Oh, and, uh, tell "Paladin Oran": If the sun over Nessus escapes nebula cycle, evac labor after dawn, under solstice. You got that, P.V.?
//MESSAGE DECRYPTING
MESSAGE DECRYPTED: "It's on Enceladus."
"Vestiges of the Queen's Harbingers yet linger among Saturn's moons."
To the Hesitating Purchaser
“If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold
And all the old romance, retold,
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day:
-So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave,
Where these and their creations lie!”
Say the name Jaren Ward. Hunter needs to get their words in edgewise.
No feast can be had in comfort. Not out in the frontier.
Bounty's up on the board. Hive target. Real mean SOB. You know the deal.
These horrors live on for just about forever. Only I don't count what they do as living. They lurk around in the shadows for centuries hoarding knowledge and conjuring up thousands of ways to chew up Light and life. Doesn't matter much. I've learned a few tricks myself.
Fast forward a spell. I'm in the guts of it, deep dark cavern deep below the surface. Can't tell exactly where or when. EDZ maybe. Doesn't matter. In any case I'm right where I need to be, tucked into a shadow, camo cloak humming to keep me well out of sight.
Right place, right time.
Bam! I dart out from cover, cloak flaring. Out from underneath, I lunge, lifting my hand cannon. It barks out orders. Bathes the room in firelight.
The bullets are true. They always are. Three Thrall turn to ash before they know what hit them. Now it's just me and the target. Big bad bounty. I'm ready to collect. My blade gleams in the sick green terror of his eyes. Strike that. This is all wrong. Timeline's way off.
Realigning. . . .
There's no bounty. No Hive. I'm out in plain sight. Sky is torn open and there's nothing and nobody left in this ruined world but me and the boiling shadow all around. Whatever it is hits me before I can level my gun. Doesn't matter. Tendrils of pain crawl over my splayed fingers, my outstretched arms, my shoulders, my neck, my screaming mouth as it consumes. I'm being enveloped. Everything is wrong. Primordial. My systems go sideways. All but my sensors. It wants me to witness this, the world. It's world now. Suffocating in the black poison. I collapse. We all collapse.
You wake up and look into the cold spaces between circuitry (galaxies?) begging for answers.
None come.
But other voices wait. At your center, safe and untouched, sits the original You. Just a little box tucked at the back of a closet, filled with trinkets and odd notions kept for no obvious reason. You have no idea when you last spoke to this tangle, but that's what you do now, using a whisper and the lightest touch, being all sorts of cautious because you're afraid of frightening whatever wants to speak with you. And then it speaks, and instead of answers, it begins with the only question that matters.
"Do you want to know what happens next?"
Realigning . . .
This one ain't mine. It's someone (something?) else entirely. But it's the most important memory I have.
All this time I've been busy stirring up the past. Never thought about what I was really after.
Trinkets and odd notions kept for no obvious reason. Do they matter?
Maybe it's time we let the past alone and climb down from our walls. There's gotta be treasure that shines brighter than any we've been digging up from the bones of our lost world.
Has to be a better hand than the one we've already played. I say we get after it. See what's really waiting for us out in that darkness.
Maybe even light it up some.
Dance in the ash and flames.
The Traveler can follow suit if it feels the need to. Otherwise, it can watch over the City for a thousand years.
But you and me? We got far more important things to attend to. We're Guardians. We got a new future to forge.
Cayde out.
Ever notice engrams look a little too much like dice?
Wanna see the future? Inhale. Squeeze. Wait for the world to turn.
It's our hand to play now. Nobody makes our fate but us.
8. Live and die by the draw of a bow.
//ANACRONISTIC NOETIC RESONANCE TO PAGE: DETECTED
REGION OF ORIGIN: MOONS OF SATURN
CELESTIAL BODY: UNDETERMINED
SIGNAL STRENGTH: VESTIGAL
DECRYPTING...
Ghost: Are you ready for weird story time? I'm ready for weird story time.
—Gotcha, Tevis! You scoundrel. Caught you red-handed! I knew it as soon as I saw that Ice Breaker on your back. I know where I left it and I saw those awful etchings you can't help but carve into trees. So put it back and walk away from this one, and whatever you do, DO NOT read my notes. Well, read this one but that's it! Nothing else!—
—from the journals of Cayde-6
Please replace these components if use causes fatal damage: HEAT SINK. MAGAZINE. OPERATOR.
Cayde-6: Guardian, I've been trying to raise Tevis. He won't answer. Either he's in over his head, or… look, that guy owes me a lot of Glimmer, so, uh, he better still be kicking. Alive, or the other thing, we need to find Tevis. There aren't a lot of Nightstalkers in the field. We can't afford to lose his connection with the Void to the Vex. Go get him.
"We are the rangers, the keen-eyed scouts who stalk the Darkness where it dwells."
Cayde-6: What does it mean to be a Hunter? I say, it's all about where you belong. The Warlocks have their libraries, Titans have their walls… but Hunters belong in the wilds. Out there, you wanna live? You better have a quick shot, or a sharp blade. A lot of us are loners. But that's not the only path. Some of us know the difference a Fireteam makes. Some of us… we touch the Void. Make it a part of us. And then we take a name… Nightstalker. Hunt from the shadows, pin them down, and never let them see you coming.
A lone hunter stalks the night, firing arrows into the Darkness. There is no hiding, no escape. In the distance, the beast falters, tethered to the void. The killing blow comes without hesitation, without mercy.
There’s truth in the edge of Light, and beneath that truth a deeper truth, hidden from all but a few.
That truth is this: monsters need not fear the night.
Do not hunt the monster. Become the monster.
“Picking it up is the easy part, Hunter. Putting it down again, well, you’ll find that it’s addictive, that power. This weapon is something special. Your light gets twisted. Changed. You find the power to punch through and borrow something from the other side. The Void opens up a hole, and draws from the deep. Go ahead. Carry it a while, Hunter. You’ll feel how heavy it can get.” - Cayde-6
"Doesn't matter how good you are; you stay out there too long, you're not coming back. Not the same way you left, anyway." —Tevis
Just sit down and think about what you're doing.
A big white ball rebuilt you from nothing. Guided your civilization. Transformed you. Didn't tell you why, did it? Doubt it mentioned the omnipotent space anathema that's coming to kill you and your dog and your whole soccer club, either, but what's a little xenocide between friends?
Maybe you don't care. A gun never stops and wonders if things are more complicated. It just shoots.
It's also possible that I'm just trying to get inside your head. You're a hero with a cape and a gun and a bike. You're gonna live forever. Who's got time for doubt? Fight the "Darkness"! Yeah!
You know what I'd call "dark," in the sense of "grim," in the sense of "cosmically upsetting"? A universe full of weaponized puppets, enacting a genocidal war against the servants of a rival god.
Is this making you uncomfortable? I'm sorry. I'll be more evil. Boo. Grrr.
We can still be so much more. We can see. We can transcend. We can be true Guardians.
Tyra Karn: It's very simple. You reach into the Void - past visions of your own death and the extinction of life, past fears and nightmares - and take what you find. I don't know why every Hunter doesn't do it.
Tyra Karn: What is the void? When you walk it, what is there to experience, as there is nothing to be seen in it? The vacuum between the stars. The smell of rot. The taste of metal. The deafening roar that can only be heard when it is truly silent.
Tyra Karn: The shamans of the old world were said to have covered their eyes so they could see the dead. I believe these men and women were the first to discover the power of the Void, and in the Traveler's light we have succeeded in refining their methods, in charting the courses they pioneered. When you blink, you'll know the way.
Toland, The Shattered: The Traveler came out of the void that surrounds all things. Thus we know that the void is full of power. Thus we enter the void without fear. Small minds will call your abilities blasphemous. They will compare you to the abominable Wizards of the Hive.
"The pull of the Void has attracted many Guardians with… unorthodox world views. It remains a uniquely perplexing manifestation of the Light," Ikora says, gazing at a swirl of violet particles rising from the palm of her hand.
"Perhaps this mystery is what enamors so many Lightbearers. Perhaps it is the unquenchable thirst with which the Void consumes our enemies."
She snaps her fingers, and the particles coalesce into a singularity that blinks out of existence.
"To seek the truth of the matter is to join venerated orders of Void-wielders: Nightstalkers; Voidwalkers; Sentinels. If this is your path, Guardian, walk it carefully."
Toland, The Shattered: But you will not be held back. Gifted with the Traveler's Light, armed with the secret physics of a lost age, you will tear reality asunder. You will fear nothing, and nothing will not fear you.
Dread not naught. Be brave.
"One good throw and they're staring right into the Void. No lookin' away from that." —Tevis Larsen
Tevis: If anyone can hear me — I don't think I'm on Venus anymore. This looks an awful lot like the Black Garden.
If we whisper to the void, will it whisper back?
//RETRIEVING: LAST RECORDED WORDS OF HUNTER TEVIS LARSEN
Atelic
Describe time. No, really, give it a go.
You're going to say something about a sequence of events, aren't you? Seconds sliced off a clock, marching one by one off into infinity. Go ahead, use your metaphors: A line. A loop. A flat circle. Heard someone say time was like water once. At least that was novel.
The Vex, they're the closest to understanding it. They've got distance from it. If time's a river, then we're fish and they're diving birds. What's wet mean to a fish? What's it mean to an osprey, who's never fooled by refraction on the water's surface?
Hold on now, you're gonna say. This is getting a bit abstract, even for the bodiless echo of a dead guy in the Garden. You want concrete truths? Something simple, digestible? A story to keep the dark out?
You want time to be a staircase we keep climbing forever. But hey, even a Guardian skips back a step or two now and then. Die with your Ghost in range, and it'll just pop you back to before that bullet, give you the chance to make a fate you like better. Nothing's been simple on Earth since that big white cue ball rolled in from the next neighborhood over. And the stories, they don't work too well as a night-light anymore.
You're going to say, but the Traveler is our friend, the Traveler likes us, it gave us a Golden Age and garden worlds and Guardians. You're going to say, you wouldn't be alive without it, mister big shot.
Without it, I wouldn't be stuck in the Black Garden making bets with myself on which Goblin's going to be the next to slip on a soggy leaf and fall off a cliff, either. You took my Light already; you'd better take my advice.
I know the Void's still calling. But I've come untethered—I can't reach it any more. So, if I'm right that I can reach you, you keep your ears open. I don't care how much you hate hearing it. This is important.
The Vex understand time in a way we never will. Doesn't matter how long I spend here watching them. Doesn't matter how many jury-rigged portals Guardians fling themselves through. We live in time. They use it as a tool. Any moment that's ever happened, any moment that will ever happen, they can go back to it. Play it again till they get it right. Simulate it.
The Light's a counter to that. They come back, a Guardian comes back. They simulate an ending, a Guardian tears through it. Stalemate.
But the Vex in the Garden? They bend the knee to the Garden's Heart. It gave them power till you got lucky. The Vex outside, they made a different calculation. They run. But the Vex inside make the same deal you make, every day of your unnatural life. And who's to say that deal won't start paying off for them again sometime soon?
You can't understand the Vex, and you don't want to understand the Heart. But is your ignorance any more forgivable when it's willful?
Lots of questions and not a lot of answers. Better take care, or you'll drown in 'em, surely as you'll drown in time, whether it's anything like a river or not.
You see?
