A parting of ways is not a simple thing, even for siblings who are now gods.
In Oryx’s books it is written in stone and fire as a swift and sudden decision, and Savathûn dryly offers to add in the weeks of meetings in each others’ throne worlds untangling armies and supply chains. Tithes are settled and renegotiated, children are fostered and exchanged to general dissatisfaction. Harmony is long since picked clean of anything that remembers the warmth of Sky by the time the fleets are ready, the war moons arrayed, the courts gathered.
Northward is Oryx’s throne, seething through the ancient bone and bitter metals of the Dreadnaught. Northward is Savathûn’s throne, fractal layers of reflections hidden behind corrosive fog. Northward is Xivu Arath’s throne, toiling foundries chained to a legion of stars. They meet at the crossroads for the last time, before the way is barred.
Oryx clasps Savathûn’s thorned shoulder and presses his horned crest against Xivu Arath’s helm.
“I will miss you, sisters.”
“You will,” Xivu Arath agrees. “But I have brought the cores of two sword-stars from my throne, so you do not forget me when you both are mapping death and defining cunning at the edges of the universe.”
“And I bring scry seeds from mine, so that you can look ahead for the cleverest path. And then, knowing the both of you,” Savathûn adds dryly, “not take it.”
Oryx laughs, and the ascendant realm keens around them, held taut between three equally commanding directions. If not for who they are, what they are, the air alone would slice them through.
“I have carved osmium from my throne,” he says. “So we remember what we have grown from, and what binds us. When we meet again, we shall wage such war that we three will be all that is left.”
These tokens exchanged, Savathûn flies into the black hole, and Xivu Arath leads her fleets to contested territories and Oryx maps the course of the Deep. The Hive continues on, a devouring tide rolling forward and sinking its ever-hungry teeth into every world it encounters. All is as it must be.
But then the son of Oryx picks up the trail of the Traveler, intending to offer it as a prize to his father, and his armies encircle the nothing-planet it’s chosen. He is killed for his pride by fools more desperate than he. What must be unravels.
Xivu Arath sees the shard of osmium splinter and crack, and her forges toll out like ceaseless thunder. Savathûn sifts a claw through the glittering powder of it and scours the Dreadnaught, wraith-like, for forgotten relics and kin. Their throne worlds drift close, bridged by rage and grief and the spinning of long-laid plans.
But never a crossroads again.
