Toland the Shattered, Eris Morn thought, was unfair in every sense of the word.
He opened the rusty door to his rooms barely an inch, showing shadowed, high cheekbones protecting sunken dark eyes like a fortress, Warlock-pale, Warlock-cloistered even out on the edges of the City. A smudge of gray dust clouded his high collar. He might have expected to see Guardians crowded into the narrow alley - exile didn't prevent devotees from seeking him out, after all - but there was bright suspicion in his eyes when Eriana shouldered forward, asking him for help.
They explained to him that Eriana wanted to win the war - that she had learned Crota's name with a Wizard's neck under her foot and with praxic fire burning in her hands, taking her captive's skin even when she paused her other tortures. Maybe Toland respected or feared that. It was Eris he looked at as he opened the door, and Eriana blinked pale pastel lights as she turned her back to both of them and surveyed the books and baubles kept by the man who had once been a pinnacle of his order.
He let them into a room crowded with metal shelves. Eriana remained distant throughout that first meeting, and later she confided in Eris that it was due to her own fear and respect, but also her fury: she was not the person she had been when Toland was a Warlock teacher either. Both of them had dirtied their hands, and so Eriana would remain businesslike, parroting the Vanguard that had failed both of them - failed to give Toland his dark resources, failed to save the armies that broke against the shores of Mare Imbrium.
They talked for a long time, trying to convince him, haggling for help. He didn't want to go back, Eris thought, but he did want to use the knowledge he alone, as prideful and conflicted as he was, possessed. She recognized the twitchy aloofness of someone who had been inside too long. Toland knew that leaving his hovel and his riches had something to do with shattering his chains. And not easily —
When they told him the name he rocked back, looked side to side. Would not tell them whether they had confirmed his ideas or surprised him. "So the lineage … " He said. "It's beautiful."
And Eriana, looking again at a fall of bells hanging from a shelf, rose so fast. She took the bells and held the clanging clump in front of Toland's face while he edged back, one hand going for a sigil on the wall. Fast, Eris thought. He hasn't lost any reflex, but Eriana outweighed him almost twice.
"That," she said, "has got to stop." The metallic jangling bounced around the small room.
Toland narrowed his eyes. "I said I'd work with you. Didn't ask for specifics."
"Crota is not beautiful. The Hive are not our pet ants, letting us look into their tunnels. I'm going to have Crota's head."
"I hope you succeed. The Darkness will last."
"Toland," said Eris, baring her teeth. Ready to tell Eriana to back off but too loyal to her to act on it without weighing how much the Exo's actions were justified.
"I see it so clearly," said Toland.
"The seeing has taught me to bring what I have to bear just as it has for you, Eriana." He raised his hand under the bells and folded them into her metal palm, making a small tinkling sound.
The Exo shifted back, laying the bells on the shelf like a pool of liquid silver.
There were other arguments, but as they gathered more fighters there were more people to direct Toland's carefully channeled madness. The impression of unfairness remained, though: the thing that had driven Toland away from the Tower would have swept him up whether the Vanguard spoke or not, Eris thought.
Toland the Shattered thought that the Darkness spurned him.
He would say, "I've searched for these secrets for years and they still seem determined to flit away. To open before other eyes, perhaps."
As they gathered other Guardians, his standoffishness became more bitter and specific, the Tower dredging up his old memories. He could conduct his research on the outskirts. He thought that he had exhausted anything the Speaker and the Vanguard knew, and stayed away out of spite - but staying out of the Tower was part of the terms of his exile. Could one rebel against their sentence by remaining intentionally, happily disgraced?
Because of this he expected no one else to give or get fairness either: his was a jungle law that Eris respected, as long as it didn't end with the fire team snapping at one another's throats.
Sai Mota, holding an elegant knife between her fingers and breathing shallowly into the artificial atmosphere soon after they landed on the Moon, worried: "And if we don't come back?"
"Then we'll give our bones to the beast like everyone else." Toland the Shattered had his own arcane ideas about how to mete out mercy.
Eris curled her lip, stood beside her in an effort to remind Sai of the fireteam's strength. Beside them, Vel and Omar pressed their shoulders together as they knelt beside one another, the mouths of their guns out the window.
Later, Eris pulled Toland aside in the complex where they holed up just before the descent. Fallen had walked here just minutes ago, and Eriana and the others were still patrolling outside, bloodthirsty and impatient. The feeling was catching. Madness threatened from all sides, making people twitchy, pushing them further along toward the Hellmouth with their desire to kill what they would find inside.
She accused him with hatred she hadn't known she'd been harboring, but which was as familiar as her own Ghost. She accused him of manipulating Eriana's team as a joke, while Eriana was too mission-focused to stoop to confront him. She accused him of having none of the secrets he professed to have.
He rubbed a hand on the edge of his helm, then reached out. It was no martial gesture, just an idle one, but she lifted her own hand to brush it away. When she lowered her hand she could still feel the air stirring. "You haven't equipped them the way we thought," she said.
"The Darkness is vast. The secrets are vaster. Do you want me to tell you the half-formed things? A theory is like an untested gun." He sat down against the wall and pulled a tiny, silver mechanism from his pack, started tightening a thin coil of wire with a finger.
She looked down at the top of his helmet. "Yes. We need what we can get. That's why we came to you."
"The closer we get to the Pit, the more become our enemy. It is bad enough without employing deeper magics. Eriana knows this."
Eris pressed the question. "What do you have that is half-formed?"
"Perhaps I will tell you."
"Just me? That isn't — " She had begun to say that it would not be fair.
He looked up. "Yes. You were selfish enough to ask. That means you have more than one reserve to draw on with which to survive."
So, suddenly and as she had suspected, they had a secret between them.
She sat in front of him while he wound Bad Juju and told her about immersing oneself in the Hive-mien, in becoming invisible to the Light. As he talked he tried it, gathering the Darkness and the Moon-dust so that her throat stung, but she felt something strong tighten around her like a cloak, and it mapped the pathways of the team so that Sai Mota's and Val Tarlowe's footsteps seemed to glow as they stepped on the other side of the walls, and she wondered if this was the sense that the Hive used when their eyes had grown over with skin.
Then he set down the intricate piece of the gun. Although he just placed it on the floor there was the feeling that it had adhered, that it would have sank into the molten center of the Moon if it had been able to burn through the metal. He drew a clicking metal Warlock bond from his cloak. "I'll have one of these as well. Take it."
"That's a Warlock bond."
"Doesn't matter out here. It's imbued, isn't it?"
She took it, struggled to clasp it one-handed around her arm. The metal was slick and textured with pores, as if it had come from something living. Toland took over the clasp, leaning over her, and when he did a green light was painted like a thin brush-stroke over the metal pieces. The bond was tight, but as she experimentally moved her arm and he leaned back, it did not hurt. Her eyes were drawn back to the doorway, thinking of the thralls and Wizards waiting for them at the gate, the vengeance taken in such small steps already -
She breathed out and caught Toland's eyes, and Eriana slammed her hand into the doorframe as she rushed to a stop, lights flashing, wondering where they had gone.
The Hive did not see fairness.
They weren't bitterness, its inverse, either - they were just swarming, taking what they could get, and in the pit Eris watched it. From behind crumbling rocks she saw the Wizards work their alchemies and the thralls stand at their guard posts. She listened for the songs and the strange tongues. Sought at first for the members of her team from whom she had separated. Saw a Knight carrying a bundle of cloth that looked older than the first battle of Mare Imbrium.
Nearly invisible, she became bolder and more vicious, striking out in lonely, primitive evocations of the missions she knew, but without order or reward. The Hive eyes itched and bled, but she found that with them she could see in the dark, although the edges of stones and tunnels were blurry. Green flashes flared in her peripheral vision, and sometimes she realized that they were the faint tracings of the Warlock bond.
Her world was the black bottom of the tunnels and the bones and the gnawing, and gradually, her world tightened down until the Tower was someone else's memory. The bond loosened on a skinny, corded arm. She became accustomed to the Hive-smell and the fear. It chased her as she chased food or thralls, and after she had grown almost used to the eyes and the bond and the tunnels she realized the fear flew where her Ghost had been. She expected it to follow her and instead there was an empty space where it should be, a wounded loss, a dense star-shape of fear.
The Nine did not condone fairness.
If it were in their speech it would be referred to as bias or tactic. Their minds stretched far, and when every person touched the mind of the next they were all one person, truly, and then the calls came out of the far, far reaches of space and he wanted to turn, wanted to swim with them in their sea but he could not. He had been right. That was the thought that sustained him through the dissolution, through the blinding and the pressing of a tunnel dug through the rich loam of the universe. Crota had just been a manifestation.
Two planes of existence were placed on top of one another like paper over paper, and the creatures that found him moved between levels so easily. So easily that he found himself pushed and pulled through barriers he couldn't see coming, brutalized until his captors realized that he lived on only one plane and had been hurt. Their awareness of his body was gradual and as dim-witted as their awareness of the galaxy was vast.
When he was hurt, when he hurt himself in the rages and the backlashes, he was left to clean himself up. In the strange gravity he thought he could feel the bones of his fingers pushing on his skin from the inside. His own gait felt so alien, and so easily exchanged for a different one.
Eventually, the Nine taught him why he felt that.
The Guardians were so selfless, or selfish in turn.
They were so fair, without the oozing skins of the Hive, without the eyes. Eris Morn was recognized sometimes, by the people who knew her before, but she did not often follow the comrades who invited her to leave her perch. With Crota still in the Moon depths (still there, by the Light, what must we do?) she could still feel the pull of the strange swirl of Light and Darkness that gave her power.
Ikora saw the Warlock bond as soon as they met. "Did Cayde help you?" Ikora asked, conscious of sartorial battles —
"No. There is no swarm yet here, but soon … "
"Did Toland make that?"
Eris found that her throat was tight.
"I recognize his workings. They were never complete."
"Nor will anything be, if Crota remains in power."
Ikora mistook Eris' hyper-focus for conscious insistence. The Vanguard came to see Eris about the Hidden one day later.
The Guardians wanted something, Xur thought, but he was having trouble keeping track of which level of the world he was in. His limbs moved of their own accord, handing over the supplies in his pack for the coins that shimmered and sank. Strange beings, Guardians, so loud and high-pitched and fast. They talked of glimmer and trials, of trying so hard before they fail, of having people and things snatched away. Xur waited to be pulled away. He waited for three days, and when his cells couldn't endure any more, he left.
The Nine spoke to him in groups, swimming through the gravity-bubbles they created for him or for whomever wore Xur's body before. They used his voice and asked him to speak of treaties and secrets he did not remember knowing, but could transmit. He was not tired, but he felt the wear on his body. Cell to cell, how did he compare to the Guardians any more? The Earth was a nucleus and around it the Nine spun.
She thought that she scented Hive on him, but it was a mistake, really - someone had thrallskin bracers, and Eris tracked to that before the figure in the corner. Not Hive, this one. Not anything, except maybe the cold pits between stars.
Xur was disjointed, as if his body was only a clotheshorse for his things: the geometric pattern like a Warlock bond, the fur around the edges of his cape, the hardened pack on his back.
She got the impression of eating.
Something had consumed him, bit at him.
When their elbows caught, though, she felt soft, folded cloth over the suggestion of an arm. As the emissary he had traveled between the stars at speeds and distances only potential for Guardians. There was a smell of ozone on him, as if he had brought outer space with him without ever touching a ship.
"The Darkness taught you," he said, pulling away so deftly that she barely felt his arm slide.
"Yes." She strengthened the fire in her hands and he moved away, backing against the wall where he stood. There were Guardians watching them now, glancing back and forth at one another.
Xur tipped his head. "Bodies come and go, but only cells remember. And if we forget, the Nine remember for us."
Was he a history, a collection of people? Different to different Guardians? Was Xur a mirror and the dead looked back? Black mirror, the glass waved with age.
There was competition between them, not economic but emotional - who was he to have more confusion than she, but also this solemn calm?
And pity, but she knew too well that only time made the memories of the Darkness go, and anything else was just messages shouted past people and never reaching their ears. In another place there might have been a memory of ash and blood, but right now Eris' memories of the tunnels and her team were distant, consumed by her own sadness. The whims that made her thoughts feel unreliable worked in her favor this time, even as she tried to wrest them into order. She peered into Xur's face, but it was only wisps and a faint, sour smell.
"So you could be. You could be so many things, and we are only singular," she said. The Light-Darkness told her this, and Xur looked around as if he saw his own body from a distance. There was the impression of something else looking out over Xur's shoulder, like the dark one had the entire Jovian system for a Ghost, small flanges stable in their LeGrange points around the core.
They disoriented one another. She thought she heard words as she backed away, a memory or a transmission, but did not recognize them.