CommanderTitanInquisitor suggested I write something about Eris' first meeting with Ikora after she returns to the Tower. This isn't quite that, but I loved the idea of writing one of Eris and Ikora's key conversations.
Night, mild, breeze from the northwest whipping churlishly off the Tower. Zavala squeezed the top edge of his mark once, puling the fabric taut. Cayde-6 paced, and that wasn't unusual for him; Ikora could feel the heat coming off him too, though. It was a sign of quiet Exo overclocking, unfamiliar morality processes clicking into place like abacus beads in his head. And Ikora, lone, looking at the ship hanging still and severe over the drop.
There were watchers on the Tower above them, with laser scanners and thought-filaments winking toward the Moon.
"Eris?" Cayde called. Warlock's responsibility, Warlock's student, but Ikora would let the others wonder and prod at the ship and what was inside. Eris had made of the ship a little black-and-green fortress. The Vanguard's Ghosts circled it, watching and testing.
A silhouette at the top, and Ikora saw the three scum-green eyes.
"Bring her out of there." Zavala was grumbling, hands now still.
"She will bring herself." Ikora said, looking at him instead of the slowly retreating figure in the entrance.
"Come on out," Cayde said. "It's just us here."
Zavala's heavy brow furrowed, and Ikora thought that she knew what he was thinking. If Eris had been afraid to walk among Guardians, the Vanguard wouldn't have come here. She would be just another strange, useful visitor taking coin and barter. Just another informant, perhaps, a middleman for Ikora's messengers. Instead, Eris whispered doom in Guardians' ears, or shouted and struck at nothing.
She was right in her proclamations, of course. The Hive were coming, and the shadow world of Eris' madness probably looked just like the Tower would if it were overrun.
She didn't remember Eris the Guardian tyro very well, but she remembered Eriana and the fireteam she chose to go down into the pit. The end of that war had felt just the same as middle of it.
Eris descended the ramp just as Ikora stepped forward to go in after her. Ikora didn't remember her well from before. There were a lot of rowdy or serious Warlocks in her care, heady with their power. Eris had, probably, been average. Then Eriana had found her, and had brought out the survivor in her.
"The watchers," Eris said as she descended, crossing one foot in front of the other until she stood heavily just above the railing. Then again she stepped down onto each rung on her toes, and found the flagstones. "The looking beasts, the waiting enemy. What do you seek, Guardian of Guardians?"
"We seek you," Ikora said.
"You have found that."
The Ghosts retreated from the hull of the ship, and Eris raised her chin to bring the eyes in line to look at their glinting facets.
"We appreciate how you've come here and told us of the Hive," Cayde said.
Don't undervalue her, Ikora thought.
"People are afraid," the Hunter said. "Of unrest getting down to the City, of Crota coming … "
"They should be. Guardians are brave, and Guardians will die," Eris said.
"Yes, but people are … distracted by your presence."
"I see them playing. I hear the screams, and see the faces over and over. People peer through the railings. Their young, dead faces … must all be watchful." She raised her hands as if to touch the people who visited her. Some came to trade and take tasks, Ikora knew, and some came just to watch her unpredictable movements.
"I won't debate with you, Eris." Cayde stood still now, one foot angled behind the other in tense readiness. "Stop proselytizing. Conduct your business in the space you were given. We all know we need that business with what's coming." His lights were dim - shame, perhaps, or a tinge of apology.
Eris nodded at him. "I will stay here," she said. "I will send your Guardians to the caves and wastes to die and be reborn as I have done. Pray the Darkness stays its hands." There was no bitterness or accusation in her sing-song tones. Worry, maybe. Concern for the people in the Tower. She watched Ikora watch the tiny lights reflecting off the scouts on the pinnacles.
Zavala sighed, but he and Cayde nodded at about the same time.
"Then good evening to you," Cayde said, his eyes brightening. Eris sighed, but the sigh seemed disjointed as any of her words. It did not match her cold expression.
Zavala turned away as Cayde nodded his head at Eris, but Crota's Bane turned to Ikora.
"You will not be leaving," Eris said.
"How perceptive." Ikora blinked.
"You do not move."
The two Vanguard and their Ghosts had gone; Ikora could hear Cayde and Zavala's footsteps on the stone stairs.
"Wash them away, Ikora," Eris said, her face lifting, gloved and studded hands grasping at dust and smaller matter trails in the air.
"Wash what?" Ikora muttered.
"Them." No indication of whether she meant the retreating Vanguard or the Hive. Cayde and Zavala were crossing the near-empty plaza now, talking to their Ghosts by the way they were nodding their heads away from one another.
"It's fitting that you should say that. I wanted to talk to you about something on my own."
Eris clutched one elbow with her opposite hand, swayed. Then she sidled back into the ship, jumping the rail in a burst of green fog that splashed off of Ikora's thoughts like sunflare. She followed, through an invisible field that gave with a tiny feeling of cold and shielding. Ikora ascended the ramp and waited, unassailed, in the hold. Her Ghost whispered worries and statistics - no corruption, no tendrils of corporeal Darkness but instead stink and electricity waiting predator-sharp, coiled on its scabby haunches.
The interior of the ship was musty and dim, with status lights winking green on panels and the undersides of panels like fungi.
Ikora's own power rose, crested, settled, and Eris didn't seem to notice. Whatever third-eye sight she had gained, she was not troubled by a Warlock venting.
As soon as she entered the hold proper, though, Eris became agitated, flitting to the old, clunky red hatch controls, to a stack of black boxes on the deck (marked as rations - so this was how she subsisted alone) to the ramp further up, blocking out the view of the green console lights and the pink and silver Traveler-shine on the bridge.
More boxes were piled in the halls, Ikora saw, tied in with bungie cords and carabiners. The mouths of guns poked out of the skewed lid of one box. On top of another beside it were dark green shards like knives without handles, spikes that might have been stone and might have been bone.
"Gifts for my brave lights," Eris said. She turned and ran gloved hands over the edge of one box.
"We must speak of the Tower," Ikora said, growing impatient.
"Wait."
Eris climbed the ramp further into the ship, into lacquered shining halls, and Ikora followed. In the bridge she stood by the single seat. It hung from the ceiling in wires and coils like the ones draped from the ship to the railings. The City was a thousand lights.
"You're under the protection of the Vanguard, of the Tower," Ikora said.
"We all need that," Eris said, looking down at her from the crowded hall. "It might be enough."
"But I need something from you too. It will be dangerous work, heavy on the mind."
It wouldn't be difficult for her to explain that the goal of the Hidden was everything and nothing, that it took curiosity and subtlety and forward momentum all at once. It wouldn't be more difficult than usual, she thought. Eris would understand. And who would she tell? Unless the Hive found her. Unless the Hive found all of them.
Ikora put her hand out toward the seat, resting for a moment against what might be leather. "There is a network called the Hidden. Warlocks not all, but most, and we reach out toward the stars and bring back what we find. I think you should join us. "
Eris' lip curled, but when she spoke it was with curiosity instead of derision. "And in the dark the moving things, up and down like waves, sin and cosine."
Ikora kept what momentum she had. "It will help the war. Teach you more about the war than you ever knew."
"Sometimes I feel l know too much, Vanguard." Eris opened one of the boxes beside her. The guns had spiked backs like animals. Ikora felt something like a breeze, something like a whisper pass both of her ears. Split resonances, she thought. That gun has two chambers.
"I told you I give gifts," Eris said. "Some Guardians listen to the whispers and take what I give. Some shiver. Some do both, and the ones who killed Omnigul are such. Would I leave the Guardians who help me?"
"You wouldn't have to. I only need information, for now."
Eris let the top of the box fall, clattering, and close. "From who?"
"I will not tell you unless you're bound to this."
Eris lifted her head, almost sniffing. A Warlock would perk up at the mention of binding, looking for the same information Ikora had already pulled from the guns she had seen Guardians carrying. "We were bound before," she said. "We had our duty, and we failed. Now, Crota approaches your people again."
Was she looking for more information? Was she judging the Vanguard, or praising them? Ikora herself had seen the need for both. That was part of why the Hidden existed.
"Look at them," Eris said. She stepped backwards, and slowly, Ikora followed her into the hallway between the munitions. There were other things boxed too, sewing kits and pieces of armor, stones painted with sheen that seemed to reverse their own depth, sinking into themselves deeper than the surfaces beneath. "I will keep building here."
A small fold-out workbench hunched in the hallway. Beyond it, a narrow door lead to a bunk flung about with cloth. Most of the blankets were black, some edged with color.
"You can," Ikora said. Eris looked impassive, then folded her arms and leaned as if dizzy. Ikora wondered if she should reach out to her, or if this was just an expression of Eris' natural state. Either way, she seemed to pull another question out of the air.
"The Tower has seen so much pain," Eris said. "We tried to stop it, and then we were no more. What else can we do? We have been placed in this space. They're gone, Ikora. I cannot be what all of them were."
Ikora waited for another answer, but there was none. She thought of the people she would put Eris in touch with first if she joined the Hidden, the ones with direct ties to the Tower: the emissary from the Nine, the laborer in the city, the one who spied on the Reef. "Do you blame the Vanguard for what happened to your team?" Ikora asked gently, trying to puzzle her out. This would have had to come to light eventually, she thought, and she was tired of waiting. Even her Ghost flicked apart and together in silent surprise.
"Was it we who should have done more?" Eris said. Saying the name of her teammates even obliquely in that 'us' seemed to take energy from her, and to thicken her voice.
"No," Ikora said, immediately. "We're glad you're back. If only all of you had returned."
Eris looked beyond her, over her head at the City.
Ikora, avatar of the Warlocks, asked another question. "And do you pity us?"
"This city?" Eris waved empty, gloved hands. Her fingers pointed down, as if through the floor to the uneven roofs of tents and buildings, but her palms made the same waving motion she had used before, drawing the silhouette of the Hive caves in the air. "I think that we are all in danger." She spoke the words quickly, accelerating through them. "I think that if Eriana and Toland and Omar and Sai and Tarlowe still lived, we would still be in it. But we would have more Light."
"Then I blame you, and you pity me." Ikora held out her hand. "We can work with that."
"I have done enough," Eris said, downcast. She had, Ikora thought, but so had everyone on this Earth of the besieged. Then Eris looked up again, close in the narrow hall. "I will do more."
"Then I'll teach you, and the bond first."
Suspicion in Eris' face, even with the eyes, but she held out a tentative hand. She expected sunglow, Ikora knew. She had expected a bond that would track or watch her, that would trace neon colors along her palm in ancient sigils. There was none. They slapped their palms together and let go. Ikora told her whom to speak to, and why, and the words to use, all the codes and connecting dots of the parts of the Hidden it would be necessary for her to see.
Ikora left hours later, after she had explained all of these things and their keys and dangers. It would have been full dark out in the taiga. The scouts were black figures against the sky opposite the Traveler, visible only because she knew they were there. Eris would understand these things, because she saw the Tower as both a Guardian and a vendor and an outsider. And because she had her motivation, sharp as a knife in her back. Ikora thought that Eris understood.
Ikora, lone, crossed the plaza and told herself that she would make sure Eris didn't have reason to pity the Last City.