Chapter Text
In her nightmares, she sees them dying.
In her dreams, Eris struggles through a narrow shaft, webbed in filth, slick with miasmic fluid, elbow-crawling at a downward angle toward the antechamber within. In places, the canal is so narrow her shoulders and hips get caught and she writhes, the fieldweave suit scraping bruises into her thighs and ribs. The air is alive with screaming – the marrow-shuddering multi-tones of the Hive. She claws toward the green glow of toxic light. The muck slithers with maggots, like the stone is rotten flesh. She imagines them burrowing into her skin, hallucinates them tunneling black honeycombs in her body, making a nest of her veins and vessels. In her nightmares, sometimes, she pukes blind worms and beetles until they burst through her papery skin and she is reborn, screaming.
But mostly, she reaches the mouth of the tunnel just in time to watch Sai open her soul like a conduit. She arrives in time to see her final blade dance. Sai lights up the dark in blinding blue-white – a black chasm separating her from Eris who peers out like an insect from the tunnel-gored wall. The swarm recoils like an organism. Sai flickers. She vanishes. She cuts through them like scythe through rotten wheat, cleaving them apart in ionic lines of Light and electricity. Sai Mota moves through them like chain lightning jumps, an invisible blur marked only by the dead, flashes of light in the dark. Instances of illumination. So fast it strobes the black in freeze frames of carnage and evisceration.
Sai Mota moves on the current of her Light, linked inexorably from one death to the next target, like electricity seeking infinitely to ground. She cuts and cuts and cuts until her blade finds the blade of the cursed Knight, the knife striking like a bolt from storm-heavy sky. The contact ignites the room with a sound like a thunder clap. For an instant Sai holds, suspended, hilt-to-hilt with a monster twice her fragile size, held magnetic to the strike by pure killing intent and Light – then Sai’s weapon explodes. The Hunter slams into the far wall, her right arm blown off at the elbow.
She crumples like a doll.
Eris doesn’t remember screaming but she screams now. She screams in the darkness and the sound loses itself among the voices of the Hive. Sai Mota rises, one-armed and grinning. Her remaining blade, broken at the hilt, she casts aside with a clatter. Staggers. She falls to hands and knees, panting. Bares her bloody teeth. She screams and punches a fist through the chest of a dead Acolyte on the ground besides her and from the rotten corpse she yanks serrated ribs.
She grips one like a knife and says, in Japanese, “Come to me, motherfuckers. Dance with me, you dead sons of bitches.”
Omnigul rises, chittering, laughing, one arm extended – an invitation, the path between her and the Hunter choked with Hive. Sai Mota makes it twenty meters into the writhing wall of thrall, tearing through them, one-armed, one blade, screaming her defiance – Omnigul stops her at twenty, her fist in the Bladedancer’s heart.
Eris wakes screaming.
Someone has their hands on her shoulders, holding her still with palms filigreed with Light. For a phantom instant, it burns like white phosphorous and Eris shrieks. She thrashes. Her aggressor cries out when she strikes them across the jaw, knocking them back and in the instant between the blow and the follow through, sanity returns. The dark confines of her ship come into focus. Her bunk, her walls marked with protective wards, Warlock sigils, Hive seal script. The back hatch is open, unlocked from the outside. Only one has the access pass to enter.
“Ikora.”
The Tower’s Warlock Vanguard turns, wiping blood from her lip. The metallic scent drifts coppery and powerful to Eris, intimate. She blocks it out, but extends a hand, shaky, palm down, toward the Warlock. For an instant, her friend remains where she is, shaken not by the blow but, likely, the dark seethe of the once-Guardian’s thoughts in her nightmares. Even now it hangs as psychic resonance in the room, dissipating like fumes. Oily and mad.
Then, gently, Ikora lifts a hand palm up to touch Eris’.
“I felt you, Eris.”
“You did not have to come.”
“Yes, I did. Your ship is still anchored off the Tower plaza. If it had gone on like it did, you would have woken the Praxic initiates who bunk two floors below. Their dreams would have taken darker shape.” A jolt of panic. “Your wards are wearing out. I will reforge your castings.”
“I apologize. I can take my ship out of the City as I should have –.”
“No.” Ikora says it and in the single word, Eris feels the flare of ancient willpower. It reminds her of Eriana in the moment before Ikora’s temper cools. She sighs and takes Eris’ hand, gently, in her own. “I mean… you do not have to do that. It was nothing, Eris. Just a dream.”
“My dreams are dangerous. Afflicted. You know better than any how darkness fastens tight to those who have walked too long in shadow. I should not be near initiates.”
“No. You are an example to them. They admire you, you know and I will always recommend them to you in matters of will. There have been none who resist the dark as you. They should learn from you.”
“Zavala would despair to hear you say such a thing.”
“Zavala can unclench his asshole and allow light to pass through for an instant.”
Eris snorts.
“Ah,” says Ikora, fondly. “She laughs. Praise be.”
Eris swings her feet to the floor of her ship and Ikora joins her sitting on the sparse sleeping platform. Side by side they share the silence for a moment, the veteran Warlock casting cool eyes about the small craft. It’s a box really. A bed, a small work station behind the cockpit, recessed storage and lavatory facilities. She is inspecting the seal work, the runes and bindings carved and painted into the walls, floor, and ceiling. There are ashen talismans, ribbed weapons, strange baubles that seethe. She carefully pretends she didn’t see them. Instead, she runs distracted fingers over the lines scratched into the wall beside her.
“Toland’s?”
“Yes. Before he lost himself in in the tunnels, he taught me. You were right to cast him out. In the end, all he wanted to was find her.” She needn’t utter the name for Ikora to know of whom and what she speaks. “I know now that, at least, I am not as mad as he.”
“You were never mad, Eris. You merely did as needed, thought as needed, to survive your mission. And for that our debt cannot be paid.”
“It is paid. By the six who did what we could not, it is paid.”
“Perhaps, but not my debt to you.”
“I know nothing of it.”
Ikora smiles, briefly, at her then presses her hand to the wall. The runes that mar the ship’s interior briefly glow and pulse to a strange heartbeat. Ikora observes this a moment, then removes her hand and inspects her palm, as though the creases in the flesh might divine something for her that her brief psychic inspection did not.
“These wards… the fresh ones ward off the influence of others. Even out here, you fear Hive corruption?”
“Ancient evil has a long reach, Ikora. Even in the Tower a Warlock can be struck down by what finds their mind as it roves. You know this better than any.”
“I do.” The Vanguard makes a gesture, fingertips to her heart, then gently she bend down and touches the floor. Instantly the guardian wards flare hot then set fast – like metal struck molten then cooled, the new shapes insulated with power. The woman sits back, exhaling slightly. “That should keep out anything short of a god with a temper.” A wry smile. “Eris Morn – she who angers the gods. Herald to their destruction!”
“I hardly held the blade that did the deed.”
“No, but that fireteam carried your banner and your weapons and your words with them into the abyss. They carried your story – the ghosts of your comrades, their sacrifice, your will. They were your blade, Eris. They answered you and you delivered them to victory.”
“I am no hero.”
“You are, but I will not argue with you.”
“Let the young ones become legend. I only want peace.”
“Peace she says! While she fashions fireteams to slay gods.”
Ikora laughs and for a moment all is well. The ship hums, purring with new power, infused with Light and in the passing of one second to the next, there comes an incandescence – happiness, fleeting, but there. Rey is not wearing her usual heavy jacket but stripped down to a sleeveless tunic, her bare arms lines with dark purple tattoos, complex lines that pulse with an arterial tempo. Eris resists the temptation, always there, to lift a hand toward her friend as one might to a fire in the cold. Her Light moves around her, as natural as blood through veins, alive inside her and the part of Eris that is dark forever turns its face toward her sun.
If Ikora knows, senses, her longing… she is careful to ignore it.
“Do you need to discuss it? More and more, I feel that you dream as a Warlock dreams. Speaking aloud their contents may reveal ulterior shapes.”
“No, not in this case. I dream of them, as I always do. How they fell.”
Ikora lets that hang for a moment, concern in the low hum of her emotions, like a current behind her eyes. “You… rarely speak of their fates. Beyond the report of their deaths, beyond the records you managed to recover from the ones you found, you don’t speak of it.”
“Because it is unspeakable.”
“Then do not speak of it if it is not to be told to others. Only know that I will always listen.”
“Gratitude for that, Ikora Rey.”
Ikora begins to say something, but it’s then that a flicker of pale light flashes suddenly from her shoulder and the Guardian’s Ghost materializes gently in the air between them. A quiet companion, Ikora’s Ghost, it rarely speaks to others. It looks back and forth between them, curiously, its anterior sections rotating with a laconic slowness. It floats off, investigating the small ship space and for a moment Eris and Ikora say nothing, simply watch her small partner as it scans things. Bored quickly with this, it drifts lazily back to them and with no hesitation drifts down to rest on Eris’s knee.
“Oh.” Eris says it before she can restrain herself.
Ikora’s Ghost ignores her small exclamation. Ikora smiles. “We are not frightened of you. You know that right?”
Eris hesitates then, with the back of a single fingertip, gingerly strokes one small panel on the Ghost’s tiny shell. She cannot admit (though she suspects that she can hide nothing from Ikora in this matter) the sudden and inexplicable damage it does her – the trust of a Guardian’s Ghost. The ache in her, where the Light once lived – it would be false to say that the darkness lifted, that the pain receded, the emptiness filled. It would be more accurate to say some small breath kindled an ember in the dark, bringing it briefly and brilliantly aglow.
“I do now.”
“Well,” says the Titan, so freshly minted the metal of his endoplating still shines. “I guess we could take down that nest in the Cosmodrome. If you like. I mean, it’s not much but…”
“Your aid in whatever capacity will not be forgotten, Titan.”
He smiles. Exo smiles are tricky and Eris out of practice with them, but by reflex she feels the smile in the flicker and pulse of his bio-lights. By body language he’s pleased, proud, maybe a little abashed of himself for feeling that way. He takes a token from her and leaves back to his fireteam who huddle eagerly to hear his report. It is, in a word, cute. The newer Guardians have been approaching her more freely now, their mentors no longer warding them off like parents shooing children from a fanatical street vendor.
It’s been three days since she woke violently and the morning sun has yet to break gray skies over the City, the great shape of the Traveler silhouetted behind a gray veil of fog. From here Eris can lean against the railing, observe the almost perfect sphere and its broken edges – hung open like a belly wound. Eris still feels it, even now, that small flame still within her – just a shadow now of their strange god’s gift. She watches the City and the Tower begin to wake.
“Fine day for killing Hive.”
Eris looks upward.
A head pokes out over the edge of the overhanging balcony above her. Cayde-6 waves. He has been sitting up there for some time she suspects, though she never felt him there. He hops down from his perch, landing with a bounce besides her. The Vanguard Hunter is cheerful. Beaming from beneath the hood of his battle-torn cloak. The construction of his face is such that he seems perpetually pleased and surprised though that is a trick of his inflexible facial construction. The Exo could be gut shot and hemorrhaging coolants and still look that way.
“Howdy.”
“Good morning, Cayde. What brings the Hunter Vanguard?”
“Well, Ikora sent me. Seems to think that one of my Hunter problems might be in your wheelhouse.” He folds his arms across his chest, a friendly flicker in the flux of his eyes. “Was wondering if I could bark up your tree for a minute, get your opinion.”
“What is the trouble?”
A Ghost spins up from Cayde’s shoulder. “Hive ritual site. Hellmouth tunnels. A forward patrol pushed into a new chamber about two miles down from the Temple of Crota. Found evidence of something. Ikora and a few matrons in the Praxic order have expressed alarm about the confluence of dark energies around the sigil site. There is a small council being held and –”
“The Warlocks are shitting bricks about it,” says Cayde summarily.
His Ghost glares its small single-optic glare. “Yes. Well, the fireteam was a single cadre trio. Expert forward scouts. King Killer Cadre, actually. Arguably the strongest Hunter troop for Gunslingers of the variable shot style. Very capable and Hive-oriented since the assault on Crota’s dimension and therefore –”
“Them boys and girls don’t fuck about.”
“Yes, Cayde. The ritual site matches previously researched Hive arcana from the Vanguard libraries. The writings are by and large forbidden and only the highest tiers of the Praxic Order even have access to such knowledge. There is only a single known instance of such a ritual. The last known event that left such a trans-dimensional scar is the suspected transformation site of the lost Hunter, the owner of the cursed weapon, Thorn.”
“The Warlocks are scared someone’s pulled another Yor.” Cayde is no longer remotely pleased sounding.
Eris tucks her arms together across her chest. “Are any Guardians unaccounted for?”
“There are always Guardians unaccounted for but as of right now we don’t have anyone officially missing. The Titans keep best record of their legions so at least there we know who’s rogue, who’s on mission, and who’s where. Warlocks have a few suspects, but none that know Hive shit well enough to do this. I’ve put out a call for head-count to the Hunter cadres but, eh, you know them. Headcounts are wishy-washy at best with all the lone wolves out there.”
“And why does Ikora seek my counsel?”
“Well… strictly speaking,” says the Ghost. “She doesn’t.”
“So Ikora did not send you so much as said something then specifically told you not to mention it?”
Cayde holds up two hands. “No offense, but I care less about your sensibilities than I do about my Hunters in the field. You’re a Hunter. So I think I can be candid about that. My team is still out there transmitting readings and I do not like them sitting in a Hive chamber sending info to eggheads. So, if Ikora thinks you’ve got firsthand knowledge I’m gonna ask about it.”
“You say the chamber is new? One unmapped even by myself.”
“Yeah, seems that way.” The Ghost projects a small 3-D display of a worming tangle of tubes and bubbles that Eris recognizes as one of her own scan-maps. A chamber blinks in red near the bottom left fridge of the knotted display. “Here they are. This chamber. You know it?”
“That is just beyond the crèche.”
“Creche?”
“The spawning pit. Where they breed and birth new swarm-level Hive, one of their darkest chambers. They must be significantly weakened if a fireteam has penetrated even to this level.”
“So you never saw this ritual site yourself?”
“No. I could never… I did not have the capability or desire to go beyond the spawning chamber.”
Cayde cannot see her eyes behind the bindings and even if he could, her hybrid machine-insect optics would tell him nothing of the horror. She briefly disconnects the optic nerve behind them, allows darkness inside her head. There, in the blackness, she sees the spawning chamber, the floors and walls writhing, fresh spawn and pupae glistening and slithering the darkness, half developed things, aborted and then reanimated. And among them – a single living being. She reconnects her eyes, finds Cayde tilting his head at her.
“Agah died in that room.”
The Hunter’s Ghost flicker slightly, ducking its tiny body like someone casting their gaze down. Cayde blinks very slowly, a conscious expressive. “Sorry to bring it up.”
“If your Hunters have breached the chamber then they avenge him even still.”
“You never saw what the bastards were doing back there?”
“No. I saw the Heart of Crota enter it once, but I did not know it to be a chamber, only a passage way I could never see clearly. The seals that locked it were too powerful for me to break even after years in Hive arcana. Toland, perhaps, could have breached the wards or two Warlocks engaged in ritual but not I. Besides that, I could never get near without the… spawn sensing my presence.”
“If it makes you feel better, they firebombed the place dead.”
“Light a spark in the dark. Leave none alive…”
“Catchy. You said the witch entered it once? Any reason why?”
“It was… after. When she left the room after she finished with Omar. That was the chamber she entered.” Cayde’s Ghost flinches again. Cayde doesn’t look away. “I never again saw her in that room. She only attended the spawn when there was… something to feed them.”
Cayde glances at his Ghost. “Did you happen to see what they did with Agah’s body?”
“A hallowed knight took possession of the corpse and carried it away, deeper into the crèche. I never found him, though I tried. I found Mota and Eriana, but Toland and Omar were lost. I never found even a trace of them in that place, nothing to take back to anyone who ever knew them.”
A beat.
“Hey, Eris. Have I ever told you you’re braver than me?”
“I don’t believe it for a moment, Cayde-6. But thank you.”
The Exo tilts his head again. “You know the King Killer Cadre was Omar’s cadre before he took with Sai Mota. They’re looking for him.”
“After all these years, there will be nothing to bury.”
“Yeah, but still. They’re looking. Armor don’t dust like we do.”
“He wore Gravebreaker gear. An Ahamkara bone gauntlet. A red fiberwire cloak.” She pushes it from her mind – the last instance she saw him. “I don’t remember what else. Please, if they find anything…”
“You’ll be the first, Eris.”
“Thank you. I wish I could say more.”
“Eh.” Cayde shrugs, bumping his Ghost who spins slightly, offended. “The Warlocks will figure it out. Ikora’s on it so one way or another, it’s getting solved. In the meantime, there’s nothing in that Temple that a few King Killers can’t handle. Place has been deserted since your pals killed its god.”
“A temporary lull. Oryx will answer one day so your Hunters are doing the necessary work.” A slight hesitation before she speaks again, a low tension of fear inside her, gently suppressed. “If need be, I can join them in the temple. If they need eyes, I have them to spare.”
“Nah. But I appreciate the offer, Eris. I’ll stop buggin’ ya and get back to it, but I’ll keep you looped in. Don’t work too hard out here.” He begins to wave, turning to walk off but stops. He lurches momentarily, like a man just remembering something forgot, then turns to look over his shoulder. His Ghost, still present, also peers at her, shyly, from behind his hood. “Y’know… I wish I’d been around in your day to see you hunt. Betcha we woulda gotten along.”
Eris smiles imagining such a different universe. “I think we would have.”
She dreams lucidly, at times, but it’s no relief.
Oh, she thinks, as she watches the Heart flay Light , shivering, luminous, in a strip from Omar’s thigh, I’m dreaming. And then – as the pleasure-song rises from the witch, the foul wet nurse feeding her pupae on Omar’s cries – she thinks, Crota is dead. He’s dead! They killed him with his own sword! Omar still screams, still bucks against the bone and fiber platform on which they’ve bound him, still convulses and pleads when the Heart carves a deeper tract from his belly to heart. This is over! They’re avenged!
She could wake up. She could stop this, take control of the night terror, will another outcome as she’s done so many times before – kill the Heart, pull Omar free, carry him into the light and in this world she keeps her promise. But the waking after such impossible fantasy comes too cruel. Usually, in her dreams, she simply kills him. The very least she could have done and failed to do. In her dreams she cuts his throat and, in blissful accomplishment, lets the swarm rip her apart.
But tonight, she dreams she holds the blade.
Agah lies there bare-faced, his slight frame shuddering, breathing the toxic Hive atmosphere. Alive somehow despite that. There is something wrong with his eyes – a swarming blackness behind them. She can see his breath like it’s frozen in the putrid air. She sets the tip of the blade against his stomach.
“Eris.”
She pushes the point through his lower belly, feels the texture of the penetration – muscle, sinew, the jerk and animal convulsion of his body around the knife. The blade does not exist in this dimension – she knows this inherently, it exists just enough. Just enough to feel. He jerks, knees twitching up, instinctively trying to curl around the wound, but he’s pinned fast. She angles slightly, slowly, pushes and he screams. When she cuts him, he screams louder – a gutted animal sound that goes on and on and he flares like a nova – dazzling, fusion, Light and pain. It’s beautiful, the sound he makes, the pitch and reverb of his screaming sets off chords in her, pulsing waves or vibrato and euphoria. She cuts him again for the crescendo, the tremble of tortured breath, the rabbit pulse of his heart. She strips an incandescent thread from his body, ripping it out by the root.
“Stop.” She feels his agony like heroin, molecular and hot. His despair a long pull of morphine. “Please. Please stop.”
She cuts relentlessly into him, long bloodless wounds. He bleeds Light thick with psychic trauma, like slicing open a honeycomb poisoned with molasses. His voice tastes good. The unborn feed on the richness, the complex nutrient of a Guardian’s pain. Eventually, his screams stop being human, become mechanical, instinctive. Like someone playing a melody by rote. She tries to bring back the song, to teach him again, in fresh strokes deeper than before. She guts and skins the Light from his flesh, but even as she flays the brightness from his shell, he can’t articulate the notes.
Empty, she says, when he goes silent. Broken.
“Eris.”
It’s not Omar who speaks. She turns. Sai stands there in the room. She’s pale and beautiful, a wraith among the jittering swarm at her back. She’s missing her right arm from the elbow down. There’s a hole in her upper chest where Omnigul punched through the shiftwire, paramuscular plate, the delicate bars of her ribcage, and ripped her heart from her chest. The ghost stares at her from the shadow of her hood. Her eyes are gone.
“You promised.”
“What did I promise?”
“It’s not appropriate.”
The sun is high over the mountains of Venus and Sai Mota is yawning. When she does the tattoos on her cheekbones pull and stretch slightly, scrunching when she wrinkles her nose. The Venusian air is warm, rising hot over the seas boiled with volcanic activity, the smell rising peppermint and akali from the deep orange tide. In the grass where they lay the wind wiffles across their hair. Sai keeps hers long, knotted and coiled into an inky princess braid – the only way to get it under her Sanction Six helmet.
“Eriana thinks it would increase our chances.”
“Eriana wants revenge.”
“Just because she has emotional stakes in this does not mean she’s wrong. We all have stakes. Crota unmade us. He destroyed us. And he lives yet while the Vanguard advise we do nothing, surrender our moon to their mechanizations. It’s wrong. You agree with me there.”
Sai heaves a sigh and leans back against Eris’ chest. “Yes.”
“I would not ask if I did not think it was important.”
“He’s my second.”
“I know.”
“My responsibility.”
“I know, Sai. She’s a Warlock. She doesn’t know. I stopped her didn’t I? She’s asked you and Tarlowe. Tarlowe’s accepted but it’s not her place to ask Agah. That’s up to you.” There’s a lull, the two Hunters sitting together enjoying the warmth and the peace only slightly eroded by what’s coming. The anticipation is two-fold – terror and thrill. Eris bends down to press her face against Sai’s neck. “I told her it’s not certain he would come.”
“You know he would. He’s a fool. Like you.”
Eris loops her arms more tightly around Sai’s slender shoulders, setting her chin into the woman’s hair. “But you like fools.”
“Cocky fools apparently.”
“The brave ones are always a bit idiotic.”
“You’re an idiot,” Sai grumbles.
“Will you ask?”
She sighs. “Promise me.”
“Promise what?”
“If it comes to a choice… you must choose my second.”
“It will not come to that.”
“But if it does.” Sai sits up, her shoulders straight, eyes forward. “You must swear it.”
Eris shakes her head. “Fine. If something happens, if things go wrong, if I can only save one of you, Sai Mota, I promise to save your –”
Sai spins and slams the jagged Acolyte bone up under Eris’ sternum, puncturing her heart like red fruit, bursting black insider her. “YOU PROMISED!” Sai stabs her again and again, over and over. She stabs her so fast, so many times, an impossible number of times. Rotten fluid pours from the wounds, decomposed, stinking. Sai stabs her in the throat. “YOU LIED! YOU LIED TO US AND NOW YOU’RE DEAD LIKE WE ARE! YOU’RE DEAD! YOU’LL DIE FOR WHAT YOU DID!” Sai’s eyes are green novas, burning, blinding in her skull. Toxic light emits from her throat when she screams. “I KNOW YOUR NAME!”
Eris wakes up.
She doesn’t scream but lying in her bunk she shakes, skin lathed in sweat, her bones pulsing. Her teeth chatter. Her body aches. She exhales slow and her breath hangs cold in the air. Something brushes her face, her cheeks, like dust falling and she opens her third eye and sees it: Above her, Ikora’s protective wards are charred black, so corroded the paint and metal is flaking away, rotten. Even as she watches, the rust is spreading across the ceiling like a mold. Fumbling slightly, she thumbs her wrist comm active.
“Ikora.”
A pause, then. “Eris? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Angry gods.”