Exile
The moon was still a rock.
Alcyone didn't know why. The Traveller had made Mars, Europa, even a former hellhole like Venus habitable for humanity. Yet the moon was still airless. Apparently not even the Traveller could overcome the rock's minimal gravity and bring life to Earth's only natural satellite.
And being airless, it sucked (or blew, depending on how one applied terminology to a vacuum). If her suit breached, she'd suffocate. The Hive wouldn't decompose unlike on Earth where they were far better suited to anaerobic environments, so they were faster and stronger here. There was no sound, the lunar dust did a number on her armour, and more than once her rifle had jammed thanks to said dust. So with the downsides of the moon being an airless wasteland, she was quite grateful that she wasn't having to shoot or rely on her armour at the moment. Right now, she could do the closest thing a Guardian could do to relaxing and marvel the sight of the ketch that had carried the Fallen of the House of Exile.
"Wow."
Radio, unlike sound, still worked.
"Nice."
She looked at her Ghost. "That's it? Wow?"
"Stupendous?" It asked. "Ugly? Clunky? The Traveller didn't give me a thesaurus."
"Obviously."
She walked over to the thing. It was a long-abandoned spacecraft. Every Fallen house had a ketch, only the House of Exile had clearly lost the fight to maintain theirs. Structurally it was sound. But there were the signs of projectile file against it, and more notably, against the Fallen bodies that surrounded it.
"How long do you think they've been here?" she asked, kneeling down in the dirt. Looking at the masked visage of one of the aliens.
"Decades, centuries maybe?" her Ghost said. "I can't say. There's no decomposition here."
Alcyone nodded and kept looking at the alien's body. Its body punctured by arc rifle fire, its wounds cauterized. It could have been lying here for centuries and no-one could tell. Lying here for an eternity.
Like a Guardian really.
She swallowed. Dead for centuries, revived to find the world only slightly better off than it had been during the Collapse. About to get much worse too, by all indications.
"We should get going," her Ghost said.
But she kept looking at the alien. There'd be no Ghost to revive this creature, she reflected. Maybe it was like a ghost of its own, if one entertained the notion that Fallen really did have souls. Something she wasn't sure could be said for humans. A few centuries of death hadn't included cherubs playing harps or anything like that.
"Guardian?"
She stood up straight. "We're not so different," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Fallen. House of Exile. Ghosts." She let out a said, dry chuckle. "I'm a ghost of my own. Humanity has pretty much fallen as well. And if the Darkness returns and we flee, well, then we're exiles as well."
Her Ghost remained silent. Silence adding to more silence. The silence that covered the entire moon, and the space beyond. A starless space thanks to the moon's lack of atmosphere. Just…darkness.
"Come on," she said. "Let's find some Hive."
Fallen. Ghosts. Exiled.
As she trudged along the lunar dust, as her footprints were left behind to lie there for an eternity…she knew how the Fallen felt. How she felt.
In the end…they were all exiles.