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Dragonslayers page 2! This season just keeps surprise adding things I never thought we'd get from an Ahamkara/Awoken season. I did not expect to cry about the Iron Lords again. And we finally know Nirwen's pronouns!

#destiny 2 #destiny 2 spoilers #season of the wish #season of the wish spoilers #long post #timur #nirwen

She liked to pick berries in the summertime, when the days had just begun to grow shorter and the nights were still warm and buzzing with insects. She would pile them in one of Gheleon’s woven baskets, or wrap them in the cloth of her cloak if she stopped unplanned in the thick brambles that wound ‘round the collapsed pillars of the city.

Once, she pricked a finger, and the thrill of the pain brought a flush to her cheeks, but she told her Ghost to leave the wound and instead she watched the crimson bead and swell and drip and disappear into the soil, dark and rich, from which the brambles sprang.

“You’re like a child,” Perun told her long ago, a smile on her face, as she crouched and filled her cupped hands with heavy fruit. A joke, because neither of them have ever known what it is to be young.

Perun marches beside her now, cloak drawn tight against the wind and blowing snow. They are all together here, the Wolves who remain, the Wolves who were there first; Radegast the tallest, Jolder close behind him, the others ranging through the drifts. Efrideet has gone, and only Saladin seems to think the plague has not claimed her as it has the others.

There are no berries here, only the glowing red of unnatural growth: rampant, hungry; brambles twisted by the programmed need to consume. She had to turn away when the tendrils brought shambling half-life back to Nirwen’s corpse, and when Jolder smote her down again and again it was with tears in her eyes and no laughter in her heart.

“West they ran, in packs of three, towards the dying Light -”

Perun barks out a laugh. “You’re still going, even now?”

“Even now,” she says, because she cannot stop, even if the words are no longer a celebration but a dirge. The ice that clings to their cloaks will not kill them but it can slow them, and speed is the only chance they have. So Radegast claims - but she knows, just as they all know, that they are marching to their deaths.

“Mercy,” Nirwen cried out as she fell, the same word that was on her lips when she rose, over and over, the sound of it twisted just as Nirwen had been twisted, until at last Jolder granted her wish and the thing that wore Nirwen fell silent.

“Bayed and howled as they went, Iron in their hands.”

The syllables sound too sharp in the way that Perun’s teeth look too sharp when the deep, cool liquor of the berries stains them. The snows end, and they descend into the forgotten hollows carved beneath the ruins of Old Russia. There is a strange heat here, though they are far from the sun; a heat that does not warm so much as it oppresses, and she shivers again beneath layers of leather and metal and fur.

The plague tries to stop them as they wind their way deeper, but they are pack now, the nine who remain; practiced, strong, they fight as one with a grimness of purpose that she remembers from the early days, when at last they learned to trust each other. No warlord, no Fallen could have stopped them as they are now. And yet death has always been the punishment for hubris, for those unworthy of the grail, and Timur at least would see the irony, the parallel.

There are no berries here. When they fell from her overflowing hands she let them lie, so that new seeds might take root. An echo of the greed that led them to this moment, perhaps; the belief that if they ever sipped too much the spilled drops would lead to ever-greater things, not to Lords lying dead and cold in the snow.

Get up, someone had begged Finnala. They had not needed to beg Nirwen.

“West they ran, in packs of three, towards the dying Light,” she says again, as the radiance consumes her for what must be the thousandth time, as she burns away another reaching swarm. Beside her, Gheleon says nothing, his trigger-pulls unerring, his face the mask it always is.

They make it to the chamber, and Radegast dies almost as soon as they breach the doors, torn apart by writhing constructs, the cry of fury on his lips cut short. Felwinter falls soon after, and she watches as his body disappears beneath the swarm, watches him rise again, his light gone, and turn his weapon on Silimar. Despite all that they have achieved, all that they have built, only this ignominy awaits them; the bonds that could not be broken in life are undone so quickly in death.

Gheleon screams. Perun does not; roars instead, but her end is the same, and her bright eyes go forever dark.

She thinks of berries, black and red, thinks of smiles and stains and white teeth and dark earth and green growth, of laughter well-earned and well-enjoyed. Gone, just as the memory of them will soon be gone. Jolder finds her eyes from across the room, and as the mites begin to swarm her, as she feels them forcing their way into eyes and ears and throat, she frees her fire for what she knows will be the final time, burns brighter than she ever has.

“West they run, in packs of three, towards the dying Light,

Far behind them stands the Tree, boughs as black as night.”

They were the first, and it is fitting that they are the last. Fitting that they should be forgotten, just as their forebears were all but forgotten. It is Jolder’s duty now, to do what must be done. She will not ask for mercy, for she knows that none awaits. She hopes only that when she falls, she does not rise; that the dark that has always lived in the shadow of their glory will, in the end, bring her rest.