Chapter Text
August 30th, ???? – 16 Days Before Oryx’s Arrival – Old Chicago, Earth
A small drone flies through the ruins of a long-dead city, the end of his distant journey from a newly-rising one.
So, this is where my search has led me. Old Chicago… swamps, Fallen, and a lot of Hive, somewhere under these roads. Not the best place to find a Guardian.
It floats by wreckage and rubble, scanning the skeletons of individuals forgotten for centuries.
Just skyscrapers and skeletons. Little trace of Light here…
Inhuman noises echo nearby, footsteps running through.
Shoot! A Fallen patrol… Need cover!
The sounds of things being torn open and searched are muffled by the drone’s hiding spot.
Don’t search in here, don’t search in here, don’t search in here…
The light of the sun bursts through as the drone is uncovered.
No no no no! I did NOT come this far to be disassembled by a Dreg!
It bolts away, evading blue electric bolts and beams as it ducks for cover elsewhere.
Try finding me now, you four-eyed pricks…
The noises fade. Silence fills the air again.
Finally, this metal was getting stuffy- WOAH! Hey… how’d you get under here? Probably wasn’t a nice way to go…
The drone scans the lone remains of an individual under a bridge. It feels a spark like none other before.
Oh, thank the Traveler…! This is… this is it!
In the drone’s excitement, it can’t help but speak.
“There you are!”
And as it pulsed with energy, the course of the universe changed forever…
…?
I’m… aware?
I’m… alive.
…Who am I?
Something nipped at the edge of my senses. What is that…?
…It’s a sound. No… words…? It’s so faint…
And then, it wasn’t. In a flash of sensations, I woke and was immediately blinded by the light, as air rushed to my lungs and my eyes adjusted. I let out a sound—a small cry—in surprise, but slowly began to perceive my environment.
I heard the words again, able to make sense of them now. “Guardian? Eyes up Guardian!”
As I looked forward the blinding light was interrupted by a… strange, four-pointed star shape. My eyes took some time to adjust…
I could see it more clearly now. It was a strange, robotic device with a white shell and a black core with a blue light that seemed to be its “eye”. It looked at me.
“It… it worked! You’re alive! I’ve been searching for you for so long!” it exclaimed, rushing forward as if examining me.
The sudden enthusiasm and foreign nature of the strange device shocked me as I scrambled backwards for a moment, grabbing at the cold, wet surface below me as I moved back. I hit a wall—hard. Something on my head clanked, sending a jolt through my head as I briefly cried in pain. Under my scrambling grasp I felt a small object which I grabbed instinctually.
“Woah! I’m not your enemy. Ask me whatever you need, I’ll try to explain everything.”
As my peripheral vision cleared, I realized that I was… in a sort of depression, by the looks of it. A disrepaired canal, it seemed, with water still flowing, just barely under me, my… boots? Where did I get those from? They were dripping with water. A collapsed bridge was above me, and cars had seemingly fallen into the canal, shielding where I was from sight.
I… I know what all these things are. Water. Cars. Canals. A bridge. But why don’t I know myself?
I found words and spoke, hearing my voice for the… first time? “Wh… Where am I? What are you- who am I?!” I asked in extreme confusion.
“You’re in the ruins of Old Chicago,” the Ghost explained. “I’m a Ghost—well, your Ghost, now—and it’s my purpose to guide you through this world. As for you, you’ve been dead a long time. You might not understand some of what you’re going to see, but I’ll try my best to explain.”
I heard a strange noise, sounding like some sort of cry. Yet it was… unnatural. It put me on edge. The Ghost turned towards it, before looking back at me.
“We have to get going. We aren’t safe here. Their scavenging crews are all around us, and there’s worse below us. I need to get you to the Last City, but how-”
It, or he, I assumed, due to his voice, stopped, looking around.
“Hold tight.”
He suddenly disappeared in a blue flash.
“Don’t worry, I’m still with you. You might not have noticed, but you’re wearing a bunch of armor I fabricated from nearby materials. It’s not very durable, but it should hold.”
I looked at my hands. I was wearing gloves. Looking down at myself in general, I was indeed in very lightweight armor, and as I reached up to my head, I felt the casing of a helmet around my head, explaining what the wall hit when I was scrambling. Somehow, I had full visibility out of it. It was then that I noticed the charm I picked up. It had an odd shape, and was attached to a short chain; like something to be hung off another object. I could faintly see specks of color in some form of clear material… a question for later, maybe. Did it hold some clue to my past?
I got up and took a better look around. It was hard to see my exact surroundings, as I was currently at the bottom of a canal, but I could tell that I was in the midst of a city, the ruins of skyscrapers looming overhead.
“Come on, we have to get to cover. Follow this marker, I think I passed a rifle on my way here.”
A rifle? I got resurrected from the dead and the first thing I needed to do was get ready to kill? That did not resonate with me. But… this was a rather strange situation. And… I felt something within, like a warrior spirit within me that arose when I was revived.
A diamond-shaped marker appeared in my view, pointing me towards a building some distance away. I leapt up and tried to grab a beam, but missed and fell.
Something pierced my side. I screamed in pain. It was foreign. A new sensation, but one I didn’t want to feel. Warm liquid—my blood—seeped from it, my vision blurring as my breath became erratic and my hands flew to my side once the shock subsided.
“H-hold on! I can heal you! You’re going to be okay-” the Ghost began to sputter as I tried to move myself off the sharp object, which I now saw was a metal rod, having to force myself to move and deal with the further pain. I screamed more as I lifted myself again, finally getting off it.
I sat up, tears streaming down my face as I panted for breath. I brought my gloved hand up, lifting my helmet to try and wipe my face off. Ghost began to scan my side, and I felt as the pain began to ebb, and watched the wound heal, the feeling of blood fading.
“G-Ghost… I… Am I the only person around…?” I asked, tearfully.
“I… I think so, Guardian,” he answered. “We’re on our own out here. It’s tough, I know, but if you want to survive we have to get moving. I can heal you of your injuries, so don’t worry too much about it.”
I got back up and looked at the bridge. I carefully calculated how to do it and this time, I found a grip and clambered onto the bridge’s ruins, carefully moving up from them onto a street, only to freeze in place as I took in the sight before me.
Skeletons littered the streets and were lying inside ancient, rusted cars. It seemed that the city had been abandoned for decades, if not centuries , with nobody to clean up the corpses. And while the ground painted the picture of death, what surrounded me painted the picture of destruction. Soaring skeletons of buildings long ruined, steel towers rising, some broken, having collapsed long ago. And deafening silence brought only more dread to me.
It was too much after the pain I had just experienced. I felt my heart start to beat faster and my breath sped up, my body trembling and vision blurring again. T-this is just one street in a city… H-how many died here…? Did I know any of them? What caused this?! WHY AM I HERE? WHO AM I?! WHY WAS I BROUGHT BA-
“Guardian!”
A thunk to my helmet snapped me out of it. As my vision cleared, I saw that Ghost was floating in front of me, looking me in the eyes with his one. “Guardian… I know it’s troubling seeing all this. I can’t imagine what it must feel like. But… we have to keep moving. Carry their hopes forward to a brighter future. You are Humanity’s future. That’s why I revived you.”
Something about that resonated with me. I still felt a massive sense of dread and fear, but a spark of defiance against it had been lit. And so I steadied my breath and kept walking, trying my best to walk around them and avoid having to see them up close.
There were still questions, so many questions. Just what had happened here? What was Ghost, and who was the “their” in “their scavenging crews”? Worse below us?!
And… just who am I?
I got to the building while those questions wracked my mind, and entered with no problems. It was powerless, but Ghost lit up the area. Eventually I came across a gate with a keypad next to it. He appeared with the same blue flash as when he disappeared earlier and began to fly around, the only indicator of him being the occasional sight of his blue light.
“Just a few centuries of entropy working against me… and a bit of old encryption. But, with my capabilities and a touch of Light…”
In the meantime I looked around. There was- wait, were there more blue lights…? Maybe it was just me-
The lights flickered on.
What the hell are those?! I thought, eyes widening as I was jolted into action. I saw strange, multi-armed beings crawling on pipes and pillars, along with other structures. I realized quickly that this building used to be some sort of factory, but that wasn’t important. I had bigger problems.
“Quick! Grab that rifle!” Ghost yelled… or I guess as “yell” as he could get, disappearing again.
I looked over and, sure enough, there was an old, battered rifle lying by a crate inside, labeled “Khvostov” in extremely faded writing. I bolted in and grabbed it.
“You… do know how to use that, right?”
I wasn’t sure how, but I did. I quickly turned off the safety, checked the magazine and chambered a round, and ran forward through the halls of the building, ready to fight. Crumbling walls surrounding me revealed broken wires and leaking pipes, the spark of a wire briefly scaring me into nearly firing the rifle before continuing on.
Eventually my first encounter came as a two-armed version of the strange beings… no, aliens… dropped down in front of me. Almost as if by instinct, I aimed and pulled the trigger.
Bullets flew, and a body fell. I continued running.
I kept bringing down the two-armed aliens, but also the four-armed ones I saw on the pipes. At one point a two-armed one dropped down and I instinctually snapped my hand forward, palm reaching forward as if trying to grab it. An energy pulsed outwards from my palm, killing it. It confused me, but I kept running. Eventually I made it to a more open area; a courtyard between buildings. It was swampy in nature, seemingly having been flooded over the years.
“Look! Over there! Incoming!” Ghost said.
I turned and I saw a strange blue effect, in which a large spaceship suddenly appeared. It was large and conical, and as it came in, it knocked down some of the structures to the sides.
“A Fallen Ketch! All the way out here?! Move before we’re overwhelmed!” Ghost exclaimed, urging me forward.
I ran and smaller ships began to appear and deploy more foes. I fired off my rifle as I dashed into an alley for cover, only to see very quickly that this was a dead-end… then I looked up. I jumped onto a ladder and quickly climbed up onto a fire escape, getting a vantage point to fire down on the aliens—or Fallen, as Ghost called them.
They poured into the alley as they realized I was stuck; or at least, that’s what they thought. I fired down on them, but eventually ran out of ammo, and looked around. A barrel was right next to me, and out of having nothing else left, I picked one up and threw it down at one of the Fallen. I heard a solid slam as it took not one, but two down due to its width.
As they were distracted, I ran up the fire escape and made it to the roof, and began running. But suddenly, as I was about to jump across an alley, I heard a shot and felt a stinging pain in my leg. Crying out in pain, I tripped over and fell down into the alley, right onto another stack of barrels. Guess that was some karma.
I took a look at my situation and tried to hunker down. “Guardian, look within yourself! The Light flows in you! Use it!” Ghost said, trying to stay calm but showing some signs of worry. I tried to do what he said, calming down as I hid and trying to reach out to this “Light”. I felt something back—a vast abyss, like a…
Void.
I drew to it, and felt it. Something… calm, yet chaotic. Quiet, yet powerful. Miniscule, yet infinite…
Getting up and turning around I grasped the energy and threw it at the Fallen. In a flash of brilliant purple, they disintegrated. Suddenly another magazine of ammo for my rifle materialized into my hand, which I quickly loaded back into the rifle.
“I can synthesize some ammo for you, but you’ll have to be careful—I can’t keep doing it!” Ghost explained.
I attempted to escape, running forward through the alley, but then a large Fallen, larger than any of the others I had seen, dropped down, blocking my passage. I shot at it, but my bullets did little against a shield of lightning-blue that seemed to protect it. I lobbed another Void orb, however, making it retreat; but then more Fallen appeared, blocking me from attacking the larger one. I kept firing until I ran out of ammo again, and from the looks of it, Ghost wasn’t able to synthesize any more ammo. I couldn’t reach for the Void; it seemed I had used it up.
I couldn’t move anywhere due to my leg being hit, and there was nowhere for me to go. I began to accept that this would be a very swift end from when I woke up. The Fallen surged forward, firing at me as I tried to fight back in some way only to take hits. I got pushed further and further back into the alleyway, eventually coming up on a brick wall after being battered, the armor that Ghost had created for me already wrecked as I slumped down, defeated.
One of the Fallen ran up wielding some sort of spear and stabbed me right through the chest. I felt the air leave my body as a lung was punctured, and the searing pain put me into shock as I began to fade from consciousness. My vision blurred as blood seeped from the wound, crimson red, flowing down the battered armor. They began to make some strange cry that sounded like a cheer.
Then I heard an explosion… or rather, what sounded like thunder and lightning…? The Fallen turned, then quickly scattered, retreating as I heard gunfire that didn’t sound like theirs. Heavy footfalls entered into the alley as the gunfire calmed down. At that point I was mere seconds from unconsciousness, but was able to hear, “Got here just in time, eh? Alder…” before everything went dark once more.