AN: Not sure how long this will be yet, but I wanted to write something Andal-centric that explored his early days as a Guardian. Given how sporadic Destiny canon is, some of this might become an AU, but right now this is almost entirely based off The Tall Tale grimoire entry. Cheers!
Oh, it was here. It was here.
"I can feel it," the Ghost whispered, neither bothering or able to hide the excitement in its voice. "I feel them. By the shore, beneath the sand." It was flitting about Micah's head as it spoke, but the hunter was patient. Micah nodded to it, and her own Ghost appeared from beneath her hood to speak.
"Think you're ready?"
The Ghost considered Atsa Hashka's words. The pull of Light made it difficult to think properly, but it needed to have a clear mind. This would be the most important event in its life since its birth. Centuries of planning and rehearsing felt so inadequate now. No words could encompass the goal of the Traveler. Human language was too small. How could the Ghost possibly hope to explain the size of the stars to an ancient stranger?
"Maybe not," the Ghost replied. "It is difficult to tell. There is so much to explain."
"You would be a fool if you said otherwise," Atsa told it. There was a smile in his tiny voice. "And so you are ready."
The Ghost trusted him. He knew better than it did, after all, and the only other Ghost left of Micah's pack was just as Chosen-less as it was.
It came up to the deck to watch as the ship banked towards the shore. An ancient pier was to the east, with old asphalt roads leading inland towards a deserted city, but they were careful not to go near any structure large enough to attract attention. Micah would protect them, the Ghost knew, but she was only one hunter, and there were so many enemies of the Traveler on Earth.
They had been combing the North American west coast for weeks now, and had made it all the way to the Gulf of California. It would be a tremendously long trip back to Siberia, and then a brutal march through the eastern Russian interior, but that would be the first test of its Guardian, and the Ghost felt giddy at the thought of a future where it would no longer be alone. Come wolves and snow, it would finally have a partner on the Path.
The Ghost gave Micah directions to the grave as they washed up onto the shore of what was once La Paz. The pull was getting stronger, and the form of its Guardian began to take shape in the Ghost's mind. It flew off the deck of the ship and whizzed across sandy beaches, unwilling to heed Micah's call to wait, following the call of the Light instead. The pull buzzed like a claxon inside its mind; a warning and a siren. So many things were about to end today, and tenfold more would begin.
The long-practiced words of its planned first conversation surfaced in the Ghost's mind as it scanned the shoreline. Anything it could say would not be enough, and it was impossible to settle on which inadequate thing it would begin with. Would its Guardian need consoling? Would they cry out as they woke, or rage or run or hide? Would they try to attack? It knew of Guardians attacking their Ghosts in a haze of misdirected fury; killing them, even. So many things could happen.
It remembered Atsa's advice, which sounded like fluff at the time but felt right now. They will be as scared as you are, so above all else, be kind. It was the only surety it could latch onto, so it did.
The Ghost stopped above a patch of sand as it found its soul. Its Guardian had probably been from the abandoned village nearby; old wet wood creaked like bones on the grass above the beach. The Ghost saw other human skeletons scattered around, some much older than its charge. It could feel the tug of Light from their bodies, too; but the one directly below was unmistakably its Chosen. The uncertainty of if it would ever recognise its Guardian when it came across their body was quiet for the first time since the Ghost had woken.
It could hear Micah docking the boat about a hundred metres south of its position. No Fallen in the trees, either. Safe, for now. It wasted no more time.
His first breath was full of sand. Fire poured into his lungs, choking him, and he died within minutes of waking.
More sand, more choking. His limbs spasmed by his sides, disrupting the integrity of his tomb. He died some more, or maybe he didn't, because death was final and this wasn't. Maybe he was in hell.
He died six more times, or maybe it was thirty or only four, before he got an arm loose enough to move around. He reached above him, hoping it was up, hoping the sky would touch his fingers. He'd made the mistake of opening his eyes at some point and now it was gritting beneath his lids. He wanted to yell and call out, but he only swallowed more sand. He felt himself die, felt his heart stop beating, and then his body went still for a moment before it started right back up. But he couldn't possibly be dying. Right?
He wasn't dying, but he also wasn't sure he was alive. It all blurred together as he moved, choked, spasmed in this grave. He had no way of tracking time—all he could taste and see and hear was salty, wet sand that continued to not-suffocate him. How had he gotten here? Had he always been buried? If that was the case, eternity felt oddly short. He could not remember the Before. There had been nothing before waking up and choking. All he knew was that this felt wrong.
Death was only a temporary black-out. His thoughts were right where he left them when he woke back up, so he began to count as he moved. If he couldn't track time, or if time didn't exist because he was in Hell, then he would construct it for himself. It helped to distract him from the sand and the choking and the stabbing grit encasing him in the ground.
He got to three hundred and seven when something other than sand entered his little pocket of existence. Muffled speech near his bicep, a language he didn't know. The pressure to his left eased and shifted. Was that up? Had he been digging the wrong way?
He died again and when he woke this time, stabbing pain along his arm was there to greet him. Liquid welled around the wound, maybe blood or maybe seawater. He was certain he was by the sea, though he didn't know how he'd come to that knowledge.
More muttering, more distinct now. Someone called to him. Light! Light behind his sand-encrusted eyelids. Something grabbed his arm, the one that was on fire from an injury he hadn't seen, and pulled him up—the real up. He'd been digging parallel with the sky.
Sunlight blinded what was left of his vision. A figure stood over him, a blur of dull metal and heavy fluttering fur, pulling him from his grave of sand and salt. Even in the open now, he had no room in his lungs for breath, and so he died again, but the waking was not immediate. This was not non-existence, but it was not existence, either.
"I told you," Micah huffed, pulling the Ghost's new Risen by the armpits towards the boat. "To wait."
The Ghost cast its eye to the ground, chagrined. "I couldn't help it. I was—not thinking."
"And you kept rezzing him. He was moving around when I dug him out."
"I could feel him dying!" the Ghost nearly cried. Its body was shaking but it did not know how to stop it. "It was terrible." Even now, with its Guardian dead in Micah's arms, it could feel the death clinging to his body like an infection. It was wrong and lonely, and that brief astral spark of connected Light had been so exquisite it had been almost too much to bear. Was partnership as overwhelming as loneliness? It didn't know how to handle that. At least solitude had become familiar.
Atsa eyed the Ghost from Micah's shoulder, his expression not unkind. "You'll get used to it. But he's fine. We'll get him sorted out."
Micah pulled his body to the ocean, her arms straining with the effort—a waterlogged corpse filled with sand and salt was no easy burden. The hunter heaved a sigh as she settled the man's body neck-deep in the water, washing away the sand covering his clothing. "Poor bastard's not looking too great. You'll have to cycle him a while yet before he gets all the dirt out of his lungs and stomach." Micah looked at the the Ghost from the corner of her eye. "Which you wouldn't need to do if you'd waited for me like I told you to. Your Guardian's in for a hell of an afternoon."
The Ghost withered down to the ground, filled with shame, and cast about its Chosen's head. Micah had been right. His skin was blotchy, his cheeks thin, and his clothes looked ready to disintegrate. Blood was weeping slowly from his mouth and eyes, no doubt from the sand. I did this to him. Was it possible to die from shame?
"Might have to cut him open, shake him out a little," Atsa suggested. "Wash his insides clean."
"No!" the Ghost barked, then paused. "Will that hurt?
"You or your Guardian?"
"Him! Both. I don't know." It looked down at its charge. "I can feel it when he dies. It's… unpleasant." Unpleasant was not the correct word. It was wrong. It was ugly and horrifying and painful. The Ghost kept those thoughts to itself. Atsa knew these already, and had known them for much longer.
Micah rolled from her crouch into a proper sitting position on the beach. Peeling her helmet off, she wedged it into the sand beside her and frowned down at the dead man. "We could," she murmured, and then sighed again. "Yeah, okay. I'll start cleaning him up." She pointed a finger at the Ghost; the other hand reached for the wicked knife at her belt. "Do not rez him until I tell you to, and do exactly as I say. Could be very traumatic for him otherwise, and I'd say he's had enough of that for a day, hm?"
"Yes!" The Ghost rose up to take in the sight of its new Guardian. "Yes. Just—tell me what to do."
He didn't wake up in a tomb this time. The breeze blew across his skin, gentle and calm. His arm was no longer on fire. And when he took a breath, air—not sand—filled his lungs.
It was such a relief that he sat up to cough. He still felt gritty and uncomfortable, but it was not Hell any longer. He put his head between his knees as he sputtered, a shiver rocking through him. The air was warm and humid, but his clothes were soaked through and his insides felt frigid.
Someone spoke by his ear. More unfamiliar language. He looked up and saw a bug—no. It was metal. Not a giant beetle. Well, sort of like a beetle. A tiny blue eye stared at him. Very intensely. If he hadn't spent eternity choking to death on the beach, he might've been afraid. All he had the strength to do now was frown.
It spoke again, drifting slowly to his left and still just as incomprehensible.
"What?" His throat burned at the word, and it came out croaked and high. Was that what he sounded like?
The not-beetle's shell clamped up, the tiny gears twitching. It was silent for a moment, then spoke again: "Do you understand me now?"
He nodded, coughing to clear his throat. "Yeah."
"Good. That is good." It paused again. Its voice was stiff and formal but somehow vaguely feminine. "How do you feel?"
What an odd question. "What's the measuring stick?"
"Pardon?"
He gestured to himself; his tattered, soaked clothes, the watery blood on his legs that he couldn't locate a source for, and the laboured breathing. "I don't know how to answer your question. Compared to being buried alive, I feel great, but—" He shrugged and looked west, towards an old village and a forest beyond. A wave of nostalgia hit him so hard he'd have fallen if he weren't already sitting. The frames of old homes stuck up from the earth, and with them came the trappings of memories he could feel gathering in his periphery. They had no form to them, but staring directly at the small village filled him with a deep sorrow. It was almost more difficult to breathe around than the sand. "Where... are…."
"We will need to have a long conversation about… many things," the little lady bug said to him. "It will be confusing."
"I'm confused already." He looked back up at the metal not-beetle. "Who are you?"
"I am a Ghost," it replied. "Your Ghost, now."
"My ghost? I'm not dead though. Right?"
"Human language is insufficient. The term is decorative, not a reflection of reality."
He laid back on the sand. The line of the forest was nearby enough that the larger trees cast some of his face in shade. The sky was bright overhead, with puffy clouds floating around.
"Okay," he said slowly. "I don't remember ever getting a Ghost."
"We only paired seventy-six minutes ago. When you woke beneath the sand—" the Ghost paused, and then continued in a low, sheepish voice. "That was when I Chose you. I apologise for the unfortunate start."
"So I was just…." he let his head loll towards the ocean. A shovel was lying beside a large dent in the shore, where water was already beginning to collect. A shock of blood floated in a loose puddle in the water nearby, with draglines in the sand leading to it. Pink foam roiled on the beach. His hand reached for his bicep, where he remembered the sensation of being stabbed. He couldn't have bled that much, could he?
"You dug me out?"
"I did not. I cannot hold a shovel."
"Right."
"Micah-10 did. She is by the boat. We should speak with her."
He let out a sigh, still getting used to the feeling of breathing in air. The Ghost floated up by his head, obscuring his view of the sky. Its tiny blue eye continued to stare at him.
"Can you walk?"
He opened his mouth to answer, and then flinched as a fan of light shone down from the drone. It passed a scanner over him and then clicked its shell together.
"Blood sugar low. Understandable. Core body temperature two degrees below baseline. Ten less than it had been before. No breaks or injuries. I healed all of those." It paused for a beat. "You can walk."
"Thanks," he muttered, sitting up again. He looked down at his arm. Blood soaked the sleeve, but when he pulled the tear open to inspect his bicep, the skin was smooth and clear. Not even a scar. The front of his shirt also had a massive medial cut down the front of it; the wet sides clung to his arms and left his chest exposed—also relatively free of any blemishes.
"Micah hit you with the shovel by accident. I didn't—well, this did not go as I had planned. It was a lot messier." It clicked at him again. "Please—ah, do you know your name?"
He frowned. That was a much more reasonable question. He knew he should know the answer, but it was even less clear than the mysterious, somber feeling he got when he looked at the ruined village. "No. Do you?"
"Know your name or my own?"
"Both. Either."
"No, and I do not have one. But we can search the village once we go talk to Micah."
He nodded, responding to the insistent tone of its voice. He braced his hands beside his thighs and tried to stand. The muscles in his legs spasmed and tightened immediately, but he pushed through the discomfort and got himself upright. Everything in his body was stiff and sore. His head began to pound and swim at the sudden shift in orientation. The little lady bug pressed into his shoulder when he began to list, and it exerted enough force to keep him from tipping over.
"Thanks." More stable now, he put one foot in front of the other. His bare feet sank deep into the sand, and for a moment he panicked, thinking he would fall in again and be buried with the shore, but then he took another step and felt the ground steady beneath his heels. He was fine.
The boat. He could make it to the boat.
"Why—" He paused to cough. "Why don't you have a name?"
It floated backwards to look at him. Always looking, never blinking. "Ghosts do not have names. Some are named by other Guardians, or humans in the wild. Some choose ones of their one. I have waited."
"For?"
"For you," it replied. "Most are named by their Chosen. It felt inappropriate to take one beforehand, and there was no need."
"You want me to name you?"
The cogs on its small body shook as if a shiver had run through it. "If you wish to."
He wondered if the not-beetle knew how ridiculous the request was. Staring into its earnest, unblinking eye, he decided that it did not. Nobody except something so innocent as this little Ghost would give a man the power to name it Not-Beetle for the rest of its life. He felt his mouth twitch, but held back the laugh. He didn't want to hurt its feelings. "That's a tall order. I'll have to think about it."
"Okay."
The little thing was exceedingly awkward, but then everything so far had been very strange. The village behind him that he didn't want to look at, the beach grave, the ladybug robot that could heal wounds. He couldn't remember anything, but he had the sense to know this was not normal.
He wobbled his way to the boat in silence. The ghost hung quietly by his shoulder, twitching and whirling but not saying a word. She seemed nervous, if he could call it that. He hadn't ever read the body language of a tiny robot drone, but it never seemed to sit still. Did they all wiggle around like that? It had spoke of others. How many Ghosts were there?
When he got within a few metres, an exo woman—yes, he did know about exos, that was something—emerged from the deck to greet them. She spoke the same foreign language the Ghost had, and her face was shrouded in shadow from a deep, thick cloak, with only her amber optics clearly visible. She must have been the one he'd seen pull him from the sand. He decided he wanted a cloak like that, too, and crossed his arms to stave off a shiver.
"Does she speak—Spanish?" He asked the Ghost. That was the language he was speaking, he decided. He remembered that.
"One moment." It flew up onto the boat to whistle at her. A tiny drone, much like his own, ducked up from under the woman's hood. They chittered at each other, and then his own turned back to him. He watched on, confused, and then the woman hopped down onto the shore, pulled something from a pouch, and handed it to him.
He inspected the small, bean-shaped piece of tech she'd given him. She indicated the side of her head and motioned to his ear, and he slotted it inside. It hummed faintly, and when she spoke again, her voice doubled and amplified inside the tiny speaker—except now he could understand her.
"... engineered Golden Age tech. Pretty spiffy stuff. It'll sync up in a bit," she added, seeing his hand cup around his ear. "I made a lucky guess on setting it to Spanish. Figured as much, given our current latitude."
"...yeah," he murmured, letting his hand fall. "You're… Micah-10? She told me to come find you," he added, looking at his Ghost. It twitched around when he made eye contact with it.
She nodded and offered her hand. "Aye. Do you remember your name?"
He reached for her hand, but she grabbed his forearm instead to shake it. He shook along awkwardly. "No."
"You from that village?"
He looked in the direction she'd jutted her chin. Melancholy overtook him for a brief moment, and he felt his Ghost—how quick he'd accepted it as his own—hover up close to his head, as if for support. As if she knew what he was feeling.
"I think," he answered.
"We'll walk the main drag, see what we can find."
"Okay."
"And we can run through what it means to be a Guardian," Micah added, then looked at his Ghost with a wry tilt of her cheekplates. "Since little Miss here seems to be having some trouble on that front."
Her Chosen absorbed Micah's speech about Guardians—so much simpler, so much better than anything she had planned—with nothing more than a slight, silent frown as they walked in the grass.
She—for she was She now forevermore, as her Guardian had called her—kept close to him, monitoring the connection between them with a careful eye. She suspected he didn't feel it yet, but it was unmistakable to her. He took up significant space inside her mind, a weight that felt so familiar it was if it had always been there. She knew it would only grow stronger with time, and already it was so clear to her! She could hardly contain her joy. Her earlier mistake at the shore faded like an old memory. Either in ignorance or deference, her Guardian had not pursued resentment at his unpleasant rebirth, and she was happy to let it slip away, forgotten. Atsa would tease her enough about it as is.
And so the shame of her mistake was quick to recede. It was difficult to hold onto when his own Light was so loud.
"I will begin scanning the homes," she said in between a small break of Micah's words. He nodded, not speaking, just—staring at the village. "Are you… alright?" she asked, unsure of her own tone. He was still a complete stranger, and it would take time to properly navigate how to talk with him.
"I think something bad happened here," he replied, sounding just as unsure. He looked between Micah and the Ghost. "I don't know if I lived here, or what happened to everyone else."
Micah put a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. He flinched at the contact, but he didn't shove her away. "It's the most difficult when you first wake, but if you did live here, it might be lucky we found you so close by."
"Where you were buried—" Both humans looked at the Ghost as she spoke. She chirped and continued. "It was unmarked, and very shallow. The orientation of your—ah, body, makes me think a storm washed you beneath the sand, not an intentional actor. Unless they did not like you," she added, and then immediately regretted it. "But—probably not, um. It could have been a local custom to bury the dead near the ocean, or…."
Her Guardian's mouth twitched into something approaching a smile, and she let her words die. She catalogued that response for later analysis, glad to have a partial baseline for his humour.
"Probably," he replied, his mouth stretching into a proper grin. "Let's see what we can find, little Ghost."
She followed after him as he set off toward a house, high on the pleasure of him addressing her directly. Her Guardian was speaking to her. She'd never felt so un-alone!
They spent the afternoon rummaging through the ruins of the village. Her theory about a storm seemed to hold true; most of the belongings looked to have been washed away, or perhaps stolen by those that had come along after. The floors of the homes creaked from his weight, and she warned him away from any boards that looked properly rotted through. It was difficult to tell how long this place had sat like this, but she supposed fifty to sixty years. The Ghost took a few photos of the wood to show the climatologists back at the City. Perhaps they would know more.
She also catalogued the other bodies found in the village. They were in the same chaotic state her Guardian had been in; limbs twisted at random, with no indication of a burial, a coffin, or other such funeral rites. Some were completely naked, with only hints of fabric still clinging to their bones. There was a graveyard further into the forest, so the people here had practiced that sort of thing. But the ones not buried were all in generally the same state of decay; they had died together, all at once. She suspected that whatever had befallen them had taken her Chosen's original life, too. Perhaps they had drowned in a storm.
A few hours into the search, she found him sitting cross-legged in the middle of a frame of a long hall. The walls had all but crumbled away, and only the support struts remained, poking up from the ground as a dark oaken skeleton. She saw a journal in his lap, and a small metal box beside him, lying open. A floorboard had been pulled up from the ground, revealing a nook below. Most of its contents had turned to sludge with rain and high tides, but the lockbox and its contents within had survived.
She drifted down to it and saw that he had pried the lock open with a tweeze of metal. "You picked this?"
He looked up from the book. "Yeah. I know how, I guess." His eyes fell back to the pages, and she hovered over his shoulder to inspect it.
"This journal, it's marked for the year of 2876," he murmured absently. "It's got names in it…." His fingers ran across the page as he read, his lips moving silently as he absorbed the words. "Looks like a death registry."
The Ghost looked around at the ruins of the building. It was too large to be a single home, and a light spot on the floor by the eastern corner suggested a large desk had once sat there. A medical building? A town hall?
"Do any of the names sound familiar?" she asked.
He hummed in acknowledgement of her question but said nothing else, focused on reading. Perhaps a storm had not killed them, then. She decided to give him some space and went to find Micah.
The hunter was up in a tree, grabbing at a piece of scrap that had been caught in the palm's massive leaves. She flew up to speak to her. "How long will you stay?"
Micah shoved the scrap under her arm and looked at the Ghost. "For as long as you need me to, little one. Your Chosen seems a bit listless."
She conceded the observation with a duck of her shell. "He is resourceful, but confused."
"An unfortunate combo."
"Yes. He does not ask many questions."
Micah shrugged. "It's a lot to take in. And you two will have tons of time to talk on your way back to the City."
Every time she thought about it, excitement swelled within her. Adventure was no longer a necessity to find the missing piece of her soul; now they would trek the globe for their true purpose, and she would teach him how to be a proper Guardian before they got to the City.
"I think he is good," she finally ventured. "I do not sense any malice in him."
"That's good to hear. Traveller knows there are enough Guardians out there wanting to do harm." Micah looked back to their boat, where her final unpaired Ghost awaited.
"Cyrell is a world away," the Ghost assured her. "He cannot touch us here."
"I'll gut him if he tries it." Micah hopped down from the tree and she followed. "So I'll stay with you both until you're ready to set off on your own."
They walked back to the house her Chosen was in, and found him with more paper; some letters, some other journals.
He looked up from his pile of paper and nodded to them. "Andal Brask," he said in greeting.
"That's your name?" Micah asked.
He nodded emphatically, looking the most sure she'd seen him yet. "It's the only name I recognise. Says I died of typhoid. Or he did. I dunno. Most of the town did, actually." He looked down at the journal again, frowning.
"Sounds pleasant," Micah muttered. "But good detective work, Brask. It's a lot more than most Guardians find out about their past."
"Doesn't feel like much."
The Ghost floated down to the lockbox he'd opened and clicked its shell on the top. "You should keep this, to keep all that paper safe. We can read it all on the way back, if you like."
"The way back?"
"Cosmodrome, Western Old Russia," Micah said. "It's where the City is—the rest of the Guardians. That's where you need to go first, get yourself sorted."
"'You'?" he repeated. "You're not coming?"
She shook her head. "Still got a Ghost looking for its Chosen. Need to help the little guy, then head back for another batch."
He absorbed this information with a silent frown. He liked to frown as much as he liked to smile, she thought. His face was very expressive.
"I need clothes," he said finally, looking down at his exposed chest and threadbare pants. Raggamuffin, Micah had called him while she'd been cleaning him up earlier. "And food, maybe."
"Well, stop looking at your old life, then," Micah said, and held out a hand to him. "Embrace the new."