He climbs the ridge at Earthrise, watches the stars fall over him. Endless jewels streak across the void, and in the distance the sapphire planet that is his home and his prison shines still, a beacon in the darkness.
He is not meant to be here. He is expected to advise, to direct, to send others to their infinite deaths. To remain locked away in the unfaded beauty of the azure, surrounded by reminders of fallen glory.
They address him only as Cayde. The do not add the “six,” the numerical proof of his multiple selves, the only record of the memory wipes. But when he speaks of himself, he includes the number. To leave it out would be a lie, and he is not a liar.
Sometimes he is afraid that he will forget again, that a seventh ring will pull him further from who he was - from who he might have been. He pats the cannon at his side, pulls his tattered cloak closer around his shoulders. The Death Card on his shoulder winks at him. The objects are familiar, soothing. They put proof to the memories. Some of them, at least.
He finds reminders of his past here on Luna, just as he does on Earth. When he watches the stars fall, he hears them whisper. He sees faces, long dead. Buildings, long since crumbled. And then they drain from him, through the layered sieves of his mind.
The sparrow shrieks across the dust. Cayde-6 takes solace in the speed, in the immediacy of the physical world. The velocity brings clarity, and it makes his worries fade.
He dismounts at the lip of the pit. A long rifle is slung across his back; a rifle he has carried for as long as he has carried his cloak. He knows its worn grip and the curve of its trigger as well as he knows anything, but he leaves it with the sparrow and treads with heavy steps down the white-grey slope. His hand rests on his hip. His chin is high.
They will be angry with him, as they always are. They will call him remiss in his duty, call him reckless, call him stupid.
The Thralls come in a shrieking wave, and he raises the cannon without stopping, without blinking, and he blows them away in a trance. His steps beat in time with the staccato bark of the chamber: one, two, three, four, five, six.
He reloads. He does not break his stride. More come, and more fall.
A face returns to him. A name. A woman. And then: nothing. She is ash, just as the Thralls are ash.
The cylinder spins, metal burning. It clicks, and with his left hand he feeds its aching hunger, and he finds that he is running.
He reaches the tomb, he slides through the doorway, his cannon up and snarling at the Knights that await him. They fall to his fury and he runs deeper, his Ghost lighting the path in silence, his knives like teeth. Itching, itching.
He leaps without stopping, falls three stories onto the smooth stones that the Hive use to pave their tunnels. He lands, and the ring of dust that explodes around him reminds him of other rings. Perhaps that is what it looks like when he resets: an ejection of detritus, a new footprint atop old, malleable material.
The Light inside him screams, begs him for release, and he closes his eyes and raises his hand to the sky, so that the Traveler can see his anger, can see that he uses its power out of spite, and he feels the rush that tells him it is always watching.
The wizards howl, and he howls back, and the golden power wails at him to use it, to unleash the destruction upon which it feeds, to burn and burn and burn and burn. It craves death.
Sometimes he wonders where he ends and the cannon begins.
He lifts the sights, a snarl on his lips - and then another face appears, and he stops short, wasted potential burning in his hand.
This is where they took her. This is where she lost her Ghost. This is where they trapped her in their tunnels, where they murdered her friends, where they killed the woman that she once was.
This place is dead. It has been dead for millennia, the hollowed-out husk of a dead thing, now the home of other dead things. How strange, that he should come here to feel alive.
He laughs. The dust shivers. And as an ogre turns to face him, his Ghost returns him to the silence of the void.
He could kill for years. The hunger is quiet, but it will return. He will come here again. But now, with sapphire blue filling the screens of his jumpship, he wonders if there is a difference between the man he was and the man he has become. He wonders whether life lies in the past or in the future. He closes his eyes and he drifts, falling endlessly around the tomb-world.
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