Of Light and Hope are Dreams Made Real
Somehow, Sari knew that today was going to be different. She knew this because of something she had once been told; Master Rahool had once put to her that Guardians do not shy away from light because they cannot shy away from light. It was their destiny to forever stand in the brilliance of the Light, in all its forms.
Sari had lived and worked in the Tower for nearly eighteen years. In all that time, she had only ever been a loyal and eager assistant to Rahool, who had taken her in when she had been orphaned in the crash. She couldn't really remember her real parents, but Rahool had been like a father to her since she was a year old, a baby pulled from the wreckage of a crashed Awoken ship by a Guardian fireteam, sheltered and raised by Rahool, the only non-Guardian Awoken in the Tower back then.
She regularly helped Rahool by sorting through the artefacts that were his business, and Tess, when she took over special requisitions, by running occasional errands in the City. And that was Sari: the somewhat shy Awoken girl who everybody knew, most loved, and all depended on to help oil the gears that ensured the Guardians could save everyone. But today, today she just knew that something special was about to happen, sitting on a box of data units, staring at the morning sun.
"I've got a good feeling about today." She said aloud.
"Do you now, my dear?" Rahool replied from behind the counter of his stall. "And why's that?"
"I'm not sure yet." She admitted. "But I know it will be." Rahool smiled at her optimism – too rare a thing to dare suppress these days.
"I'm sure you will. Now, could you unpack these boxes for me? The Speaker has an artefact he wants me to appraise rather urgently."
"Sure." She jumped off the box, eager to start the day, and while Rahool walked off towards Tower North, she began arranging the engrams and items neatly along the counter. When everything was sorted to her rather exacting standards, she sat back in the recliner chair the cryptarch kept in the back of the stand and opened up the novel that had hooked her recently. It was a pre-Golden Age Earth text, written on paper, an ancient method of writing that Rahool found rather charming. And although she had always argued the corner for modern technology with her foster father, sometimes quite heatedly, she secretly preferred paper books too.
Rahool was convinced that it was a significant historical text, about invention and progress and social reform. Sari had found it to be a delightfully entertaining work of fiction. She gently caressed the cover of the book with her fingertips, the old paper, which she had miraculously and painstakingly restored, crackling slightly under the pressure. The title was still just legible: Raising Steam. The authors name wasn't visible anywhere, but whoever they were, Sari thought most highly of them.
As she was reading, she was also wondering about her future. Although she would happily stay with Rahool for the rest of her life, she was nineteen now, and she had to consider striking out on her own. She couldn't depend on being Rahool's assistant forever; she needed to stand on her own two feet. Since the legendary fight at the Black Garden three months ago, the dynamic of the City had changed subtly. People were no longer planning for the worst, but instead they were preparing for the future, a future with, for the first time since the Collapse, a glimmer of hope to ward off the Darkness. There had been talk about beginning reclamation of the whole planet, not just their small slice of it. Some industrious citizens had banded together with Holliday and put together plans for mobile settlement platforms. Sari was deliberating on joining one of their crews. It would certainly be a way to see the world, something she had always wanted to do.
When she was younger, she had often dreamed about being a Guardian. Free to go where she willed, fighting the minions of Darkness, saving the lives of everyone she loved. She would waste away hours just happily daydreaming about the day her Ghost would come for her. But, as the years rolled by, Guardians came in, Guardians went out, a few of them never to return, but still she was never chosen for the singular honour of joining their ranks. Recently, the dreams of a child were forgotten in favour of the harsh realism of adult life.
One day, when she was sixteen, a squad of Fallen soldiers had penetrated the City, swarming into the Gozari District, where she was doing an item run for Tess. She had no idea what prompted her to do it, but she saw an old rifle standing next to a box of munitions, and when she saw a Fallen vandal charging her, she picked it up and shot him. Dead. Sari had taken out no less than twelve of them before Commander Zavala turned up with half of the Sun Sentinels Regiment. Although his Titans quickly took over, he was nonetheless impressed by her skill and bravery, and when he told Cayde about it, the old exo insisted that he teach her proper marksmanship. Three years later, and the two of them were evenly matched with a sniper rifle.
Cayde often lamented that she was a loss to the Hunter Corps. Sari secretly hoped that the loss would one day be rectified. But she had to outgrow her dreams one day. And when there was an opportunity to explore the world going, now seemed as good a time as ever.
Sari was engrossed in the novel when Nero 21-04 came over to the stall. The exo Titan was about to interrupt her, but the last time he remembered anyone reading a book was shortly after his activation, almost one and a half thousand years ago. The sight of someone doing so now intrigued him, and he decided to wait a moment. Still immersed in the story, Sari didn't notice the old Titan for a few moments.
"Haha… Mmm, that's clever… Oh, poor – Waah! I'm so sorry!" She jumped clumsily out of the chair, dropping the book in the process. "I didn't notice you there, I was just…"
"It's alright, Sari." Nero put his hand on her shoulder to calm her. "You didn't notice me because I chose not to be noticed."
"You- You didn't?"
"No." He chuckled, and reached down to pick up her book, dusting it off before handing it back to her. "It's been far too long since I last saw someone reading like this. I wasn't about to stop you after 1500 years."
"Really? That long?" He nodded smartly, his mechanical face slightly creased into a pleasant expression. "Wow. So, how can I help you?" She smiled brightly at him.
"I found this artefact out in the field, some kind of Hive Codex I can't identify." He handed her the ream of silken material, the secrets of the Hive priests woven into it. Sari took the fabric in her hands, dexterously sifting it through her delicate fingers, trying to decipher its secrets.
"Well, this is nothing like I've ever seen either, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It looks like an early form of Oryxian."
"Oryxian?"
"It's the most ancient of the known Hive languages." She explained. "We believe it was first written before the Hive came to the Sol System."
"Wow, almost as old as me then." Sari giggled at the Titan's dry humour, reminiscent of the wit that practically oozed out of her novel. "Can you read it?"
"Nobody can read it."
"Oh. So you can't use it then." He said with a little disappointment betraying itself on his mechanical face.
"Of course I can still use it. I'm compiling a program from all the Oryxian codices we find, as well as established modern Hive dialects as a baseline. With enough data, hopefully it might be able to read Oryxian someday."
"Sounds impressive."
"Thanks." Sari put the Codex down on the counter and turned to the datapad that held the cryptarch account details. "I can offer you the standard reward bounty, as well as the usual reward points, but anything more and you'll have to wait for Master Rahool to come back and authorise the transaction."
"That's alright. I wasn't expecting anything more anyway."
"Ok. Sign here please." She presented the pad to Nero, who placed the identity chip in his thumb over the fingerprint scanner. A green light on the pad indicated success, and Sari tapped a couple of buttons, before placing her own thumb on the scanner.
"Ok, that's all sorted then. Glad we could be of service." She looked over his shoulder to see the master cryptarch appear at the entrance to Tower North. "Oh, there's Rahool now if you want to talk to him."
"Thanks, but I had better get back to it. See you around, kid." Nero was about to walk away when suddenly his Ghost, Elita, appeared – in front of Sari. "You ok, Elita?" He asked, but the Ghost ignored him, choosing instead to scan Sari.
"Uh, is she usually like this?" Sari asked nervously.
"No." Nero looked directly at his Ghost. "Elita, what on earth are you doing?"
"Not now, Nero." Elita replied in a distinctly Far East Asian voice. "This is important."
"What's important?" He asked, beginning to lose his patience with his usually very demure Ghost.
"The Light persists in this one." She answered frantically. Nero was about to argue with her, when the gravity of what she had just said hit him.
"Wait, what – Are you sure?" She nodded curtly, still scanning Sari, who was still a little apprehensive. Nero looked around, searching for the thing that would change her life forever, and then he saw that Rahool was being accompanied by the Speaker. He marched over to the pair, seeing concern cloud Rahool's usually jovial features.
"Master Rahool, Speaker, don't be alarmed. Everything's fine, I think."
"What is going on, Titan?" The Speaker asked in his gentle, sagely voice.
"If Elita," He gestured towards his Ghost. "Is correct, the Light persists in Sari, it would seem."
"What does that mean?" Rahool asked, concerned for his daughter, but stopped as he heard the Speaker gasp.
"You are certain?"
"Elita is."
"Well, there can be no better judge. Tiberius?" The Speaker summoned his own Ghost, a reminder that he, too, was also a Guardian.
"What's happening?" Tiberius asked in his synthesised, African-American voice. The Speaker gestured, and when Tiberius saw what was happening, he floated over to the other Ghost and also scanned her.
"Wait," Rahool began to grasp what was happening. "Is she…"
"Possibly." Nero answered. "Ghosts have been wrong before, though rarely."
As they stood and watched, waiting with no small amount of anticipation for what was about to happen, Nero spotted something in the corner of his optic, and pointed. The two men followed his outstretched servo, and watched as a Ghost, with a shell enhanced with splayed fins, slowly winded out of the sky and tentatively hovered in front of Sari. Elita and Tiberius turned to the newcomer and exchanged some information digitally. The exchange over, they respectfully kept their distance, returning to their respective Guardians to watch this sacred moment.
Sari, meanwhile, had nervously stood through the abrupt scanning, and didn't quite catch on to what was happening. The new Ghost hovered in front of her, seemingly quite nervous itself. Its lobes suddenly expanded in a sphere of blue light, and that was when the Guardians were convinced. This was the moment a Ghost looked into your soul and deemed if you were worthy. The Ghost reformed its shell, and moved to look straight at Sari.
"Hello, Guardian." He said in a soft Caribbean accent. "I'm a Ghost. Yours now, as it happens. I hope we can be good friends, because you and I are about to see the best, and worst, of times together. Now it's our time. Come on."
"Our time, f-for what?" Sari stammered.
"Our time, Guardian, for us to fulfil our destiny."
"You mean – You mean, I'm a Guardian?!"
"Yes, you are." The Ghost nudged the tip of her nose affectionately. "And I'm sure I chose right with you." The shock suddenly faded away, and Sari suddenly realised exactly what she was being told. Just as she had given it up for dead, her lifelong dream had just come true. She could barely stop herself from laughing hysterically, let alone stop the jaw-splitting smile that adorned her face. "Definitely sure!" He laughed. The next thing Sari felt was Rahool's comforting arms wrapped tightly around her.
"Oh, Sari, congratulations!" The old man was almost in tears. "I've been hoping for this day for years."
"As have we." The Speaker interrupted the family's moment of joy. "Sari, we have all spent the years watching you grow up, from a shy young girl into a confident, charming young woman. That transformation has been joyous for everyone, something we owe at least partial thanks to your father, Rahool, for." He nodded to his old Awoken friend. "We had all hoped that, one day, the fates would allow for you to join our ranks, and now it seems our hopes have been answered. We are honoured and augmented by your presence among us. And I know your Ghost has chosen wisely."
"Of course." Ghost chirped. "You'd have to be blind not to see the potential in her."
"Indeed." The Speaker nodded respectfully to the small floating robot.
"Well, I don't know much more about this honour and privilege crap than the Speaker's already said, which is saying something in its own right." Nero smiled at Sari. "But I do know one thing he doesn't."
"Is that right?" The Speaker glanced dubiously at the exo Titan.
"Yeah." The old machine sighed. "Cayde's going to be insufferable for the next ten years."
With the congratulations handed out quite liberally, Nero accompanied the Speaker in taking Sari to meet the Vanguard. Sari had dealt with them many times over the years, especially with Cayde, but never on their terms. Never like this.
"Breathe, Guardian." Nero's scanners noticed the spike of excitement in her system when he used the word. "We don't want you dying of asphyxiation before you've even got your first cloak." The Speaker chuckled at the joke.
"Sorry. I guess I am a little nervous."
"A little?" Nero quipped.
"Everything will be fine, young one." The Speaker reassured her as they passed Shaxx's desk, the old Titan looking on with a knowing smile.
"Cayde!" Nero called.
"'Sup, Titan? You come to get style advice from the real master at this table? Again?" Cayde chuckled darkly as Zavala and Rey skewered him with a pair of scathing looks.
"If I was looking for fashion tips, I'd go to Lavente." Nero retorted. "No, we've brought you an early Christmas present." Cayde looked up from the map he seemed to be eternally studying, his curiosity drivers piqued. Then he saw Sari standing nervously next to him.
"Sari!" He said jovially. "No, don't tell me – you finally beat this old rust bucket's high score. Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Beers are on me, guys!" The Vanguards cheered in celebration, then they saw the Speaker stand on her opposite side.
"Sir, forgive me. I didn't see you there for a minute." Cayde nodded respectfully, the other Vanguards sharing a look of confusion. "What brings you down here?"
"Sari?" The Speaker gestured for her to step forward. She nervously smiled at Cayde, before placing her palm out. Cayde was confused for a moment, but then he saw the pale form of a Ghost form in her outstretched hand. It took his processors a few seconds to realise that it was her Ghost, and his shock clearly showed.
"Shall we leave her in your capable hands, Vanguard?" The Speaker gestured for Nero to leave with him; even Ikora and Zavala followed suit, leaving the two friends alone.
"Surprise?" Sari giggled. Cayde stood there, his computer core on the brink of emotional overload, before seizing her in an ecstatic embrace, his synthesised voice emulators laughing as he span her round and round in his excitement. The two Ghosts, Sari's and Cayde's, simply watched, both of them deadpanning their irritation to each other.
"He always this nuts?" Sari's Ghost asked Cayde's, Zion.
"You have no fraking idea." He lamented.
Cayde had managed to calm himself down enough to put Sari back on her feet, but he was still like an overexcited toddler.
"Sari, this is – I mean – Wow!"
"You're telling me. And I thought I was the one having the special day." She replied, having learnt the art of sass from the very best.
"Damn, you haven't forgotten a thing I taught you." Cayde smiled. "Well, I guess we'll have to get you kitted out, girl."
"Hmm. I'll see if Rahool has any spare stuff from his engrams."
"The hell you will." Cayde retorted. "For you, my dear, we pull out all the stops. Come on." He took her hand and led her up the stairs towards his shamelessly eavesdropping colleagues. "Shaxx, you got the stuff there?"
"Sure I do. The hell you take me for, Cayde, a Hunter?"
"Hah, hah, fraking hah." He muttered under his breath.
"What stuff?" Sari asked, confused. Shaxx and Arcite came back with a box between them, the old war frame tapping a code into the lock. From within, Sari saw Shaxx lift out a set of armour. Hunter armour.
"Wait, what…" Suddenly realisation dawned on the young Awoken.
"Sari, for nineteen years, you have helped us all." The Speaker began. "Not just by helping Rahool and Ms. Everis with the equipment Guardians sorely need, but with all the other little things. Your language algorithms have helped to crack over a hundred Hive and Fallen dialects, and saved thousands of lives in doing so. Your understanding of ancient Vex symbols has shed light on the origins of our most deadly adversaries. And those are just the obvious things."
"I've had many a Guardian lose their squad because of poor judgement or tactical missteps." Zavala rumbled. "I always tell them, when they fall, we will be behind them. They recently tell me, when they fall, they usually fall into your arms. Sometimes literally. You've no idea what a mug of cocoa and the right words can do for a broken warrior."
"My Warlocks have gone to the moon and Venus wholly expecting to succeed and come home safe because of data you uncovered. My predecessor would have called me insane for the idea that anyone could go there at all."
"And I'll be damned if Shaxx and I haven't learned a thing or two from the way you hold a weapon." Cayde said. The grizzled Titan nodded his affirmation.
"Guardians have always fought and died for us. But you, Sari, you did more than that, in your own way, under no compulsion to do so other than the kindness inherent in your heart. We, the Guardians, owe you more than we can ever repay. At least we can give you these now." The Speaker offered the armour in his hands to the awestruck Awoken, who reverently took it from him. She could tell just by the feel of it that it had been handmade, probably from scratch. She traced the light plasteel plating, reinforced with high-grade sapphire wire, with her fingernails, lost in the quality of the workmanship. She noticed Rahool holding up something else. When she looked, she saw it was a Hunter's cloak. The armour she was holding was exquisite, perfect in every way – she dropped it when she saw the garment Rahool was offering to her. The fabric was like woven gold, and shimmered with Light when she touched it. The pattern weaved into it was of a red, serpentine dragon, encircling an orb that was clearly meant to be the Traveller. The great lizard was wrapped around its base, both protecting it and looking up to it in awe. The fabric gave it a fluidity all of its own, as if it were alive. Sari was utterly enraptured, her eyes brimming with tears of joy and gratitude she could never properly express. She looked up at her father, words failing her, instead flinging her arms around him.
"At this point, I would usually bore the Guardian present with the long and intriguing history of such an item as that. But this one, I won't, because I genuinely don't know what it is." He let go of Sari and held her by her shoulders. "You will be the one to write the history of this cloak. Make it a good one."
"I will." She smiled up at him. "Thank you. All of you. I don't have the words to say how much this means to me."
"You have thanked us enough by gracing us with your Light, Guardian." The Speaker answered. "Now it is time, my dear, for you to live up to your destiny." Sari nodded firmly, her confidence bolstered. Now her dreams really had come true.
"We will leave you to prepare yourself." He gestured for the Vanguards to return to their work, walking happily back to Tower North himself. Nero nodded politely to Zavala before smartly marching back up the stairs. Sari and Rahool followed, his arm comfortingly over her shoulder, the young woman still a little star struck.
"How did you know?" Rahool snapped her out of her reverie.
"Know what?" She asked, confused.
"That today would be different." She laughed when she realised what he was referring to.
"Every morning, I watch the sun rise over the Tower, but I have to look away when it gets too bright."
"This morning?"
"This morning, I looked straight into the light of the sun, and I wasn't blinded by it. It was like you said: Guardians don't shy away from Light because they can't. I couldn't look away from it today. And that was when I knew." She looked at the Traveller, looming over all of them, protecting them from the Darkness, heard its internal mechanisms slowly begin to stir back into life again. "That's when I knew that the Traveller had given me my dream."