There was no sensory perception here, barely awareness of herself as a discrete unit of consciousness amidst the flow of everything else. She felt Bahaghari searching for her in the way all Ghosts separated by death from their Guardians do, and carefully suppressed the primordial urge to respond. Were she practicing thanatonautics, she would attempt to fly far enough away from the veil of the living world to connect to some higher truth. But today she rested on the membrane between life and death, singing.
From the other side, approaching Light, Darkness-tinged and tumultuous.
She carried the notes of the sun's song to its spectacular crescendo. Solar Light welled within her, reconnecting soul and body. She awoke on fire, comfortable heat in the cask of her chest, the licks of flame pleasant through and on her skin. A moment of enjoyment ruined when the man standing above her turned away from his examination of the decoy ghost, revealing his identity.
Backdraft-quick she gripped Dredgen Hope by his thick, leather-clad ankle. He yowled hideously, doubling over reflexively before he regained control of himself, lifting his leg to stomp at her arm. Letting go she rolled away from him, dodging his boot and propelling herself to her feet, preparing a gout of flame in her hand as the Shadows poured out from hiding and bullets began to fly.
With an entrance that blackened the floor and set the apartment's sparse furnishings smoldering, the Praxic Warlocks Taeko-3 and Lyra-4 blinked into the room, alight with radiance as they joined the brawl.
Hot energy arced between Taeko's hands before she unleashed a volley of plasma upon the group who charged her, instantly dispatching both the attackers and a structural beam, the ceiling sagging threateningly where it gave out. Lyra meanwhile fought off a group with searing fists and feet, igniting her opponents wherever she struck and sending them staggering dazedly as their Ghosts fought to heal without being caught in the crossfire.
As her companions handled the others, Aunor focused on Hope. She threw a spray of flame from her hands, but he leapt behind an overturned table before it could hit. Peeking out, he fired several Thorn rounds. Two whizzed by her shoulder, but the third grazed with a sickening sting, breaking her candescent armor with a black-green bruise of hive corruption. In the split-second it took her to assess her injury, Hope had already scrambled to his feet — and toward a hive artifact piled unceremoniously among weapons and other loot in the corner of the room.
Aunor recognized it instantly. An item of both academic significance and destructive potential, it was the object with which she and her squad had been tasked to recover.
She braced for him to pick it up and make for the exit. She didn't expect him to summon his own solar light and set it ablaze.
As she sprinted for it, he dashed away. She ripped down one of the dusty curtains that darkened the windows and dropped it on the object. Taking a glance over her shoulder, she saw that Hope was prying open the sash, shoulder wedged beneath it as he gauged whether he'd fit.
"Stop him!" She cried to her fellow Praxics as she attempted to extinguish the artifact. They disengaged from their fights and turned toward the escaping Dredgen, but it was too late — he'd already snaked out the window.
Throwing the artifact in her satchel, she sprinted over. Peering down several stories to the broken stone below, she found that he'd vanished.
I thought I added this to art tags very late last night but anyway one of the numerous things that are good about Savathun’s Song strike (1. very pretty 2. savathun is kinda there) is that it’s a strike you cannot actually, fully win. every time, you lose. (or at least, you come out alive, but you have failed in your mission). and every time, I think maybe this time we’ll save Taeko, see her, and we do not
You are Taeko-3. You have been eaten. Not just eaten: you have been digested, stored like fat for the hungry machine of the Hive. Where am I? You ask yourself. Your voice does not echo, not even with the imagined/true tenor of yourself inside your head. You are almost entirely sure that you are paralyzed and alone, and your own inner voice is comforting.
You expected death. Your fireteam looked for you before you disappeared. Of course they did. When they stopped calling, you knew what they thought and almost believed it yourself. You are dead. You are a Guardian, so this doesn’t scare you much. It’s the becoming that scares you, the steady press of time toward a webbed-foot Caliban monster-future.
But you know that future, the dark and short one, won’t come.
You think something other than death might be coming for you. You put up your hands to meet it, and all of your senses with them. That is what it means to be a Warlock, for you: to unite all of yourself in a single direction, body and mind.
The mind is the difficult part.
There are so many aspects of the mind, after all. Facets, slates, translucent panes. Why do you imagine your own mind as a crystal? Why do you see your own thoughts as lattices, as liquid suspended? You are not used to interrogating your own thoughts. Action is better. However, you are almost certain that you did not feel this way before all of the confusion, before the sense of interacting with the world through a radio that doesn’t transmit. Action, now, seems like it will require more planning than usual in order for it to be possible. You rarely relied on thought alone before, but now you will have to. Your philosophical identity is a set of tools in unpracticed hands, and your thoughts bounce away from the fact that you are bodiless. That can’t be right. That cannot be factored in. It must be factored in.
What was that? Did you hear that sound? Is this thing on? Maybe it was nothing. You hope it was something.
*
There must be a point at which bravery is no longer a choice. One must be brave or one must be underfoot. Would it be bravery to jump away the moment someone hits you?
Euclid-319 thought bravery was a choice. He thought that he had often chosen cowardice.
This was one of the reasons he sat alone. Ikora Rey gave Euclid a small space in the Tower, a temporary gantry-turned laboratory. It was a place where construction frames once lifted rebars up to make the stairway above. Because of the method and balance of its construction it had walls on all four sides. Like an empty crawlspace on the edge of the Tower, it hung there without any windows to remind the occupant of the vertical drop nearby.
What were the others doing during the Red War? Euclid imagined one of his friends, their face blank with the failure of his imagination, and tried to picture them living while he was split/dead/cancerously alive. Surely Jolly would have been doing something heroic in that time not long ago, but he couldn’t quite conjure her. And Yarrow, she would have been doing useful things, probably, not separating mind from body in a nuclear sacrifice. Euclid’s body had become an enemy of sorts, sent on its own desperate, twisted journey. He had not been used to thinking of himself as just a mind, but that experience had been forced upon him and he had … learned from it? He had certainly experienced it. There it was, logged in the memory banks.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Ikora, if she had kept to her schedule. (Five minutes late — standard for a sentient being.) Euclid flexed his wrists over the books he was using as a headrest, lacing his fingers together and turning the joints until he heard the smooth and satisfying shush of metal rubbing together. He couldn’t bring himself to read the books that had been returned to him, not really, but collecting them and putting seed packets in the pages to mark his place was comfortingly familiar. He had been killed and cured and self-immolated and cured again, and still he felt … self-conscious, around his Vanguard. He created a careful remove between himself and his monstrosity, and so she might see him as like a child and … no, that wasn’t sound either. Euclid shook his head, popped his joints again, and watched as Constant (old, many-lived, loyal and tired as a hunting dog) opened the door.
Ikora Rey nodded to the Ghost as she entered the room. Euclid missed his gardens where she had once visited him, but the Vanguard made the crawlspace warmer.
“Good morning, Euclid,” Ikora said.
“Good morning, Ikora! Tower’s still standing, huh?”
She didn’t smile.
“I’ll put the seed packages back,” Euclid said. “I found them on the shelves …”
“They’re actually for you.”
“Ooh!”
“I thought it might be nice for you to have a bit of home. Claim a spot on the garden ledges if you want. You can use my name if anyone complains,” Ikora said.
He looked at her evenly. Both of them knew that he was effectively confined to the Tower, the Vanguard studying him even as he studied the new emanations of the machine-deity. What effects might the Traveler have on plants brought from Venus, life forms used to being closer to the Sun and farther from the Light? Which way will sunflowers turn?
“I talked to Kass the other day. She says you’ve been talking to Jolly, that you’re okay,” Ikora said.
“It’s good to have some friends,” Euclid replied.
Euclid came to terms with the fact that his body roamed, mad, while his mind seethed inside the magic-magnetic field of the shard of the Traveler. He came to terms with the fact that the blood of Guardians was on the hands. It still cast a layer of dark irony over all of his appreciation, though.
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Ikora said. “Eris and I have been researching the ways in which Savathûn’s Hive lock Guardians into these crystal shells. Taeko-3 and her fireteam were instrumental in determining what exactly the Hive are doing on Titan. If I remember right, you were part of her cohort when she was first raised.”
“What have you found? Is there a way to revive her?” He thought he was babbling, possibly even asking for impossibilities.
If Ikora’s patience thinned, though, she did not show it. “The blueprint of her body and her spirit still exist within the shell. You, with your understanding of Exo brains and Void Light, are the perfect person to try to bring her back.”
“Yes! I mean, I’ll do it. If you need the help.”
It would be so good to help with something again. For a long time he had felt like a machine from which no energy escaped, turning and turning on his own wheels, pushing the fire he generated into his own mind. This could be a project that could occupy him, could keep him from dwelling on the transformation from which he himself was still healing or re-forming. Taeko hadn’t been the easiest Exo to understand, not when she seemed to switch from aggravating him to praising him with a rapidity he could not match — but he had missed her. He had carefully stored her memory in a kernel of his and told himself, over and over, that she was now just a talisman he had imagined for himself.
“I will bring you what we recovered from Titan,” Ikora said. “I’ll expect regular reports.”A stern, promise-making look. She would not let him catalog plants alone any more. She was right to do that.
“Of course. Of course! Right away.”
“We have already brought the crystal to the Tower,” Ikora said. “With your brilliance and the resources we have left, we might be able to reverse-engineer the power crystals.”
“My brilliance. Hah.” Was the bitterness going to come out now? No need to inflict this on Ikora, but — fine. She was still his Vanguard, despite the way they had learned to stay away from one another as a show of support. He made a conscious effort to regulate his movements, despite the strong urge to pop another joint in his hand. “As if it could make up for, ah, what I did. After the occupation.”
“Yours was one long, strange story among many.”
Would it help to think of it as a story? All of this was real, wasn’t it? How did his story compare to Ghaul’s? Was it larger or smaller, less or more catastrophic? Or … no. Ikora meant to reassure him, to smooth over history.
“I hope it was one that did not make too much of an impact on your, uh, the rebuilding efforts. Of the Tower,” Euclid said.
“I hope it did.” Ikora smiled.
*
You died on Titan, under the briny waves and the old hulks waiting for their crews to pilot them. You died with a sword in hand and a halo made of Light.
You woke up with your internal chronometer reading zero.
All around you is green and purple light, swirling. It’s oddly flat, though, like paint on the outside of a sculpture. The colors don’t move closer and farther away. They play out as if on a screen.
Maybe they are the paint and you are the sculpture, able to look only inward through to the other side of yourself.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
The voice comes from outside, beyond the screen. You imagine a Hive Knight, hunched over with a knife in hand, but then you recognize the tremulous voice.
Hello?
“There was the, I mean, you know there was the war. You saw some part of it, I think? In as much as the Hive knew about it? They were on Titan before Ghaul, but the buzz afterward … someone stirred the nest.”
Euclid? Oh Light, something went wrong and they sent him in after me. Light, he came into the tunnels after me.
Light. Euclid?
“Ikora said I could use the battery but this, how long has this been here? Whose emergency power am I using? The first Vanguard’s? The Golden Age’s?”
Flip the switch, Euclid.
“Okay, this crystal matrix interpreter is set — doing what I told it to do, huh! Things that work, a brave new method in engineering.” He gave a tremulous laugh.
For all you know, the power is already on. He’s just second-guessing whether he deserves to use it.
“Good. This is good.” He has to convince himself, but that doesn’t take long. Afterward his voice is stronger. Maybe you can hear a shuffle, a click, like metal against metal or clothes against metal. He is sitting down or leaning against a feature of the room. It’s a small room.
“Now I just have to wait,” Euclid said. “I don’t mind waiting. I can water the plants outside, although should I leave this room? Something might go wrong if I leave this room. Someone recognizes me out there, and … maybe … maybe not.”
I know you’re a hermit at heart, but why would things go badly if someone recognized you?
“You don’t … listen to me, talking to myself! Ikora wouldn’t want to hear this. Taeko doesn’t … I bet she doesn’t know.”
You know what, she doesn’t. Why don’t you tell her, Euclid?
Taeko-3 thought maybe she could feel her limbs now. At the very least there was an impression that the colors around her had gained dimensions. The world she inhabited now contained the width and depth of arms and legs, making herself her own compass. It contained time, linear and marching, in a way it had not before. If she had to stay here, trapped in a body instead of a crystal and unable to move, she might go more mad than when she had barely registered herself at all. Better to go to sleep (that horror-sleep of the Hive, but still, it had not hurt) than to lay paralyzed. Where was her Ghost? What if she had woken up without them?
“Yes hello Taeko, while you were away I was the sphinx guarding the entrance to my own brain and also my mindless body killed some Guardians, and also I might have saved or, uh, delayed a large portion of the City from being overrun by Cabal legions.”
You what? Of course you did. You made it worth it, you old obsolescent brilliant machine… Thanks, for letting me know.
“That will have to be it.” He sighed. “But how can I explain it to her if I don’t understand it myself? That’s the key. To find out what happened.”
More cloth rustled. You guessed that he stood up. Your sense of having a body was slowly returning, although the prickling feeling and the sense that power wasn’t sparking from your brain to your limbs quite right were more worrisome than reassuring.
Don’t spend the rest of the day, however long it is, trying to diagnose your malaise, you wished for him. Go tend your garden, Euclid, you old obsessive. Go see the Sun over the City. Go to the Crucible and prove to yourself that you aren’t going to break.
It sounds like you’re partially responsible for anyone surviving to see that view.
*
Ikora offered to bring Euclid whatever other resources he might need to recreate Taeko’s mind, so the room filled up with a power bank and a lab table. He studied Eris Morn’s research and Commander Sloan’s field reports, digested all the data on the new nests on Titan. After 48 hours, he knew that he could clip the Hive crystal into an Exo body and set Taeko like a jewel. She would not be exactly the same, but she would be able to walk and talk and live. She would probably not have a Ghost, and he had worried himself so much about that until he thought about Eris.
Unless he was wrong and he was just giving one of Savathûn’s batteries an Exo-suit, to cause chaos in the Tower or to stand swaying silently like an industrial machine…
He would have liked to say that it worked on a day he didn’t expect, using a technique he didn’t expect. Then he could have run to Ikora shouting “Eureka!” Then he could have thanked some force of heat or Light for the victory instead of carefully piecing together the fact that yes, he had done it all correctly. The plan was his whether it flourished or burned.
Taeko, of course, was ever her own. Her green-plated body lay on the table, covered in simple robes.
Her eyes flared. They had been tinted green when the new body was built, but for a moment the horror of the Hive-glow returned to Euclid and he considered, terribly, telling Constant to stitch him up a gun out of the air. When the initial power surge faded she began running diagnostics, though, the twitches and stretches he had been expecting her to do. He stepped back, eager for the moment she would be ready to speak.
She sat up on the table. Her feet almost touched the floor. “Hello?”
“Oh, it’s you!” Euclid said. “I mean, of course it’s you. I … you should probably know that I rebuilt your body. And you’re in the Tower. And you’re not optimal yet, but your self-repairs are yours, you know, so, I didn’t want to touch that —”
“I know, silly.” She hopped off the table and took a long look at everything — at the corner where Euclid sat for rare and fitful sleep cycles, at the potted plants (more every time Ikora visited with a basket under her arm), at Constant. “I’ve been listening to you since you …”
She looked directly at him for the first time.
“Since you told me you were outside your body for a while.”
That isn’t exactly what happened, but Euclid doesn’t correct her. “I’m, uh, I’m so glad you’re okay!”
“Real talk? Me too. About both of us.” She paused for a moment. “But … are they alive?” She said it flatly, maybe curious, not angry and certainly not full of relief.
Who? The Hive? Would he have to tell her that the broods still shrieked on Titan? Euclid hesitated, his hands hovering just above the table. He spoke softly, apologetically. “Who?”
“My Fireteam. Caliban.”
“No. I’m so sorry, Taeko, I —”
She didn’t avert her gaze. “No, it’s okay. I thought so. From what you said, I just …”
She looked at Constant again and then flung her arms around Euclid, a hug so unexpected and with all of her weight behind it that he staggered backward, almost fell against a shelf full of bean sprouts and pine sprigs. “We won!”
Light, how can she celebrate so soon after her own freedom from paralysis? Doesn’t the joy have to wait, doesn’t he have to make sure he has not irreparably broken his relationship with the Vanguard first? Doesn’t he have to watch for the next war, the next slip, the next Vex poison-neurotransmission?
Maybe not.
Taeko slipped away, back to the center of the room near the table. She raised her fists. “I know what I heard, and in among all of the stuff you said, I heard we won.”
Euclid put a hand on his own chest, where a flesh being would have a heart. Artificial muscle was sheathing him properly, nothing bare that should not have been. The bonds between his body/shell and his soul/Ghost were strong, kept humming by the energy of the unified mind/self he felt with as much certainty as the metal.
Still, he felt as if something in him was falling apart. He had missed her so badly, even as he had struggled to understand the things she said that he tried so hard to interpret. The teasing, the jokes, the way she would lean her shoulder against his as if they were both as strong as the City walls, not machines ready to fall apart.
Maybe the feeling of anxiety wasn’t anxiety at all.
“I think you were very brave to rescue me,” she said then, sobering, and very little else mattered.
