Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

    This story is not for you.

    You know all about being a messenger, and for that we are sorry. Word has reached our courts of a change as momentous as the killing tide. Today our wisest ones see a seismic shift in the things you and we have different words for. Again, we reiterate, we are sorry, although it is mostly our inaction that wounds you. Regardless.

    We have only limited capacity for responsibility for these things. That is not a philosophical matter, but one of degree.

    You flew among the stars to find us. We have never been in the business of killing emissaries. You will be received with courtliness if you arrive.

    There are dangers between us and you that are out of our control.

    Worms.

    Stars.

    Arms like Leviathan’s arms.

    And if you arrive, we will tell you more stories.

     This story is for the people who remember them. We speak the language that first said their names.

    Remember that part.

                   

    
    The world around Eris Morn flattened and tore like a piece of paper, and when its shape returned, she felt safe.

    Safety did not often factor into the life of Eris Morn. She had been passing a folded Titan mark to a Guardian, her palm dusted with the rank-smelling pollen of the wormspore he had traded for it. The Dreadnaught had sounded a beat like a drum on her senses, the distant, waiting war temporarily stalled but always set to begin again. Other Guardians had moved like points of Light around her, dim to her amputated magic and half-blind eyes. A sunny day for waiting, for buying and selling. There was to have been a meeting with the Hidden in the night.

    Disoriented, Eris fell. Where she expected her hands to hit a crate, there was nothing. She caught herself on hands and knees near a floor coated with dust, and hissed. She could see in the dark easily, but registered at first only the familiar, unbroken expanse of the concourse floor. She had been hit, maybe, but the Tower was very quiet, and emptied.

    She curled and pushed herself backwards to put her back against the wall, fortified against the staircase. Her talisman, the molecular tangle of Light and tomb husk and Ghost-shards, dropped from her hand and then slung back as she had made it to, stopping centimeters from her palm.  

    Its bright green light disoriented her more than the darkness had. It looked like no one had walked on this unbroken floor in a long time. The spark-presences of the Guardians were gone. Eris drew in a deep breath full of dust, coughed.

    The Hive had left the Moon.

    She reached out into orbit almost effortlessly, tracing the path with which she usually kept a sliver of her consciousness watching the Hive. Exultation cleared her mind. Where were the traces of Oryx, of Crota, of hated Omnigul? Where was the Deathsong, threading through the astral realms still? Where were the thrones?

    With her armored back scraping against the wall, Eris reached tentatively out into a world that did not feel deadly to her. There was no Hive-trace connecting the space between the Earth and the Moon. Perhaps something had gone terribly wrong. Perhaps they had found a new leader and had learned to hide from her, like a submarine diving.

     Eris sat up slowly. With a curl of energy she cast toward the astral plane and found a suggestion of form, strange but present. The universe was still structured, mostly, as she understood it. Kinder, though. Emptier. She sensed a glimpse of the Light.

    “What has been done…?”

    On the other side of the dark hall,  Arcite 99-40 was missing. Wooden boxes were stacked, broken, in a thick pile where he should have been. The Vanguard were gone, or simply not present. The only sound from the end of the hall was a creaking, like wind through ruins, and the sudden call of a bird.

    Something living. I will still be able to eat.

    “One bird. Two birds. And so much Light …”

    She knew the difference between time-distortion and matter-distortion well, and that this was the former. Along with the certainty that the day had not changed, she was still filled with a reassurance, and then a fury, at her inability to sense the Hive. If she felt relief that they were gone she would surely be opening herself up to more terror. If they were not gone, they were hiding well. If it was a trick, a new and terrible fancy -

    She stood up slowly, gingerly, and rested her head and her hand on the side of the stairway. The alcove allotted to her by the Vanguard was empty, dead leaves crumpling in the corners. What trick, what illusion? When ever did the world feel real? While some senses were dulled, Eris’ vision was clear and washed in crisp-blue gray in the dim light. Ruins could be comfortable, if their occupant suited them.

    Without imminent danger, she was tempted to stay where she was. The alcove was defensible, especially if she collapsed one of the stairways. Curiosity, though, overcame her. Maybe Ikora had released some terrible energy in some strange experiment. For a moment she considered blaming Cayde, but he was not clever enough for this.

    She thought next to blame Toland, whose penchant for edging into the mortal world sometimes brought with him horrors. He was as likely to appear crowned in gore and bearing gifts as he was to bow at her feet and tear the universe apart. She could not summon him, but nor did the astral plane feel as solid as she remembered it. He had helped her by virtue of existence, a role he appreciated as both enemy and fellow survivor: almost-love, almost-student, almost-teacher, confidante. Six had gone down into the pit and one had come back, and one had purposefully skewered himself on the sharp point of the universe and all had been broken by it. Now, where…?

    She edged up the stairs, her back prickling from the emptiness in the Vanguard’s hall behind her, the talisman held close to her stomach.

    The light brightened gradually, as she was used to. There was something melancholic about the sun-backed clouds today. It was autumn in the Last City, crisply cold, saplings staggering up red-leaved through flagstones. The Tower walk was broken, jagged edges veering down.

    “Dead, all dead, and yet alive … ?”

    The kiosks she was familiar with were equally gone. A few dead screens were lined up where Master Rahool had been, leaving the courtyard wide open and studded with struggling saplings. A building she did not recognize but which had maybe been as large as the trading post hunched in Banshee-44’s corner under the eaves, collapsing into itself.

    The Traveler was missing.

    Of everything that she sensed, this at first shocked Eris the least. It would explain the destruction, she thought, as well as the absence, and why her Hive-sense had not changed. The horror and pity followed, though; had the Guardians been destroyed? Had something taken her out of existence just to spare her? Time still seemed to not have changed.

    Eris stood in a stupor for seconds, looking at the white and gray and pink of the clouds where the surface of the Traveler should have been, and then Hunter-quick made her way to the elevator.

    It had been a long time since she had descended to the city. Birds had nested everywhere in the halls, leaving detritus and droppings.  She moved quietly, but saw no people or predators, or even the remains of weapons. Once, she saw a ship fly past a breach in the wall, heading out toward the mountains.

    The elevator was at the concourse floor, but without power. The tangle of stairs, ladders, and winches that allowed emergency access out of the Tower was large enough to accommodate several fireteams, but, Eris realized, was also crumbling. She would have to work her slow way down for hours on rungs and steps blurry in the sunlight.

    Physical work kept her from casting out too far, though, and the lack of the Hive kept her in a consistent state of alert amazement. As she descended a rusting ladder she felt out the lack of the Dreadnaught around Saturn, trying to make its absence as powerful as its presence had been. She and Ikora and the Hidden had pored over the Hive hierarchies they could discover by watching the ship and its Court. Toland’s journal and the occasional cryptic contribution of its incorporeal writer taught her more, and made more sense now that the sword-logic was writ large in the form of Oryx’s conquest. Now, though, even her experience in the pit was as if it had been washed away. Peace alternately exhilarated and disoriented her. She paused on every few levels to look out at the white clouds again and to reassure herself that she sensed neither Hive nor Guardians.

    She was not even half-way down when she heard a cry of a bird again, closer. Startled, she dropped three rungs to the floor and edged to another crack in the wall, looking out over the dizzying slice of the City.

    A flicker of Light or sound, or - she did not always know the difference. When she had emerged from the pit it was with some senses dulled and others increased. Her vision was bad, making her carefully choose her steps on the stairs. Her hearing expected more echoes than it heard. She knew that someone was nearby, though. They rippled the air.

    Around a corner, her next traversal waited: a wide staircase, switching back and forth for what might be hours, open on some sides to the sky. If the creature ahead of her was not Hive, she neither knew nor cared about its identity; it was Oryx who had wronged her and Oryx’s brood who she would one day spend her last life destroying, as Mara Sov had done in her own convoluted and exceptional way. Without them - this tense calm, this frightened relief. She edged toward the stairs.

    A silhouette of black wings flashed up the Tower. The steps in front of Eris were blurry, and she had barely enough time to increase her pace when the thing dove, tracing its own path backwards. A clattering told her it had landed one switchback below. The world was so terribly blurry, as if another film had been placed over the veil that covered her unhealed Hive eyes.

    She headed for the stairs, trusting that if she just moved the same way every time, she would hit each step without falling. At the second switchback, she released the railing and saw the alien.

    As avian as the Hive were humanoid, it was as tall as a Knight and longer, the black wings sweeping backward toward the hole in the Tower. Golden jewelry hung around its neck and banded its long tail, and in sections seemed to sink into the skin, white pins poking up around reddened skin like undeveloped feathers. Blue reflections slid over oily black eyes and blended into the feathers so much that it looked eyeless. When it called, its voice was not like the Tower crows but more rasping, with foul breath. In hands she could barely see under the feathers, it held a stone sword.

    A voice came from somewhere deep in its throat. “What are you?”

    Eris moved back up two stairs. She had not worn a knife in the Tower, thinking herself safe.

    I am Crota’s Bane. I am Eris Morn. I wear a name for far, cold orbits.

    “Where are the Guardians?” she said. “Where are the Vanguard?”

    “Gone! Gone!” The bird cried, almost too wild for her to understand the words. She was moving before they were finished anyway. Eris knew how to use an enemy’s own weapon against it. She dashed forward, her teeth bared, the talisman held back with both hands like a sword at her hip. The monster retreated, but drew her out from the stairwell as it did, the end of the sword scraping against the floor.

    Eris ducked underneath and grabbed for the sword.

    This hadn’t always worked with Knights, and she was not surprised that it didn’t now. The trailing end of the wing followed the blade, though, and Eris was hit, smacking against the floor. Her quilt-and-iron back plate scraped across the floor, and the bird swung around again. Eris looked backward and saw the ragged edge of the concrete stairway, rusted pins, and the drop.

    She tried to crawl back toward the stairs, but the claws came down around her, caging her in black. She held the talisman close. The creature looked down at her, but instead of meeting whatever was in its black-on-black eyes, she touched her lips to the field at the edge of the talisman and began to whisper.

    The words charged it, changed it, and drained her almost instantly. The room spun and blurred, but the talisman glowed, sparks dripping onto the talon.

    Eris named a final syllable.

    The outer layer of the talisman exploded.

    The talon released her as the creature was thrown one way and Eris the other. She felt her back hit hard again, and one arm flail as she tipped dangerously over the edge of the Tower. She pulled her arms in tight and looked back at the creature. It had hit a wall, and smoke had started to vent from the places where the golden jewelry met the skin. Eris snarled.

    Shrieking, the creature charged. There were arms under the wings, too many limbs reaching as the taloned hind feet reached in front of the wings and strange, scaled hands. Eris sat up, remembered that the creature had tried to speak.

    She reasoned in the face of its charge. “You do not follow the predatory law. Why then?”

    It charged. Eris caught a leg; a Hunter out of practice could still jam a foot into the joint of something alien. She pushed, swinging herself past the shoulder at the same time as the creature tipped off balance.

    Wings caught the air. Eris hadn’t been expecting that. The wings filled like sales and tipped, the creature’s far shoulder going toward the floor and the near wing coming forward. It caught her in the stomach, a sudden punch. Maybe her kicked-out breath had words in it; maybe the creature was chanting, its voice a labored cough.

    Eris tumbled over the broken concrete.

    Vertigo made her gut feel empty, but she had fallen before, and twisted to try to reach the ledge. Then she was falling too fast, fast enough that any strike would break bones, and her with no Ghost —

    A golden light flashed. Another kick, to her shoulder and her back this time, was someone’s arm and side against her body. The Sunsinger rocketed back toward the concrete and let Eris tuck and roll as soon as they touched the ground. She recovered while the fire flashed again and the Guardian hauled a rocket launcher over her shoulder.

    The blast flung the creature halfway into the hallway and killed it, energy bleeding from the golden cuffs like dust in sunlight. Eris stood, reaching again for the  Hive-sense and dimensional-sense she knew to anchor herself and finding neither. The Sunsinger wore the striped cloak of a member of the Praxic Order, and practically blew the smoke off the barrel of the rocket launcher as she slung it across her back.

    Eris recognized the movement, a double-take familiarity as if from the other side of the room. Next the Warlock’s shoulders would slump - they did. She would rest her hands on her knees. She would turn and - the helmet was not the same, not golden but burnished bronze with wide vents like spikes across the top of her head.

    She would speak, and it might as well have been her. Eris did not mess around with prophecy.

    Eris said, “Eriana.”

Chapter Text

    The talisman was guttering. Eris drew it closer to her chest.     

    The Sunsinger hesitated, the corpse of the creature smoking five meters away.  Eriana would not burn this way if the Deathsingers had taken her. She had …

    “You burned this way when you died,” Eris muttered.

    The Sunsinger straightened up and folded her arms. Her voice was Eriana’s, each metallic crack calling up memories. Eris would not have been able to say that Eriana’s voice had sounded like this. In the pit, she had forgotten. Now, though, there was a familiar feeling to the buzzing, lilting tones, a jarring truth. “Traveler’s shadow, they shouldn’t be up here. Just the one. The walls are holding. The walls are holding.”

    Eris did not know what to say in the face of this statement. The Exo was saying it to reassure herself that it was true. “Eriana … ”

    Then the Exo seemed to notice Eris’ eyes, her clothing. The helmet’s obscure gaze looked for a Ghost over Eris’ shoulders.

    “Are you all right? If you’re one of the rebels, we never saw one another. I’ll hold you to that.”

    “Eriana.”

    Something that was not a Ghost bobbed up from behind the Exo’s golden shoulder.

    For the first time, Eris felt that she could anchor her Hive-sense in something; the little mechanism was a blot of Hive-stuff, mutable, a mote of DNA and smoke. It seemed to jar something in Eriana. “Oh, Eris?”

    “Is this a meeting at the bottom of the pit?” Eris looked at the bird-corpse. It gave off a smell now, sweet and electric but not unpleasant. She assured herself that she was not dreaming, not glamoured; Eris Morn was careful to be certain of her reality. The thin air blew with the smell of the autumn.

    Eriana tugged her helmet off. Underneath it, she was as white and gold as her cloak, her face studded with blue lights. “You’ve come back!”
    
    “Back? No. You have, perhaps.”

    “What happened? Did you find what you were looking for?” Eriana moved forward and Eris flinched back, overwhelmed by the contact and Eriana’s bright, victorious tone.

    “You died.”

    Eriana hesitated. “Then I came back, right? What happened to you? Where is the scholar?” She hesitated, met Eris’ eyes with a sudden look of terrible surprise.

    Eris’ lip curled. Why she felt disgust for the questions she was not sure, except that they did not make sense - and then the disgust evaporated, because in her curiosity Eriana had gotten to the heart of the question. The wind blew harder, pushing Eris’ skirt against her legs and ruffling the veil. “Tell me what brought you here.”
 
    “I heard a rumor that the Swarm had passed the wall. There was just one,” Eriana said.

    “That creature.”

    “Yes. You know, the Swarm.”

    Eris wanted her to explain, but her own reality insisted on itself. She wanted to embrace Eriana, too, but she did not trust this new reality yet enough to touch. “You died, Eriana. How have you returned with your Light?”

    Eriana’s straightforward gaze faltered. “What do you … think is happening right now? Start there.”

    “I know!” I insist. It is how I survive. “You gathered six Guardians to go down into the pit to fight the Hive. You were destroyed and I survived. For three years, down in the pit, and then I rejoined the Guardians.”

    “No…You just left, days ago.”
    
    “Two days.”

    “Yes.”

    “The time is the same,” Eris said.

    “What do you mean? Of course it’s the same.”

    “I do not know you, Eriana.”

    “Of course you do, Eris.” Eriana was becoming flustered, aggressively interested in interpreting Eris’ words.

    “Once, I did. You were dead then. There.”

    “You do such strange explorations. Now are you telling me you went and saw a world where I stayed dead?” Eriana said.

    “Yes, but there is more to it than that, Eriana. More time, more streams … “

    “It must have been some kind of time distortion,” Eriana said, picking this up faster than Eris expected her to. “By the Light, my friend. Has it been three years for you?”

    “Not just for me.” Eris wanted to sit, but strengthened her back and her resolve. “It was. Tell me your story.”

    “Light. I went to watch you. We ran strikes together,” Eriana said. Only a little bit of hesitation, as if she wondered whether she was telling Eris something the ex-Hunter already knew. “You and Toland and the Vanguard had a plan to investigate the gravitational anomalies out near Jupiter. The Deep was spinning, resonances going wild. I helped do the calculations, but everyone wanted a Hunter on the team, and of course he went with you. That was two days ago. You disappeared.”

    So that was why Eris’ explanation wasn’t so far-fetched to Eriana.

    “That is not the story I know,” Eris said. “Did we face Crota together? Did we go to Mare Imbrium?” Where was Toland? Eris kept herself from asking. He would be too self-satisfied if he knew that she missed him.

    “I haven’t experienced any of those things. You… thought the anomaly was connected to the Swarm’s rantings about Auryx.”

    “Yes, Oryx the king and his son Crota.”

    “Auryx, the Swarm Emperor, hibernates on the moon. Or … did.”

    Eris found herself looking at the floor between her feet, figuring Eriana’s words out. “Oryx, in a Wizard morph or something stranger. The same sovereign in different form.” She had a disorienting, sweeping sense that she did not know what day it was, and then just as fast the gentle realization that she often lived in such a state.

    “Did you go to another world?” Eriana asked.

    For a moment the word did not register. Eris was always living between worlds, between the Hive and the Guardians, the astral plane and the Earth. She laughed to hear Eriana being so imprecise. “Not to another plane.”

    “No. To another world of quantum possibility. One atom shifts, and then history shifts. Your yesterday was not yesterday,” Eriana said. Eriana was more relaxed now, Warlock-fascinated, earthier and less contained than Ikora. Slowly, she put it together.

    “No. I think it was not.”

    “Traveler’s shadow, Eris. You have no Spirit.” Eriana paused, hesitant and awkward. She took two deep breaths, recovery protocols hooked in to microphones and speakers.

    “That?” Eris looked over Eriana’s shoulder.

    A golden nod.

    “I have no Ghost.”

    “Is that from the pit?”

    “Yes. They took my eyes, they took my Light, they could not take the rest. You wield the Praxic Fire. There are Guardians here?”

    “Yes, of course. We’ll go speak to the Vanguard.”

    Eris sighed, realized then that she had been afraid for Ikora. Perhaps there were copies of everyone here, versions. Maybe there were infinite copies in infinite worlds, and some were Oryx-touched and some were not. There was a world where she had never gone into the pit. Maybe she had always felt that, and had only now stepped into it. It had the odd familiarity of a dimly-remembered dream.

    “None of us predicted this side effect coming. If you and Toland change states, perhaps matter demands that you be replaced. You - they would not tell us what they were after. Maybe the Vanguard knew. I did not.”

    “So you were not on their Fireteam?”

    “Sometimes. You were well-known. You worked with the Vanguard. The scholar and the Hunter.”

    “She may be still alive. She is not in the past.”

    Eriana may not have noticed her own continued expression of continuity between the two versions of Eris, her insistence on saying ‘you’ instead of ‘she’. Her lights flashed shame, quickly gone.

    “I missed you,” Eris said. The words were thick with meaning, but felt thin and quiet coming out of her mouth. Eriana looked … was it pity? Eriana had never shown pity, not even to her own.

    Eriana nodded. “I was going to suggest we jump down. Now, I’m starting to think we should take the stairs.”

    The stairs: so many switchbacks, down to where Eris’ ears popped. She and Eriana walked in companionable silence except for the strike of their boots on the stairs and the wind sweeping around the Tower. Eris had to watch her feet, had to calm and then pick apart her thoughts as she digested the conversation, so she remained quiet until they were low enough to see hammocks on roofs in the city. The walls were the walls with which she was familiar. The Tower was different, full of holes and lattices of rebar. In the distance stood another white Tower.

    Closer, the thing that was not the Traveler glowed like a cocoon backlit by the sun. The form was natural, grown outward in tufts and curls like a strange egg, but the very fact of its organization was unsettling, like an animal with an extra, twisted limb. Things did not grow this way naturally.

    Eris stood at the turn of the stairs and wrapped her gloved right hand around the cold railing. Flags waved in the City with insignia she did not recognize stitched on their tattered fields, and Eris looked at them sidelong. She couldn’t meet the not-Traveler’s gaze. She didn’t have to, in order to fight it, and sometimes things found her one-third stare all the more disconcerting.

    “What happened to the others?” Eris asked.

    Eriana paused two steps down. She moved like she was on an escort mission, but she trusted Eris to stay with her.

    “What happened to the rest of our Guardians?”

    Ours. Sai, Vell, Omar. Wei Ning.

    “Wei Ning is here.” A proud gesture - here meant the Last City. “She lives with me, in the Tower.”

    Wei Ning, alive. What mass social change did that entail?

    “And the others? Sai, Vell, Omar?”

    “I don’t know those names. I’m sorry. Maybe Vell. Is he a Warlock?”

    “Did you organize them for the strike on the moon?”

    “No. Which strike on the Moon?”

    “Have there been many?”

    “There have been … explorations, census.”

    “Of who?”

    “I think … the Vanguard will explain. It’s so confusing.”

     Eris’ fingers curled. She tapped the fingers of her right hand against the railing, imagining claws. Who was on the Moon? Who watched them? Eriana had always been able to comfort her. She could feel the slight heat from the Exo’s idling Radiance.

    Eriana’s voice softened. “You and I and Toland talked sometimes about the moon.”

    “And where is Toland?” The name, too, was empty in her mouth. There were more questions she needed to articulate here, holes in Eriana’s story which were also holes in the world, but she could not yet chart them.

    Eriana sounded more confident about this answer. “I thought you knew. He went with you. If you are from another world … I’m sure he would have been brought to the same place.”

    “The world eddies strangely around him. He was in another place. Another plane. He was killed, Eriana. But he alone survived.”

    “So maybe he appeared somewhere else. Or in that other plane.”

    “It does not … I can not feel it. I will need to recalibrate the chants. But that …” Her hands tightened around the railing. The prospect of research, when she still did not fully understand the things right in front of her eyes, was exhausting. Surely she was asking the wrong questions and Eriana would answer the right ones. “I missed all of you.”

    Eriana pus a hand on her shoulder. “We’re here. We survived.”

    Eris looked to her. Turned the three-eyed gaze on her, when she had not dared to make such a declaration of war to the not-Traveler. “You did. And I know enough to pity the survivors.”

    Eriana lowered her hand.

    “I will learn again,” Eris said. “To … live among … ”

    Maybe Toland was still alive. Maybe she would not have to completely unlearn her mourning. It was not a book she had wanted to read again. It was not a journal she had wanted to write again.

    Eriana nodded at her in curt reassurance. It was a battlefield gesture, withholding no help and inviting her soldiers to take action. Eris homed to it. It took her back down the stairs, under the eaves of the city.

    At the bottom, the stairs emerged from within meter-thick walls. On the other side of the shadow of the Tower, the streets were brown and dry and teeming. Eriana checked her gun before she left the stairwell. A crowd was murmuring around the street corner, breathing like an army. Eris tucked her talisman close.

    “We’ll go around them,” Eriana said.

    “What are they doing?”

    “Protesting the appointment of the Titan Vanguard.”

    “Guardians, then?”

    “Guardians and the City.”

    It was strange to have both united, both the City’s refugee-citizens and their immortal watcher-protectors. Eris knew of no taboo or rumor against it, but nor had she heard of the like before. “What do they protest?”

    “They want Skolas removed from the Titan Vanguard. They say he’s too ambitious. Most of them just don’t want an alien in the Vanguard.”
    
    All the while she spoke, she was leading Eris around the protest, into a side street filled with shifting slate that let them out into a sunlit avenue on the other side.

    “Skolas the murderer?”

    “Skolas the alien, more is the concern.” Then Eriana seemed to remember, and looked at Eris with a wide-eyed skepticism as they walked along the quieter ally. The crowd hardly muttered on the other side of the block. Had Eriana so quickly forgotten that Eris was a stranger?

    “In my world, the Fallen were not our allies.”

    “He is an Eliksni, the ones who came to the stars. We had room for them, and there were few of us anyway, and many of them. We fought. Skolas was halfway to declaring himself king of the Earth when a Spirit chose him. They say it shocked the Guardians into peace talks, because Warlocks needed to figure out what it all meant.” She scoffed, as if Praxic Warlocks were another breed entirely and above all that nonsense about meaning, but she also spoke quickly, as if nervous. Eris did not expect anything else when one saw a friend come back from the dead.

    But Skolas, in the Tower! What had happened to the Queen?

    Eris tried to get her thoughts in order as Eriana lead her quickly through more City streets. The styles of the awnings and shop doors was familiar; it could have been home if not for the fog where the Light of the Traveler should have been, in her sight and in her mind. She tried to work out the story of the alternate world, to piece together what must have happened for the Fallen to have allied with the Guardians and for the Ghosts to smell like Hive. (The Spirit did - it had a mustiness about it.)

    They walked in silence for a time. The silence switched back and forth from companionable to distrustful. Eris was sure Eriana was also piecing the alternate story together, but there was something odd about her reaction - not enough surprise, or too much. Of course, Eris had not been gone to Eriana as long as Eriana had been gone to Eris. Eris looked at the Exo’s brightly-colored robes with an appreciation that tugged at her gut.

    By the time she had formulated another question, they had arrived at the elevator to another tower. Although this one did not face the same way Eris remembered, was not surrounded by loading docks of the same shape, it was built of the seamless white stone that she recognized. The light was the same, the sun coming down in clear, bright slants of blue and orange through the tattered flags.

    Guardians got priority up. Eriana stood in the familiar lane.

    Eris was looking up at the shadowed vaults of the unfamiliar Tower, trying to shift so that the sun didn’t wash the shadows out, when Eriana spoke again. Eris’ eyes would probably start aching from the light soon, and at first Eris thought that this was to what Eriana referred.

    “You can take the mask off,” Eriana said. Small miracles: she spoke without pity. “We’ll go to the Warlock wing first.”

    Her room, she meant. She was trying to say that Eris would be safe. How could she assure that? How could she not expect the shadows in even the most familiar spaces? Eriana from before Mare Imbrium interacted differently with the world than did an Eris who had survived three years on the Moon.

    The elevator doors opened with a scream. The mask, Eris realized with a terrible clarity. Eriana thought she was wearing a mask. Of course, Eris thought, confusing timelines again. Eriana had never seen Eris after the pit. Eris raised a hand to touch her own face.

Chapter Text

[[Hey there! This is an update for readers who might have subscribed to this fic but not my author feed. It's been a bit since this one updated, and that's because I've been ignoring and re-writing it for several years. The new version is here and will be updated regularly.]]