also on ao3
In the shadow of the wing of her jumpship, hood hanging low over her eyes, Eris pulls on her rain boots.
The ground, after years of dry-dust Moonrock interrupted by stints of Tower concrete, has a strange give underneath her feet. Even the snow of Europa was packed hard, and solid beneath. The earth of Savathûn’s throne is like the rest of her: slippery, ready to give way any moment. Strange things lurking in the sawgrass. Eris is thankful that most of the Guardians have moved on, so that there is no one to see if she falls.
She grabs the wing of her ship and pulls herself up, spine cracking as it straightens for a moment, the bag at her hip rustling. She does not know quite why she has come here, but she wants to be prepared for it. She could go to the Altar of Reflection, maybe, but she does not know if it would speak. Would it tell her riddles about the egregore, or the Crown? The black hole of the future?
She imagines Savathûn’s dissected body rising from the autopsy table, Deathsinger chorus spilling like blood from her mouth. Eris has been having strange dreams: not the usual shadow-soaked nightmares of the Hellmouth, but a deeper Dark. Savathûn’s corpse held information like ripe cherries to be plucked. What else does her throne still hold, her lassoed Pyramid?
Eris trudges along the marsh, picking at a shard of osmium with scarred fingers. It seems that the Guardians are seeking entertainment where they can before the world ends, fantasies of blind robbery and the goodness of pure violence. But she has work to do, if she can figure out what it is and where it hides.
The osmium chimes like a hundred discordant bells. She sighs, tucks it into her satchel. In the ravine below her, an impatient Scorn sends up a rifle-crack of purple fire that scatters light and noise across wet stone. Eris leans away, hides herself against an outcrop for a moment. Before her slopes the green-brown of reforged landscape. Some days the exhaustion settles in her joints and her molars, the fatigue growing worse after the long weeks bound to the Crown. When her campfire ceases to warm her face, she considers returning to the Tower for the final act— seeking sanctuary, after so many nights abroad in the pure Dark. But she will always be needed in the wilds, whether or not she is willing to go.
The bells ring again, undercut by a deep hum pulsating through the ground and up into the soles of her boots. Always these games, even without their overseer…
Eris, warm rain dripping from her pauldrons, considers. Even dead, Savathûn has a talent for sublimating everyone into her schemes, sending Eris tripping across the board.
Something buzzes above her and she cranes her neck with a muscle memory never forgotten even after years in the sunlight, wincing at the near-sensation of rain striking her blindfold. A Hive Ghost lets out a yelp and darts back into the rocks.
“I don’t have anything you want, I swear,” it says from its hiding place.
“You have no tidings?” Eris asks, wry. “I thought you were a spy.” Or maybe a scout, or a canary; something with less finesse. She noticed the missing flange, after her instinctual urge to reach up and squeeze. The existence of the Hive Ghosts makes her uneasy, paranoid like she hasn’t felt since the Tree. Who can use them as a keyhole, unespied?
A green eye peeks between two jagged rocks. “Oh,” Fynch says. “I thought you were— you know.”
“You have no allies among the Hive, then.” How strange, to see the Light transformed into this— something emerging, looking up into the watery half-cast of sunlight. (But, she thinks, this thing does not garner so many whispers, nor quite so many stares.)
“Yeah, but having allies in the Hive was worse,” Fynch grumbles. Eris knows: a memory of that hellish place-between-worlds, Savathûn reaching out, Child of the Hive. As if that was her inheritance. Her distaste turns over in her stomach.
Fynch doesn’t notice the twist of her mouth, continues, “Anyway, what’s brought you out here? I’ve heard about you, obviously, but I thought you hung around on the Moon when there’s no Hive gods to kill.”
“There may yet be mysteries to decipher. And you, little gravedigger,” Eris says, “Ikora has told me of your… participation in deposing the witch. What else have you seen in the dark?”
“Uh, like…?” Finch tries, spinning anxiously. At Eris’ silence, he says, “Savathûn’s still dead, Immaru’s still MIA, the Pyramid’s been— weird, but not since the whole Calus thing ended. I mostly just keep an eye out for trouble. Ready to sound the alarm, I guess.”
“A strange life.” Eris shifts her weight, and the bells chime again. “You act as the Guardians’ scout, yes? Do you know the paths that the Scorn and Hive do not take?”
“Oh, yeah! I’ve got routes to every corner of this place. I’m, like, a master of stealth now, I hardly ever get shot at. You don’t have a HUD, do you? Dumb question, I know. I can—” he bobs upwards to glance at the pathway leading up to his meager station— “yeah, there’s never anyone around these days. I can show you?”
Eris is not afraid of this swamp nor anything lurking, alive and dead, within it. She is sharp-eyed and ready, but she is also dressed for hot humid marshland; without her gloves, Stasis numbs her arms up to the elbows. And not all pain is necessary, not when so much is coming.
More importantly, she knows that there are strange eyes peeking out from the dusk of the Pyramid. She may do well not to venture forth alone.
“Yes,” she answers, after a moment. So many strange Ghosts flitting through her life, lately.
“Great,” Fynch says, though there’s an odd shake to his spin as he cartwheels through the damp air. “Any idea where we’re going?”
“I suspect that our journey will end in the Pyramid. For now, we go where we are led.” She moves down the slope and hears a noise like a child shaking a wind-chime. For a moment, the rainfall turns to mist.
Fynch asks, “Did you hear that?”
-----
“I’m glad I don’t have feet,” Fynch attempts after an hour of silence broken only by the strange noises of a stagnant throne. “It seems so… wet.”
Eris listens for bells. Something sulfurous sloshes around her feet, dead grass poking through the green haze. She stops at a crossroads, faces west, east, south. Something tolls when she turns northward, the Pyramid’s shadow already bearing down across the long stretch of mud.
“It seems the Pyramid’s store has not yet run dry,” she says. She wonders when it will.
Fynch, shaking off a sheet of drooping lichen, says, “I hate this place.”
A shard of glass held up like a mirror: “Then why do you stay?”
“I don’t know, someone has to.” He sighs, the sound buzzing. ”And I don’t really know what would happen if I just left my Knight’s body lying around. If someone would steal it or something, I mean.”
“Are Hive Ghosts not afforded the opportunity of a new charge?” The Ghosts of Warlords were impressed into changing their minds. Maybe the Hive, novel heresy turning to dread, will face a similar reckoning.
“I screwed up so badly the first time, I don’t know if I deserve to. Or, you know, if I deserve to leave. Even if Ikora didn’t blackmail me into staying.”
Eris runs her hand along a stone glowing with strange runes. Water pools in the hollows of the carvings. “The Sword Logic hinges on the language of deserving,” she says. The bells chime and she moves forward, counting her steps as she goes.
-----
At the gate to the Disciple’s Bog, there is a Knight wreathed in fire. Its Ghost hovers predator-still over its shoulder, assessing.
Fynch mirrors the other Ghost’s position as he makes an inarticulate noise of dread. Eris stands unmoving a few hundred yards away, studies her targets. She has not yet killed one of these Dark-shelled Ghosts. She wonders: if she cracked its hollow middle and watched the green light drip out, would it feel like some vindication of Brya? Would her Ghost cry out at the loss of so much Light?
The Knight raises its shining sword. Eris snaps at it in Broodspeak: The Witch-Mother has sent us. Do not rip a hole in her fine-spun cloth.
The furnace heat dies back as the Knight gradually resumes its sentry position. The Ghost watches them pass, but says nothing. The wide-angled door slides shut just as they pass through it, leaving them in the insect-buzz of the Pyramid’s approach.
“Clever,” Fynch offers. “Why do they listen to you?”
“Time among the enemy is valuable,” Eris says, footsteps echoing on shining black stone. “Some things can only be learned alone, and then imparted.” Mara’s most important truths had only come after months of death’s-head silence.
Fynch flies up to get a better look at the unnaturally-edged Pyramid. Even at this distance, it radiates shadow. “What is there to learn in there?”
“You came to this throne before anything else. Why?”
“I don’t know, curiosity? A sense of adventure? The Light was somewhere it had never been before. I just wanted to know what that meant.”
“Before the Guardians killed that awful disciple, no Light had entered this Pyramid. We must follow in their tread and see what tools remain.” She adjusts her cloak. “Curiosity does not serve us here. Choose clarity of purpose instead.”
“Ghosts love purpose.”
“So I have learned.”
-----
Inside the Pyramid is a silence more consuming than any void Eris has been in. The animal-instinct that kept her alive in the pit tenses her muscles, freezes her fingers, says run run run run. She hears Fynch’s internal processes shut off as he throttles into a quieter mode. She realizes that the silence is being created: all noise is being swallowed as soon as it is made. Vibrations are killed in their cradle.
She moves slow across the polished floors. The doors refuse to open for her but in their place are drilled holes, shimmering Hiverock to bridge gaps, what might have been air ducts if this had ever been a place of life. Tucked away in corners, only centimeters wide, are glowing green witch-glyphs.
Eris knows when she is being taken by the hand and led like a child. After an hour her shoulders burn with hauling herself onto ledges and through barely-there gaps in walls. Her Ahamkara bone sits heavy against her side, but she suspects no amount of teleporting would show her the final room of this labyrinth. Some things must be worked for.
She drops from a ledge and lands neatly in a long room, empty even of bones. At one end is a Hive portal casting sickly green light.
Once, in the outskirts of the Flooded Plains, Eris saw a ruined fire-bell carefully balanced hundreds of meters in the air, wide enough that she imagined a whole fireteam crawling up around the clapper. It rings now, in this silent place, and the noise echoes and reverberates and cannot be contained.
“Do you know what’s on the other side of that?” Fynch asks. The question hangs in the air for a second before vanishing.
Eris stands before the portal. She does not trust it, of course she does not, but she knows where she stands. “It is her nature. One final mystery.” Something she would never have wished to consider, ten years ago: there are things more ancient and more dangerous than the bloodiest Hive.
The Stasis coiled through her hands responds to the environment; she feels it twitch. Some tools can be reclaimed for a nobler purpose.
She is not a Guardian, has not been since Crota carved the Light from her body, but she still understands the value of decisive action. She steps through, and the world inverts.
-----
They are still in Pyramid-space. Eris thinks that they are still in the throne’s Pyramid, but this deep inside there are few ways to be sure. Dim light shines from somewhere above, illuminating a humming plinth.
Fynch floats a few feet away and scans the objects hanging shrouded from the walls, though he’s careful not to stray out of reach. “This is an armory,” he says. “But these weapons are new.”
Eris approaches the plinth, half-ready for some shambling horror to rise revenant from its operating table. The carvings match the conduit on Mars, as does the long line of sleek metal lying in the groove of the stone. She raises the staff to the light, cautious as she tests its heft.
“It is a glaive,” Eris says, “or it was. Someone has altered it.” She thinks she knows who. Wheels within wheels, ever turning.
Fynch hovers closer. “Huh. There’s a gap in the handle. Wait, I think…” He dips underneath the glaive, tucks neatly into the space between grip and blade. Eris sees the faint outline of an extra flange, a hole in space.
Eris takes a careful swing. “A cooperative weapon.” She resists the obvious metaphor, can still hear the witch’s laughter echoing down the line.
“I’ve got some directional control in here.” Fynch tilts the curve of the glaive up, just enough to be noticeable. “It’s harder with the missing piece, but I can make it work. I think this would hurt a normal Ghost, but a Hive one like me— we're good for weapons, I guess.”
“You will find that self-pity serves no one but the enemy.”
He sighs. “Yeah, I know.” The blade spins in a neat figure-eight, and Eris raps the handle with her knuckles. “Sorry. Why are these here, anyway?”
“They are…a gift. Some may call this a token of goodwill.” Eris huffs. “I would not.”
Fynch squirms out of the glaive like one of the Tower-cats trying to squeeze through a barred window. “Does transmat work in here? I can dump them all back in the Quagmire.”
One by one the room empties, though Eris keeps the last glaive tucked in the crook of her arm. She has seen the video-feeds of Guardians called for a practical demonstration after they have discovered some new weapon, and will not be caught unawares.
She reaches for her Ahamkara bone, extends her other hand. “Come,” she beckons, touching the orb to her forehead. Fynch settles in her palm, warm in the still air of the Pyramid.
A sudden plummet, the sound of a million fires extinguished at once: she turns and lands on half-solid ground, mud sucking at her boots, a slowly-decaying Knight a scarce few inches away. The rain has stopped.
Fynch’s iris cycles, flickering blue before settling back into hellfire green. He shudders, surveys the cache of weapons just visible in the mouth of a small cave. “What do we do with these?”
“I will alert Ikora. There are still Hidden studying the relic on Mars.” Hidden who will have questions for her, no doubt.
“I can keep an eye on these until they get here. I think that’s all the excitement I’m getting for the month.”
“This place may be instrumental in winning the coming war. Until then, it must be stewarded.” Eris dips her head. “It is a responsibility. And I must attend to my own.”
Fynch turns to glance at the dead Knight, then wheels back around. “Keep one of those things, yeah? It might come in handy.”
“Repair your shell, little bird,” Eris says, and begins the long walk back to her ship. For a moment, sunlight illuminates the dead-reborn world.
