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She feeds me well in her loathing. Hatred is a potent feeling, circular and self-sustaining, and there is no one she would devote her thoughts to more than me.
It’s almost obscenely easy. She haunts herself with the ghost of me, seeks me out in darkened corners and doesn’t rest until she catches a glimpse of my prying eyes, opens the door of her mind for me the wider the fiercer she attempts to seal it shut. It is all but an invite signed with a flourish on perfumed paper. I come and watch her, and revel whenever her gaze sweeps past my hiding spot to search for me elsewhere.
I sense her fear — like a child looking down at the knife in their hand and realising they could use it to kill, hyperaware of its shape and sharpness and the ease with which it would puncture skin. She is terrified of her own power, of her own desires; of expecting the Darkness’ touch to be a vicious chokehold and instead feeling a caress. She doesn’t sleep much, even after exhaustion drives her away from her studies, and I watch her lie awake for hours on end, staring at the circular opening between the Tree’s roots.
I restrain myself from entering her mind, and so it quickly becomes tiresome.
I cloak myself in youthful naïveté—a refreshing sensation, really—and reveal myself to her as something both newborn and ancient. She is wary, at first. Her dry voice tastes of tightly-guarded loneliness, a palisade around a closed-off settlement, and there is a fickleness in how harshly she questions me. She is expecting arrows aimed at her throat to come from every shaded corner, and I see how it both tires and electrifies her, a sizzling impulse constantly keeping her on edge. Her mind is strained like a cord, and I feed richly on the tune it plays.
She sends me off with the most ridiculous request, and I find myself, at last, visiting Titan. The Arcology is sprawling and gorgeous in its ruin. My brood does not recognise me; I sip this deception like the finest cream, and my worm rejoices when they rush against me and I tear them apart through roars and laughter. Their blood burns my soft hands.
Such small things they are, these pine-apple seeds I know well where my Thrall have been stashing to keep safe and examine at some point in a hopefully quieter future. I admire their curiosity, and bait them away with a soulfire-brimming crystal so that they wouldn’t have to fight me. I slip away easily, trove in hand, and this too fills me with delight.
I keep one of the seeds for myself. They remind me of humans — small and persistent and brimming with potential, even when lost amid the rusting rubble of a dead golden age. My witches split it into a thousand tiny shatters and grow each one in a different environment to see how they will adapt. The rest I bring smiling to the campsite on Io, and pour into Eris Morn’s gloved hand.
There is a flicker of held-back excitement in her eyes, imperceptible to all who are not versed in Hive expressions, and she puts them away on her workbench with cautious reverence I’ve rarely seen her exhibit. She tells me she has been cooking. I know this, of course, but I still grin indulgently with my alien mouth—it is strange, not being able to smile with my eyes. I agree to sample her fare.
She turns around, and I am close enough to strangle her. The temptation itself tastes like soft, sweet fat.
Human food is… ah, odd. Too dry and sinewy for my taste, generally, but I do admire the vast palette of sweetness their fruit provide. Hardly anything like that could be grown without ample sunlight. What Eris serves me is a kind of grain, small and white like maggots, peppered with something brown and sugary that clings to my gums when I chew on it. The whole thing smells thickly of overcook, and tastes oily and burnt.
“I may have gone a little overboard with the oil,” she muses.
I chew defiantly. The grains catch between my teeth and under my tongue—what a nuisance, this meaty blob I must focus not to choke on, wet and shapeless like a slug—and I struggle to dislodge them without drooling. I feel her eyes upon me, searching for a reaction, but I force a smile only after most of the food has made its way down my gullet.
“The pineapples,” I say, “I think you could grow them.”
Eris tilts her head ever so slightly. She begins wondering aloud whether the seeds would even take root, if howevermany centuries in the more than questionable conditions on Titan hasn’t rendered them sterile, if the dusty soil here can sustain alien plant life. All this comes across as an attempt to cushion the fall, picking at every potential failure before she allows herself the risk of having hope.
Still, she does—after a long string of doubts and disclaimers—end with, “...I could try.”
I smile at her again, feigning giddiness. It strangely seems to reassure her. She is so lonely; almost enough to ask me to accompany her, to bring her some garden soul and fertiliser and help with tending to the plants.
But she is also paranoid and on a mission. So she does not.
I watch her for the next few weeks, carefully mixing soils and nutrient paste and planning out her little garden, then planting the seeds in rows one by one. She handles them with tenderness and caution, like a beloved family china set. She sets a firm schedule of watering and fertilising and weeding the plot out, and not once fails to stick to it.
I drop by in my Guardian form every now and then, and she always lights up when she sees me. I feed her morsels of lies that she laps up with embarrassing eagerness; she is happy to listen, even if she doesn’t speak much. She has no reason to doubt me, which is in itself a fatty treat my worm wastes no time sinking its teeth into.
To her credit — she does grow suspicious over time. When I once reveal myself after what has been, to her, a week of apparent absence, she greets me with a curt nod and eyes stern behind the gauze.
“There was a Ghost here a while ago,” she says in a voice even and rough with disuse. “Was it yours?”
I want to laugh as my worm feasts on the deception. I don’t have the slightest idea of what she is talking about, but I put on the face of innocent defensiveness and begin to protest. I know she doesn’t believe me. She asks why I keep coming here, then; why I’ve been so generous to her, so eager to please.
I stop and ponder on this for a moment.
She is terrified of everything here—of me, of a shot in the dark, of the material of her studies blowing up in her face and corrupting her forever; of all the hushed warnings Guardians whisper about her proving true. Of a knife in the back wielded by a familiar hand. Trust is such a fraught thing, and she’s spent so long learning to allow herself to have it.
“I’m a Gambit regular,” I tell her. “My fireteam asked me to go to you… to ask you to guide us down to the Deep and back, like ancient Inanna. To teach us what you’ve found here.”
There it is. The glimmer in her eyes. It dies just as quickly as it has sparked up, but I see it.
She is lonely. She is so lonely she almost opens her mouth and agrees, curtly but fondly. She’s been here for so long, alone with only her research and the whispers of the Darkness in the back of her mind. She would love a partner—an ear to speak to, a mouth to feed, a pair of hands to push some of her work into, eyes to keep guard while she sleeps. She is so weary of doing it alone. She is tired of being afraid.
For a fraction of a second I think I have won.
But she is resilient. She has been lonely and frightened before, and trust is a fraught thing with her. The spark in her eyes flickers out, and she sends me away with a glare.
As I leave, I look back only once, to see her standing among her blooming pine-apple saplings. They’re such a beautiful shade of purple, small frail things with tissue-thin petals.
By the next morning, she has them all pulled out by the roots.