Chapter Text
“So… The mountain.” Aloy stood just outside the entrance where she had once watched Varl charge a thunderjaw. “You ready?”
“No.” His reply was simple, irritated. He paced back and forth, rolling his shoulders like he was gearing up to fight again. “Why is it so important to you I go in?”
There was a cruel and bitter urge in Aloy to crush Varl’s spirituality. A small, petty desire for the Nora to know their culture was based on lies and misunderstandings, and they had cast out and exiled their people for nothing. But that wasn’t the reason she wanted Varl to see Eleuthia.
Not the whole reason, anyway.
She had told him what she learned about the fall of the ancients. She told him about GAIA and her quest to restore her and stop the derangement. She had even told him that she had been born in the mountain without a mother, and he had accepted this. But to him… the mountain wasn’t a metal ruin filled with robot corpses and broken children’s toys. The mountain still held mystery and power and she wanted him to know where she came from. What she came from.
What that made her.
He said he understood, but could he? He hadn’t seen the artificial wombs, the metal arms that must have cradled her before leaving her to cry on the cavern floor. And until he did, she couldn’t trust how he saw her. That he wouldn’t revert in his head to thinking of her as anointed or holy.
She needed him to choose to go into the mountain, or she couldn’t trust him.
“We’re going to be exploring ruins out west,” she said, “I have to access the old machines there. I know you consider it all tainted and forbidden. I thought you could get used to the idea before we go.” Or give him a chance to change his mind. Stay in the Sacred Land and help rebuild it all. He’d be good at that. He’d be good for the Nora if he stayed.
“No,” he said slowly, shaking his head, “That’s not why. You saw me fight in the metal ring. You know I’m willing. You want me to go into the mountain because you’re asking me to give up everything I’ve been taught to believe.”
If he wasn’t sharp, she wouldn’t have wanted him to come with her. Aloy leaned against the cavern entrance, arms folded across her chest.
“Did you know the Osseram don’t allow their women to work in their forges?”
His eyebrow slowly quirked upward as Varl chewed on that. “How do they stop them?”
“I don’t know.” Aloy rubbed at the scar above her eyebrow. “Physically? I guess I didn’t ask. How did the Nora stop me from living among you my entire life?”
Varl moved to answer, but Aloy waved him away.
“I met a woman who set up her own forge in Carja territory because they couldn’t stop her there. But the Carja aren’t much different. They don’t allow their women to fight. And they have some sort of weird nobility system I didn’t actually figure out. Plus their religion—the sun this, shadow that. According to them, the sun is a man. Somehow.”
After thinking about this for a minute, Varl shielded his eyes and gave a skeptical look to the sky. “I’ve never noticed any, uh, masculine bits on it.”
“That’s what I said!” Aloy grinned at him.
“What about the moon?”
“They didn’t have much to say about the moon. Although after the sun nonsense, I didn’t really ask.” Aloy kicked at the dirt. It was good dirt, the right color, not like the dirt in Carja territory. “Did I tell you I became a Banuk chief?”
Varl laughed, coming to lean against the wall next to her. “Why?”
“I wanted them to do something, and it was the fastest way to get them to listen.”
“That was the fastest way? I know the Banuk are different—”
“I ran all around the Cut trying to impress them. They made me Chief, and then I had to tell them three days later I didn’t actually want it. Gave them their old chief back. Becoming a Seeker was a little bit like that. I probably would have left anyway to do what I needed to do and become banished for it.”
“So to you, Nora customs are just as incomprehensible as the Banuk, Osseram, and Carja are to me.”
“That’s not exactly what I’m saying. When I left, I was so ready to find out that other people had it right. That they knew more about how the world worked, and the Nora were wrong and stupid, and I could just leave all of this behind.”
“When you yelled at us here, inside the mountain, you said they were just as good as we were.”
“They are. But they are also just as misguided and wrong as we are.”
Varl nudged her. “We?”
Sharp again. She rolled her eyes. “I hate it that this is the place that feels most like home. And it’s not just the forests or the mountains, but it’s the people, too. I understand them, somehow. The very people who cast me out and rejected me my entire life—”
Varl put a hand on her shoulder. “Aloy we didn’t have a choice. The matriarchs—”
“You have a choice now! Go into the mountain with me and see what All-Mother is.”
She sounded bitter and whiney. She knew she sounded bitter and whiney and that it wasn’t a good pitch at all. Varl was not convinced. She sighed and tried again. “You might have stopped calling me the anointed one, but you still see me as something more. If you saw where I came from, if you understood it…”
“You want me to see you as something less?”
Yes. She hadn’t thought it in such stark terms, but yes. She was Nora, and she was in spite of the Nora, and it felt good to be something greater to them, to prove how wrong they were about her… for a minute or two. But now, among the people she worked so hard to be a part of, the only people who felt even a little bit like home, she just wanted to be. Being sacred was just as lonely as being an outcast. But maybe she could just be a person with Varl.
“You think I need to see where you were born to know who you are?” Varl asked, “What you mean to me? To—to the Nora?”
What did she mean to him?
What did she want to mean to him?
Aloy was motherless. She was the daughter of the Goddess. She was born in tainted ruins. She was anointed. An outcast and a seeker. It was all contradictory bullshit, and she was so tired of it.
“So you’re not going in then,” she muttered.
“That’s not what I meant.”
They settled into an uneasy silence. For once, Aloy had no idea what Varl was thinking. She tried to get a read on him from the corner of her eye, but he was staring straight ahead, jaw set.
“Okay. I’m ready.” He pushed off the rock and started walking for the entrance.
“What?”
“Let’s go.”
Aloy had to jog to catch up with him. “What changed your mind?”
Varl didn’t slow down. Now that he had decided, he seemed eager to get it done with. “I didn’t change my mind. I made up my mind. And you won’t like my answer.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“If you’re right, after everything you’ve been through, and everything you’ve done for us, you deserve to have someone believe you.” Aloy stopped walking for a moment, letting Varl get ahead of her. But before she could catch up and tell him that she did like that answer, he continued, a half-smile on his lips, “And if you’re wrong, you’re working for the Goddess and you want me to do something, so I should do it.”
“Okay, yeah, I did hate that part,” she conceded. But Varl was grinning a little, so Aloy chose to focus on the first part—the part where Varl wanted to believe her on her merits alone.
They reached the chamber with the door. “There’s no goddess inside the mountain,” she warned him, “There’s… there’s nothing inside anymore. Metal and scrap. Just be prepared.”
“I know, because the Goddess was fractured and we’re going to put her back together and drive out the corruption of the machines.”
“Because GAIA was never in the mountain. This mountain, anyway. She controlled it for a while, but she never lived here.”
Well, he’d see soon enough anyway. The door began its scan of her.