When Eris called them away from the swarm in the pit, Kass had been staring straight at Guile-11's helmet. One moment she had raised a fist to break the jaw of a thrall between the two of them, and then she was stumbling, the sharp echoes of her boots ricocheting off the chasm as they found themselves on the opposite side. Guile's horned helmet was cracked, black fluid from it or his face trailing down the jaw like Eris' ichor. The comms were back, and Eris was telling them she refused to lose them.
Kass stared at Guile, checked her radar, and thanked the Light that her breathing was steady.
When they returned to the Tower, a storm had just broken up on the mountains. The smell of rain hung over the plaza, and clouds bunched up around the Traveler, torn occasionally into thin, strange wisps by the gently massive forces around it. Thank you, Kass thought. Thank you for your shield around this world.
Before she had turned to fight into the crowd that had cornered Guile, she had stolen the piece of Crota's soul. A discarded thing, coveted now by the Hive for its legacy and its power, trapped in nets of gravity and darkness - and now, secreted away in transmat, under the protection of her Ghost. She had never seen Crota up close in life, and holding the Hive prince's reality-bending memory had been unsettling.
"So that's what we're facing," Guile said suddenly. His throatlights flicked in fast red bursts Kass couldn't interpret. He'd lost a tooth, a not uncommon occurrence; another of the yellowed canines lashed onto his jaws was askew. The broken helmet, which he had acquired not two days ago, was now laying rolled halfway onto its filigreed side at his feet. "All those swarms of Hive and Taken. How did anyone ever kill that thing in the first place?"
"Lots and lots of bullets," Kass said.
Guile crossed in front of her, put one fist down on his open palm with a clink of Titan armor. "So we go now. Do the same thing to his father."
With the calm of battle fading, Kass was starting to feel the turbulent thoughts afterward. She kept her breath steady. "We should at least rest for the night," she said. "We'll meet Ilena in the morning and go."
Guile spread his hands, antsy. "As someone who has vowed - you have heard it - never to touch time travel if I don't absolutely need to, I say the morning can't come fast enough."
"You're scared."
He rounded on her, his antennae silhouetted against the sunset and the Traveler's smooth surface. Then his shoulders slumped, and he propped himself back with his weight on his left foot for a massive shrug. "That's true."
"The Traveler will protect us here."
"The Traveler and the Warminds. If anything comes close enough to orbit …"
"It won't." Kass kept looking at the Traveler. Evening was coming in like an advancing army, but the sunset sky filled with ramparts of rich pinks and golds. After the crepuscular fumes of the Hellmouth she felt jet-lagged, and tightened her hands into fists for a moment.
Her Ghost drifted out of the corner of her vision, as if knowing that she wanted to acknowledge every tactile thing she could find nearby. The little construct's red and orange livery was still a surprise to her: that unstealthy honor had come along with admiration from younger Guardians that Kass took with calmness. Ask one whether they touched the Void or the Sun, ask another if they had unearthed any artifacts, and they would leave feeling mentored. Maybe one day she would get to know them better.
"You don't think that Dreadnaught could come here?" Guile asked. The loose tooth rattled.
"The Hive meant to take resources from the rings," Kass said. "With the Reef's defenses broken they could do just that, but now, we're harrying them. After they rebuild the breach, kill the Cabal? Maybe."
"You said nothing will get into orbit."
"The Traveler chose Earth. Nothing will touch it, but it might get Zeno's Paradox close."
"At least the Cabal will be doing part of our job until then," Guile said, but he sounded uncertain.
She rubbed her hand over her opposite forearm, thinking again of the pressing weight of the Hive. It helped that she wore Eris' bond on her right side, glowing softly; it helped that she wore smart armorweave engineered to the teeth. The Traveler's silver glow reminded her of the concourse on the other side of the Tower, where the fish swam. The sleeping Traveler, observer-shield-parent, looked down on the Vanguard too. Kass thought of the scrap of impertinent vulnerability in that hallowed hall.
"Let's talk to Cayde," she said, looking for irreverence as well as comfort; she would go to sleep afterward, and wake up to gather Ilena, their third, and kill a king.
Guile was swept up behind her, walking steadily and looking around as if he was still expecting something to come teeming out of shadowed corners. Guardians lingered around the plaza, looking over their caches or talking. Inside, the Vanguard's hall was equally dim, its lights and sharp edges like crystal - and the long table was empty, the Vanguard having apparently retired for the night. Eris' grotto was empty too, the former Hunter having returned to the room she was slowly beginning to turn into a match for the labs and libraries on her ship.
Kass sighed. Even though she couldn't see it, she thought she could detect the Traveler's Light in the walls and in the clouds in the distance. Particles scattered and told her the story of its many long, long years, of the hatreds and sartorial wars under its unchanging gaze. Her Ghost clicked at her side.
"Sometimes Cayde stands on the balconies," Guile said calmly.
Kass looked up at him. She had been standing almost where Ikora usually did, and felt intrusive and weighty in the footsteps of the leader of the Warlocks. If she had wanted to, she could have examined the narrow lines and script notes of Cayde's map. She nodded.
Guile lead the way, and although they didn't see Cayde's silhouette above the outcropping where Eris used to stand, Guile's spirits rose. He made it into a game for them to find Cayde, peering with exaggerated slowness into dark corners as they wended their way into Tower North, self-deprecatingly asking how a Warlock and a Titan could possibly be able to sneak up on the leader of the Hunters. The Tower still hung, guiding, making Kass feel absent and calm. Guile was treating her like a sibling, she thought distantly. The Light eased around the Speaker's astrolabe, pooling in the strange, dense gems. He was treating her like she was younger, although his brother had been older.
To the game, then. They found Cayde sitting on the railing on the far side of Tower North, his legs hanging out over the drop. He turned to look at them with a wry expression in his eye lights, as if he had heard them coming from the moment they left the plaza.
When he swung out on the wrong side of the railing a burst of dizziness wormed its way between Kass and the Traveler's calm. Cayde's coat flapped, and she remembered the claw-sharp edge of a jut of rock, maybe shale - the brown dirt clumped at the base of yellowed grass, and seeing that edge in almost microscopic detail before she fell, and falling. The edge beyond the railing was built slightly unevenly, so that it was inches wide at the far end and disappeared long before it reached the wall.
"I come out here to be alone, and now just look at you," Cayde said. "Hero of finding people who just want to stare at the mountains."
"We didn't tell anyone about your stash in the Cosmodrome," Guile said quickly, to Kass' relief. There was another memory she didn't want - the broken floors, the pipes suspended in the air, the slow progress of one foot in front of another while Guile and Ilena cleared out the Fallen two rooms in front of her.
"Everybody needs hobbies," Cayde said. "You two all right?"
They glanced at one another, Kass grimacing for a moment at the way Guile's bright eye lights and dimmed throat approximated her raised eyebrows. If she craned her neck, she could see the Traveler, made into a half-moon by the side of the Tower.
"We did the job, sir," she said.
Cayde nodded. "Yes you did. And you didn't just mop up somebody else's kill. Half the Taken army was down there, it seems. You did good."
"Eris helped," Kass said quickly. "I don't know exactly what that power she called up was."
"Oh, Ikora actually wanted me to tell you about something like that." Cayde levered himself back onto the railing, cueing Kass' worry about the height again. "About a quest she wants you to undertake before going after the big bad. You've already talked with Zavala?"
This was directed toward Guile, who nodded.
Cayde said, "Just our star Warlock, then. And do it before you head to the Dreadnaught, no matter what Eris says."
"I will," Kass said.
"And stop trying to sneak up on people who won't be snuck on. We don't need too much creepy around here, now do we."
Kass' Ghost chirped as she and Guile turned, and Kass silently agreed with its consternated sound.
Kass had always felt a strong affinity for the Void, or a distance from the true Sunsinger's mastery of fission and plasma: instead, she stitched through and around the universe, diving into that energy that felt to her like a cool wind or deep water. When Ikora told her that it was time to unlock the Arc storm, though, she was ready: she left the Tower on that damp morning with a determination that, again, Oryx would be dead by no later than tomorrow. In the Void-dance she was graceful, raveling and unraveling gravity and quanta. Kass could fly.
She didn't want to look down.
On her comm, Ikora's focused voice said "Find a space to clear your mind. This is how a Stormcaller begins."
She struck at Vex with a precision that split her in awareness in two: bullets cut into the Vex's weakest points and splashed blinding white sparks across the rooftops wet with synthetic fluid. They tried to read her Ghost's energy, tried to simulate what she would do next, but she was too quick for them to organize if not to analyze, and she cut through more and more.
The other part of her mind, though, was with Oryx and the Hive. That Dreadnaught of traps and hidden caves, old reefs built upon older to make the armor of interplanetary war, would be like this. She must be prepared for Hive crowds again.
Ikora had said she had no more to teach her.
Ikora had said that she was one of the brightest-shining Guardians the Tower knew.
So she worked on controlling the masses of machines. As soon as she saw the bright light of their emergence into the universe she lined them up, splitting carapaces and then reloading. She moved to place one Vex in front of another and fire, cutting out an armored knee while the second Vex twitched and danced to find a place where its gun wouldn't line up behind its dying fellow -
And all this on one platform, one corrugated shelf of old Mars colony metal. She found a corner that felt right and looked up in the sky just as bright lightening forked down. In the calm dark with the Vex prowling at the edges of her Light, she calmed herself into the meditation.
Ikora said, ""Good, the storm is aware of you. But you need its loyalty. Do it again."
Another heavy Vex platform advanced, and Kass shredded it, circling to keep from backing up to the edge. A cord like a tail whipped across her shoulders and she blinked, catching the cool scent/touch/taste of the Void for a moment before she rammed her hands against the back of the Vex's carapace, tearing it apart. She re-wrapped her fingers tighter around her gun and looked for the next invasion.
White lights two rooftops away.
She almost fell on the way, a swell of fear hitting her as her cloak curled around her ankles mid-air. Meditate again, Ikora had said. Kass made it a fighting meditation, breathed with her next step as the Vex spread out.
The first few shots hit her, but she walked through them. She locked her finger on the trigger, and two Vex soaked up bullets and exploded.
She found her calm center in the memory of the Traveler, and began to breathe with beats, with gunshots. She found the pattern of the Arc light flashing around them, lost it again as a Vex bruised her skin through her armor. Her foot hit the edge of the rusting floor, and then she knew that the Vex were the mechanism but not the challenge. Perhaps Ikora and Cayde had known what would threaten her, and Cayde standing on the ledge in the Tower had been part of their test. Ikora may or may not have known it - the heights were the rub.
Understanding is the key, Ikora had said, and the trance is understanding. Transitioning into the trance on the way to her next meditation brought Kass through two more waves of Vex. The world smoothed. The meditation kept her breathing steadily as she held her ground, the Void-sense flickering on the edge of her perception as she glanced into the layers of energy just beneath the visible.
Glory, she thought. The Traveler had brought her to this glory.
"The storm begins to obey," Ikora said. Thunder crashed. "Once more, Guardian."
More Vex appeared from across another rooftop, creaking and squealing. She began to understand the connection between the Conductive Mind and the Arc energy, sharper and more branching than the Void. Instead of a cool constance, she felt erratic jolts of power. She was breaking through, scenting the Arc wash that she usually felt only from the barrel of a gun. Murmur smelled like this. How did the Arc hold? What equations governed it?
Understanding was true power. Those were elementary words from Ikora, more suited to the tyro Kass had once been than the woman Ikora called the Tower's champion. There was the mystery —
And there the flash of gunfire. Kass flowed to the next rooftop.
The Vex followed, bulky and shielded.
One advanced with a will, firing bursts that drove her back even as she angled around its fellows. She blinked again, emerging too close to a high ledge. Thick pipes cling to the wall behind her before diving back into the towers of the junction, and Kass felt the meditation falter. The Vex's attack chained off its arm, striking her shoulder and her face, filling her vision with red.
She blinked backwards.
She knew she would re-emerge in mid-air, had in fact willed herself to do just that. The disorientation hit her immediately as she watched the walls and the pipe fall in front of her, the Vex a red and white wall above them. Vertigo pooled in her stomach, but she knew to bend her legs and balance, and when her boots smacked the ground she kept her feet, tucked her gun under her arm and fired upward, rewarded with the splash of a Vex core dissolving into the air above her.
She backed up, found her calm center again, held more Vex off and tried not to think about the sickly feeling.
Ikora's voice was a relief. "Your lighting walks its own path," she said, her voice thick. Ikora had commanded armies with such steeliness in her words. "A show of force is in order. Call the lightning, and become one. You will either rise a Stormcaller, or not at all."
Kass smiled for half a second and started fighting her way through to where the Arc light tugged her.
Then she saw the gantry. Both the arc light and the lightning had hit the old steel beams, making the surface squirm and shift at the molecular level. This far into the trance that sight came easily, and although she felt it unseelie to lean on the Void too deep into the Arc Light, she did it anyway, smoothly. As if a lens had fit in front of her eyes, she could see the surfaces around her as solid matter again.
With that came her other farsight, the view of the shadowed ground as she edged onto the beams stretching out into the air. Putting one foot in front of the other became an act of asserting order in the universe. Left foot, the treads of her boot catching and shredding rust from the beams, and she could tell that the next lightning channels were going to open up above her before the bolts. Right foot, and she felt the energy from the Conductive Mind's Arc source lose some of its Vex properties and gain others which her body and her Ghost and her armor all gathered and remade. Left foot, a long step that landed solid, and her link to the Void in this moment snapped like a lifeline, but it was no longer needed.
Right foot and she found herself in the eye-
plasma tunneling into -
charged branches spitting pregnant ions -
Vex platforms watching, sieves for Arc and time -
Kass looked down at the sparking reactor on her shoulder and the lightning leaders in her hands.
The lightning flung her back and she caught herself midair on its forces. Understanding, Ikora had said. Kass understood that she could chase Oryx and his armies with this power; she understood that the texts she had studied with Ikora and Eris spoke of power like this. She understood that the storm was both question and answer.
I have just, she thought, been given the keys to the universe.
When she dropped to the gantry, the fear hit her again. Coolness wished away the sweat on her face under her helmet, while her limbs prickled in the insulating armor. Her ever-present memory of falling was not distant, but had almost reversed - that woman who fell would have flown today.
The screeches of the Vex flitted up from behind her.
"I think we did it," her Ghost said. "But there are more incoming. If you're going to use it, I'd use it now."
She nodded, and shook her hands out so that lightning darts cascaded into the black sky. "Wouldn't miss it for the world," she said, and swayed a little, and stormed forward.