It's always darkest before the giant alien army.
Eris Morn ran.
Regolith slid under her feet as she dug her toes in and powered up the side of a dune. Two thralls at the top of the ridge crossed one another's paths and stared down her with their green shard eyes, and the Hunter pushed upward with her feet and the knife in her hand and bounded toward them on to the flat of Mare Imbrium. One hand she cupped around a neck and drew just in time to slice a deep line of ichor across the throat. She shot the other thrall through the ribs, and moved away before she saw them fall. The ridge in front of her was high and gray, and she kept climbing, making up for the time she had lost when the mob and the quake drove her down.
Past the ridge was the battle. Guardians staggered in ones and twos across the dark gray rock, too wounded to die and too alive to revive. It would be a kindness for them to die, but Eris would not be the messenger that told them that if they didn't figure it out themselves.
As she fell down the cliff, she had thought she heard the Hive behind her: the thralls' footsteps like dried leaves, the thump of knights' feet. She had landed on her forearms, the regolith tearing filaments from her fieldweave. Eris had breathed deep and felt the gap between her and the other Guardians like a pit. The world had been turned on its side now, the rocks clattering around the people as they fell.
The Earth had risen during the battle. Occasionally, ships streaked across its face, fleeing or aiding the battle. Would there be enough? Would all the warriors the Tower could send be enough?
Eris' faith in the Traveler was a practical one. There were only so many Guardians in its gracious shadow.
All talk about the Festival of the Lost had been bitter that year, because there were so many dead.
The festival had been inherited by the Tower from the City, Eris knew. Refugees had started it, maybe when the Fallen first came, or the Collapse broke civilization open. For Guardians, the Festival was still a new tradition, one which they celebrated with vigor and martial mourning. The Hive, corpse-cold and shuffling, brought death close to the Guardians on both a spiritual and physical level. Morale was being sapped, and maybe it was knowledge, not victory, that would ensure it. Victory seemed impossible, but at least they could say that they knew what the Hive could throw against them? At least they knew now how long they could stand in front of a blast without being burned?
It would be even worse after this.
It already felt like it had been long ago when things had risen out of the pit on Mare Imbrium: wizards of unmatched power, and a creature with a sword that left streaks of blackened dust radiating out as if a meteor had hit the moon. It had killed swaths of Guardians at a time with an energy that made the world seem to turn in on itself and Eris' eyes water. Its last strike had taken her footing and tossed her off the hill. The Hive juggernaut was still there beyond the lip of the pit, sending out its Darkness, but it knew the Guardians were on the retreat. They would have to fall back to the ruined buildings if they were going to go anywhere, risking the narrow passes.
Eris scooted into the shadow of a stone when she reached the open plain. People were disorganized there, but worked on shoring up the flank of their retreat. Fares of fire and golden gunshots colored the nearly bloodless battle as ranks advanced and broke against the swarms of Hive. With the Guardians' backs to her, Eris could hardly see the Hive lines. Next to her, though, someone skating three feet above the ground on clouds of energy was pierced by bullets that bowled them over and exploded again, belatedly, in the disintegrating body that collapsed like crumpled cloth. The Guardian's Ghost snapped out, forming a sphere of binding blue energy.
Beyond it, beyond a few other Ghosts floating over corpses as they knit bodies back together, an Exo burned a Hive wizard up with yellow fire. Eriana-3, commander of one of the Warlock brigades that had been among the first to advance, glowed like a sunny day in the steppe. The gunfire reflected off her silver helmet, further confusing the blinding blasts around her.
Eriana saw Eris and, with a tip of her helmet, became Eris' next priority. Protect the people around you. Know the lay of the land.
"Any word from the Vanguard?" Eris whispered to her Ghost. The dry click in response meant that there had been nothing. As the sunfire burnt out in a line across the regolith like a fuse - perhaps where oil from Eriana's own body had dropped - a hole opened up in the Hive lines. Eris sprinted to Eriana's side and spoke
"Cleared out the thralls over the ridge," she told Eriana.
"I know his name," Eriana said. Her voice was high and throaty. Gloating, unlike her usual calm.
"Who?" Eris braced her aching elbows more firmly as she tracked a knight with her pistol sights.
"The Hive lord who slew our ranks. His name is Crota."
Eris thought of the darkness coming down, the sword, the blast that had pushed her down the hill. She had landed on her shoulder on the way and thought she felt the a string of muscle tear.
"How do you know?"
A wizard plummeted toward them, a toothless mouth screaming in a leathery face. It was already wounded, a hole in its side bleeding gray smoke, but Eriana too had exhausted her reserve of sun energy. She fired at its head as Eris angled around and lined up her own shot.
Straight through the wizard's cheek, bits of skin flaking off like leaves.
"One of these told me," Eriana said, and slammed her rifle against the wizard's wounded side.
The creature fell bonelessly to the ground, started to dissolve into grave dirt. Another arced right over it, though, blasting green energy that separated Eris and Eriana. Eris backpedaled, almost backing into a Titan wrestling with a knight.
Eriana, like the rest of the Exos, had been built to be a war machine with emotions. What advantage could possibly come from her voice thickening? She fired again, disintegrated a pack of thralls. What element put the ache in her tone? She said, "It told me that we are fighting a Hive prince called Crota. It told me to find the twilight world under the dead star eye, and it told me that Wei Ning was dead."
The ground began to shake, and Eriana, Eris, and the Titan looked up at the same time.
"Their prince has returned?" Eris muttered. Then, "I'm sorry."
"She died fighting," Eriana said. Only her helmet was turned toward Eris, but Eris knew - could read the set of Eriana's shoulders under the fall of her cloak.
A crack like lightning left blue afterimages in eyes she suddenly squeezed shut. The ground did not so much crack as undulate, spitting pebbles that floated slowly downward in the light gravity. The Titan was flung off his feet, and the knight brought its sword down. Eris and Eriana were crowded together suddenly, between more thralls and the new ridge in the land. Their shoulders hit, Eriana's Warlock bond glowing bright yellow against Eris' black fieldweave.
"Go left," Eriana said. "We'll try to support that Titan."
Eris went, hearing Eriana laboring slightly behind her. Again Eris climbed a hill, faster this time without an invisible threat behind her. The threats were certainly visible now, Hive running around unstable ground in dark packs.
The Titan had gone to one knee, but scorch marks and dissolving Hive said that he had struck out and won just a moment ago. He was injured, though, his Ghost bobbing frantically around a gash in his leg that oozed blood onto his armor. Human, Eris thought distantly. She tried to lean around the Ghost to see more clearly, without breaching personal space and touching it.
The Titan grunted, his head down. He was still scanning for Hive, had probably seen the two knights lumbering toward them while Guardians moved parallel to them just behind them, driving thralls and wizards into a swirling mess of a battle.
"Where's your team?" Eris asked.
With another grunt from the Guardian, the Ghost patched her in.
"Your team."
"Your Titan needs help," Eris told the strangers, propping her gun on her knee and watching the knights. Eriana, crouched on the side of the hill, had the Hive in her sights.
"Thanks, Guardian," came a woman's voice.
Eris edged around the Ghost and patted the Titan on the shoulder. "Your people are on their way."
"Thank you," Eriana said to Eris on a private channel, tired and relieved.
The Darkness was still weighing down, and both of them could feel it. Eris knew this when Eriana's Ghost appeared, flitting nervously around the Exo's head and speaking in a voice like a young girl. "It might be wise to get out of here."
"No. Keep looking," Eriana said, and lifted both her face and her gun toward the army in the distance. Other Guardians around her hackled, bounced on their toes, or took off at a jog, to defend larger groups of the survivors who had been driven back and back, dying every time. Eriana kept moving among the bodies with an almost joyous energy, and Eris followed, scouting for weapons and strange footprints.
"What are we looking for?" Eris finally asked.
Eriana looked back at her, yellow eyes glowing steadily. "Remnants of the energy that attack used, or their energy supply, or anything we can find. Ikora knows the Hive are cloaked in concentrated darkness, but so little else."
There was another wave coming toward them, two ogres hanging their tumorous heads low toward the marching cadre of thralls and knights. Behind them came another wizard, her skull heavy with horns and bone bracelets ringing her hands. The Darkness pushed down on them, on the backs of limping Guardians and Ghosts struggling through ministrations. Eris could feel the energy of her own Ghost like a drop of water in a desert.
The ogres fired, and energy came down all around Eriana in a blazing circle. In the distance she could see the form of the horned Hive king, flickering like static, raising a black sword.
Something watched from behind the blade of the sword: something that asked: Who are you? Her bones answered: Eris, who was waked in a car wreck; Eris, who was chosen by the Light and chose it back; Eris, who when she hunted and tracked felt like she had all the knowledge of the universe under her feet. Eris, who could read people, and in this colossus read a death as sure as gravity.
It asked: But Eris, who are you when you're alone?
"We have to go," Eris shouted, stumbling over the words, and reached out for Eriana, and the Ghosts tugged both of them away.
They stumbled toward one another when they met again at the Tower. The moonrise wouldn't ever be the same, not with all those final deaths on it, and when Eriana-3 saw it she curled an armored fist. Beside her on the Tower balcony, in the blue-silver of the full moon, Eris patted her hand on her own folded legs and thought that Eriana took the slaughter harder than her. Wei Ning had been there, after all, and her Ghost choked on Darkness like the others. To Eris the moonrise was a frontier gone bloodier and wilder than it had been, or a weapon hanging suddenly so close above their heads: to Eriana, it was just one thousand and one funerals.
The whole Tower felt some measure of that grief: Some Guardians accused the Vanguard of misjudgment, but most blamed them more for sending unskilled warriors (that being, anyone except the one who accused) into the fray.
Eriana had not spoken since they left the crowds of shocked and directionless Guardians who had retreated. Ships were still eking in. Like refugees, Eris thought. We're all a little more homeless now.
She reached out to Eriana, closed her fingers around the air before they could touch the Warlock's shoulder. Eris was comfortable with letting other people confide in her, but she had not had to do it so often before. Eris grew impatient of the war in everything from its campaigns to the tiny interactions between its fighters.
"I know what I'm going to do," Eriana said.
Eris withdrew, curious.
"The attack wasn't precise enough." Eriana's throat lights flicked on and off in Exo distress. With her, Eris knew, this as often meant deep thinking as worrying. "We know how to charge in. I've searched the books and the dead records." She ran her thumb over her fingers, remembering old burns. "We don't know how to move with the forces he throws at us. The Hellmouth is a puzzle, not just a big army."
Another ship came in, and she said, quietly, "It is also a big army."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to find one of the Warlocks who were exiled from the Tower." She didn't flash guilt, or change the way she sat, turned half-away from Eris, half-away from the moon. "Toland the Shattered or Osiris. They know about the pieces of the puzzle."
Osiris explored the wilds of Venus, Eris thought, and Toland succumbed to the Darkness. These were the stories she heard, but they were Warlock rumors, and she had been most curious about where one went if one was exiled. Halfway across the world? To another planet? To the remains of a Tower?
Those ideas, which caused her to look down from the moon and across the dark, rumpled mountains, finally dislodged her grief. The moon was falling and the Hive would overwhelm them all, turning the Towers to tunnels. Eriana had given her direction too, though. If the world became as dark as that then Eris, like Eriana, would search through the wreckage that remained.
"I'm sorry about Wei Ning," she said.
Eriana's lights stayed steady as she looked at the moon. She nodded, and they sat in silence for a time.