the opposite knee. Two more fighters were climbing down into the pit. Blurg reached behind the crate and picked up a flask. Unscrewing the cap, he sloshed half the contents into a dented tin cup and passed it to Shiv.

It smelled of sour fruit and grokdrul. The Prosecutor sniffed it appreciatively, trickling some on it on his foot before taking a deep swig, eyes streaming from the burn of it sliding down his throat.

“Good stuff. How much you blow on it?”

“Eh, couple of rounds. Skoom tried to cheap me, so I put one through his leg.”

Shiv grunted his approval. All around them, spectators roared as the second fight of the evening kicked into high gear. Two Scorpions from Raddick’s unit had been matched and blood had already been drawn. Shiv eyed the fighters. One of the women was much bigger, but her opponent had been augmented below the hips, heavy metal pedes slamming the deckplate as she circled. It was going to be a close bout – but not a very spectacular one. The pair were better trained than most, but having been deprived of their trademark machetes, neither were impressive in a fistfight.

Blurg shoveled another fistful of roaches into his mouth. “I’ve got a thousand on Sloan.”

Shiv quietly sipped his booze.

The alarms sounded just before dawn.

Shiv was comfortably asleep in his bunk when everything flashed to red. Bypassing the ladder, he quickly swung himself down to the floor, narrowing avoiding landing on Blurg. The Lancer still had a ratty mylar blanket wrapped around his leg. He kicked it away with a curse.

“All stations report in! All stations report in!” The PA blared. “Intruder in the compound. Lockdown in effect. Main gate sealed.”

Shiv sprang into his combat suit, strapping his breastplate on with quick, practiced motions. Oxygen conduits hissed as the suit pressurized. Blurg lobbed a machine pistol at his head. He caught it one-handed and shoved it into a thigh holster before picking up his amphis, activating the weapon with sharp crack of electricity. Someone howled as they pinched a finger in the magazine well of their sidearm. Bullets chattered into the ceiling.

“Trigger discipline!” Shiv barked. He strode to a control console and punched up the comms. Frag was technically in command of the unit, but Frag had fallen into the trash incinerator three days ago, and a corpse couldn’t issue orders.

“Somebody talk to me,” he growled. “What’s going on?”

“There’s been breach in the lower levels,” the comm officer reported.

“The freight rail?”

Silence.

“I can’t see if you’re nodding!”

“A-affirmative, sir! Assembly Area 5.”

Situated between the blast furnaces, Assembly Area 5 sat at one end of an electrified freight rail. It was normally used for very large or very heavy pieces of machinery that couldn’t be moved any other way, usually gas turbines and Galleon hull plates. Or the Fomorian Core.

“All of you, with me!”

There were twelve of them in all. Armed and mostly awake, they spilled from the barracks with Shiv in the lead. After a confusing series of switchbacks and internal staircases, they reached a wide, vaulted gallery on the south end of the shipyard. Air filtration systems with fans as big as Firbolgs cranked and rattled overhead, assuring that the atmosphere inside the facility was at least marginally less polluted then the toxic soup outside. The large bay doors at one end of the room were already open, the Core sliding noiselessly along the overhead rail. Shiv threw one arm towards the consoles.

“Alright, shut it down!” he ordered.

His eyes swept the room and the network of rusted pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. Nothing. Shiv wondered if it was some kind of mistake; it wouldn’t be the first time maintenance had decided to shuffle something around without notice – but somehow he doubted it, because every instinct he possessed screamed otherwise. The thing Vay Hek had feared, the intruder Shiv had expected, was here. Somewhere.

The rail powered down with an audible whine. Shiv scented the air, inhaling the stench of stale water and engine lubricant. A drop of moisture, warm and oily, splattered on the top of his cowl and slithered down his face. Shiv looked up. Everything exploded to white.

The flash was brighter than exploding magnesium, stabbing through his pupils and into his skull. His vision gone, Shiv howled and clapped both hands over his eyes, optic nerves popping with incandescent sparks. Something heavy landed a meter to his right. Big, but not clumsy. Metal scraped and sang, almost crystalline in its resonance. Not Grineer pig iron, but something much, much purer. Primal instinct skittered the length of Shiv’s spine.

He ducked.

Bright heat slashed across the bridge of his nose. Shiv hit the ground rolling, relying solely on his memory of the factory floor as the ground dropped out from under him and he toppled, limbs loose to avoid injury, into the deep channel that ran beneath the rail. Somewhere to his right, the sounds of his fellow Grineer transitioned to phlegmy, bronchial screams as body parts started thudding to the floor. Shiv swiped at his streaming eyes. His vision was starting to return in murky smears of yellow and dirty, metallic brown. The Core was moving again.

He staggered to his feet, the cut on his face already clotting. A grey shape was whirling in the midst of his unit, wielding a blade one-handed as it scythed through the crowd. Shiv grabbed his pistol and opened fire. The thing whirled behind another Grineer, seizing the man by the bulging collar of his suit, and hauled the body between them as a human shield. Shiv didn’t have time to contemplate the tube brother he’d just shot dead.

The thing – the Warframe – was on the move, jogging alongside the Core as it reached the second set of doors leading to the auxiliary dock. With lockdown in effect, they should have stayed closed – but to Shiv’s growing confusion, they juddered open to let the cargo through, moving swiftly along a plume of crackling energy attaching it to the Warframe itself. Shiv leaned over the control console and hammered on it with the side of his fist, but the Core continued to slide along the rail, completely autonomous from the system.

Leaving the dead and dying, Shiv raced after it. Ceres’ predawn sky was a gangrene shade of yellow, so thick that he could taste the pollutants on his tongue. Shiv squinted against the incessant rain. He’d never seen anything like the ship hovering at the end of the dock. Vaguely like a kite, closer to the massive horseshoe crabs scuttling the tropical shorelines of Old Earth, its ivory hull and glistening golden panels spoke of an era long dead. Water swirled and spattered as it dropped lower, spreading its vectoring thrusters. The Core was already levitating up to meet it.

Tractor beam. It means to take it in one piece.

At this point, such an observation was a given. If the Warframe had intended to rupture the containment field, the entire facility would’ve already gone to Hell in a handbasket – taking a good chunk of the sector along with it. Blinking away the last of his vestigial blindness, he spotted the Warframe jogging in the shadow of the Core, still connected to it by a tendril of energy. Shiv fired at it as it ran.

Amazingly, impossibly, the Warframe used its sword to deflect the barrage into the sky. Most of Shiv’s rounds never found their mark, while those that did vaporized against a solid film of energy. It was no surprise that the Warframe employed shields. There was also every reason to believe that the efficiency and output of those shields far exceeded those of Corpus, and Shiv had killed enough taxmen to know that his pistol would run dry long before they popped. If there was any hope of victory, however slim, he’d have to change tack.

Shiv switched his aim and drilled a line of bullets into a nearby pallet of fuel canisters.

Things could not have gone more perfectly. The containers shredded apart with a concussive thud, hurling shrapnel and flames up into the belly of the ship, and engulfing the Warframe in an expanding balloon of burning gas. The Tenno ship flared its thrusters, momentarily angling up, but it was only a reflexive twitch of caution. Shiv could see that it was completely undamaged. He’d expected as much. The sudden fireball had served another purpose.

Shiv dropped the empty pistol and took a better grip on his amphis, charging headlong into the oily heat. As he’d hoped, the Warframe burst forward to meet him. Shiv’s gaze knifed to the sword it was holding in a low, double-handed grip.

It’s first strike will come up from the ground.

Light flashed on the killing edge as it swept forward. Shiv met it halfway, batting Tenno blade aside and bringing the butt-end of his amphis up in a whistling arc meant to catch the thing in the stomach. The Warframe parried the upstroke easily, sparks peeling off with a harsh rasp. They traded blows once, twice. Shiv barely saw the sword as it hurtled around for a third, the Tenno expertly redirecting the momentum of its last strike, to angle at his hip. Had it connected, his guts would have sluiced out onto the floor. Shiv whirled his amphis to one side.

Tenno steel collided with Grineer iron, and skidded harmlessly off.

The Warframe hesitated, surprised. Shiv took advantage of its distraction. He spun the amphis fast enough to make it buzz, feinting to the right before launching a crushing, overhand blow from the left that the Warframe almost, but not quite evaded. The amphis cracked it alongside the ear, driving its head sideways with the force of the blow. The Warframe retreated a step. It gave its head a quick shake, maybe momentarily dazed, maybe rerouting whatever HUD it used for sight.

The Tenno craft sliced overhead, buffeting them in the downdraft. Aborting his follow-up lunge, Shiv shied away instead, shielding his eyes against the choppy splatter of water. The Warframe looked up, tracking the ship as it moved, then leapt straight up as it passed overhead, landing nimbly on the slope of the Core. Shiv’s mouth fell apart. Powerless to stop it and too stunned to make the attempt, he could only watch as the craft arced away into the clouds. The Warframe looked back to regard him, its sightless gaze fixed on Shiv, and the Prosecutor thought he read something in the tilt of its head. Not fear, he thought. Not wariness. Curiosity.

Seconds later, it was gone.

Left alone in a slick of burning fuel, Shiv let out a cheated howl of frustration.

The Core was flagged as stolen, most likely destroyed, and Shiv did not envy the commanding officer whose duty it was to report the loss to Vay Hek, but Pisswash Station quickly returned to its usual humdrum. There were quotas to be met, orders to be filled. Warships to be built. The Grineer machine stopped for nothing.

Hours stretched into long, agonizing days that Shiv attempted to fill with menial tasks, trying to drown his frustration under repetition. The Warframe was constantly on his mind, consuming his waking hours and leaving him awake in his bunk while everyone else snored and flatuated in the hot, grimy darkness of the barracks. His only means of relief was to slip away to an unused storage room and drill with his amphis long enough to work himself ragged, hoping the fatigue would quiet his agitated thoughts. Sometimes it even worked.

The Warframe had been unlike any opponent he’d ever faced. They’d only squared off for but a moment, but Shiv found himself reliving every detail, every second elongating into forever. It had intuited his every move, met his every strike. He’d not defeated it, only caught it off guard, and it seemed to Shiv that even the Warframe had been taken aback. It underestimated me and I got lucky. It will not make the same mistake twice.

He slammed the lead-end of the amphis into the training dummy he’d built and ducked as the boom came careening around the other side, dealing another frustrated blow as it passed. The padding split, spewing moldy plant fibers and asbestos onto the floor. Shiv snarled and hit it again, tearing the dummy in half and sending a shower of rotten wood hurtling into the bulkhead. The remainder flopped to the ground with a sad whump of finality, leaving Shiv standing over the mess with his fists clenched so hard the knuckles turned white, trying not to scream.

“Go ahead. Tear your back out,” a voice reprimanded him. “When you can’t use that precious baton of yours, they’ll be shipping you off to the belt mines, or over to Ludi to strip rusty Bolkors for scrap.”

“Piss off,” Shiv responded testily.

He set one end of his amphis on the floor, slanting an annoyed look over one shoulder. Blurg glowered right back, his mismatched eyes only adding to the effect. The right was now a bulky orb of metal and circuitry glaring from a puckered seam of slow-healing flesh, courtesy of the sawbones down in medical. Shiv’s gaze trailed down, following the scar to the skeletal prosthetic replacing Blurg’s left arm. One clean slash, from armpit to opposite eye. He was lucky the Warframe hadn’t opened his throat, too.

Shiv’s ire softened marginally. “Is it healing alright?”

“It itches.”

They faced in other in silence for a moment. Blurg scratched at his eye.

“Why are you so obsessed with that thing?”

“I’m not obsessed.”

“Yeah, and my gonads actually produced a couple of brats.”

Silence again. Shiv rolled his aching shoulders, the sweat on his skin drying to a crusty lather. Blurg folded his arms with an angry creak of overtightened sprockets. The new arm needed a better lube job.

“Why don’t you go and join one of the units thumping on Cetus? I hear your new buddies have been spotted down there.”

It sounded like advice, but Blurg’s tone was sour. Shiv stared off into nothing. He’d already thought of that. Despite the blatant failure of last week, more Fomorian Cores were being shipped in. Pisswash Station was the only shipyard in the sector with the facilities to install them. Vay Hek was doubling security, doubling the workers. Doubling the timetable.

“The Councilor would never approve my transfer,” he said quietly.

“Because you’re needed here. Why is that not good enough for you?”

Shiv said nothing. There was no way he could explain it in terms Blurg could understand. After a long moment, the lancer heaved a sigh. “Put the club away and get your ass back to the barracks, Shiv. Me and Pock got a game of fuda going, and she’s anteed up some… some, uh- whatever it is those fish-gulpers chew. Fresh, too. You in?”

Shiv looked at the mess on the floor.

“Sure. I’m in.”

When the claxons ripped through the facility for the second time in as many weeks, Shiv’s heart almost burst with excitement. It made no sense for the Tenno to be back so soon. The new Cores hadn’t even been delivered yet – unless they’d had a palaver with their queen and decided to blow the facility sky-high in advance – and there was no reason to guarantee it would even be the same Warframe.

Despite all of this, however, Shiv hurtled down the passageway so fast the lancers puffing alongside him could barely keep up. Blurg had been right. It was an obsession, and Shiv was spurred on by an insane hope that he needed to see to fruition, or else sink slowly in madness. The alarms had been triggered from a console located on the auxiliary docks, and the tight, swelling ball in his chest clung to that fragile coincidence with all his being. One more door, he told himself. One more door and it would be there, planting charges on the fuel line or setting the reactor to blow.

The bulkhead cracked apart, and Shiv lurched out into the storm. Silver flashed past his temples, and the lancers flew back like sacks of grain tossed into a storeroom. Shiv skidded to a halt. He looked back, he couldn’t help it, and realized both men were dead before they’d even hit the ground – gleaming silver kunai embedded in their throats. Shiv slowly rotated back the other way.

The Warframe was waiting for him in the middle of the platform.

It sat with its legs crossed, hands resting lightly on its knees with upturned palms cupped full of rainwater, a massive golden shotgun lying across its lap. It was also floating a half meter above the ground. Beneath it, blood sloshed in time with the rain. The dock was littered in bodies, radiating outward like a spiral galaxy with the Warframe at its center. Seeing Shiv, it casually unfolded its legs and stood. Looking at it, truly looking at it for the first time, the Prosecutor could only stare.

There were no golden adornments, no strange, protruding angles or decorative pseudo-clothing, just raw anatomical musculature, right down to the indented V of its pelvis. Even the suggestion of genitalia was contained in a low, sloping bulge. In an odd shimmer of insight, Shiv realized it was a tribute. A homage to the artistry of the human body.

The oldest stories told of gods, born of pure Thought, who’d fashioned the human race out of clay, leaving fingerprints on every dip and swell. Needlessly melodramatic in Shiv’s opinion, but not entirely untrue. Far from it. Orokin had created Grineer. Theirs was the hand that’d fashioned the molten yellow irises in every identical face, in the straight nose and lush mouth that a few lucky tube-born could see in the mirror for just a couple of short days before their skin began to sag, their teeth grew crooked, and those luminous eyes sunk into hollow pits.

The Orokin even fashioned themselves, or so it was said. It was not hard to imagine the hands of some Golden Lord, flawless in every physical way, molding the Warframe in the idolization of his own image. The perfect Warrior, cast in living steel.

It was still holding the shotgun.

Muscles so tense they hurt, Shiv gripped his amphis with both hands, getting ready to roll behind cover. The Warframe slowly moved its gleaming weapon off to the side, held it for a moment… and dropped it to the deck, where it fell with a heavy, splashing thud.

Shiv’s eyes cut to it, then back up. Lifting both hands now, the Warframe cupped one against the other, fingers curled around an invisible cylinder, and drew them apart. A blade of turquoise light emerged from its palm, its slightly curving length wreathed in oscillating skeins of energy that traveled up and down the blade in unsteady waves. Standing tall, the Warframe pivoted the incredible sword aside, its shields dying away with a crackle.

Waiting.

Shiv’s mouth went dry. Whether the thing was incapable of words, or had simply chosen not to utter any, made little difference. It’s meaning was clear. It was a challenge, an invitation with as much equality as could be arranged. No guns, no shields. Just natural talent. The cauldron of restless, bitter discontent that’d swamped the later years of Shiv’s life suddenly boiled over. He heard the door at his back slam shut and lock. There would be no interference. No running. Shiv wouldn’t have considered it even if the option had been open to him. He didn’t care why the Warframe had come back. All that mattered was that it was here.

Trembling with anticipation, he swiveled his amphis into a ready stance.

The Warframe nodded.

Then it attacked.

By the Queens it was fast, but Shiv had read the coiled power in the Warframe’s thighs, seen the artificial muscles tense in its calves, and knew it’d meant to lunge. He moved away at an angle and brought the butt-end of his amphis up in a crackling arc. The Warframe was ready for him. Grineer iron met unholy light as their weapons collided midway. Shiv felt the impact click his teeth together. He recoiled, sidestepped, and swung again. Again, the Warframe blocked. Glowing blue sparks showered into the puddles and were extinguished.

That blade is very light, and very, very fast. It will attempt to out maneuver me.

The Warframe revolved past him, their shoulders becoming a pivot, and directed a short chop to Shiv’s exposed back. Shiv rolled his amphis over one shoulder, parallel to his spine. The glowing sword bounced off with a reverberating clang. Shiv found time to be surprised. Something told him that blade should have been able to cleave through entire men, through armor and muscle and bone. Was it possible that the Warframe could modulate its strength somehow? The idea enraged him as much as it piqued his curiosity.

His limbs became a blur, launching blows with both ends of his amphis as he drove the Warframe around the edges of the dock. It let him come for a moment, then launched a disorienting cut into Shiv’s midsection, its sword a slashing flare of azure light. Shiv parried, drove it back, and lunged forward with a counterstrike of his own, amphis whistling in low. It was a blow meant to pulverize kneecaps, or failing that, to snap an opponent’s tibia. A fighter that couldn’t move, couldn’t win. The strike was his!

The Warframe cocked its leg and stepped on the polearm as it passed, driving it to the floor. For one incredible moment, Shiv faced the thing as it perched on the shaft of his weapon. Then he caught the Warframe’s heel across the temple as it delivered a roundhouse kick to the side of his head.

Flung sideways by the impact, Shiv accelerated through the puddles. He tumbled to all fours as his momentum played itself out, amphis clutched tightly in his fist. The Warframe regarded him silently, dark against the pustulent yellow floodlights. Shiv suddenly realized he’d been baited. He spat out a tooth, an insane laugh bubbling from his lips in a terrible, maniacal upwelling of delight.

He reared back to his feet and met the Warframe as it charged.

They went back and forth, gaining ground and loosing it again almost as quickly, their feet constantly in motion, spraying filthy water into the air as they moved. The rain was as warm as the blood flowing from Shiv’s grinning mouth. He threw his head back and howled in pure animal joy as he traded blows with the thing, accepting the white-hot agony of the slashes it left on his torso, savoring the impact of the blows he dealt to its joints. There was no pulling his punches this time. He needed all his strength to attack and riposte, every ounce of concentration to see when the thing unexpectedly changed the direction of its strikes.

They wheeled back to center, spiraling in a dance of false cuts and feinting thrusts. The Warframe’s hide was scorched black in places, epidermal layers sloughed back to ooze a brilliant molten gold. Energy flashed and leapt. One end of Shiv’s amphis died with a sudden pop of sputtering circuitry. He drove it into the Warframe’s belly anyway. It slap-parried his wrists with its free hand, blowing his arms wide. Too wide. He felt the Warframe’s knuckles collide with his sternum.

For a moment the world seemed to slow on its axis and Shiv found himself processing information in fragments, like a comm unit with a broken oscillator. He stared at the Warframe’s featureless visage, their faces only inches apart. Why hadn’t it moved? An eternity seemed to pass, then Shiv looked down at his own chest… impaled on an exalted Tenno blade.

“Ah.”

The amphis clattered to the floor as Shiv’s legs unhinged beneath him. The Warframe’s fingers clamped on the back on his neck, shielding that vulnerable place with the hard, solid plane of its hand as it sank with him, bearing Shiv’s weight as they knelt in a rapidly expanding lake of blood. The blade cutting through his aorta had the weight of a sunbeam – but Shiv was acutely aware of the power of it vibrating through his bones. He cupped a shaking hand over the fist that held it, his grip death-tight, his arm dragging, unable to move again.

His own heartbeat thundered in his ears. Stuttering. Slowing. Dying. There was something wrong with its echo, a slow, venous cadence of three instead of two. Repeated ad infinitum. The Warframe had its own heartbeat, Shiv realized, now that he was close enough to hear it. Some terrible, thumping thing that powered its limbs and bestowed its twisted immortality.

Shiv hacked a clot of blood onto the Warframe’s shoulder, slumped in its implacable grip. He didn’t thank it. Didn’t curse it, either. Simply acknowledged it with chuckle, thick and wet in his throat, and rode that hypnotizing sound into the black.

It had been a good fight.

At last.

He could not have known that long after his heart has ceased to beat, the Warframe had carried him away from the polluted shipyards, away from the grinders that would’ve recycled his flesh into the protein slurry from which new Grineer were born. He could not had known that on some distant spire of rock, a cairn was erected over his body and his amphis planted in the snow alongside it.

Chapter Text

Jar of Greed

My name is Canto Denarii.

I was navigator aboard the Juno Moneta, a Corpus freighter of the line.

And I was a fool.

I could make excuses, of course, but that’s all they would be. Excuses. Whether this account serves to condemn or exonerate me, I will catalog the incident as faithfully as am I able to recall. I have already been judged, not in any court of my peers, but by a remnant of the Orokin Empire-that-was... and I have been found wanting. I think it knew that even as it saved me. 

These Tenno… their kindness is often an altogether different sort of cruelty.

In any case, it is my hope that these memoirs will shed some light on the fate on the Juno Moneta and her crew. Where I go from here remains uncertain, but at least my part in those events will be accounted for. 

I will start at the beginning.

According to the Company Calendar, in keeping with Orokin Standard, these events took place between the 15^th and 17^th of the month of Martius in the year 10,191. By the Ostron Lua-Count, which we were often compelled to use in our dealings with their floating markets, it was the 28^th of Nagpa, Year of the Golden Mergoo.

I was stationed out of Valhalla Basin on Callisto, where the Company maintains the largest metropolitan colony in the sector. From the lowest prefab homes on the outermost trough zone to the great, glitter-glass manses located at its center, seeing it from low orbit is quite the sight. To those unfortunate masses that have neither the funds nor means to travel the System, I tell you that there are few things that compare the majesty of Jupiter hanging low in the midnight sky.

It is not impossible to mine a star. It is possible to mine anything if margins are profitable, and Jupiter was nothing if not profitable. Day and night, helium and metallic hydrogen is mined from the upper atmosphere of the planet, while rich silicate deposits and purple Gracilarian kelp are farmed from Callisto’s vast subsurface ocean. The former goes into everything there is to manufacture, while the latter is a favorite ingredient in salads and jellied condiments.

The Juno Moneta was a freighter by trade and not a particularly big one at that, running loads of commodities to the colonies out on Pluto, where we’d usually dock at Thanatos Station – by far the biggest speck of civilization on that tiny, misbegotten rock. I was standing second watch as we made the bimonthly trip, our holds stocked with routine supplies, when a flicker came across my board.

The signal was very faint, coming from well beyond the outer terminus. If we hadn’t adjusted trajectory to avoid a comet shower the previous afternoon, I doubt the Juno’s instrumentation would have picked it up at all. I managed to identify the garbled wavelength as an emergency transponder registered to a deep-ore mining hauler by the name of Lira. A subsequent review of the registry database told me that the vessel had been listed as MIA approximately four months previous.

It is rare that a man can track his downfall back to a single moment in time.

That moment on the Juno Moneta was mine.

Company protocol dictated that I report the distress beacon to the nearest military vessel or installation – in this case, Thanatos Station – and hand over all pertinent data, including any logs or transmissions that might have been acquired.

I did not.

There is a rich tradition of salvage rights within the Company. Dedicated salvage teams often make a hefty profit by stripping Grineer vessels, Orokin-era derelicts, and failed mining colonies for every copper wire their holds could carry. The returns on a Stanchion-class mining hauler, to say nothing of potential cargo, would double or even triple my current portfolio, far more than a ship’s navigator could hope to see in a year.

I downloaded the coordinates to a holotab and erased the logs. With the only copy in my hand, I then went to see the Juno Moneta’s captain, a man by the name of Zebedee Cassel. For the record, Cassel was close to six foot six and lanky as an Eidolon, with a neatly sculpted beard that hid a chin sharp enough to puncture a bulkhead. He was a fair man, and occasionally my friend. 

It didn’t take much to convince him. We agreed to split the profit, he ordered the ship diverted to the coordinates I’d acquired. There are no Golden Rails beyond the Jovian system, as you well know, but with some clever bookkeeping to account for fuel costs, it took us approximately 32 hours to reach our destination.

The Kuiper Belt is an empty, desolate place filled with the icy corpses of stillborn planets. As I set a vector toward Eris, I wondered if the Lira had crash-landed on its surface. I am ashamed to admit that I hadn’t considered the possibility of survivors, but after a moment’s reflection, I concluded there weren’t likely to be any. At the time of our arrival, the tiny planetoid’s orbit had taken it so far from the sun that its atmosphere had frozen and was falling to the surface as snow.

We found the Lira in a decaying orbit around Eris’ solitary moon, Dysnomia. Structurally speaking the hauler looked perfectly intact, and sensor beams indicated that the engines still had power, but repeated hails elicited no response. We followed standard docking procedures.

As I’ve said, the Juno Moneta is not a particularly large ship, and I have never been aboard a military vessel for comparison, so I admit to being taken aback by the cavernous size of the Lira’s docking bay. It needed to be big to hold all that monstrous equipment, the earth-movers and stone-haulers with caterpillar tracks higher than my head. I remember how warm the air felt, how it tasted like metal and dirt, and smelled like the rotten mud they haul up on Callisto.

Fifteen of us boarded the Lira and split into three groups; one to check the medbays for the survivors I’d selfishly hoped we’d not find, another to check engineering, and one to investigate the bridge. Captain Cassel and I were amongst the latter, accompanied by Miri X, ship’s tactical officer, and Julian Verge, comms specialist. I don’t know if any my crewmates caught on to the real reason we’d come aboard the Lira, that under the pretense of searching for answers, the Captain and I only wanted to check the logs to see how much mineral wealth had already been stowed in the hold.

By the time our group had reached the bridge, the vacancy of the ship had become nerve-racking. Soon were we all sweating in the muggy air and Cassel was getting antsy. While Verge checked the logs, we checked the manifest. I was excited to find the holds brimming with several metric tons of ferrite, nickel-iron, and rare asterite crystals. The Lira had been just a few weeks short of surpassing their quota.

Given this information, we were all wondering the same thing. A ship this size would have retained a crew of nearly 200 Company men and women, so where in the hell was the crew? If there had been some kind of hostile boarding action, we would have seen blood or bodies, or the telltale punctures left by ramsleds. Instead we’d been greeted low lights, rancid odors, and empty corridors creaking against the hollow void of space. It was if the crew had vanished into thin air.

Down in the medbay, our CMO – a severe woman by the name of Lenora who, through every fault of her own, had the misfortune to remind me of the negligent mother I’d left as soon as I’d turned sixteen – described unidentified fungal growths that’d taken over the empty beds and biocapsules (a report echoed by our teams in engineering). Without any visual reference to fuel my imagination, I found myself thinking of the loathsome slime molds and mutant fungi that carpet the Orb Vallis. Disgusting, but ultimately harmless. None of us grasped the implications of the horror we’d unwittingly entered upon.

Neither had the Lira’s crew.

According to the logs, the Lira – having ranged much further than any commercial hauler in the sector – had discovered a rich seam of ore approximately five months ago. (Her captain had stricken the exact location from the record.) Subsequent mining operations had been immensely profitable, and they’d evidently thought to return several times before the seam played itself out. The promise of a massive payday had only increased with the discovery of an authentic Orokin derelict approximately seven klicks from their brand-new strip mine. The corvette’s disastrous planetfall, a perfectly straight avenue gouged deep into the icy surface of Dysnomia, had apparently exposed the vein of ferrite that’d drawn the Lira’s attention in the first place.

Golden detritus had splattered for kilometers in all directions, but the ship was reported as being largely intact – and the Lira’s hold contained more than just valuable minerals. The cargo manifests I read that day also listed Orokin computing devices, kesslers, fresnels, rare aboroflora trees and decorative knickknacks of every shape and kind.

I was going to be a very rich man.

Using the hoverlifts and maglev dollies normally used to offload our own cargo, we immediately delved into the Lira’s pregnant belly and began transferring everything she held onto the Moneta. We soon realized that even with our own shipments pushed out into the corridors to free up space, we could take less than a quarter of the Lira’s spoils. Naturally, we decided to start with the most valuable items.

We were in high spirits. The worst part was the growths.

As we worked, it became apparent that the pulsating mats of fungus weren’t merely growing on everything… but somehow growing out of it, as if they had fused directly to the metal and fiberplastic. Luminous orange pustules would burst as we worked, showering us in embered spores like cinders swept up from a fire. I wasn’t worried. My suit was atmospherically sealed. Everyone’s was.

But it got in anyway.

Symon was the first to show signs. Within a few hours he was mentally disoriented and, according to what news trickled up from Lenora’s tyrannical little kingdom, running an unusually high fever. He was sent back to his quarters with a medpatch slapped to his arm and orders to get some sleep. There’d been the usual hibernal outbreak of flu back on Callisto and nobody thought anything of it – other than to wonder if poor Symon had breathed on any of us before he’d turned symptomatic.

I remember resolving to take a handful of zinc supplements when I got off shift. 

Meanwhile, the growths bedeviling our attempts at pillaging had become so thick that progress came to a standstill. Captain Cassel ordered several acetylene torches up from maintenance, and with full tanks we turned those bright geysers of burning gas towards the tumors. The quivering mass convulsed as though we’d prodded a living thing and incandescent trails raced through the aggregate like electrical signals along exposed nerves. Something shuddered in the depths of the vessel. Not the cry of a beast or the shriek of anything human, but a subsonic rumble, like the grinding of gristle in an arthritic knee, whose sound almost contained the shape of words.

Within moments the first of the horrors appeared.

The Lira’s cargo hold was neither the deepest nor the lowest part of the ship; that designation belonged to the sumps, to the baffles and crowded spaces where the vessel stored the engines and machinery that propelled it through space. The creatures came up from there.

I say creatures, but a better term would have been monsters, twisted abominations that resembled living things only as a grotesque sum of parts. The first one I saw came at me along the ground, pulling itself along using two palpitating appendages which terminated in bloated hands.

It was human. Had been human. Beneath it’s sickly flesh I could see the outline of shoulders, the boxy and elongated helmet worn by all Corpus representatives. It had no legs, no lower body whatsoever – yet it came at me with a frightening speed. I was unarmed, but I grabbed my acetylene tank by the nozzle and swung it at the monster just as it reached me. I can’t say I killed the thing, for surely it must have been already dead… but I got it to stop, motionless in puddle of clotted orange fluid whose malodor reached my nose even through the seals. You cannot imagine such a smell. It spoke of rot and pulsating flesh, but also something seductively wet and infinitely harder to describe. If bees could somehow extract nectar from the fluids of a corpse, I imagine this is how their fecund honey might smell.

More came soon after the first, until there was no doubt what had befallen the Lira’s crew. Quadruped horrors arrived with tumors sprouting from chest cavities rotated so far from center, their ruptured sternum faced the ceiling while their lolling heads hung beneath like an udder or a single, swaying testicle. More often than not, they still showed a recognizable human face. Waxy skin and sunken eyes frozen in perpetual horror. The entire mass… the hive of growths that’d taken over the Lira’s bowels like intestinal worms… had awakened.

As they came loping towards us, these horrors birthed from reconstituted human flesh, something flitted across the back of my mind… stories of a handcrafted disease created long before the Old War. I denied it at first. Of course I did. In all my thirty eight years there had been only one, single, unsubstantiated rumor of an outbreak on some floating Ostron market, and even then, no one really believed it. Knowing those backwater yokels drink the fluids that seep from that techno-organic Tower they venerate like some kind of god, I couldn’t help but think that contracting some rare Orokin cancer seemed par for the course.

The Infestation is much worse. Somewhere in the depths of that golden derelict, broken against the barren surface of a moon drifting in an expanse of space so vast, even planets become grains of sand, the star-scourge of the Orokin had survived. And the Lira’s hapless crew had brought it back to life. Or perhaps they’d merely been its latest meal.

Armed with mother-wrenches and blazing acetylene torches, we tried to hold out against the onslaught, but we were not a military vessel. Our complement of weapons consisted of only a few Detron pulse rifles and personal sidearms. After numerous casualties were incurred, we eventually retreated to the Moneta and attempted to seal ourselves off, but it was too late. When two ships dock together, regardless of size, there is an exchange of oxygen via the airlock as the two vessels match pressure. Standard filtration procedures usually provide enough of a barrier to prevent the spread of mold or any of the usual illnesses. They weren’t designed to filter out a plague even the Orokin had feared.

A glance out a starboard window revealed inky black tendrils, like the root system of rotten tree, snaking out from between the Lira’s hull plates and latching onto the Moneta via the umbilical, worming its way into critical mechanisms. Even now, it was not the speed at which the tendrils grew that alarmed me; it was how intelligently they’d seemed to do it.

Unable to decouple from the Lira, we could only drift along with her.

Naturally we tried to comm Thanatos Station for help, but our distress beacon went no further than that of the unfortunate Lira. Hysteria began to set in amongst the crew. Cassel dispatched a team onto the hull to try and cut us loose, but where us pitiful humans need oxygen to breathe and insulated suits to protect us against the merciless cold, the Infested have no such qualms. They attacked us in vacuum, claiming several more victims, including poor Mira X, before the group managed to retreat to the airlock. She and I were not the best of friends. In fact we often fought, but we were crewmates and I… recall her having two children somewhere in the colonies.

We brought the bodies inside, and I personally helped CMO Lenora zip them into storage bags. At that point the Moneta’s tiny morgue (four refrigerated drawers meant for transient use) was already full, so we had to pile them in the auxiliary airlock, close to the chill of the outer hull. Our respect for the dead only accelerated our downfall. We should have thrown the bodies out into space.

They did not… well, they did not come after us like the reanimated dead worn ragged by every holodrama in the System… but they did come back. Later, as I peered into the narrow window that afforded me a view of the airlock, it was if the bodies had melted… leaving their gore-smeared bags deflated and empty… while something of roughly equal mass writhed and pulsated in the corner between wall and ceiling. Patchwork horrors arose, and although we spaced the airlock, it did little to purge its contents.

You recall I mentioned Symon. After some hours had passed, and we collectively seemed to remember him (or rather, to finally recall the reason for his absence) someone was sent to rouse him from his bunk. She came back white and shaking, telling us how Infested growths had filled his quarters, while Symon himself – what was left of his half-assimilated body – hung from pulsating sinews and organic cordage, a gory picture she likened to that ancient, near-forgotten sect of religion where Divinity hung from a cruciform.

We sealed the door – sealed the entire section! The Moneta had escape pods, of course, and after 32 hours of trying to everything we could think of, anything we could do to save both ourselves and our cargo, Captain Cassel ordered us to abandon ship. But the pods did not deploy. I don’t know why. Maybe there hadn’t been enough reserve power. Maybe if we’d rebooted the OS… maybe then they would have deployed. Maybe the Infested had wormed its way into those systems, too. Hell, maybe it was even smart enough to plan it that way!

At that point, nightmare and reality blurred together in my head. I remember losing the Captain as we forced our way back to Deck 3. At that point, I hadn’t seen Verge in over two hours. I don’t know how or when he met his fate. I remember slipping in sticky-sweet, tar-like excretions as I scrambled towards the medbay. There I found Lenora dead next to an open bottle of Scotch, an eruption of blood painting the wall behind her in a dazzling rooster tail of crimson. My foot kicked at her Plinx as I staggered away, the telltales along the side of the weapon indicating that a single charge had been expelled from the battery. Of all those who perished onboard the Moneta, she was only one who’d done so on her own terms.

Alone and half-mad, I fled across the umbilical back into the Lira. In my panic I thought to try one of the hauler’s escape pods, or failing that, to attempt to open the hold and cast some piece of mining equipment out into the black, a life raft without food or water, and only a low band emergency beacon meant to draw rescuers to the sight of cave-in, or other such disaster.

The main route was plugged by Infested, so I squeezed myself into the maintenance shafts – the latest in my series of stupid plans. I had only the vaguest idea of how these passageways fit together, and if some Infested spawn had come upon me while I was on my hands and knees, I’d have been eaten right there. As it was, however, I somehow made it down three decks before finding my way blocked by a clot of organic matter.

The tube I’d descended had been pushed up by the force of its growth, and there was a narrow gap at the bottom that I thought to squeeze through and escape. In my infinite wisdom, I removed my helmet and got down on my stomach, using fingers and toes to try and lever myself through the opening.

I’d pulled myself halfway out when the aperture closed against my hips. Perhaps the Infested tissue had swelled as I agitated it, or perhaps the damn thing was just sentient enough to be cruel.

I thrashed and contorted, but the pulsating tissue only seemed to engorge itself further, so I dug my fingers into everything I could reach and tried to twist myself out instead. I later found out that I had sprained my back and bruised both kidneys, but at the time my desperation to survive was so intense, I don’t recall even feeling the pain. Slowly I realized that the tissue wasn’t just swelling; it was winding around my legs. The movement was slow and thick. I might have held it off for hours had I conserved my energy.

Exhausted and drenched in several liters of my own sweat, I could barely kick either of my legs.

To make matters worse, I’d caught my ankle against some flange of exposed chitin buried inside the mass and a dull, writhing ache now pulsed up my calf in time with my heart. My lungs burned as though I’d inhaled thorns. Liquid heat pooled in my boot, squelching hot around my toes. Every so often I’d struggle for a moment, then lie forward on the deck with my weight braced against shaking arms. I didn’t scream. There was no one to scream for, and I was too afraid the sound would attract unwanted attention.

Certain that I was soon to die, I should have been thinking about home, about my pristine apartment back on Callisto with its view of the River Vimur – a magnificent artificial canal built not for traffic, but to be admired for the way it reflected the incandescent Jovian auras and glittering Company offices. I should have been thinking about a past lover, or my elder sister’s home-cooked meals. Sari had all but raised me while our mother was lying somewhere with a needle in her arm. I hadn’t seen her in years.

None of these things crossed my mind.

All I could think about was the undeniable certainty that the Moneta would never have come here if it hadn’t been for me. We never would have passed the Outer Terminus, beyond the reach of all help, if I’d just reported the Lira’s distress beacon to the proper authorities. The agony tunneling up my leg grew with the guilt and self-recriminating grief. My head filled with impulses that were almost words, urges that scratched and mingled with the ragged sob of my own breath, the suggestion of speech hidden in every malignant noise. 

Hunger/

            Kill/

                                                                        Feed//

I couldn’t hear the words. I felt them.

                                                                                                            We hunger//

We… expand. We absorb.

                                    Hunger/HUNGER

The door across from me gave a thunderous bang. I swallowed a scream and raised myself to my elbows. The heavy door quaked again, bending inwards off its track as something powerful hammered on it from the other side. A hand punched through the seam between bulkheads. Fingers clenched hard enough to crumple alloyed steel, widening the gap enough for a second hand to join the first. Pneumatics hissed and burst as they levered the door apart. Infested spores dusted from the ceiling, fiery hot in the sudden, staccato flicker of light.

The thing on the other side of the door was no Infested, but it was a monstrosity. Two and half meters of restrained violence and armored plates trimmed in scintillating Orokin gold, it moved with remarkable grace for something so heavy and imposing. It stepped through the gap in the door, snapping bits of metal beneath its heel, and regarded me lying there – not with any eyes that I could see – but with a force of presence that nearly loosened my bowels.

I’d never laid eyes upon it in my life… but I knew what it was.

Nothing in this universe or the next, none but the vanished Orokin could have created something so marvelous… and so terrible. There was something gnarled about its body, something grown instead of built, like the contortions of some antediluvian bristlecone pine, and indeed its limbs were thick enough to have passed for tree trunks. Blast damage pockmarked its massive chest, leaving splintered craters that pulsed with metallic golden light. Our most advanced MOAs and Jackals and bipedal proxies were science fair novelties compared to the Tenno, those knights of a fallen empire.

It continued to stare me down without speaking, perhaps as surprised as I was. I reached for it with one hand. Please, I begged. Fervently. Desperately. Please. I was so mad with terror and exhaustion, my tongue glued inside my mouth like a desiccated slab of meat, I don’t even know if the sounds I uttered were identifiable as words. Heat coiled in my leg. Something in my head hissed with anger… and fear.

                                    Flesh of our flesh//

                                                                             Enemy/

            /Get away. GetawaygetawaygetAWAY!

Movement twitched near the ceiling, and something leapt from the puckered opening of a vent. I’d been right not to scream before. The noise had attracted attention. The Tenno barely reacted. Its massive hand shot out and grabbed the thing midair, holding it out by the throat. Armored fingers tightened and its esophagus burst in a torrent of luminescent gore. The abomination continued to writhe and contort, trying to wrap itself around the Tenno’s arm.

With an echoing roar, the Tenno slammed the monster against the ground. The floor cratered. Chips of epoxy glaze flew into the air. The creature shrieked and hissed. The Tenno slammed it down again. And again. With a final crunch of bone the monster lay still, and the Tenno dropped the pulped remains as if ridding itself of dirty laundry.

It seemed to consider me again.

Seconds elongated into forever, but when the Tenno moved, it moved suddenly. Standing so near that I could have rested my cheek on its enormous gore-spattered boot, it made a fist and struck the conduit I’d wedged myself under. Hundreds of pebbled shards rained down on my back as it exploded. A hand fisted in the back of my suit, and I was tugged free with a grisly pop. The snare I’d exhausted myself against, loosened as easily as the lid of an annoying pickle jar.

Whatever had pierced my ankle must have been stoppering the wound, because as soon as it was gone, blood began oozing steadily. The Tenno dumped me onto my stomach, thick fingers probing at my ankle. Distracted by the slither in my skull, I felt rather than saw the blade. A moment later, I knew the razored heat of it.

I screamed obscenities mingled with the wordless screech of terror and betrayal.

I must have passed out because the next thing I remember, I was moving. I peeled my eyes open. Nausea clawed at my belly, but my head was empty. No slithering. No animal urges in the shape of words. It took me a long moment to realize that the waterfall of shifting color billowing against my face was actually the cloak falling from the Tenno’s wide shoulders, its ragged edge whipping over the deckplate a meter below.

The Tenno had thrown me over it’s shoulder like a disobedient child, one arm across the back of my knees, it’s every stride impacting my stomach as I bounced against its armored pauldron… hauling ass to wherever it was so hellbent to go.

I slipped unconscious again.

When my eyes opened again… oh, the things I saw.

I was surrounded by polished alloys, by curving panels and consoles and shimmering glass, a bubble of serenity drifting out in the black. The merciless clarity of space hung so close that for a moment I thought I’d been tossed from the airlock – but I was alive, viewing the scintillating ice of the Kuiper Belt through a viewscreen as big as the tiny room I occupied. The Tenno stood next to me, its big hand fisted in my utility belt. I was once again struck by how huge it was, easily reaching seven feet. I was an insect in its shadow.

I also got the feeling that it’d roused me for a purpose, slapped my cheeks like a fainting debutante and filled my spine with whatever sorcerous narcotic was keeping the pain at bay. Despite the febrile exhaustion, my senses were painfully clear. I swear that I knew colors for which there is no name.

I also knew that I had only one leg.

The other ended in a cauterized stump just below the knee.

Too overwhelmed to process the revelation as anything more than data, I straightened and swayed, and turned my gaze back out into space. Eris and Dysnomia hung below us in perpetual twilight. Some kilometers closer, I could see the Lira and the Moneta drifting along with them. Even I watched, fire bloomed in the Lira’s lower decks, bursting through viewports and hull-plates rapidly ballooning outward under the force of some internal explosion. The hauler shuddered and buckled as shockwaves tore it apart at the seams. Half the vessel cleaved away in a gout of flash-frozen oxygen, burning fuel, and chunks of organic matter. With a navigator’s trained eye, I saw it’s orbital trajectory wobble. The Moneta sank away with it, chained to the doomed hauler like a cancerous lover.  Silhouetted against the stark white of the moon, I also saw half a dozen tiny, tumbling specks that I suddenly realized were bodies.

Hot bile rose in my throat. I wondered if any of them were Lenora, with her sour face that reminded me of my mother and the drinking habit she tried to hide, or the mouthy Miri X, who often commed her sons and the long-suffering sister who took care of them with snapshots of Jupiter’s moons. Symon, Verge… the dozen or so other men and women who offloaded our cargo and scrubbed the grease from our engines. Our chief engineer had been a former debt-slave of Fortuna. As an enlisted navigator who’d graduated from the flight schools of Triton, I’d thought him so beneath me, I couldn’t even recall the man’s name.

The crew I’d murdered for my greed.

I tried to avert my gaze from the spectacle, but the Tenno – who had remained motionless up until this point – suddenly reached up and seized the back of my neck, preventing my head from turning. My heart was pounding so hard, I could feel my pulse hammering against the vise-like grip of his fingers. Almost as if he could read my thoughts, the Tenno flexed each of them in turn, slowly and one by one, so that I could feel them individually tighten against my spine. He gave me a little shake. The message was crystal clear.

WATCH.

I stared out the viewscreen as the pair of ships tumbled through Dysnomia’s thin atmosphere, ten billion tons of twisted metal slamming into the surface with enough force to hurl snow into orbit. A thin ring formed around the moon as gravity carried the particles along. I’ll never forget the words that husked from my mouth, not an apology, but a shameful desire to know how he’d been able to accuse me.

“How did you know?”

The Tenno held up a holotab, laughably small against its massive hand, and flicked it to land incriminatingly at my feet.

I stared at it for a long moment before I recognized it.

It was the holotab I’d loaded with the Lira's coordinates and distress beacon. The holotab digitally signed with my name and rank the moment I’d inserted it into the computer. Even a mundane court could have sentenced me with such evidence.

I nodded bleakly.

After a long moment, the Tenno released his grip on my neck and deposited me into the corner. I was a nonentity to him, a scolded dog being ignored after it urinated on the carpet. I curled up as best I could and laid my blistering forehead against the glass of the viewscreen, where the cold of space formed delicate fractals of ice.

Possessing of a wyrm drive far in advance of our own, it only took the Tenno craft a mere handful of hours to reach the edge of civilized space. I was not allowed to descend the aft ramp into the rest of the ship – if indeed where was anything back there to explore – and stayed huddled in my corner, my downcast eyes on the floor. I did not try to look around, not wanting to test the boundaries of the Tenno’s patience by looking as though I was committing his secrets to memory. A female Cephalon once inquired after our destination. I deliberately forgot what was said.

He left me amidst a sea of rover tracks two klicks outside of Thanatos Station, next to an automated mining outpost that marked the outer limits of the settlement. I assume it must have paged the station with a distress beacon, because within the hour, I was being hustled off by a team of surprised rescuers.

There was an inquiry, of course.

I told them what I knew, and what I decided to reveal about my involvement. I told them about the Tenno, but in those days their presence was much lesser-known, and many of my attending physicians thought I’d gone mad. I never told them the coordinates which mark the grave of the Lira and the Moneta, or the dreaded star-scourge that might still lie awake in their coffin.

It is now the 19^th of Iunis.

Recovery has been slow. I’d been a fool to remove my helmet on the Lira. Irritated from exposure to the Infested spores, my lungs began to fill with fluid, becoming swollen and blocked. The medics couldn’t understand how I’d been breathing on my own, even for a few hours. The Tenno had been merciful – but the effects had long since worn off, and I was given two options. Tether myself to an oxygen bottle, or undergo partial augmentation. I opted for the latter. Now I resemble any other rig jockey out of Fortuna, or any of the Company’s orbital mining subsidiaries. 

I’ve been fitted with a prosthetic leg, too, a very good Diane-Herbin model, but the stump aches fiercely, forcing me to walk with a twisting limp. I like it that way. I don’t want to forget. I petitioned the Company for partial access to Miri’s records, enough to wire half my portfolio to her sons.

I’ve been offered a navigator’s position aboard the hydrogen barge Helios, and at greatly increased pay, but I won’t take it. The Company reps treat me like a hero, a survivor. I refuse to be rewarded for what I’ve done. Instead I’ve used what was left in my account, got in touch with a few acquaintances, and set myself up as the middleman for a salvage and technology trader.

And so I came to Cetus instead.

Clutching a worn datapad close to his face, Canto Denarii had been writing for several hours in the flickering glow of an oil lamp. Electricity was scarce in Cetus, whose denizens preferred the gentle light of candles or Eidolon breath-globes. With the exception of small refrigeration units many households didn’t even possess appliances, preferring to cook and eat their meals in large communal kitchens.

It had been difficult to adjust at first.

When he’d steered freighters and dropships between planets, his domain had been numbers and parabolas and complex holographs etched over the viewscreen in realtime. Now the texture of Denarii’s world consisted of handmade ceramics, of silk and boiled wool overlaid with the musky, bloody scent of temple kuva wafting up from the flaying beaches, his Calisitian apartment traded for a modest hut on the outskirts of Cetus.

The locals had been welcoming of him, something that had surprised Denarii. He’d expected to be ostracized, or been at the receiving end of more than a few suspicious looks, but the Ostrons had shown him nothing but hospitality. A guarded kindness perhaps, but kindness nonetheless. Some days it made him feel irrepressibly guilty, knowing the dark secret he kept hidden from them.

Every morning he woke with the dawn and limped the short distance to the markets. Slowly he came to enjoy their alchemy of scent and sound, each voice trying to outdo their neighbor in volume. Everything in the System, be it people, news or goods, eventually made their way to Cetus. From the poorest colonist to those rich enough to own a moon – all felt the pull of the Unum. Even the Tenno.

Denarii saw them from time to time, always at a furtive distance and never face-to-face, but saw them he did. They came more often now, never making a spectacle of themselves, and he gradually came to recognize several individuals, the most frequent of which was the smaller one with the trailing red ribbons. They usually came to trade for information and occasionally for supplies – mostly auron and coprun, and sometimes the lotus silk made by clades of old women down by the shore. Despite their warrior’s code, the Tenno were also as vain and elegant as the Golden Lords they’d once served.

Or so the whispers said.

Denarii knew who he was really waiting for-

-but he never saw the one who’d rescued him from the Lira.

His fingers, which had grown strong and calloused from months of lifting salvage, hesitated over his datapad. He wondered if he should add something else to his memoir. To his confession. The subject of it haunted his nights, when the steady drone of manual labor could no longer crowd out his thoughts. He’d grown content here on Earth. There was even a woman – a rug-weaver by the name of Aidana, who manned her stall directly across from him in the market – who had begun to take an interest in him despite his physical deformities. Denarii couldn’t help but wonder. Who was he to deserve a good life, when he’d robbed over a dozen others of their chance at the same?

He turned the datapad over in his hands. Despair lapped the tired shores of his thoughts. He could always end his own life… atone for his crime once and for all… but something about it stuck in his craw. He thought of the Tenno again. If it’d found him so contemptible, why save him at all? Rumor insisted that the Tenno valued honor above all else… but what justice was there to be found in sparing a sinner like him? If it could not, would not, commit an act of deliberate cruelty by simply leaving him to his fate, a simple execution would not have violated their code. A quick death would still have been a mercy compared to the alternative. What was he missing?

A breeze sighed through his window, carrying a gale of laughter and phony squeals of pain. Denarii stood up and took his dark thoughts out onto the porch. Outside, the sun was just beginning to set. The fading light was warm on his skin. Earth’s sky was a translucent shade of carnelian banded with columns of gold. Rock shadows blended sensuously with the outflung silhouette of the Unum thrown across the water. Looking down from his hut, Denarii watched a group of children chase each other along the beach. Several tumbled to the kuva-soaked gravel, then picked themselves up with a laugh.

They were playing Tenno.

A game of wooden swords and papier-mâché masks in crude likeness of their heroes.

There was never an argument of who was to be Tenno, and who was to be Grineer. These children had been born in Cetus, raised with the virtues of community. They took turns without fuss. Denarii sat down on a stool by the door, fingers absently massaging the half inch of intact flesh below his knee. A thin haze of smoke hung over the village, heavy with the scent of cardamom and grilled fish.

What was he missing?  

It was important.

He watched Forgemaster Hok pause on his way somewhere else, listened to him holler at the children. Not for running, or for being too loud. As the little would-be Tenno raced past, Hok snagged her with a brawny hand, shoved the kid’s elbows tighter to her sides, lifted her sword out further, and pressed her into a partial squat. She gave the new stance a few experimental swings. Hok grunted in satisfaction. Denarii rubbed his aching joint. 

The Ostron people had a strong warrior tradition, and protected their own with the strength of hand-forged blades. Ever since their mysterious awakening, the Tenno had become Cetus’ most stalwart defenders – but there were hundreds of Grineer, legions of Grineer, and even Warframes couldn’t be everywhere at once. Those who lived here dwelled on the brink, and Cetus never truly slept. Even when the markets were closed there were meals to cook, laundry to do, ointments to prepare, new warriors to train, old warriors to mend.

The breeze picked up, ruffling the placid inland sea. A flock of coastal Mergoos wheeled overhead with a screech. Many fisherman regularly fed them. The ridiculous-looking creatures were supposed to be lucky. But it was more than that… it was a cycle of kindness, of service to other living creatures.

Someone called his name, and Denarii looked up towards the village. Aidana was standing on the stairs leading down to the beach, a massive copper pot braced against one hip. It was her turn to help in the kitchen tonight, and Denarii knew it would be filled with tubers or slabs of Tower flesh. There was a smile on her tanned face. She beckoned to him with her free hand.

When he didn’t move right away, she affected an exaggerated pout, lips twisting into a frown meant to be visible at a distance. She beckoned more deliberately, this time using her finger in an obvious come-hither motion. The children laughed again and went pelting off down the shore. Voices drifted down from the market, hawking powdered dyes and half-priced jugs of kuva. Denarii’s heart gave a lurch so fierce it bordered on pain.

Suddenly he understood.

The Tenno had condemned him to live… to atone for his mistake every time he made someone laugh, every hungry Mergoo he fed on the back porch… every bloodied warrior he helped carry to the healer, because he was the only one who could get that ancient hoverlift to work. He was used to transporting delicate cargo, after all.

His penance was earned every time he helped Aidana set up her brightly colored rugs, and every time he helped someone free of charge, because an old man had once gifted a lost ex-navigator several dozen fresh persimmons (including the homespun wicker basket) when Denarii had first come to Cetus.

It was early in his relationship with the rug-weaver… but if it continued… if in some distant future he was blessed enough to father children with her… his redemption was earned in seeing them raised with the simple honor he’d been forced to learn the hard way.

Denarii stiffly got to his feet. Aidana waited patiently for him to shuffle his way to her, alternating between teasing and encouragement. She called him a crotchety old man, knowing perfectly well he was still years from middle-age, and he called her a withered old shrew, knowing perfectly well she was younger than him. He tried to take the pot from her. She swatted his hands away. They linked arms and set off towards the kitchen area at the rear of the market.

Weather permitting, meals were always an outdoor affair in Cetus, warmed by the glow of a central fire and surrounded by the smell of food and fragrant bundles of vetiver grass to keep the mosquitoes away. Denarii had not planned to come to Old Earth, but as he chopped lotus roots and added them to the peanuts and red dates browning at the bottom of the kettle, he was glad it’d turned out that way.

My name is Canto Denarii.

I am a merchant and huckster of Cetus, a settlement unique among the stars.

And I am going to live.

Chapter Text

Spoilers

The Heart of Deimos - MAJOR

They’d not concealed themselves in the Void… not precisely… but it was somewhere on the threshold, where that terrible unlight shone beneath the door. Unlight. Untime. Unreality. It was the strongest in the back rooms, in the workshops and abandoned apartments. The servants were gone. The housemaids and the valets. All gone.

Only Loid and Otak remained.

There were times when Loid couldn’t remember how it’d been since they’d pulled Deimos out of phase. Not because he was forgetful, perish the thought, but because it was difficult to measure time in a place where time had no meaning. Hours became days, became months, became centuries. It had been tolerable at first. House Entrati had soldiered onward despite the isolation. Theirs were an old bloodline, after all, and well-used to the capricious vagaries of fate. Their patriarch’s research into the Void had once catapulted the Orokin Empire to its greatest height – and inevitably brought its Downfall, for it was that penetration into the profane, the Solar Rails and Reliquary drives, that set the stage for the Zariman disaster… and the unholy children that gestated in its womb.

Loid creaked the door open with his shoulder. It should have opened automatically, but like so much else on Deimos, decay had taken a heavy toll. It’d been a nice room once. Loid could remember when the third-story atrium had commanded an impressive view of the planet orbiting below, staining the room in shades of carmine and ocher. Natural lighting had been very important to Son.

“It’s necessary for my work. Glow panels are so harsh. Ruins the colors.”

He’d had such a wonderful grasp of colors. Translucent blues and golds, fiery reds and luminous greens. Every detail of the eye rendered in exquisite detail. Loid floated his way up the destroyed staircase, the soft glow of his repulsors playing over squelching, writhing walls. The terraglobes had gone dark, but one or two cast fitful sparks, shadows mixing with the fevered orange light slanting down from the high, shattered windows of the atrium.

“Um… Loid? You’re not gonna actually try to clean in here, are you?”

“Hush, Otak.”

He had not been trying to wipe a dirty rag on the banister, searching for any trace of the milky Thassos marble it was made of. Certainly not.

Something slithered near the ceiling, but they reached the second floor unmolested, dipping to avoid a low-hanging clot of growth. The easel was right where the boy had left it… four, five centuries ago… maybe longer. Loid maneuvered closer. The half-finished painting was wrapped in pulsating ichor, but enough was visible for him to recognize the landscape depicted from the family’s summer villa on the edge of Mare Nectaris, an incandescent lunar sunset captured amidst mile-high spires. There was no atmosphere on Lua, no particles to scatter light, and the beyond the class-ten containment field, the dying glow appeared as a cold and luminous white.

“…Loid? Loid!”

“What?!”

“Could you hurry? I think something’s watching. It wants to eat us, I just know it!”

Loid worked to free the crusty painting, but with only rudimentary appendages to work with, progress was slow. The Infested had done more than just grow over it. In many places it’d fused to the canvas, assimilating each cotton fiber before moving on to the next one. Movement again. Something with too many legs that cast a skittering shadow. Loid freed the painting with an overzealous tug that sent him spiraling backwards into the wall, torn canvas swinging like a pennant. He hastily rolled it up.

Spit dribbled from the ceiling.

“Loid!”

They shot forward, soaring back down the destroyed balustrade as fast as their repulsors could carry them. The juvenile carnix scrambled to follow, snapping at their metaphorical heels. It leapt after them just as the fleeing Cephalons sluiced sideways through the gap in the door, two and half meters of mutated chitin accordioning up against the frame.

“Ha! Take that you- you bitey Scratchykins you! AH!”

Otak yipped as the carnix shoved its head through the breach and snapped murderously at them.

“Run, Loid!”

“That’s what you get for taunting it,” said Loid primly.

He leaned into the door, well out of reach of the scissoring jaws, and shut it as best he could. It was getting harder and harder to wander the household as more of the outer rooms fell to the Infested. Subsequently, Loid had also gotten very, very good at avoiding the unsavory denizens of the place.

They set off down the corridor, heading towards the east wing. There’d been a time when Deimos had been the envy of the Empire, its unique aesthetic admired but never duplicated. It had been a hub of science. Of discovery! Scholars of every conceivable discipline had graced this moon with their presence, and Loid had helped entertain them all with wine and good conversation, as befitting a Cephalon of his station.

No one came to Deimos anymore.

Not willingly.

The only guests they saw these days were the shipwrecked survivors of vessels that wandered too close to the moon’s concave reality. Loid watched and cataloged, and measured the centuries by the devolution of their attire, their equipment, their language – the music of the Orokin syllabus slowly decaying to harsh consonants and glottal pauses. Factions fell. New factions arose. As things decayed on Deimos, so too did the outside world.

No one came to Deimos anymore.

Not the Archimedians.

Not the Executors.

No one.

“Loid?” Otak’s voice was soft. “You’re being gloomy again.”

Loid did not comment on the obvious. Otak could not understand what he could not remember, and perhaps that was for the best. Was it better to have had and lost, then never had at all? Loid didn’t know. They moved through the halls at a slower pace now. No one occupied this wing anymore, either. Loid passed huge workshops filled with armor plates and weapons crumbling to rust. For Father, the Downfall had taken place long before the palaces and promenades of Lua ran with Orokin blood.

Despite their outward simplicity his Necramechs had been marvels of engineering, the latest in Void technology. People remarked on the prestige Mother’s new husband had brought to House Entrati. When the Sentients first fell from the stars, Father’s Necramechs were among the first battalions sent to defend the System, their plain and, some would say, unsophisticated machinery immune to the pulses that crippled the Empire’s more advanced equipment. But for every Murex they sent packing, every Orphix they brought down, another materialized to take its place – again and again and again in an endless hoard pouring from some gargantuan assembly line in distant Tau.

The Outer Terminus fell, and the Empire was slowly but surely being pushed to the brink.

Then the Warframes appeared.

Loid remembered the celebrations, remembered the unreadable gleam, the burning worlds in the Executor’s smile as he’d accepted his accolades with aplomb. The whispers of high society were quick to change. Compared to the grace and brilliance of the Warframes, Entrati Necramechs were ugly, brutish machines deemed too rigid to face an enemy that was constantly adapting.

Father had never really recovered from the disappointment, retreating into his workshops, into the confines of his own head, long before ruin had come to Deimos. Father was what they called him now. Father was the only thing that remained, a hollow title for a hollow soldier who wandered the suppurating plains of Deimos, Necramechs at his side, jousting with the Infested as though his private little war would make up for the one he’d lost.

Loid realized he was still holding a dirty rag.

He slopped it against a piece of abandoned machinery, rust and rancid fluid sloughing off onto the floor. No matter how hard to scrubbed, he couldn’t keep up. The stains came back. The decay kept spreading. Yesterday he’d gone down into the cellars in search of a bottle to pour for Daughter. House Entrati had once boasted such a collection! Spiced date-wines from Mars, garnet brandies from Ceres. Icy juniper spirits from Lua.

No more.

The Infested had taken those, too. The bottles had been tipped over and smashed, the racks pushed out of place by swollen nodules of disease. Loid’s appendages drooped. Somewhere in the back of his weave, in that liminal space he shared with Otak, he felt the other Cephalon mutely nuzzle closer.

“Tch. Surely you don’t intend to actually clean in here, Loid. What a waste of time.”

Loid whirled around.

She had no name because she’d forgotten it, and Loid could no longer bear to speak it. Mother was who she was. Mother was all that was left. Pincers clacked and shuffled wetly in the gloom, like the carnix that’d pursued them from the atelier. It was not often she wandered the corridors like this. Loid wondered why she was doing so now.

“Hello, Mother!” he said quickly. “Can I get you anything?”

“He’s never here anymore,” she replied, ignoring the question. “He’s always preferred the company of his damnable machines. Husband. Hmmpf. Always running away, my husband. From me. From us. From the jeers I had to endure on behalf of this family.”

Loid remembered the snickers, the poison barbs hidden between the silken folds of civilized discourse. Her father had been mocked for his research, her husband mocked for losing face. No one remembered the triumphs such endeavors had brought, or what sacrifices had been made to achieve them. Mother’s long fingers scraped against the seriglass shard she carried with her. Blood pattered on the floor. There’s always blood these days, the skin raw and sore, muscle torn like ribbons against an edge so sharp it’d once cut its way between worlds.

“Would you like me to fetch a glass of something of calm your nerves?” Loid hedged nervously.

She fixed him with an icy look. “Don’t lie, Cephalon,” she hissed. “I know there’s nothing more than swill in this house. I’ve seen the cellar, seen the ruin that idiot boy has wrought upon this family.”

Fingers raked against seriglass again. Scraping. Scraping.

“Loid… the painting,” Otak warned.

“Ah, but there were a few bottles I was able to salvage-” Loid began quickly, but it was too late. Mother’s gaze fixed on the canvas dangling from his appendages. There was a manic gleam in her eyes that set Loid’s circuits on edge.

“Is that one of his ugly little pictures?” she sneered. “Useless. Just like him. Wasting his time painting and flirting when he should have been learning from the Archimedians. I want you to dispose of it immediately!”

She’d called his paintings beautiful once.

Hung them on the walls where all the guests could see.

No one came to Deimos anymore.

Dripping fingers stretched out as though to tear the artwork from his grasp. Loid inched backwards out of reach. He was small, but not particularly quick. And she was blocking the door. His internal receiver chimed.

“Hello? Loid? Hate to be a bother, but could you be a dear and stop by for a tick?”

Grandmother’s aged but still beautiful voice was unmistakable.

Mother’s twitching hand stilled.

“Sorry, Mother. Duty calls!” said Loid quickly. “I’ll be sure to dispose of this on my way!”

He whisked forward before Mother had a chance to recover her thoughts. He could feel her jagged glare on his back as he zoomed down the corridor, trying not to look like he was fleeing the scene of a robbery. She didn’t take her eyes off him until the corner mercifully hid him from sight. Otak wilted with relief.

“Whew. Close one.”

“Indeed.”

After a brief search they found Grandmother in her garden at the rear of the house, its massive, sweeping balcony and flimsy containment field overrun with Infested palpators, thick as climbing ivy, trained to grow along the marble balustrades.

“Ah, Loid dear,” said Grandmother. “You needn’t have rushed.”

“Oh, we weren’t busy,” Otak chipped in helpfully. “Mother was just about to murder us!”

“Otak...” Loid forced air through his vents in a good approximation of sigh. He pulled himself up in what he hoped was a dignified manner. “It wasn’t a problem, mum. How may I be of assistance?”

Grandmother smiled at him. Despite the ravages inflicted by time and the Infestation, her face was still regal, her eyes still sharp. She gestured to a pile of creepers with her pruning shears.

“I’m afraid they’ve fallen over.”

Loid set the rolled painting aside and moved to hover over the tendrils. Many were thicker than Grandmother's wrist, and most were adorned with pulsing orange buds. He gathered up what he could and hoisted the bundle towards the trellis.

“A little higher- good! Now if you could just hold there...”

Grandmother's garden had been beautiful once, an exotic oasis filled with dozens, if not hundreds of rare blooms twining and tumbling around one another in a riot of perfectly imperfect chaos. If he concentrated, Loid could remember the roses and waxen plumerias, the pond overflowing with endangered blue lotuses transplanted from the oases of Mars. As a child, Daughter had loved the pond more than anything in the house. She'd spend hours lying with her nose mere inches from the water, crushing the grass and the delicate purple phlox beneath her stomach, attention fixed on the fish sliding around in the darkest, deepest depths. Loid had dredged her out of it more than once, her sodden tunic clinging to gangly prepubescent legs as she beseeched him not to tell Mother.

Looking over there now, Loid saw a shattered marble basin filled with the slow bubble of exocrine oozing up from Infested aquifers. Any fish it contained, if it contained any at all these days, were of the aberrant, mutant sort – carnivorous predators that rose by the light of Fass to feed on their smaller and weaker cousins. A far cry from the gentle spotted koi that'd once called it home.

Loid felt an odd choking sensation shudder across his weave. He was a Cephalon and Cephalons did not cry – having no biological functions to speak of, and therefore no tear ducts with which to shed saline – but they possessed something of an equivalent.

Grandmother’s shears rasped in the silence. "Loid, dear. Whatever is the matter?"

"Nothing, mum."

"Liar," Otak accused in a whisper that could be heard twenty feet away.

Bits of Infested foliage dropped to the ground as Grandmother pruned, tending the polyps as she'd once tended an arbor of roses. "This new strain is finally starting to take hold, you know," she said conversationally. "Over there, by the vases. Do you see it? Isn't it a pretty blue? Makes such a lovely contrast to all this orange."

More palpators fell in wet, meaty plops.

"Such a shame the Heart's been acting up lately."

Loid jolted unpleasantly. His thoughts began to race, searching for signs he'd missed, duties he'd neglected. The Heart was buried deep in Entrati Vaults; no one had gone down there for centuries, but surely any problems would not have been subtle!

"But the Heart is in good working order!" Loid protested. "It's power outputs are normal, and there have been no local disturbances in the Void. I would have noticed if anything was amiss."

"It's not your fault, dear. A stitch in time saves nine, and you're the only one that's kept up with the sewing while everyone else runs about in rags," said Grandmother. Her soft, spidery fingers twined amongst the Infested.

"The Tenno are bound to notice! Such marvelous things, the Tenno. You remember them don't you?"

“...Yes, mum," said Loid slowly.

"They were our allies once, before the entire System went to rot. Can you imagine, that floating fat man asking for my granddaughter’s hand in marriage? The nerve of him. As if she could do no better! Honestly, I expect he got exactly what he deserved when they kicked in his door."

A humid breeze sighed through the garden – not the gentle, katabatic zephyrs that'd once played across Deimos – but the living heat of the Infested itself pulsing and writhing across the surface. Grandmother gestured with her sheers.

"A little to the left, if you please."

Loid stared at the side of her face. Stared for a long, long time. Most days her memory was the best of all of them, but on other days, Loid wondered if she was altogether there. He obediently floated close enough for the Infested to twine against the trellis.

"Ew," said Otak.

"The Tenno are not our allies. Not anymore," said Loid slowly. "Surely you haven't forgotten."

"My body may be blunted, dear, but my mind is as sharp as ever," Grandmother replied. She snipped off a gnarled clot of growth and gently arranged the remaining shoots to wrap around the trellis. "And a mare can only limp on a broken leg for so long before she must be healed, or put down."

A fresh surge of exocrine welled into the fishpond, followed the shattered canal, and dripped from the balcony in fat spumes of mucus. Daughter no longer came to the gardens. Not after she'd looked into the empty basins and saw nothing but twisted life, the promise of reseeding them turned to a handful of ash. Loid shifted uncomfortably. What had been a reprieve from Mother's delirium had turned sour and heavy with the weight of things left unsaid.

"I- I don’t understand."

It was a lie, of course; he’d been programmed to interpret social ques, his software meticulously calibrated to feed him a constant stream of data suggesting whether or not someone was being truthful, and Grandmother was oh-so-casually avoiding his gaze, denying him the advantage of reading her eyes.

"Oh, don’t mind me,” she said delicately, flapping a hand at him. “Half the time I don’t even understand myself, prattling on like an old woman. Run along now, you two. Thank you so very much for the help."

Loid slunk away without another word, stopping only to retrieve Son's painting. He did not throw it out like Mother had instructed. He took it into the baffles and narrow attic spaces of the house, where it joined his sad collection of other forbidden items. Piles of notebooks and anatomical sketches belonging to Daughter, each one bound in the finest skate-leather. She'd never had much taste for Vitruvians, choosing instead to feel the paper beneath her fingers. Another painting by Son. Mother's wedding ring, hurled spitefully away. Loid had never been able to find Father's.

He unrolled the painting and tried to spread it open against the wall, but without a frame it only flopped into a pile. Loid said nothing. After a long moment, he settled on the floor amongst the neglected, broken things. Otak took the opportunity to organize everything he could reach. A cup there, a glossy weapon part there. A collar embossed with the name of Kalymos long dead. He waited for Loid to notice the artistry of their new arrangement. When the other Cephalon did not, Otak's pincers drooped.

He was a broken thing, too. Something else Loid had rescued from the ruin of Deimos. Words confused him. Emotions confused him more. He could not remember the way things had been, but he knew they were getting worse.

"What's going to happen to us, Loid?" he asked quietly.

"I... I don't know, Otak. I truly do not know."

Otak fidgeted with a pile of zodian beads. It was… it had been… a necklace. A net of stars that’d once graced Mother’s neck. Loid had said so. Or had it belonged to Daughter? Otak couldn’t remember. He moved the beads around in little circles, watching how they caught the light.

“Things will get better! You’ll see!”

The silence stretched. Round and round went the little broken beads, the string long since rotted away. House Entrati had lost so much. Their dignity. Their memories. Loid wondered how much more they could stand to lose before they were no longer themselves. How long before only he and Otak were left, drifting through the Untime in an empty, rotten house until they finally turned on each other?

Loid shuddered. He promised to overheat their black box and destroy them both before it came to that, but now it seemed the choice was being taken out of his hands. He was not obligated to participate in what was coming – Grandmother had given him no direct order – but he had served House Entrati since the beginning, and he would do so until the end.

He opened his internal database and scanned a list of private carrier frequencies. Once he’d boasted a library of over a thousand individual contacts. Now it contained less than a hundred, everything else lost to fragmentation and corrupted partitions. Even he had not escaped the ruin of Deimos wholly intact. He scanned the flickering haze of pixels.

The Council of Executors: Dead.

The Archimedian Colleges, destroyed. Their alumni, dead.

Everyone dead.

The Grineer would be of no help. Even if they were so inclined, they were mere servants, cannon fodder bred to protect the true soldiers of the Empire, the Dax and the Tenno. And the intervening centuries had not been kind. Nowadays they were barely intelligent enough to identify the business end of a rifle. No aid would come from there, and Loid almost barked a laugh at asking the merchants for help. The Corpus Guild had better technology and the acumen to use it, that much was true, but the idea of allowing them to see their once proud family forced to stoop so low-

No.

Pride was all House Entrati had left, and Loid refused to barter it away. He could attempt a general SOS, of course – there were other factions who might be convinced to assist, even if they had much less to offer – but such a broadcast would be heard across the System, and as Grandmother had said, the Tenno no longer dreamed. Time was they’d been the pride of Empire, the living manifestation of both sword-arm and shield. Was there truly no means of persuading them to show clemency? Considering how things had ended, Loid very much doubted it. Exiling Deimos from reality had been an act of survival, not an exotic holiday to some unspoiled beach on Old Earth.

Still...

With a few efficient swipes, Loid brought up another tab and set it alongside the first. Details of the Warframe mandate were forbidden to all but the Seven, but there was information to be had nonetheless, and it wasn’t as if the Tenno had been hidden from the public eye. Loid’s visual sensors traced each of them in turn.

“Burns its victims, buries its victims, chokes its victims. Turns its victims inside out,” Otak chortled.

“Otak! You are not helping!”

“What? Isn’t it good to know how we’re going to die?”

There wasn’t much Loid could say to that. Esoteric and eternal, the Void itself given form, a mere hundred Warframes had laid waste to hundreds of thousands of Sentients, and went on to murder the ruling body they’d been created to serve. House Entrati’s chances were slim as it was, to say nothing of the dire straits of Deimos itself. Loid recalled the verdant gardens of colonies overrun with Infested – and the cleansing fire of the Warframes.

“The Tenno are not cruel, Otak,” Loid reminded him quietly. “We… will not suffer.”

No more than they had already, at least. The sputtering list continued to roll. Loid brought it to a halt. One number stood out amongst the rest. Not five people in the Empire had individual access to it, but the nature of House Entrati’s research had once afforded them certain privileges. Loid scrolled to the frequency and tapped it. His databanks opened accordingly.

“The Marshal?” Otak asked meekly.

Loid remembered the parties, the sparkling galas where champagne poured from the fountains. The Executor had been the picture of Orokin grace as he’d danced with Daughter, as was only polite. Mother had delicately tried to suggest marriage – but Ballas had graciously declined, the flashing golden band in his hair suggesting his heart belonged to the memory of another. He’d often come to speak with Mother, to inquire after her late father’s research notes. There were many late-night conversations over many a glass of apothic crimson cognac, which Loid had faithfully served.

All the while, a Warframe lingered in the corner, never straying far from the Executor’s side. Whatever was said in that room had been said before the Marshal of the Central Altar, and as the war dragged on, the System whispered of a burning thing. It was said that wherever he went, things were not as they seemed, that a minor skirmish on some no-name backwater had just become a turning point of utmost importance, that it was swifter to send the Marshal rather than update battle-plans in realtime. A clarion of hope for a war-torn System.

If there was one Tenno that might, possibly, be convinced render aid, it would be this one. And if no quarter was given, death would be a kindness. Loid closed his databanks and slipped from the crowded cubbyhole. He went slowly, walking through the memory of the house as it’d been centuries ago, when the walls sparkled and laughter filled the halls. Outside on the Drift, the sky was the color of an old bruise. The only light that fell on that horrible place came from the embered glow of Fass. There were no stars, no sun. The sky was empty except for the whorls of colorless energy that billowed at the edge of reality. Loid had not seen the face of Mars in over a millennia.

He floated in place and waited for something to happen.

Loyal servant of the great and Glorious Orokin Empire...

On second thought, perhaps he shouldn’t have phrased it quite so. Deep beneath the surface, the Heart gave a cavernous ka-thump. The Infestation began to writhe, keening with a subsonic resonance beneath the range of normal hearing. Loid had no mouth to set in a hard and determined line, but he imagined himself doing it anyway. He was not betraying the family. This was for the best. He was doing this for everyone’s own good. Otak said nothing, and Loid was left to reassure himself in silence, repeating the litany until he’d almost convinced himself of it.

You are hereby commanded to honor your oath and render assistance without delay.

The Tenno were commanded by no one – not anymore – but Loid knew of no other way to address them. It was proper protocol, after all, and the potential end of the world was no excuse for bad manners. The Heart convulsed again. The veins of energy crisscrossing the sky flickered and burned. Deimos shuddered to its foundations.

At first Loid was afraid the ill-kept machines would misfire and tear the moon in half, stillborn as an infant whose umbilical had wrapped around its neck. The tiny moon quaked again. Unreality loosened its sticky hold, and Deimos slipped back into reality as easily as it’d left. All across the System, heads turned to behold the lost moon of Mars; a pulsating tumor with a burning, embered heart, silent but for the ancient carrier wave pulsing out from its seething core.

An ancient code pleading to an ancient ally.

We await your arrival upon this, the most cursed moon of Deimos.

Your star chart shows the way.

I am Loid, Cephalon Servant to House Entrati

“Please bring guns,” Otak added in a small voice.

No one came to Deimos anymore.

No one except the Marshal.

Chapter Text

Spoilers

The Sacrifice – MAJOR

The Chimera Prologue – MAJOR

“Welcome back, Operator!”

Nezha exited the docking cradle, runnels of polluted rain trickling down his legs, and watched through the viewplate as fire erupted from the compound below, blasting out chunks of metal and burning slag as the explosion propagated through the corridors. With luck it would cripple Grineer activity in this sector for at least a few cycles, even if the respite would be short-lived. Like the mass-produced weapons they churned out, the Grineer lived out their brief but violent lives on an industrial scale.

The Liset arched away, punching a hole in Ceres’ dirty yellow clouds. The dwarf planet was like a rotten apple held together by its skin, its metallic core plundered, its surface pocked with sulfuric lakes of acid rain. It had been an outpost once, an agricultural jewel that fed many an Orokin colony after old Earth had been abandoned. A breathable atmosphere had been inflated, the asteroid’s briny mud made fertile, and grain from Ceres served the finest tables on Lua. During the Old War, the Sentients had taken great pains to smash that jewel into dust, cutting the Empire off from one of its main sources of sustenance.

Many lives had been lost retaking those fertile soils – now shrouded in filth and toxic waste, pocked with shipyards like so many pustulent sores. Ceres had become a battleground once again, a point of leverage over a war-torn System. Nezha angled his chin, a tense, unconscious gesture that popped the gristle in his Warframe’s neck.

It is with greatest risk that I commit this recording. The codices within reveal the weakness of your greatest enemy…

With stiff movements, Nezha lifted a hand before his face. He commanded his fingers to flex and they did so without hesitation, with all the strength and dexterity of the living. Better than the living. A vessel created for a singular purpose, a battle envoy for a devil mind. The Tenno tamed, but only just.

Nezha turned his palm, forma glinting at his fingertips.

                      My creations.

                                 My Frames of War.

Vitruvian memory-glyphs flickered through his head, and Nezha’s thoughts ruptured as memory of the Executor’s voice sundered the unstable weave of his mind. It had been days, weeks since that confrontation- but the dissonance had not abated in the slightest. Static filled his head as the somatic link began to fray, memories from completely different eras backing up behind his eyes, jumbling together until nothing could be clearly discerned.

                       Where is she? Ballas, where is the Lotus?!

I am here, Tenno.

His senses filled with the reek of blood and blackened petals, a forgotten garden turned sacrificial altar. Nezha grit the Warframe’s recurved teeth. Somewhere far away, blood coated his Operator’s tongue as he struggled to rein in his fragmented thoughts.

             What have they done to you?

                                    Nothing. This… is what I am.

Her answer had been a twisted caricature of that time when those same words had been used to comfort, when the Dream had first been broken. She’d tried to kill him. Might very well have succeeded if not for Umbra-

                       Can you hear me? Father? It’s me, Isaah. Do you remember me?

Of course he remembers you, young Dax. Which will make this reunion all the more tragic… when you watch him die. I’ve had lifetimes to plan my defection. You spied on me, intercepted my communications, but I saw your move long before you took it.

And so… we come to the consequences.

Nezha shook his head as the foul memory reached up to swallow him.

I killed him, he thought bleakly. Isaah.

“Did you now? Is that how you remember it?”

The runaway train of Nezha’s thoughts came to a grinding halt. His head snapped around, directing a fixed look into the back of the Liset. Below in one corner, the foundry whirred and revolved, sparks leaping onto the floor as it electroplated some new component. Somewhere in the back his kavat yawned and turned over in her sleep. It was the same sight that had greeted Nezha for years… yet an unseen weight pressed in, dark and mercurial, and the rear of the ship suffocated under a heavy sense of foreboding. The Orbiter was unoccupied... but not empty.

Come, Devil. Walk with me.

Words spoken centuries earlier echoed through the Void.

The reflection of a command, invoked as an invitation.

Nezha descended into the Orbiter.

Cold, chalcedony stars gleamed beyond the canopy viewplate, filling the hold with pale light, and his shadow walked before him as he moved into the dim recesses at the back of the atrium. The gleaming floor beneath his feet was as level as it ever was, but in the Void, the fabric of reality lay tilted on its side, urging him towards his personal quarters like water trickling down a slope.

On some level, he already knew what to expect – it was hardly the first time such visions had haunted the limbo at the corner of his eye, vaguely sinister, vaguely childlike, peering at him from around corners only to vanish the moment he truly gazed upon it – but when the door opened at his approach, Nezha jerked to a halt upon the threshold.

The entity admonished him with a laugh, a discordant, double echo that began in one reality and ended in another. Wreathed in smoke and crimson motes of energy, it sat upon the pedestal he’d constructed to hold the Lotus’ headgear – wearing that same helmet pulled low over its dread eyes. It slapped its knee in amusement, then vanished in the usual fashion. The helmet remained, however, leaving infinitesimal vibrations in the air around it... like a distant, muffled heartbeat.

The invitation was impossible to resist, and Nezha did not try. He stepped forward and extended a hand to touch the helmet’s polished surface. Fingertips touched, colors smeared, and the world dissolved in a blinding flash of light.

Cool air touched Nezha’s cheeks. It smelled of rain and mist-drenched wood; the ozone anticipation of a thunderstorm tinged with the delicate florals of a sakura tree in full bloom. Water dripped and pattered from thick green leaves. Nezha opened his eyes.

He’d returned to that garden high above the overgrown jungles of Old Earth. Lua swelled in the sky, the cradle that held its shattered fragments – a feat of unnatural defiance only the Orokin could muster – gleaming in its reflected glow. The air was filled with nocturnal stirrings of coqui frogs, furtive and soft, as if the wildlife itself was wary of disturbing the fragile, dreamlike quality of the night.

“Hey, kiddo.”

The voice was barely above a whisper.

The reverberating laughter that followed was not.

Nezha lowered his eyes and found his own reflection standing nearby. Waiting for him. Its- his hands were clasped demurely in front of his chest, delicate and straight-backed, the Lotus’ helmet shadowed against the swollen light of the moon. Nezha defiantly lifted his chin, the specter of a memory pressing at the edges of his mind; fires raging on the lower decks, the sound of laughter echoed through a dying, derelict ship.

He took a step closer and his reflection streaked away in a blackened slash of Void-fire. Nezha followed the trail with his eyes and found that the specter had not disappeared, merely moved further along the path, where it was now sitting at the base of one the garden’s monolithic stones. Knees updrawn, hands clasping at ankles. A child waiting for someone to come along and play.

Nezha descended the overgrown path. When he got within striking distance of the specter it flashed away again, reappearing another ten meters distant. Before him on the terrace, the garden’s solitary sakura tree stood in full splendor. As Nezha drew closer, a sigh whispered through its branches.

                                                                                            Are you… are you…

Coming to the tree?

His own voice rose on the breeze, haunting and darkly beautiful, the sound poised on a knife’s edge that seemed to part the membrane of his skull. His doppelganger stood with one hand against the tree, head tilted to look back at him over one narrow shoulder. A coy smirk played about its lips as it sang to him.

                       Are you… Are you,

                                        Coming to the tree?

                                                                           They strung up a man, they say who murdered three.

A familiar body lay crumpled at the specter’s feet. One of the Executor’s hands was pressed blindly to his stomach. The other was fisted next to him, grinding his forehead into the brittle grass. He was shaking, his chest heaving at an alarming rate as he tried to drag in another thin gulp of air. Dark, fresh blood glutted between his fingers with every tremor, pooling next to him on the petal-strewn earth. Nezha watched without expression. His had been the hand that’d forced Umbra’s faltering resolve and he did not regret it. Regret was too strong a word.

                                                                                    Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be,

                                                   If we met at midnight, in the Hanging Tree.

In the disjointed, nonsensical way of dreams, a lotus bloomed from the blood-soaked soil near the base of the tree. Ballas stretched his fingers towards it, struggling to cup it in his palm as another convulsion seized him from head to foot. Sandalwood and narcissinum pooled in the air between them, ghosts of the finest perfumes the Empire once had to offer. In the latter years of the Old War, Ballas had modified it to include the scent of lotus, too. Memory pulled like a wounded tendon, and Nezha fought to make sense of it all. The Lotus was not Margulis. Margulis had been put to death, sent into the Jade Light for railing against their mistreatment. How had Ballas possibly mistaken one for the other?

                                                                                     I told you not to speak out. If you recant, then maybe-

                                                 They’re just children, not your proxy soldiers!

                                                                   How can you defend these devils, Margulis, after what they’ve done to you?!

They couldn’t help the outbursts. They had hurt her. Blinded her. And still she had loved them. The lotus had been her favorite flower, the cradle into which she’d lain them down to sleep, a whispered promise that something beautiful could grow from something ugly. After the Downfall, she had taken up that mantle – a surrogate for the love they’d lost, a new mother who’d given her children the moon.

Laughing, Nezha’s reflection playfully swung itself out of sight behind the tree and reappeared high in its branches, hanging upside down by the crook of its knees. Swinging back and forth like a pendulum, it waved to him over the dying Executor’s head.

                                                                                          Are you, are you,

                                                                                                    Coming to the tree?

                                                                                                                 Where a dead man called out, for his love to flee.

                                                      Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be…

                                                                                              If we met at midnight, in the Hanging Tree.

The sakura tree suddenly burst into flame. A ring of fire erupted around the edge of the terrace, presumably to forestall any thought of escape. Nezha tensed sharply, adjusting his stance in preparation for a fight as waves of heat buffeted his exposed skin, the air thickening with swirling embers. Dark silhouettes appeared in the flames, silhouettes with a feminine figure and a familiar petaled helmet, ratcheting forward like a horde of defective MOAs.

Horror trilled down the length of his spine and Nezha seized his wrist in his opposite hand, feeling a prism that had not been there a moment before. He waited, hesitating to fire, as the shadows of the Lotus closed in around him. They didn’t speak, but they did make a sound, a ghoulish hissing that rose into an inaudible, breathy shriek. The closest one lunged forward, hands shifting like ragged streamers of smoke-

Nezha opened fire and the apparition burst apart as concentrated Void energy lanced through its gut. Another lurched in to fill its place. Nezha cut down another, and another and another. By the time he’d taken out a dozen, he was whirling in place to keep from being overwhelmed. Fear began to scratch the back of his mind. He might have been Tenno, but Tenno bled just like the so-called immortals that’d once held them in chains, and he’d come to this place without his Warframe. As the number of specters grew, so did the strength of the firelight. In moments the garden had retreated into darkness. The tree was gone. Ballas was gone.

And suddenly the ground was gone, too.

Nezha threw his arms out for balance, but despite the incredible rush of wind, he didn’t fall very far. His feet lightly touched down on a protuberance of rock and he instantly sank into a crouch, counting out the seconds. Nothing else moved to attack at him. The shadows had disappeared.

Nezha took a deep breath, feeling his heart pulsing steadily in his chest. The tunnel that surrounded him was roughly angular, vaguely biologic, and stretched ahead for about fifty meters, pitch black except for the dirty amber glow radiating from a chamber at the far end. Moisture dripped and plinked somewhere in the darkness.

“No,” a voice echoed. “My beauty, my grace, my… my humanity…”

The syllables were oddly strained, shimmering with a metallic resonance that echoed forlornly in the gloom. There was also something deeply familiar about it that Nezha couldn’t place. He went to touch his prism and discovered, not only that it’d disappeared again, but that he could see right through his own hand. He held it up in front of his face, then directed a pointed look at the mouth of the tunnel.

It was obvious he was being led.

Moving within the Void, he traversed the tunnel to an outcropping on the other side, zigzagging his way towards the light. In seconds Nezha found himself overlooking an altogether different kind of terrace, one with a floor like the sutured cap of a skull. Fantastical, knobby spires and floating buttresses held the platform suspended over a chasm so deep that Nezha couldn’t detect the bottom. All of it was built, not of metal or forma, but of bone and secreted resin, giving the entire room an unpleasant, weirdly organic sort of quality. A chill shivered its way down Nezha's spine. It had been centuries since he’d seen this kind of architecture, but there was no mistaking it.

Something moved off to one side and Nezha hurled himself behind a spire, not wishing to be seen by whatever it was that prowled the half-light of the chamber. Footsteps clattered, like a spider scuttling on metal legs, and even that image would have been a compliment to the malformed horror that picked its way out of the darkness. It stood on a Sentient’s digitigrade limbs with the useless remnants of human legs flopping from its knees, it’s right arm so unnaturally elongated, the sheer weight of it required the connecting shoulder be braced by an artisanal sunburst of pins embedded deep into the muscle – but that at least was familiar to Nezha, as he lifted his horror-stricken gaze to the creature’s face.

Only half of Ballas’ exotic features were recognizable. The other half was a puckered wasteland of scars embedded with a glaring red eye. The fatal wound in his abdomen was gone, his ribs spread open and fused directly to an amalgam of Sentient resin that left a ragged, fleshy pit through the Executor’s naval. Forma gleamed in the baleful light, tangled in the snarl of his once perfectly coiffed hair as Ballas craned up on the pegs that now served him as feet.

“H- Hello?” he called plaintively, searching the chamber with his eyes. When Nezha did not respond, the Executor’s hopeful expression crumpled. “No,” he mumbled, shrinking back. “No hope. Only-”

His right eye suddenly exploded in a burst of light and the Executor wrenched as though he’d been struck. He stumbled back, breathy gasps wringing their way through his teeth as he rode out the discomfort. After a moment, the convulsion seemed to ease.

“Only suffering under her eye,” he finished. An arc of light cut across the chamber as Ballas began to pace, cradling his right arm in the opposite hand. “But… she gave me the gift of life. Why would I betray her?”

He shook himself again.

“Fool,” he sneered. “This… this is no gift.”

With great difficulty, as though the aesthetic now caused him great pain, Ballas stretched his elongated arm above his head, made a fist, and tugged violently at empty air – as though he were pulling something down from above. A cloud of blue sparks materialized in time with the movement, swirling around a fragment that suddenly appeared on the dais to his left. Nezha's eyes cut to it, trying to decipher what it was and if it posed any kind of threat, but his investigation was cut short as Ballas began to swivel. If the Executor turned around now, his eye – that strange, blazing eye – would sweep directly over him and something told Nezha that being caught in its glare would be unwise.

He hurled himself to another, much higher outcropping towards the back of the terrace. And although he moved on the fold between worlds, the chill air shivered with his passing. Ballas whirled around.

“Oh? Is there someone-”

When the silence stretched without answer, the Executor’s shoulders wilted.

“Only shadow,” he mumbled. “Ah… only shadow.”

He sounded so wretched that Nezha was overcome by an unexpected feeling of pity. He couldn’t say how long Ballas had been imprisoned in this dread place with nothing but his own thoughts for company, but it had surely been several weeks. Long enough to have gone slightly mad. Giving himself another miserable shake, Ballas went back to his pacing-

-and Nezha found himself wishing to return to this place in his Warframe, not as a specter existing between worlds, not for something so noble as forgiveness – but to lay a blade across the Executor’s throat and put a merciful end to his suffering. He hated him, resentedhim, but like so much that characterized his relationship with the Orokin Executor, those sentiments were murky and grey, their edge dulled by a complicated history. How strange it was, to miss someone you despised.

Ballas grasped at the air again and a second fragment appeared on the dais, stacking one atop the other.

“We saw what we wanted, those devils and I,” he continued, holding court with himself. “A lover… a mother. But now I know. She’s neither. She’s a hawk calling with a sparrow’s song. A viper, blending into wood. And her venom… it spreads not into flesh, but into your heart.”

Nezha felt his pulse jump.

“Those devils!” The Executor scoffed. “What has their great awakening accomplished but the destruction of potential allies? Don’t they see?”

A cold runnel of dismay trickled down Nezha’s spine and pooled, heavy as lead, in the bottom of his gut. The accusation hung poisonously, touching on a nerve that he’d been wont to pick at in recent years, prompting him to maintain certain channels his fellow Tenno might not have been altogether comfortable with, if he’d deigned to share the exact details. But even so, Ballas was perfectly correct in his assessment. The Tenno had made friends, certainly – both personally and as a collective – but not with the powerful, not with those who commanded armies and resources. In fact, they’d gone out of their way to make enemies of such factions.

The Lotus had not expressly ordered them to do so, and it was unlikely that they would have chosen another path regardless, but even so, her opinion had certainly weighed heavy upon the decision. And why shouldn’t it? They had trusted her. Surely she wouldn’t have intentionally steered them wrong.

“And the Lotus… just some cloud in the sky, just some shape they imagined,” said Ballas.

Another gesture towards the ceiling.

Another fragment on the dais.

“Only the Sentient is real. Only Natah,” Ballas concluded bitterly. His back was to Nezha, displaying the twisted ruin of his spine, but as he spoke, he inclined his head toward one shoulder. “So… tell me, Devil. Do you understand what must be done?”

Nezha’s teeth clacked together, his hackles rising. In that instant he knew Ballas was speaking to him and not the empty room. It was the change in his tone, in the way he’d pronounced the word, his Orokin accent adding a musical stress to the syllables so that it was heard with a capital letter: Devil. No longer a blanket statement, but a proper noun layered with scorn and twisted endearment.

Ballas turned towards the dais, looking up at the floating shards.

“The Paracesis. The Sentient Slayer,” he announced gravely, as though he were committing the name to one of his Vitruvians. With great effort, he reached up and wrapped his spidery fingers around the uppermost piece, slamming them down – one atop the other – with a clang that resonated through the entire chamber. Sparks fled like startled fireflies, leaving behind what Nezha now recognized as a massive blade.

“Hurry!” Ballas urged, his voice taking on a note of desperation as he ducked behind his palm, hiding the piercing gaze of his eye. “Take this. The idea of it! It is the only way your war can end.”

A surge of complex emotions boiled in Nezha’s gut, but he hesitated for only a moment before warping down to stand opposite the dais. He was so close now that he could hear the labored gasp of the Executor’s breath, the strain and creak of his mutilated body. Nezha lifted one hand towards the blade’s ivory hilt, then hesitated.

Who was to say it wasn’t another trap, peddled by another puppet master? He flicked a glance at Ballas, sensing his presence in the Void like a rotten tooth. Nothing had changed. The Executor’s desolate aura felt as it had always had felt, like fangs sheathed beneath immortal grace and sophisticated conversation, but not empty of venom. A bargain had been levied, a hand extended in invitation – and oh, what a familiar invitation it was. Of course there was an angle, but were their goals not aligned? Did they not wish for the same thing?

“You needn’t like it, Devil,” memory whispered with the Executor’s voice. “All you need do is obey me – until that day comes when you chew your own leg off to escape the snare, just like the animal that you are.”

They’d both known the end was to be written in Orokin blood, whether the Sentients ultimately claimed victory or not, so when the Naga drums had echoed through the halls of Lua, petals and golden confetti raining down from the towers to celebrate what should have been a day of triumph, Nezha had stoically glanced up at the promenade, past the soldiers and the sycophants, and found Ballas waiting there to catch his eye. There had been no clemency, no intent to warn in Nezha’s gaze, but the Executor’s mouth had twitched into a knowing smirk and when the drumbeats had fallen silent, only Six of Seven were ever found.

He needed Ballas’ permission for nothing-

-but in that moment, then as now, it didn’t occur to him to refuse the Executor’s blessing.

He stretched the last remaining inch and seized hold of the Paracesis’ hilt. Sparks flared and scattered, and the blade began to vibrate as though it were trying to rattle itself apart. He and Ballas instinctively tightened their grip, while images poured into Nezha’s skull until it felt ready to split from the pressure: flashing schematics inscribed in Vitruvian gold and Orokin script, like shimmering threads of spider silk.

        I’ve taken their own bones and forged it against them-

                                  Infested the blade until it curved, until it attained the most exquisite balance, and plated

                    the killing edge in the purest forma, sharpened to a mono-filament edge.

                                                                                     A scalpel against the cyst, crafted as my Frames of War were crafted-

                                                                                                                                                                                    -in blood and steel.

Ballas began to shake, fighting to keep his head turned away. Half a heartbeat later, some unseen force wrenched it around against his will, the expression on his half-melted face slack with dismay. The light of his eye bored into Nezha’s skull.

Tenno.

The light surged forward, and Nezha reeled away with a scream. The flow of images did not cease, coming faster and faster, slicing into him like shards of glass borne upon a raging flood. He saw the Sentients falling from the darkness between stars, larger than even the grandest Executorial Frigates, as battlegroups of Railjacks sailed forth to meet them. Nothing remained of that brave fleet – and beyond the Oort Cloud, the Sentients had only grown in number. The vision blurred and tilted, and the bulbous galleons scrapped together by the Grineer were torn in half as Natah’s armada advance past Saturn. The Corpus fared little better. Obelisk Cruisers were laughable compared to the technology of the Golden Lords they tried so desperately to emulate.

Unchecked, the Sentients pressed forward into the System, their scouts falling onto the Plains like malevolent comets. Unable to break free of the vision, Nezha watched as the grasslands and hilly steppes were consumed by flame. The Unum stood, her shield flickering in the fitful light, but for how long? How long before the last bastion of Earth went to her knees?

In winter, we fell upon the stars and sang as one voice…

Natah recited the words like poetry, her voice echoing across the Void, echoing back from a future not yet come to pass. Grineer fell beneath the assault. Ostron blood pooled in the folds of fulgurite glass that dotted the Plains like crumpled scars, memoirs of the last time a Sentient had fallen from a burning sky.

A constellation… an army.

Something crimson glowed in the darkness of the Void, an upside-down triangle comprised of many segments, and another voice floated on the rising tide. An imminent threat grows. The enemy rebuilds. My crew- Dax. My crew- Gone. Tenno, you will do.

“Operator?”

Laughter swelled.

Burning eyes watched from the place beyond reality.

“Operator!”

A hand seized hold of his arm, and the vision shattered like a pane of glass. Nezha stumbled back, throwing both hands up in front of his face, and would have fallen in an ungraceful heap if not for the solid grip just above his elbow. After a belated moment of panic, Nezha lifted his eyes to meet Umbra’s gaze. The Warframe was as rigid as a statue, giving no indication of the sentience that occasionally stirred within, but his posture broadcasted an aura of security that Nezha – crumpled in the former Dax’s shadow – was wholly grateful for.

“Operator, are you alright?!” Ordis cried. “Your somatic activity just went off the charts! Would you like me to lead you in some breathing exercises?”

Nezha forced his racing heart to slow. It was not the first time he’d experienced such visions, except this one had been much more, not just a composition of memories from a past that had come and gone, but something concrete. Something real. Nezha flexed his hand and felt the ghostly press of a hilt digging into his palm. He sought the recollection of its design, and it found inscribed in perfect detail. With a growing sense of wonder, he turned the cunning glyphs over in his mind. The Paracesis was more than just a blade. Like the Warframes themselves, it was divine blasphemy, a sacred conduit for the unholy Void. Nezha clenched his fist. It would be difficult; the materials needed were rare and the crafting process was far from easy. He would have to make full use of the Helminth infirmary across the hall…

…but it could be done.

If Margulis had been a mother to the Zariman rejects, Ballas had been their estranged father – and of all his hated children, Nezha had been the Executor’s favorite. Where other high-ranking Orokin traveled with a retinue of Dax soldiers, Ballas had retained a single Tenno, a shadow to walk beside him in dim laboratories where his twisted brilliance was locked away from prying eyes. Nezha had seen many of his comrade’s Warframes crafted in flesh and sword-steel, knew many of the secrets forbidden even to the Council. Such knowledge had been given in the manner of one sharing a secret with a favorite cup, or a half-tame kubrow with a gilt collar around its neck – assured that neither possessed the disposition to repeat it – but knowledge it remained.

“Operator?” Ordis pressed meekly. “Ordis wonders… what are you thinking about?”

“A new war is coming, Ordis. We must prepare.”

Chapter Text

Spoilers

Saya's Visions - MAJOR

Saya's Vigil - MINOR

The Dream always began the same.

A terrible storm, icy autumn rains lashing against the bone and wood and ceramic, icy rivulets splashing over bloody steps. The gentle, life-giving waters of the Unum's sea were as black as the Void itself. All along the flaying beaches, Infested growth choked the shallows in thick, organic mats. Black, inky tendrils tipped with poisonous light. Chitinous growths. Gnarled sinews thicker than a man's arm, pulsing with aberrant life. The stench was overwhelming. Like a corpse left in the water to rot, with a terrible, saccharin undertow - like the sweetest, most fecund honey. And the noises - ai yo, the noises! Like the bestial squealing of animals. Grunts and shrieks and moist, terrible groans.

The Infested had come to Cetus.

They came from the waves, tumbling over each other like an anthill. The people of Cetus retreated into their homes. Barred the doors. The shutters. The ones that were fast enough, anyway. The very young, the very old, and those who stopped to help them - friends, family, lovers - were quickly overwhelmed by the advancing tide. It was a terrible thing, the star scourge. Plague of the Orokin-that-were. All their brilliance, their cunning, their malice. Embered spores danced between the raindrops, filling lungs and clogging throats. What a terrible way to die! Husbands pleading with their wives to draw a blade across their throats before the thoughts in their heads were no longer their own. Parents staring into the cradle while something cracked and twisted beneath homespun blankets.

Throughout it all, Saya stood in the middle of the rain, her sheath clinging to her legs, stained to the knees in blood and ichor.

Unable to help.

Unable to interfere.

Something writhed beneath the waves. Something big. An ancient of its kind, with centuries to grow. A mountain of chitin, fang and poisonous barb. Saya didn't know if it'd been born beneath the waves, or merely slumbered there - asleep in the Unum's shadow - waiting out the long centuries. A speaker blimp floated high above the nightmare, broadcasting Vay Hek's voice. His taunts and jibes floated between the screams as claws scratched against shutters and tendrils wriggled under the gaps beneath doors. Outside of Cetus' walls, an army of Grineer waited. Hundreds of butchers, ghouls and Tusks. Waiting for the people to die, or be consumed. It was their fault. This nightmare - all their fault! Depth charges lowered into the deep, undersea mining that delving too greedily and too deep, breaking the seals on some forgotten laboratory.

"Let your precious dice decide!" Vay Hek jeered. "Even roll, you let the Infested consume you. Odd roll, MY GRINEER BURN CETUS TO THE GROUND!"

The dice?

Ah, yes. Koumei.

Saya turned, like she'd turned a dozen times. The statue of the Dice Maiden loomed over her in the rain. None could remember who had carved it, but it had been there since Saya was a girl, since before the time of her grandmother's grandmother. The effigy had no face - the Tenno had no face - but the worn, weathered stone exuded an aura of gentle kindness. Distant and remote, like the touch of spring sunlight, or the warmth of the hearth on a cold night. Little things, and yet... powerful. Offerings were scattered at the statue's feet; white, waxen candles, baskets of sweetfish and goopollas. Seasonal fruits and vegetables, crisp with vitality. Gourds of fine daku liquor. Offerings for good luck. Offerings to avert illness or accident. Entreaties to change one's fate.

Koumei! Gentle One! Weaver of Destiny-

Help us!

Saya bolted awake. There was a terrible moment of disorientation, of not knowing where or even when she was. Gradually, the sticky tendrils of the dream loosened their hold, and Saya once more recognized her surroundings. The home she shared with Konzu was dimly lit. Not in a terrible, ominous way, thank the Unum, but cozy and inviting. Homespun wool. Hand-carved statuettes of kuakas and condrocs Konzu loved to whittle in his spare time. Little trinkets, folded clothes - a lifetime of odds-and-ends, mingled as their lives had mingled, when they had married.

Saya sat up in bed. Her limbs were drenched in a cold sweat. Her joints ached, especially the dry twist in her knees. Most days she did not feel her age. Other times, like tonight, she had never felt so old. She ran both hands over her face, her thin hair - silver in the barest thread of moonlight sliding between the shutters - sticking to the back of her neck like cobwebs. Konzu grunted beside her.

"...What is wrong?"

She had woken him up, too. She wondered if she twisted or turned, or even screamed while the nightmare held sway.

"Nothing," she mumbled. "Go back to sleep."

But Konzu's dark eyes gleamed up at her, his face lined with fresh creases from the pillow.

"The dream again?"

Saya heaved a sigh. "The dream again," she admitted.

Konzu stretched a hand across the mattress and gently stroked her back.

"Ai yo, I have not had such dreams since I was a little girl," Saya continued in exasperation. "My mother would constantly have to to reassure me of this or that - that the Grineer could not get into Cetus, that the great Eidolon did not wait outside the gate to snatch me in its jaws! I was quite the nervous child. Once I dreamed of a burning mountain which crashed into the Moh and how Gara went into battle against it - riding a horse of all things!"

There was a heavy pause as they thought about the meteorite which had crashed into Plains, cancerous with star scourge. Saya chuckled ruefully. 

"How my sister laughed at my imagination! The Tenno were little more than myth then. Nowadays I am afraid what other "myths" might suddenly reappear."

"Have you ever spoken with the Quills?" Konzu asked.

"Bah! The Quills speak in circles. When Onkko disappeared, they would tell me nothing, so I cast the Five Fates. Did I ever tell you? Of all the patterns to get, it was the Blooming Flower. Ai yo, how I raged then!" Saya laughed and shook her head. "Koumei knew best."

"Her feast day comes after tomorrow," said Konzu reassuringly. "Your mind is filled with thoughts of fate and fortune!"

"Perhaps. It does not soothe me, however."

Konzu patted her thigh consolingly. "Try to get back to sleep," he said.

She leaned over and kissed his wizened forehead.

"Follow your own advice. There will no doubt be at least a dozen squabbles over vegetables for you to sort out in the morning!"

Grumbling, Konzu plumped his pillow and rolled over. After a long moment, Saya laid herself out beside him - but she did not sleep. Long after her husband's snores filled the empty house, she did not sleep. In the twilight of her years, Saya had experienced bad dreams many times before. They were always brief, fleeting things. Even the worst of the lot faded as soon as she opened her eyes. But this dream... lingered on. Closing her eyes did not erases the sight of the Infested ravaging Cetus, nor did her husband's snores blot out the memory of those awful sounds.

When the grey, milky twilight filtered through the shutters, and it was appropriate to be out of bed, Saya slipped from the covers and put a pot of water to boil. Gathering dried boba leaves, salt and nutritious balb flour, she packed them into two gourds, put a cut of tralok on the grill, and cracked eggs into a pan. As always, the delicious aromas brought Konzu out of bed, blinking and grunting. It was their way. She handled the morning meal. He prepared their dinner. It was a good arrangement for the both of them. They sipped their hot harpu in companionable silence.

When the sun was warm and high, they bid each other farewell, and left the house to attend their separate duties. He to the matters of a village Elder - settling formal disputes, hiring off-world talent - and she to Hok's forge to get their kitchen knife resharpened. After that, there was much to do prepare for Koumei's feast day. She had to muffle her laughter as Hok insinuated that his assistant's mother had hopped around while pregnant, presumably scrambling the poor boy's brains. Such bluff and bluster! Everyone in Cetus knew Hok doted on Pedlek, maintaining that daily insults kept the boy "humble, with both feet planted on the ground rather than his head planted firmly in his ass!"

With her personal business concluded, Saya wove through the marketplace. Everyone called out to her, and she made time for each and every one of them - whether it was a simple wave, or a few moments conversation. This morning, however, she noticed a certain... discomfort in the air. It was a subtle thing. So subtle she wondered if her own disturbed rest were not projecting itself on everything in sight. Pedlek was not the only one half-asleep at his post. More than a few people had bags under their eyes, clutching gourds of hot kahve like condrocs over a kill. Others seemed unusually quite. Saya passed a knot of young women listening to one of their own complain how her infant had awoken screaming in the night, and no amount of rocking, patting, or mother's milk had been able to coax the child back to sleep.

So often it is the children who truly know, while the adults scoff.

Saya quickened her stride.

She was able to keep such anxieties at bay for most of the day. There was much to do and prepare. Curtains of steam boiled from the communal kitchens as people worked on the feast; white sponge cake with sweet, sliced mapricos, grilled tralok, white dumplings filed with kuaka meat and fresh garlic, or the most popular - a fish-shaped treat made of thin, sweet dough stuffed with peca nut paste, kuaka meat, or fragrant vegetables. It was a way of tying the earth and sea together; the symbol of Mer-Sah's domain plump with the bounty of the Er-Phryah's land. 

Saya dropped in at each of the kitchens, soothing ruffled feathers and mediating petty disputes. Cetus was born of community, of cooperation - but like any muscle, it needed exercised constantly, and was prone to becoming sore and injured from overuse. Being the wife of the Chief Elder, with plenty of her own wisdom under her belt, had taught Saya a thing or two about keeping the peace. Most of her afternoon was spent putting out small fires that arose between the temple harvesters and those who wished to purchase a jug of temple kuva.  

It was tradition for each member of the family to sip the thick, oily liquid and cast the Five Fates in hopes of receiving a glimpse into the future. When was a good time to marry, whether one ought to purchase a new boat or repair the old one. Questions from all walks of life. Saya had often seen outsiders, many of then tipsy on cheap kombuchi, scoff at what they thought of as "mundane" questions. In Saya's experiences, their was no such thing as mundane. Each person's life was as important to he or she as the great wars that had tipped the fate of Origin System in ages long since past.

By the time the light began to wane, Saya was feeling worn. Her knees ached, and she thought longingly after a long bath and a jar of liniment. The sun was a molten orb on the western horizon, painting everything in a breathtaking palette of fiery reds, deep oranges, and soft, dusky violet. Where the light kissed the sea, it shattered into a million colors. Mergoos screeched and wheeled in the sunset. Dark, steely clouds were gathering, obscuring the Sentient bones jutting up on the horizon.

It might rain tonight, Saya thought. Then she thought: I should pick up a murkray for dinner.

Despite the warm glow, however, the rising wind had a bite to it, whipping her hair back with invisible hands. Saya wrapped her shawl against it and hurried to the hut where Konzu lived out his days being available to the public. Located on a spit of land near the edge of the village for privacy's sake, the hut was a large, but very modest affair - indicated by long streamers of red canvas that fluttered from the eaves. Saya had planted boxes of snapdragons, ruk's claws and dragonlillies in large pots when she and Konzu were wed. The overall effect was quite welcoming, she thought. Hopefully she wouldn't have to pry her husband from his work, or find him blinking like an owl somebody had thrown from the loft - having lost all track of time. 

Saya laid her hand on the door curtain and drew it aside.

"It is late, Konzu! Have you eaten at all today, or do I have to drop in and rap you on your skull to remin-"

She stopped short on the threshold.

Tenno.

The head that turned in Saya's direction was lotus-shaped, like a bud rising from the water, crowned with a glowing coronet of ribbons. It was taller than her, and by a significant margin. A relic of a bygone era when the great Orokin-that-were easily reached six or seven feet of soft, lotus-blue skin. A living statue of cool, white ceramic and scintillating gold, wrapped in a halo of flames. She could see creatures looping in those flames - tiny serpents, or maybe dragons - weaving around the Warframe in a constant dance of movement. Saya had heard of ephemeras before; beastly expensive, holographic lights worn by the rich and well-to-do of the System. In this case, however, Saya doubted it was mere light. She could feel the gentle heat on her skin as the creatures orbited. Hear the delicate crackle of their flames.

"Apologies, surah," she said softly. "I did not mean to intrude."

"You are not intruding," Konzu reassured her. "We were just finishing up, eh killer?"

Killer.

Her husband dealt with many of the Tenno and their myriad of shifting Warframes, coordinating various bounties, rescue and recovery missions on the vast Eidolon Moh - but only one had been gifted with the honorific of "killer". The very first who had come to their shores. How Konzu told the difference between them was a mystery to Saya, and she had mixed feelings about the pejorative. She'd  had never been able to decide if it was a mark of union and friendship, that the Tenno allowed itself to be called by pet names - or was simply too polite to point out her husband was a demented old fart.

What had began as a wary, tentative association had solidified into a solid partnership. The Tenno maintained good relations with the village of Cetus. They, like so many others, often came to trade for information, silks and resources. Even so, the Tenno were a secretive group. No-one saw them unless they wanted to be seen.

The Tenno acknowledged the situation by dipping its chin - but it was not looking at her husband.

Saya could feel the weight of its eyes - if instead there were eyes behind that expressionless helmet - on her face. Gazing, not at her, but through her. It put it's head on one side. Slowly. Like a wild vasca eying its dinner. Saya quickly put the metaphor from her mind. It came back swiftly as the Warframe took a step towards her. It closed the distance with deliberate purpose, giving her ample time to retreat. Saya did not. She tilted her head back to keep the Warframe's face in view. The dragons opened to include her in their endless orbit.

"You have my thanks, surah," she said softly. "For everything you have done, and for whatever things my idiot husband has said when he forgets to eat his lunch."

"I resent that," Konzu grumbled.

The Warframe lifted its hand. Even its fingers were dipped in pure aurum. No, not aurum, Saya corrected herself, thinking of a conversation she'd had with the Forgemaster. Forma. An Orokin alloy whose secret to production had been lost to brooding time. It was why bits and pieces of it were so valuable in Ostron society, encompassing everything from knife blades, to jewelry and family heirlooms. It stretched those gleaming fingers towards her face, leaving Saya somewhat uncertain of it's intentions. Surely not to pat her on the head! Its index and middle fingers touched the center of her forehead. And they was cold, those fingers. Cold.

Images knifed through her skull. 

                                 The Infested overrunning Cetus. 

                                                                                      Darkness and rain. 

                     The screams of the dying.

                                                                   Vay Hek's jeering laughter.

The Warframe's hand twitched like it'd touched the surface of a griddle, breaking contact with her forehead. Startled, Saya quickly took a step back. She and the Tenno stared at each other for a long moment, its hand hovering at half-mast between them. Slowly, its arm fell back to its side. As it brushed past her, Saya caught the fading scent of fire-hardened steel and the finest kyara incense mingled with the lick of blood not yet dried. The curtain rustled behind, and suddenly the Tenno was gone without a word. Saya let out the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Konzu was looking at her oddly.

"...is everything alright?" he asked.

Saya lifted a wizened knuckled and rubbed her forehead. The vision had been brief, but startling in its clarity, like the Tenno's unseen eyes had peered directly into her thoughts. There was something else, too - the impression of a young boy with hair the color of purple wine, his glowing eyes - ai yo, those eyes! - boring into her soul like ice picks, strange and horrible as an endless night where black stars rose. Her heart hammered against her breast. And yet his expression had been so kind. So kind, utz.

"Saya?"

Her husband had not seen the Tenno's fingers against her forehead.

"It is nothing," she said, letting her hand fall. "It has been a long day, and I am famished with hunger!"

"And you lecture me about eating," Konzu groused. "I thought you were in the kitchens all day."

"That is beside the point."

"Seems relevant to me."

"Everything is relevant to you. You should have been a merchant, you old bean counter."

"And you should have been a flesh harvester with that nagging voice of yours."

Leaning on his staff, Konzu rose from the cushion behind his low desk. Saya took the hand he was holding out to her, and Konzu kissed the back of her knuckles - tasting sweat and garlic and balb flour dusted on her skin - before folding her hand over his arm, as though they were youths courting 'neath the maprico trees. Despite her weariness, and the unpleasant shock she'd received some moments ago, Saya couldn't help the smile that crept across her face.

"Flatterer. I am ugly and old."

"I only see the light of the moon," said Konzu sweetly.

"Those are the cataracts."

"Ah, well. Lucky for our marriage that I cannot see how unfortunate you look."

She kissed the side of his face, and leaned against his side as they walked, basking in the pleasant glow of being loved. The marketplace, far from slowing down for the evening, was just getting into the swing of things. Warriors returning from the Eidolon Moh gathered at the stalls and communal kitchens, filling their bellies with grilled squid and sweet potatoes, and nutritious slices of temple flesh. Those leaving work for the day were busy picking up ingredients for the evening meal. And of course, there were the usual handful of off-world visitors dressed in shimmer-silk or simple bodygloves, soaking in the myriad of scents and sounds unique to Cetus.

"I need to pick up our knife from the Forgemaster," said Saya. "And we should purchase a mirelurk for dinner."

Then walked  little further before she added: "And what job did you burden the Tenno with tonight?"

"Bad business, utz," said Konzu, shaking his head. "Mikhal has not been home in three nights. His sister is worried he has run afoul of Grineer."

"Mikhal the miner?"

"The same."

"That is bad news. He was told not to wander so far!"

"Mikhal does as Mikhal does," said Konzu, shrugging.

"And he is likely to pay for that attitude," Saya muttered.

They stopped at Hai-luk's stall first and purchased a fresh side of mirelurk wrapped in clean brown paper. As always, progress was slow. Everyone wanted to bend Konzu's ear to whatever problem they were having. Night was falling by the time they made their way up the avenue of metalworkers. They passed a large crowd gathered in front of the puppet-master's theater, young and old alike sitting cross-legged on thick rugs, while enchanted tourists recorded the affair on handheld captura devices. The bright sound of a shawzin plucked at the cool night air. Konzu grinned.

"I loved these when I was a boy," he said fondly.

"You still do," Saya corrected him.

They stood a moment and watched the ornate puppets - dressed sumptuously in silks and miniature jewelry  - reenact the story of Ulgen and Elrik, the warrior and archivist, who sought to fight against the corruption that blanketed a world that was no more. Ulgen, kindhearted and gentle, had spoken words of reform. Hulking Elrik, born in the fires of war, sought to rebuild a newer, better order from the ashes of the old one. Unable to reconcile their differences, they became bitter enemies - destined to fight across the stars. A favorite of the people Cetus, the tale was designed as a lesson, to show what happens when differences of thought sow conflict rather than strengthening the whole.

Someone in the crowd, Corpus probably, scoffed. Saya was idly scanning the crowd for the naysayer when her gaze fell on two young boys huddled together in conversation, paying no attention to the theater.

"-and I'm telling you the demons are asleep beneath the water," the older boy said in an annoyed tone. "The Unum protects us! So do the Tenno. There is no reason to be afraid. Besides, you are getting far too old to let bad dreams frighten you!"

"But Mermu," the younger boy protested, his hair long and plaited in a youth-lock, "I saw it! On Koumei's feast day!"

"And last week you saw a Tenno disappear into solid rock!"

"But-"

"Ai yo, it was only a dream! Now would you be quite? I am trying to watch."

"You have seen it a dozen times," the younger boy muttered.

Saya suddenly felt cold. It was as she'd feared. It was not only she that whose rest had been disturbed by putrescent visions. More than a few people across Cetus had experienced the same - especially the children. All at once, Saya wished she'd had the courage to lay a hand aside the Warframe's arm that afternoon and explain her concerns. If their was anyone who could have laid those concerns to rest, it would have been the Tenno. Konzu squeezed her hand on his arm.

"Did you forget your shawl somewhere? You're very cold."

"Let us go home," said Saya quietly.

The knife was picked up at the forge, but only due to Konzu's insistence. Saya's thoughts were elsewhere. When they got home, she barely paid attention as her husband filleted the mirelurk and setting it to grill. Unlike many homes, they had their own small kitchen so they wouldn't have to brave the chill during the winter months. Saya's thin hands, which had begun to ache in the evenings, mechanically rubbed heating liniment into her throbbing knee - the pungent, warming smell of cinnamon and clove filling the air. She didn't notice the mirelurk had been served along with a bowl of simple brown oriza until Konzu rapped her forearm with his finger.

"Are you still concerned about that dream?" he asked.

Saya capped the bottle of liniment. "It has troubled me all day," she admitted at length. "I fear that it is more than a mere dream - but a Fate Dream! Many people I encountered today are plagued by the same vision - especially the children. Unless Cetus has fallen to the grip of madness, I do not believe it is coincidence."

"Fate Dreams are not uncommon," Konzu pointed out reasonably. "I've had one or two in my day. As they Quills say, they are only possibilities - a glimpse at a single point amidst a hundred maybe-futures and countless maybe-worlds! The fact that we have decided to eat mirelurk this evening has already wiped out half of those possibilities, and conjured a thousand more."

"Bah! Why do you not become Quill?" Saya grumbled. "You certainly sound like one!"

"Unum forbid," said Konzu. "It is hard enough keeping one future straight, let alone many. You will find me stark-naked on the Plains baying at Lua in a fortnight - and then you'd have your hands full beating away other women with a stick, eh?"

He winked at her meaningfully. Saya rolled her eyes, but she reached across the table, and Konzu enfolded her hand in his.

"If you are still upset in the morning, we might try informing the Tenno," he added. "To put your mind at ease."

"I wish I had spoken with that one earlier," Saya mumbled.

"Spilled milk," said Konzu, again very reasonably. "Besides, maybe you will rest well tonight. Why don't you heat a cup of moon milk? It might help!"

Then finished their dinner, and set about the quiet hum of a restful evening. Konzu worked on his latest figurine. Saya busied herself with rolling the aromatic woods, roots and resins for the little cones of incense she made for their personal use, setting them to dry in the rafters of the house. Before she'd married Onkko, she'd been apprenticed to an incense maker. Even after all these years, the soft fragrance and simple, repetitive task never failed to bring her some measure of peace.

When the hour grew late, she poured a clay mug with heated milk and spices, and added a generous handful of what the Orokin-that-were used to refer to as tasoma - to invite pleasant dreams. By the time she laid down to sleep next to Konzu, the weariness of the day had crept up suddenly, and despite the anxieties she felt (blunted as the were by the soothing drink), she fell asleep against her will.

Gentle Lua rose in the east, gleaming between scudding patches of clouds.

Tenno lisets descended with their Void cloaks engaged - moving between the fabric of reality, not quite here, not quite there, surfing the grey twilight that existed somewhere between the folds. Warframes deployed from their docking cradles, appearing suddenly as they plummeted to earth. Despite their immense weight, they landed in silence. As Cetus slumbered, they crept into the shallow cliffs near the shoreline where Koumei's shrine resided, forever looking out to sea.

A few stubs of candles were burning, throwing a faint light over the moss-covered folds of Koumei's statue, hands delicately folded in her lap - the posture of a devotee, of an Orokin maiden at a tea ceremony whose complex rules and social graces had faded into obscurity. Waiting. A few kuakas skittered away as the Warframes approached, abandoning the offerings of fruit and fish they'd been dining on in favor of crouching in nearby holes, beady eyes shining.

There were two of them tonight - the Marshal of the Central Alter that hung above in the night sky, and the one known as Nyx. The Harbinger of Insanity. A cacophony of voices in constant harmony (discord) - the sound of thought itself, that being equivalent to a form. Their combined light drifted over the shrine, merging in the handwoven jute and damp, trembling flowers before flashing in brilliant starpoints on bits of forma scattered amongst the offerings. Thunder rumbled ominously.

"Cast your net wide," said Nezha without speaking. "I want everything within range"

Nyx slowly turned her head to look at him. She was a fearsome creation, this Warframe. Horrifying and eerie, and so beautiful, that to gaze at her too long was to invite the whispers of madness. Crowned like a tyrannical Empress with a sharp crest of forma-plated, Infested bone. Beneath its curve, liquid thoughts swirled beneath a transparent skullcap. The call of the Void; to jump from a high place, or step out into the blackness of space without an EVA suit - just to feel that last and final moment when your skin turned cold and your last breath was snatched away. Of all the dread forms Ballas had molded in his lab, Nyx was perhaps the most frightening. How could you fight against what's inside your head?

"Even the kuakas? (You might know/unite/think in terms of cheese and filling the grass with offspring.)"

Nyx spoke in two voices; the first confident and firm, the other no more than an eerie whisper.

Manifest and unmanifest thought, irrevocably entwined.

"Everything."

Nezha went to his knees with both hands placed on his thighs. Silent as darkness, Nyx moved to stand behind him. Both hands rose to frame his helmet in a living cage.

"Are you certain you do not wish me to do this alone? It might be... difficult. (Roiling, moaning, this realm of ours. In madness, lost shall die.)"

Fass.

Nezha cracked the Infested gristle in his neck.

"I am prepared."

I have seen worse, he did not say, thinking of the Void which hung about the Zariman, or the blackness in the Other's eyes.

He had a feeling Nyx heard his thoughts anyway. Thunder rumbled again, and the sky split open with the first rain of autumn. Chill with the promise of winter, the falling droplets were heavy and cold, a balm to the parched grass and tired, wilting mapricos growing out on the Plains. The candles at Koumei's feet snuffed. The only light now came from the Warframes themselves. Brilliant, unholy, Void.

"Then we go. (And die the little death.)"

There was a flash of poisonous light as Nyx's hands turned radiant with light and dancing Orokin script - insufficient words to describe the madness of chaos, and the compulsion of dreams. There was a catapulting sensation, of his mind being flung into the abyss, where blackened eyes (stars) gazed, accused, and denied. Of himself being ripped from himself. Destiny twitched, like an over-wound shawzin- and the Tenno entered that realm of potential, kuva-soaked from the Unum's consumed flesh, and dreamed.

The Dream began again.

Once more Saya found herself standing in the rain, each droplet stealing a little more of her body's warmth-

-but this time, she did not stand alone.

Others gathered on the stairs with her. Raf, the cosmetics seller. Tuya, who was getting married soon. The twins, Lola and Lana, born nine winters ago. The nervous boy from the puppet theater. Nakak, with her eyes heavy with wisdom beyond her young life, standing without her mask. A sullen girl with pale hair, whose parents had drowned out to sea.  A stranger in Corpus silk who had come to have his fortune told. A crowd of fifteen or twenty people, blinking in the icy rain.

The Infested were coming.

Saya felt warmth against her back.

The crowd parted around the Warframe that Saya had encountered that afternoon. She stared at it in mingled awe and relief. Many times she had lived out this particular dream - but always by herself. Never with others. Never with Tenno. The crowd rustled nervously, whispering. Saya's eyes shifted to the roof of the nearest hut. Another? she thought, awestruck. Crouched on all fours, bestial, hunting, this one was wrapped in a mantle of green. Not the vibrant, full green of summer, or even the rotted green of infection - but the emerald vibrancy of arsenic, the poison of kings.

There was a chilling screech - and the sound of Vay Hek's gloating.

"But- but Mermu said the monsters would sleep forever!" the youngest boy cried. Saya recalled his name. Poma.

There was a scrape of steel as the Tenno hefted a magnificent polearm. Over seven feet in length, it was bladed at both ends - decorated with ribbons and a blade guard in the shape of a lotus. A weapon that could cleave armor and chitin as easily as Hai-luk could gut a khut-khut. Saya suddenly thought she understood.

"No," she said softly. "This nightmare is a gift. A chance to change our fate!"

The fiery Tenno glanced over it's shoulder at her.

"It is difficult to change fate's course." 

It did not speak, but she heard the words in her head - a boy's voice. So young. So very young!

"We share this dream," said another voice - a young girl. "This places stands on the sandbar between Form (Jahu) and Void (Lokh). Here, the weft may be plucked, the tapestry rewoven. (Little by little, your efforts shape your fate!)"

Her voice chased itself, whispers scratching through Saya's head like the claws of kuakas. It made her want to itch her very brain. Ai yo, what a terrible thing that voice! How easy would it be for such a voice to whisper terrible things, awful things - things that peeled the soul and laid it bare. Madness would be sure to follow.

"We must push back against the weight of possibility," the boy added.

"You cannot alter the course of fate without choice. (If wishes were fishes, beggars might ride.)" the girl(s) added.

The Tenno wanted them to fight.

"How?" Saya whispered.

The answer came to her with the sudden, all-knowing clarity of dreams - like knowing you could fly, or breathe beneath the waves. Offerings. Offering to Koumei, the dice-maiden. The Puppeteer. Offerings to Fate itself. In this intangible realm, where corporeal law held no sway, it was the act of offering that mattered. Collective desire made manifest through the choice to act. The Warframe twirled its spear. Rain spat and crackled against the flames.

"We will hold the Infested at bay."

"You will dream (wish/fight/act)."

Someone in the crowd whimpered.

"Enough of that!" Saya ordered, not unkindly. "Quickly, get inside! We must make offerings to Koumei to push back against this tide!"

There was no argument; everyone dreamed the same impossible dream, had heard the same impossible (possible) words. Saya shooed them towards the nearest house. The door stood stood ajar, beckoning them inside. The interior was illuminated with beeswax candles and breath lanterns, flickering light mingled in a dream-like dance. Empty baskets were heaped on the floor - but nothing else. Outside, the Infested screeched.

"There is nothing here!" the Corpus stranger cried.

"Yes there is," said Nakak quietly. "If you believe there is."

Suddenly her arms were filled with dried oriza stalks, scythed down in the field on reaping day, their nodding heads heavy with nourishing grains. The girl nodded, too, as if this made perfect sense. Sitting down with the bundle in her lap, she began to plait the strands together. Koumei's Cords, thought Saya. Hung up up on the dice-maiden's feast day to symbolism wishes for a rich harvest.

"BEHOLD!" Vay Hek's gloating voice boomed, "the fearsome Ostron counter-attack: GIFT BASKETS!"

Several people cringed. Nakak continued to braid, unperturbed.

"Come!" said Saya briskly. "We have work to do!"

Rain drummed on the roof like a hail of stones, sluicing from the eaves in little rivers. In dreams, Saya's body was free of the little aches and pains of old age. She went down on her knees, her thoughts consumed by what gifts she could possibly offer. Almost automatically, she thought of sandalwood, cassia, and the powerful, earthy aroma of patchouli from the distant jungle clades. Roasted choya, vetivert and myrrh. Even the terribly expensive wood of the kyara tree, and ingredient she'd never been able to afford - but this was a dream, was it not? 

All things were possible!

The ingredients appeared between heartbeats, spread on a squares of plain linen. Saya got to work, adding water to the binding power, and kneading the incense ingredients into a fine paste, which she formed into little balls, cones and sticks. All around her, the people of Cetus dreamed. Some of the other women were dressing a fine basket of gopollas. The twins had summoned sheets of parchment and pots of ink, writing wishes on zigzagging strips of paper. Tuya cleaned vegetables in a basin of clear, cold water. The infested shrieked, and Saya noticed that if her concentration started to slip, the ingredients in her hands would no longer hold their shape.

Outside, the battle raged.

Ropy guts sluiced onto the putrid ground. Bones cracked. Gristle tore. The tide was endless-

-but so were the Tenno.

Unable to help himself, Poma climbed onto his knees beneath the shutter and peeked out. A body struck the side of the rocks and slid down the siding, leaving a gory smear. Poma clapped a hand over his mouth to muffle a scream. Whatever malformed thing lay in the mud, it was impossible to tell what it had been. It had a man's hands and feet, but hunched along on all fours like a beast, glowing tendrils sprouting along its spine like a mergoo's crest. It dragged itself through the mud towards Poma, towards the fragile little house where everyone worked.

A sword stabbed downwards through the creature's back, pinning it to the mud. Poma lifted wide eyes to the Tenno's face as it tore the blade free. Emerald light blurred into a halo through the sheeting rain. A malevolent angel, standing with endless, patient malice. Somewhere in that narrow chin, Poma was certain there were teeth. Dozens of gnashing, zippered teeth like a murkray's grin.

"We are monsters (born to slay monsters)," the girl's voice whispered.

Another deformed thing leapt over the rocks. The Tenno disemboweled it midair.

Sliding away from the shutter, Poma folded paper fish with shaking hands. Yellow fish. Blue fish. Fishes covered in little pink flowers. Fishes for good luck, his mother's voice said. Poma thought they could use all the good luck they could get. Little by little, the people of Cetus filled the house full of baskets - fragrant incense packed alongside crisp vegetables, fish and parchment, and wishes aplenty. As they did so, Koumei's fingers threw another cord round the wrists and ankles of fate, binding it like a puppet dancing on strings. In this place, everything was possible; the faces of the Eternal scattered like the infinite stars in the sky.

"Let your precious dice decide!" Vay Hek jeered. "Even roll, you let the Infested consume you. Odd roll, MY GRINEER BURN CETUS TO THE GROUND!"

In an instant, the hut was gone. Saya's hair and veil plastered to her skull as she and the others stood beneath the driving rain, clutching baskets of wishes. Koumei's statue loomed as lightning painted a jagged streak across the sky. The sea that stood at the base of the Unum lashed in the storm, but Saya could not tell if the angry waters were the result of the wind, or the Infested life roiling beneath the waves.

"Place the offerings!" the boy Tenno ordered, his voice resounding inside her mind.

The people of Cetus laid their gifts at Koumei's feet. The Quills see what had been, and what will be, but they did not share their knowledge. For the ordinary folk, the shrine of the dice maiden served as an oracle. A chance to snatch a glimpse of their future - to change it, even - and Saya felt the world (dream) shudder with every basket they placed. For generations, the people of Cetus had prayed to her as a deity, her origins obscured by time as a stone is obscured by moss. The revelation of her true nature as Warframe had not changed their minds, however. Having seen the terrible, awe-inspiring power the Tenno wielded firsthand, the people of Cetus figured they'd had the right of it all along.

Hurled to her knees, Saya could only watch in horror as something moved beneath the putrid waves. It heaved itself up on shore, a nightmarish mukade over 7 meters high, every one of its many, many legs like a scythe used to harvest oriza. An Oni of the ancient world, who must have been birthed when the Orokin-that-were still walked the halls of Lua. Squeals and meaty pops erupted beneath it's feet as it trampled the lesser beasts of its kind. Gripping Nakak about the girl's narrow shoulders, Saya swept her against her side and held her close.

"May the Unum have mercy!" she croaked.

Next to them on that exposed cliff, wet with blood and sea-spray, the Tenno crouched and prepared to spring.

Kumihimo.

A handful, a dozen- a hundred razored wires filled the distance between them and the approaching horror. Each one glowed with the diamond clarity of a cobweb strung in sunlight; some brighter, others nearly invisible in the storm. Running full tilt into them, the smaller Infested beheaded, amputated, and disemboweled themselves against them. The mighty Oni stopped and pranced, feeling the bite of the wires against its breast.

"Look!" Poma cried in a shrill voice.

He was pointing back towards the shrine.

Saya turned to look.

A petite Warframe was perched on the coronet of forma that backed the shine, a spear balanced across her shoulders. Tall, as they all were, but tiny; a young maiden, with delicate hands and spike healed feet, clad in thick folds of pseudo-clothing - a crimson skirt, a delicate white shirt crossed over tiny breasts. Even the suggestion of long hair had been rendered over that expressionless face, a crown of metal flowers floating several inches above her brow - shedding holographic petals onto her shoulders. It were as if weathered stone had been brought to life.

"Koumei," Saya rasped.

"She walks amongst us again!" Tuya cried.

The Warframe dangled unnaturally. Her right arm and shoulder were hiked above the level of her head, hoisted up by luminous filaments, and her toes didn't quite touch the arch of the shrine. A puppet, Saya thought, thinking of the beautiful bunranku that night at the theater - Ulgen and Erlik, actors in a play, controlled from behind the stage. Koumei's head ratcheted up as someone- some thing tugged on the filaments. Delicate hands grasped at the polearm and gave it an expert twirl, pirouetting down amongst them a little too slowly - buoyed by invisible strings. Here in this dream, the Guardian of the Five Fates herself had come to aid them. Was she really here? Then again, Saya thought numbly, were any of them truly here? Somehow, she didn't think so.

"All that we see (or seem) is but a dream (within a dream)," the female Tenno whispered unhelpfully.

The Oni roared, the sound tearing at Saya's ears.

The Tenno kicked off from the cliffside.

They soared like condrocs unfettered by gravity. Landing in the midst of the swarm, the emerald frame (Nyx!) the voices whispered. sent a wave of energy crashing through the wave of Infested - infiltrating their minds, stripping them of every vestige of free will. Orokin script flickered between their bodies. (Obey!) the voices demanded. It wasn't difficult; there was so little of their minds left, individuality subsumed by the greater Hive, there was no independent thought - only base impulses. Hunger. Rage. Hatred. So easy to turn it back on themselves...

Obey!

                             Obey...

OBEY.

The Infested stopped, ichor splashing between their claws. They turned on their heels - sitting, squealing, baying around the Warframe's feet like trained hounds. Nyx lifted a condemning finger. As one, the creatures surged back towards the Oni. Biting and clawing, tearing through chitinous segments. The mukade reared back, half it's body rising off the ground.

The Marshal leapt onto its neck.

(Nezha) the voices acknowledged. (Mara Lohk! MaraLohkmaralohkmaralohk)

Driving its bladed polearm into the monster's neck with a spurt of gore, it whirled the gilded ring from its back in a dance of fire and ribbons, and hooked it beneath the Oni's upper jaw as it opened it's mouth to roar. Teeth and pincers gnashed, hurling droplets of venom, as the Warframe braced its feet against the monster's skullcap - riding it as one would ride the extinct beasts that once roamed the Eidolon Moh, what Tesonai had called "horses".

And Koumei danced.

Sacred envelopes appeared around her in a ring, orbiting. Koumei snatched one up and broke the seal. Saya's breath caught. To open a fortune charm and gaze at the slip of paper inside was to invite ill fortune! The mukade bucked furiously, nearly unseating its rider. Vay Hek's howls of laughter rang out across the water.

"NONSENSE! You pray to NONSENSE!"

Discarding the fortune, Koumei furiously seized another.

In their blind rage, some of the Infested turned back on Nyx. Guts and pulsating, malformed organs flew as she sliced into them, painting her skin in their infected blood. Claws raked against the rocks as dozens more tried to mount the cliffside to reach them, scrambling over each other like crabs in a bucket. Poma screamed as one nearly seized his ankle. Nyx flung out a hand. A fusillade of luminous, transparent bolts slammed the creature into the rocks.

Again and again, Koumei broke the seals on her envelopes - searching for the one that would turn the tide. One future of a hundred thousand. Each time she cast one aside, Saya could feel the world slipping around her. Flickers of those discarded futures flashed in her mind - the Tenno trampled, Infested beasts snuffling at their corpses, Cetus in flames as the Grineer picked it clean - rising up like a flash in a pan before sinking back beneath the foam. Ai yo, was this how the Quills viewed the world? A constant shifting of fortune where nothing, not even the dawn, was ever certain? No wonder each and every one of them were mad!

Nakak broke free of Saya's grip and crawled towards the shrine. Grabbing up the wet stub of a candle, she cupped both hands around it, shielding it beneath her scrawny body. Somehow, a tiny flame ignited to kindle the wick. Nakak held it up to everyone to see. Despite the pounding rain, the flame did not extinguish. Such is the impossibility of dreams.

"We stand with you, surah!" she shouted in a reedy voice.

In the midst of chaos, the people of Cetus lit their candles. Some cupped them between their hands, as Nakak had done. Others held theirs out to be lit by another, delicate flames springing to life in the moon-soaked gloom, until the shrine was bathed in their gentle flicker. A beacon of hope. Warmth against the bitter storm. A gentle cup of tea offered to one who is hurting. A nursery of tiny flames (stars), each one a fragile, desperate hope.

It wasn't much (it is enough!)

One of Koumei's envelopes twinkled, flashing gold for just a heartbeat. The Dice-Maiden snatched it up.

The Marshal seemed to catch fire. A second set of arms burst from his shoulders, each one wrapped in living flame. With impossible strength, all four hands gripped the ring and wrenched the monster's head back - exposing its soft, putrid underbelly. Nyx's army of the enslaved rushed the Oni's legs, tripping it up, binging it down. Koumei seized her spear. She launched forward like an arrow shot from a bow, leaping, twisting, dancing beneath the razor-field of deadly wires. The tiny bells attached to her spear rang merrily as her final leap buried the weapon beneath the monster's throat, so deep the blade punched through the top of its head.

Lifting skyward, the terrible mukade sluiced sideways like a felled tree. It fell with a crash, hurling a flume of blood, salt-water and ichor that splattered Saya's face, killing hot. Like water from the cookpot. Bladed legs twitched and curled in a paroxysm of agony as the beast doubled and twisted on itself, making the most terrible of noises.

And then, just like that, there was silence.

Cowed, the lesser Infested stopped in their tracks. Vay Hek's voice rose obnoxiously.

"HOW?! How could the mighty Oni fall to TENNO TRICKERY!?"

"Silence, you bloated oaf," said Saya wearily.

The Tenno turned to face them. The Marshal, the Dice-Maiden, and the Harbinger. Numinous they were, vanguard of the Orokin-that-were. Beautiful, terrible, impossible things. It would have been easier to accept them as mere specters of dreams - or even as the shadows of a nightmare - not physical things that walked the waking world, the dread precision of flesh and bone. And yet, linked together in this place beyond reality, Saya felt such ferocity and compassion, she was nearly moved to tears. Of the hundreds of millions of would-be futures, this one would not be amongst them.

"Dah-dap, surahs," she whispered, her throat tight.

As one, the Tenno brought their closed fists to their hearts, bowed-

-and dropped to their knees in the mud, lifeless as statues.

They're all puppets, thought Saya, in a terrible flash of insight. Dangling on Tenno strings.

It was getting hard to think. In the usual way of dreams, the details faded first. Like frost on the edge of a window pane. Saya was perfectly aware of the fact that, impossibly, she was waking up. Despite it all, she tried to remain asleep just a little longer, holding the image of the Tenno in her mind. The stench of rot and filth, so clear mere moments ago, were suddenly hard to grasp - even as memories. The smells that mingled in her nose were soft, clean linen and the tang of rising vinegar. The lingering pungency of joint liniment. The scent of her husband's skin. Sweet, like wildflower tea.

Saya closed (opened) her eyes.

She was not surprised to find herself lying in bed. A clear beam of sunlight sliced through the shutters and fell across her chest, gleaming with floating motes of dust. The air whispering through the gap in the window smelled sweet and clear. It had rained last night, and the tired Eidolon Moh - weary after the long, dry summer - rejoiced.

"Good morning," said Konzu brightly.

Saya turned her head on the pillow.

Konzu was propped on her elbow next to her, smiling. Saya had no idea what to say to him, so she settled on "The sun is shining."

She had no idea what she meant by that, either.

"Well, you were sleeping so comfortably, I did not want to wake you," Konzu replied. "To be honest, I did not want to get up either. So many people bickering and complaining about how the last batch of wine tasted musty, or someone's kubrow shitting in his neighbor's onions. Ai yo, sometimes I wish we lived in a hut somewhere on the Eidolon Moh!"

"No, you don't," said Saya, softly. It still felt strange to speak.

"I see you slept well. I told you some of that drink would help! Too much vobi cheese you ate, yeah? Just bad dreams."

He kissed her on the forehead, the stiff white bristles on his chin scratching against her skin.

Just bad dreams.

Thanks to the Tenno, and the courage of those who had stood in the rain, that was all they would ever be. 

Feeling both like a bystander in her body, and aware of the smallest things with unmatched clarity, even the simple breakfast they shared tasted like the finest banquet. Saya dressed herself in a clean robe, wiped a spot of shaving foam from Konzu's chin with her thumb, and they left the house to take on the day. Koumei's feast day. The clean, damp air smelled like spicy bao, like coils of incense smoke and baskets of flowers offered to Koumei's shrine. She and Konzu shared a sip of temple kuva, the flavor coating their tongue in an odd, almost repulsive mixture of blood and raw honeycomb, and Saya threw the Five Fates. They were old things, those dice. Scrimshaw carved by a wandering Arbiter over two generations ago.

"The Ascension!" Konzu whistled admiringly. "What marvelous luck. Maybe an old shrew like you will finally catch the eye of a good man, eh?"

She elbowed him in the side, blowing the breath from his lungs.

"I hear from Hai-Luk that Mikhal returned to Cetus early this morning," he continued, chuckling. "It is not half a bad as we had feared. The old fool had taken a gourd of kombuchi with him and drank it all in one sitting! Imagine his face when a Tenno came upon him in a puddle of his own piss!"

Saya passed the dice to the next petitioner in line.

"I doubt piss was the only thing he was sitting in," she said distastefully, but secretly, the news was very glad to her.

All around them, Cetus laughed. She caught Nakak's eye as the scrawny girl (honestly, that child needed some meat on her bones!) boldly climbed into Koumei's lap to drape a braided loop of oriza stalks and dragonlillies around the statue's neck. If they shared the memory of that place outside the waking world... some things were best left unspoken. Saya lit a cone of incense and placed it amongst the myriad offerings.

"Lok-heb, surah," she said quietly. "And thank you. From the bottom of my heart."

Chapter Text

Spoilers

Whispers in the Walls - MAJOR

1999/The Hex - MINOR

It was midwinter in the Origin System.

Once, before the Exodus, before the Artemis Accords and the ecological collapse, snow had been common on Old Earth. These days, it could only be found on the highest peaks of the Himadri - far above Earth's vast, polar deserts and equatorial belt of toxic jungle - and occasionally on the low-lying steppe known as the Eidolon-Moh, mostly due to the shielding effect of the Unum. A damaged, greenhouse world caught on the edge of perpetual summer, the wheel of seasons meant comparatively little on Earth, and with the tundras of the Orb Vallis warming a little more every day, snow had become somewhat of a novelty in the System.

When it began to fall on Deimos, Loid knew their time was short. The deep, organic heat of the Infested was too great for it too gather in any great amount, of course, but the flakes whirled and danced in the air, soft as eyelashes, and katabatic winds came rushing down from squirming heights. It was quite impossible not to read it as some type of omen. The countdown clock was about to strike midnight-

-and Loid was not prepared.

He'd done all the necessary research, poured over every scrap of documentation his Albrecht had left behind. In truth, Albrecht had made the crossing to 1999 many times. A thoroughly messy, distracted sort of man when it came to organization, he collected artifacts like a corvid collected shiny objects - not for any sort of aesthetic or sentimental value, of course, but because even the smallest things could be pried apart and studied. As the Entrati family crest so boldly attested: No God Above Knowledge.

In his more philosophical moments, Loid wondered if that brash statement had angered those very gods, and whether amends could be made by offering flowers, food or incense at some inchoate pagan shine. In any  case, the Netracells - and oftentimes the laboratories themselves - had amassed a bewildering array of... stuff. Videocassette recorders. Compact discs filled with upbeat music. Piles and piles and piles of sodding paperwork, seemingly stuffed into a satchel at random. Bulky cathode-ray monitors, not unlike the archaic POM-2 into which he was currently staring. He'd forgotten what he was supposed to be doing ten minutes ago.

Behind his oculus, Loid's eyes felt gritty. He fought the urge to place his head on the desk and grasp for a few, precious moments of respite. The POM-2's ancient hard disk rattled in the silence, filling the air with the smell of static and lukewarm dust. Loid's weary gaze drifted over the primitive collection of "photographs" displayed on its bloodless screen, trying to restrain a bitter laugh at the thought of a man like Albrecht strolling about like a tourist. 

The ancient city-state of Höllvania was strange and primigenial to look upon. Cobbled grey stone, plaster and timber, bloated hazmat structures ballooning around low buildings that rose no more than four or fives stories high. Other photographs showed immense, steel-and-glass constructions known as "skyscrapers". A pretty title for things Loid thought were both structurally unsound and terrifying. Like a child stacking blocks, or Icarus undaunted trying to touch the sun with waxen wings.

He knew the city was in the clutches of midwinter, and it was unreasonable to blame the trees for their lack of foliage, but even so, he was unable to shake the bleak feeling the city conjured in him. Rats may not have been to blame for the city's predicament, as other, even more ancient plagues had been - but deadly, skittering things still waited 'round every corner. Unlike the weaponized Infested it would one day become, the Technocyte was still dependent on technology as a rule, but Loid theorized that the local mammalian population had been all but obliterated. Squirrels, rodents. House pets. Zoo animals left to starve in their pens. Organic fodder for the spreading rot.

The desolate streets looked bitter and empty, like a bed gone cold. It was an easy metaphor for Loid's weary thoughts to clutch at, fingers stretching across the sheets into the faint hollow where someone once lay, hoping for a lingering shred of warmth. The scent of Albrecht's skin -  a cold fougere of shaving foam, grey pine and bergamot - wrapped around him with such clarity, Loid could almost believe that if he turned, the man himself would be nearby. He knew better than give in to the compulsion. The scent was no more real than the voice he sometimes heard when he was alone. Quiet. Entreating. Insistent. Whether it was his own haunted halls of memory, or the meddling of Albrecht's demon, Loid didn't know - and he didn't want to.

Snow was falling on Deimos, whose labyrinthine sprawl of laboratories lingered so close to that membrane between worlds.

He'd messaged the Tenno promptly, and now waited for his arrival.

The POM-2's screen abruptly went to black. A fleet of small kitchen applications took flight across the monitor, followed closely by slices of bread turning loop-de-loops. How they were flying was anyone's guess. At least the appliances had wings. The sight was so absurd, Loid couldn't help but snort. The ancient computer had formerly displayed a primitive star-field in response to inactivity. A crude, but functional piece of ephemera meant to prevent the phosphorescent "burn in" endemic to these old relics. Loid wondered who had fiddled with it while his back was turned. Honestly, it could have been any one of the Cavia. Fibonacci would have thought it humorously low-brow. The bird probably just enjoyed watching the motion. And Tagfer would have altered the program simply to be cheeky, especially if it got a rise out of him.

For a brief moment, Loid simply watched the appliances flutter past.  In the black spaces between them, he could see his own pale, distorted reflection staring back from the glass. His gaze didn't linger long. It was unwise to peer too deep into reflective surfaces around this place, or turn to follow the shadow at the corner of one's eye. There'd been a saying, back on Old Earth: do not stare too long at the moon, because it will eventually blink. It doesn't like being watched. 

Taking a deep breath, Loid got to his feet. A faint wince crossed his face as his knee and low back protested the movement. He may have wiled away the last millennium in a dreamless sleep, but he wasn't as young as he once once - and hours of crouching on the unforgiving marble floor, contorting his body into impossibly tight corners to access circuits not meant to be accessed, had taken its toll. Loid flattened a hand into the small of his back and arched against it. Something popped, but provided no relief from the discomfort.

There was a formal tea set on the edge of the desk, and far too many cups to count. Instead of washing them as they were used, he'd gotten into the habit of selecting another when his current one had gotten too unhygienic. The detritus was scattered across the desk, with more then one sitting precariously close to the POM-2's archaic keyboard. Albrecht had been guilty of that particular offense more than once, something that'd annoyed his tidy, fastidious assistant to no end. Having registered the mess, a frown tugged at the corner of Loid's mouth.

He possessed many skills worthy of his station. Discretion. Attention to detail. A grasp of the current fashions and formal attire, lest the family be inadvertently embarrassed. He was also a capable scientist in his own right, with a broad grasp of Void-dive physics, temporal anomalies, and Conceptual Embodiment, with plenty of practical knowledge besides. The art of tea brewing, however, brought him a more personal pleasure. A measure of serenity in times of stress. The temperature of the water, steeping time, the subtlety of scent rising on delicate, rising curlicues of steam.

Most of the cups polluting his workspace had little cottons strings dangling over the rim. Cheap, instant varieties doused with water at a boil. Irritated, Loid picked one up by the rim. There was an inch of cold, over-brewed liquid sitting at the bottom - and no way to tell if it'd been brewed that morning, or the prior evening. As the workload piled up, unforgiving of the even the most trifling of error, the delicate greens and serene herbals had given way to dark, oxidized brews and ginseng roots scalded for every ounce of energy they could spare. Loid gave the cup a sour look.

His back was still troubling him. It would not do to meet the Tenno hobbling like an old man. Flinging open the desk drawer, Loid added several painkillers to his palm and washed them down with the last of the bitter liquid. He'd been unable to eat anything more substantial than fortified glasses of milk for two days, and the mixture was not welcomed by his stomach. He pulled a disgusted face.

You can do this, he told himself. It is not so difficult a thing.

He'd done it before, after all.

"Mr. Lo-oid!" Bird 3 trilled. 

Loid seized the hem of his waistcoat and gave it a tug.

Dignity. Dignity at all times.

He met the Tenno at the entrance to the Sanctum. He had become familiar with many of his Warframes, but the one descending the stairs to meet was not one he'd previously made the acquaintance of. A vision of the feminine form rendered in ceramic and sword-steel, this one was more elegant and ostentatious than most. The bluish glow of the teroglobe's flames reflected on cold, bone-white surfaces and glinted back from jointed, oddly-segmented talons protruding from the platform's forearms. Folded back to tuck against its elbows, not unlike a bird at rest, Loid thought of wings. Wings that'd been striped of flesh and connective tissue, until all that remained were bones.

"Wonderful to see you, Tenno," he said, earnestly. "Come. I have much to explain."

The Warframe fell in behind him. Despite the high-heels, it's footsteps made no sound against the rare cuts of marble. Silent as the flight of a bat. It was through a deep and abiding sense of trust in it's Operator that Loid was able to turn his back on the dread thing without fearing for his life. As he walked, however, he felt the telltale press of Transference enter his consciousness. Like holding his hand close to a source of heat - invisible, but identifiable all the same.

"You're favoring that leg again. Are you in pain?"

Warframes could not speak. They could only scream, or roar or howl. 

But the Operator, the Tenno from which the platform drew its unholy power?

That was another matter entirely.

It'd taken Loid a good deal of time to be comfortable with the notion, knowing, on some instinctual level, that the Tenno was choosing to be gentle. Should he deem it necessary or his comfort irrelevant, that fleeting touch could become a lance of burning steel, an invasive hurricane of force that would strip his thoughts - drench them, twist them - until his very sense of self had been subsumed under the Tenno's much greater will. A living vessel to puppet as it might.

Loid grit his teeth, sorry he hadn't taken the painkillers a little earlier. A tool must be in tip-top shape, after all.

The thought rose unbidden. Loid guiltily shoved it away.

"I am well, Tenno. I assure you," he said, not disingenuously. He descended the stairs at a brisk trot.

Tagfer joined them at the bottom, curiously sniffing at the newest Warframe. His crest flared at the scent of blood.

"...You, uh, you do much hunting in this one?" he asked.

"It's a War Platform, Tagfer," Fibonacci huffed as he swam over. "Surely even you must realize how moot that statement is?"

"Yeah, well, this one's... different. Sickly. Like it's been taking a bath in the stuff."

"Rosters must have taken a hit, I daresay," said Fibonacci slyly.

Tagfer rolled his eyes. The fish just didn't get it all at. What would something that sucked water through its bulbous head know of the deadly, den-smell of a predator? Like gallons upon gallons of blood glistening on cold whiteness, arterial spray pumping from hearts impaled upon shattered altars of bone. Footsteps advancing through the powdery snow, lips peeling back from killing teeth. The short fur along Tagfer's spine bristled. He sneezed and shook himself. Thankfully, their Tenno was a predator of predators, and not them. Hooves clattered as he leapt a bundle of crap Loid had strewn all over the ground.

"Mind the cabling!" Loid shouted after him, exasperated. 

He gathered himself, then turned to face the Warframe.

"You recall I mentioned a "connection" in the Vessels that I believed I could exploit? To start with, I should clarify that Albrecht made many successful journeys to the Plague Year of 1999. Most often, he returned with technology. Things like that charming antique on the desk over there. Other times, the things he brought back were of a more organic nature. Blood and tissue samples from his... "volunteers". Specifically, the proto-frames Excalibur and Mag."

There was a long pause.

"I regret that I do not know their names," Loid added quietly. "Albrecht never mentioned them in his notes, nor in any conversation with me."

"What a surprise," Tagfer deadpanned. "People get names, and he doesn't treat anybody like people. Just things."

There was a glint in the creature's eye, daring Loid to refute what'd been said.

"Arthur," the Tenno's voice said softly. "His name is Arthur."

"The Excalibur frame?" Loid huffed an empty laugh. "That does track with his usual sense of... humor."

"Hardy har," said Tagfer, coolly.

Ignoring the creature's attempts to barb him, Loid indicated the Vessel in the center of the room with one slim, strong hand.

"In our work to combat the Indifference, I helped Albrecht combine the proto-frames' unique genetics with elements of the Grey Strain - it's predominate feature, as you well know, being it's propensity for absolutely gargantuan proportions. Combined with certain wisdoms gleaned from the Warframe mandate - acquired at no small risk, I assure you - we were able to create the Vessels, with "Arthur" being the progenitor for the male body-frames such as this this one."

As he spoke, Loid stepped over the mess of cabling descending from the Vessel; some as thick as his leg, others a delicate nervous system of fiber optics and spun forma. Most of the latter were hooked into Albrecht's casket, recently repaired to the best of Loid's ability. He trailed a hand over a splendid obuls. Many of them were still missing.

"When my Albrecht made his final crossing, he entrusted me to destroy the instruments. He implied that the Entity would follow him - a hound to the hare - and the destruction of the equipment would prevent it from ever returning to our time. To "protect me" from its unblinking gaze - though he never said as much. It was ever Albrecht's way, saying nothing. Allowing others to fill the blanks in whatever manner they needed to make his silence palatable. Laudable, even."

The Tenno's head swiveled towards him like a security turret painting a target.

"Buddy, please don't tell me you bought into that spiel," Tagfer scoffed.

"Of course I didn't!" Loid snapped. 

Once, perhaps. But no longer.

Tagfer's gaze narrowed, his crest fluttering.

Loid took a deep breath, cursing himself for the outburst. 

"Considering that the enemy yet lingers in our esteemed hallways," he continued, calmer now, "and given that I refuse to believe that Albrecht would make such a casual error, I can only conclude that I was bade to destroy the equipment to keep others from following in his footsteps. Mine, perhaps. Yours, almost certainly."

He peered at the Tenno over the rim of his oculus, aware of the sudden, barb-like intensity of it's gaze.

Like it, too, was trying to figure something out.

"As the "chosen Operator", he no doubt meant you to remain in this time to pilot the Vessels. Perhaps during the next phase of the Sequence. Perhaps as a redundancy, should Albrecht's plans fail. He was very good at constructing redundancies. In any case, my destruction of the casket was... very thorough. I have repaired the device to the best of my ability and hardwired it into the Vessel, as you can see."

The dregs in his stomach were not abating, If anything, the roiling discomfort seemed to be getting worse - reaching into his chest and contracting the muscles there, forcing his breath to come swift and shallow. He resisted the urge to flatten a hand against his middle, afraid that he couldn't show functionality, he'd be benched in favor of someone more capable. The Construct, perhaps. The bastard had even given it an oculus.

"...You, uh, you alright there?" Tagfer asked, his tone cautious.

Loid cleared his throat.

"Perfectly," he responded crisply. "Fortunately, you will not be needing to use the casket. Not in the same manner as Albrecht used it, in any case. Given that this Vessel is genetically identical to the proto-frame Excalibur, they are in essence the same Warframe - size not withstanding. My plan is to use to casket as a lensing device, what Albrecht's notes on the era refer to as a "Star Sixty-Nine." A primitive way of calling up the last coordinates inputted to a device. If you use Transference to synchronize with the Vessel at that moment, and if all goes well, I believe you will seamlessly transition from piloting it to piloting... Arthur. Distasteful as that sounds."

There, he'd gotten it all out. The bulk of it, anyway.

Talons clicked against the marble as Bird 3 bounced through the mess with more dexterity than something of his bulk should have been capable. Loid's eyebrow twitched, refraining from yet another warning to mind the cabling, his thoughts going to how much extra work he'd need to put in if the avian disturbed even one of the coaxials-

"I'm still con-fused," Bird 3 muttered. "What does Papa Albrecht want in the long-gone anyway? Wuk wuk wuk."

He butted his head beneath the Warframe's arm.

"Scritches please!"

The Warframe's fingers carded through the avian's brightly colored feathers, causing a pleasant shiver and a iridescent flash of color.

"I dunno, what's the douchebag ever wanted?" Tagfer muttered sourly.

"Language!" Loid growled.

Honestly, these Cavia.

Tagfer made a rude noise.

"His notes speak of the radiation wars, of the incandescence of atomic fire," Fibonacci chipped in, bobbing up and down the water column of his tank. "Tagfer has been, mmmmm, very diligent in combing through the contents of the Netracells. Albrecht has not been so generous as to leave us a roadmap, but he speaks rather frequently of the "uniqueness" of the time. The analog world at the cusp of emerging into a new, digital area. A time like no other in history!"

"Papa said we were "unique" too," said Bird 3 sadly.

"We still are, at that!" Fibonacci told him.

The mood was very close to taking one of it's frequent dips.

"I also promised you would not go unarmed," said Loid, quickly jumping back into the conversation. "Your equipment should follow the Transference stream, just as if you were performing an Extraction-jump from the labs. As I mentioned, Albrecht was able to exchange objects from both ends of the timestream. However, I suspect there must also be a casket on his end to facilitate this. Until it is located, or until you can contrive to build another - a task I do not envy, given the technology of the time - you may have to make do with "local" hardware."

To Loid's credit, his voice was steady, even laced with a touch of humor. It was easy to pretend, easy to casually puppeteer himself. Disconnected. Dissociated. The ever-faithful, diligent servant. The Warframe's head canted to one side, not unlike Kalymos when she'd been roused from sleeping in the most inconvenient of spots - the slow, lazy tilt of a predator deciding if it was worth it. Almost as if it sensed his insincerity. Loid swallowed hard.

There was more he wanted to say, and even more unsure if it was wise to say it.

Well, better to hoist himself by his petard.

"Tenno, I must warn you that despite my efforts... this is all mere speculation. In the end, I was merely Albrecht's research assistant. This cobbled-together device of mine may not work at all. Or it may work improperly. You may not arrive at the correct time, or you might suffer irreparable harm. Of what sort, I dare not imagine. One must also consider the possibility of harm to the proto-"

"Oh, pish posh!" Fibonacci interrupted. "He's just being modest, you know. Waste of time, if you ask me. Being modest."

"I don't recall anyone asking," said Tagfer, without heat.

"Hmpf! Lucky for you, ahem, lower lifeforms, you're getting my unfiltered opinion - free of charge!"

"Well, something's unfiltered around here."

"Wot?! Are you- are you implying that my tank is filthy?!"

"Just calling it like I see it, fish. I can literally smell what you had for breakfast."

"What did we have for breakfast?" Bird 3 asked. "Did we... did we even have breakfast?"

"Yes, we had breakfast," said Tagfer patiently.

"Mr. Loid doesn't hardly eat anything. Not juicy-fruit, or dewy-green. He just feeds us, and works and works and works..."

"Do not change the subject!" Fibonacci gurgled, butting in. "My tank is perfectly pristine!"

"Suuuuure," said Tagfer lazily, unrepentant mischief gleaming in his eye. "If that's the case, where do you go the bathroom?"

Someone laughed, but the sound was utterly... wrong.

"You're staaaaaalling, Loid."

Loid's eyes daggered towards movement on the stairs, forgetting that all-important rule: never glance at Lua. One would think, given the commonality of mirrors and the fact that humanity had evolved past daubing ocher on the walls of caves, the sight of one's own likeness would have ceased to hold any kind of supernatural power. But there was a certain, special terror in seeing oneself, not in reflection or painted likeness, but duplicated. It dragged one hand down the banister, glancing at it's fingertips in disgust. The gaze that bent itself on Loid over rims of an identical oculus was as blackened as the stars it'd felled.

"This must be awful hard on you, day by day, ripping off little pieces of yourself and lying them on the altar..."

That voice, that horrid, resonant voice... was his.

It gave a little mock gasp.

"Oh, why don't you try begging? You wanted to beg last time, didn't you? But you were too proud."

I was too proud.

The taste of bile in Loid's mouth was as thick as tar. He heard anew the sound of crunching metal, the sputter and pop of damaged circuitry. Obols popping off, coins for the Ferryman, under every punishing swing of the Ekhein. Again. And again. And again. Until he'd gone to his knees beside the ruin of the casket, chest and arms burning as bitterly as his tears.

He took the the bloody cat instead of me.

The Indifference started to grin-

-and Loid threw up on the floor.

There wasn't much to expel, just a thin, acidic splatter of tea. Tagfer leapt aside with a startled yip. The Warframe moved suddenly. So fast, it barely seemed to move at all, rather that it was over there... and then suddenly here. It's arm flew up alongside Loid's head, the drape of its sleeve abruptly blocking his view of the stairs, while it's terrifying, bird-like talons clicked forward like golden scalpels - encircling him in a protective cage of blades.

"Don't look at it!"

"Tenno, it- I-"

Temporarily witless, Loid didn't even know if he meant it as a warning, or a protest.

"I know it's there. It gives only what you offer it. Look at me."

The waterfall of silk might have been impeding his view, but Loid heard the laughter anyway. Resonate, malicious, laughter. He must have flinched at the sound, because there there was a noise like a doorway opening between worlds, and the Tenno abruptly stepped out of his Warframe - halving Loid's personal space in a heartbeat.

He was painfully young - and already nearly as tall as Loid himself. No stocky Ostron with dark, common eyes, or some Corpus-born autocrat with pallid skin - but fine-boned and beautiful, with a delicate nose and pointed chin, his neat hair the exact color of Martian shimmerwine. The scientist in Loid couldn't help but note that the Grineer would give anything to get their hands on such pure, untouched stock from before the Fall.

Loid had seen the boy before, in fits and starts, over the long months of their acquaintance. And time had not dulled the feeling of... obscenity. Like walking in unannounced on someone in the bath. This hidden component, this stark reminder that Warframes, for all their terror, were mere battle envoys for something much, much worse was terrible enough on its own, let alone the realization that this child - his eyes blazing star-points of unholy light - was himself a vessel of some third, ethereal quality beyond mere flesh and bone. A magician by any other name. And Loid knew enough of the arcane to know that to wield magic's dreadful power, one must also be willing to pay magic's dreadful price.

He dropped his gaze to the floor. Partially out of respect for the Tenno's nakedness, and partially out of sheer embarrassment. To be in the presence of such towering might with cold sweat oozing down his back and his teeth burning with acid, like a toddling Kaelli throwing up in the aircar. Void, he would have given anything to return to that moment, a wad of napkins in one hand and reassurances on his lips. At least his stomach felt better, at any rate.

The Tenno's warm hand slipped beneath his chin, and tilted his face back up.

"Look at me," he repeated, more firmly this time.

Loid's throat made an audible click as those unfathomable eyes searched his face.

"What's wrong?" the boy pressed. "Whatever it is, let me help. Please."

Loid suddenly wanted to scream. What was wrong? Bloody EVERYTHING.

Consummate coward, that he could not give voice to the choking rush of emotions.

It had been a year since he'd awakened from that cryopod, though the chill of it still haunted his marrow. Sometimes he still awoke in the night, expecting the frozen sleep to have worn off, the device to have malfunctioned, and find a dark sarcophagus lid arcing over his head. It hadn't happened, of course. Albrecht's machines had performed admirably, despite the march of centuries. He'd been forced to hit the ground running - having fallen asleep mere moments ago by his reckoning, the sting of Albrecht's departure still lodged in his breast like a thorn. In the intervening months, it'd been a struggle to find a new equilibrium. There were thousands of deeds to perform, a million tasks laid out for him, ranging from basic maintenance, to cataloging supplies, to playing command-and-control when the Tenno descended into the deep labs.

All the while, the Murmur tested their defenses.

A few months previous, he'd bullied the Tenno into taking him into the labs to do some repairs on the Auricle. He was perfectly capable of handling himself in a crisis, thank you very much, as the holstered Zylok should well attest. For all his warrior's skill, the Tenno was neither a scientist nor a mechanic. They'd gotten by for the most part, with Loid talking the Tenno through most repairs over comms, but some things required the touch of someone actually qualified to do the work - not a bullet to a conduit in order to release pressure build-up. Loid shuddered at the memory.

The Tenno had been obstinate - but so had Loid.

Eventually, they'd descended into the deep labs. The space had become cavernous in the millennia while Loid had slept. The blueprints no longer matched reality; and Loid would know, having designed half of them himself. Rooms had been doubled, duplicated. Other spaces had vanished entirely, only to reappear weeks or months later in an entirely different place. Entire sections of architecture had been torn away or transmogrified into something else. If any further proof was needed of the Sanctum's dislocation, of it's tenuous hold on reality, it was those citadels, the bleak, barren spaces of titanic grey blocks where endless storms raged, and the rough sand that danced through the miasmic half-light was not sand at all, but aeons of powdered bone.

The Warframe had stood guard over him as Loid had shimmied beneath the Auricle to enact repairs. There'd been a sodding incursion, of course. Dislocated hands and legs, crawling up through rents in the floor. He'd escaped without injury. At least, none inflicted by the Murmur. The ones to his fingertips had been self-inflicted. While the Tenno fought, Loid had continued his work, shedding his gloves by prying them off with his teeth - needing the extra dexterity bare fingertips would provide in such a cramped space. He'd flayed them raw against the razored filaments of copper and auron as he'd striped their casings and frantically twisted new connections together.

Such shoddy work, and so blatantly against safety protocols, too.

The Tenno had to drag him by the arm as they retreated to the safety of the upper levels.

He'd found an earthenware jar on his desk the next morning, filled with healing beeswax and tallow, a milky spray of macerated roots rising from the earthy sweetness of honey. A remedy from distant Cetus, undoubtedly. He'd gratefully applied it. Below the scent of herbs, there was the distinct, chemical astringency of nepenthe - a rare, microbiotic fluid for healing wounds. So expensive, only the wealthiest Orokin could afford it; an unheard-of miracle in the current state of the System. Somehow, the Tenno still had access to a supply.

And it wasn't just the jar.

Sometimes, when the voices drifting up from the labs were too loud, the days too long, or contents of the Netracells particularly grievous - the Warframe would take up position at the corner of his desk, radiant with the heat of its ephemera, but far enough away as not to be directly underfoot. Legs crossed into lotus, its sorcerous power keeping it afloat nearly half a meter from the floor. Silent. Formidable. It was there as Loid worked tirelessly, trying not to listen to the strident coughing of the Cavia - and again when he woke to find himself on a nearby chaise lounge, covered by a heavy crimson duvet. He'd fallen asleep at his desk, and the Tenno - that dreadful Warframe - had carried him across the Sanctum and put him to bed without awakening him.

Like it'd cared, or... at least had the capacity to pretend that it did. For his health, if nothing else.

Loid couldn't help but clutch the realization like a life-raft in a storm, no stranger to this kind of awful self-delusion.

And now-

Now he was standing over this casket again, ready to say goodbye. Exactly a year to the day.

What next? Another millennia tucked away into a cryopod? The thought was nearly enough to make him retch again. His place should have been with the family upstairs. Instead, the bloody Construct had gotten that honor, while he was placed in cold storage - a tool awaiting the day it could carry on it's master's grand work. Loid clenched his jaw, ashamed of his hateful thoughts.

Do not punish the Construct for existing, he reminded himself. You know he has been nothing but loyal, that their misery wounds him as surely as if it were his own. Place the blame where it truly lies. It is you that cannot bear to look in a mirror and see what you really were to him.

          Rark! Papa loves us! Papa won't let us become dead things! Wuk Wuk! ...Right, Mr. Tagfer?

Papa

     We trust in Papa's wisdom-

Papa

          Papa-

     Forever kissing the fist that beats you, eh fish? That's all we ever were: "tag for disposal".

          I SAVED YOUR LIVES! Do you really think Albrecht thought to freeze you? To preserve you? That was me! In the hope that we might find a cure-

Look at these things. Lying around. ABANDONED. *gasp* Like you, Loid!

Through it all, Loid was intensely, excruciatingly aware of the Tenno's small hand against his cheek. Why that gesture, of all he could have chosen from? Collapsing into himself without moving an inch, Loid clutched at the Tenno's wrist - desperate to prolong this last and final moment. Like clutching a dagger buried to the hilt, knowing that to withdraw the blade, to unstopper the pulse of blood, would surely be his death.