The sun had set above ground, Eris was sure. She could almost hear it in the silence. Warlock magic did not tell her: there had never been fission in her hands. Instead, she felt the regolith settle and the lights go out; the Moon returned to the wild, broken land it once had been. She could have tracked animals on Earth, could have listened for Vex clicks and signals in fetid Venus swamps. On this moon, the land was dead even to a Hunter, and dead things walked there.
The Moon had fallen, and Eris had neither saved nor mercy killed young Omar, and the sun had set.
She wedged herself into a crevasse in the dark. Before she lost her knife, she could have pulled herself along hand over hand and properly climbed, but the knife was lost with Toland. Before she lost her helmet she could have watched for the red glow of enemies, although they were probably all around her. Navigation had been made useless by proximity more than by distance, ever since the fireteam dropped into this hole. A Hive Knight scraped a sword along a wall two jagged turns away, patrolling restlessly in halls so filled with Hive and Hive-scent. An antibody, inside a corpse.
I feel more Light here. At least I have made that progress.
It would be nice to be able to spring out and stab the Knight in the throat, but breathing easier was also nice.
And a Hunter alone was not unarmed.
She slipped down the narrow hall.
In the old, solid moon base, with Crota's spawn screaming for a rematch in the outbuildings, Eris put her back against the wall. The others didn't. They ranged around the center pillar, Eriana-3 drawing the stock of her gun down her arm with a sound of scraping metal. Slight Sai and rangy Omar took the doors, masked gazes pointing out toward the gray-white hills and shuttered doors. It had been a long time since someone had made a last stand here, since fast-moving smoke had risen from the ruins of the human Moon colony on the wide, tumbled valley that had long ago been named the Ocean of Storms.
"This is not the entryway yet," Toland said. The Warlock cloak cinched at his hips flared across the floor, and Eris felt her frown grow deeper. The team needed him, but not to sap morale like he had been doing. Not to list all the ways they could die. "This is the long event horizon, the shining curtain."
"Targets," Eriana said.
Omar started humming. War! What is it good for?
Toland tugged at the sleeves of his own cloak and shrugged his gun into his hands.
Absolutely -
Omar fired.
Inside the Hellmouth, Eris was nearly invisible before she even blinked. Hugging the slick sides of the crevasse, she plotted how best to approach the sword-bearing Knight that lumbered, swaying like the ocean, down the hall in front of her. If she had still had her Ghost and her team, one Knight would not have required a plan. Just a dive.
She found herself rocking too, moving her head back and forth in response to the movement of the Knight's spine, and so she knew when to jump.
The first few steps didn't require a blink, just a kick off the wall. She landed in a crouch. The Knight heard her. The moment it swung around she launched herself into no-space, saw the opposite wall hurtling toward her and hit the ground with both feet.
The Knight lumbered around. A few more blinks in the narrow space confused it, and disoriented Eris. Maybe it was shrieking, supersonic, calling others. Maybe it was dizzier than her. She rammed both of her hands under its knuckles, fist under palm stacked to slam, and stabbed the Knight's sword into its own gut.
No blood, a little bit of corpse-dust. The blow was glancing and the Knight recovered fast and whipped the sword around, over her head. Smelled like grave dirt, smelled like Crota. Eris was left without a weapon, her shoulders aching with fear and exertion. She struck out for the sword again, this time took it with her when she blinked, along with a chunk of the Knight's hand, torn into the void.
The creature howled and Eris felt her own throat itch.
The sword dragged her wrists down, stone and Darkness.
Once, she would have hesitated to use one of the sons of the blade that cracked the Moon. She had advised against it, and confided in Eriana her fears that Toland might go that route. Now she was, in the darkness (wicked and desperate) out for the blood that protected her own blood.
The Knight swung at her and she almost backed into the black wall, edging instead toward a widening cave. She lifted the sword and caught a second swing on the blade, turned it aside and left the Knight with one mangled arm and a gash in its shoulder. If she had a gun, this was where she would have shot, would have turned the thing to golden dust. Her gloved hands squeezed just a fraction on an imaginary trigger. Instead, she jammed the sword into the Knight's chest and it reached out, gauntleted fingers curling toward her face far too close, and she felt tiny pinpricks on her temples before the claws made for her eyes.
Before it was lost, her Ghost told her the strange traditions, the egos and resignations, of her new people after it raised her from the wilderness.
Missions brought her back to the old Cosmodrome time and time again until she loved the blasted pines and eerie onyx, until a ship felt as solid as the Earth.
Eris Morn felt that being a Guardian did not prevent one from looking for answers about the ancient, storied Solar system, but felt also that the Vanguard did not have those answers. This was one of the few things about which she was both ignorant and uncertain.
Her Ghost lead Eris to Eriana and her vengeance.
Then, the Ghost died shortly after Omar. Eris had known the weight of the Darkness was pressing on its systems, some interference making it forget what it was. Its cones scattered and twitched, revealing a flickering core haloed in green. Eris had always thought of the Ghost as a part of her or a part of her mission. It could prevent her death and she could prevent its own, right, that was the back-and-forth flow of things, as solid as the law of gravity.
Her Ghost had said several times that it couldn't get a signal out, couldn't contact the distant, untouchable Vanguard. At first Eris had screamed for help for her fireteam, and then for herself, and then for the shifting dark thing the world had become. When her Ghost died nothing changed. She folded gloved hands and turned studded gauntlets to catch a little light on their facets. She felt like the catacombs in the Moon were worse than the wilderness that had been the site of her first death. It was worse to be lost once she knew what it was like to be found.
"Keep an eye on the sun," Toland had said, before the fireteam entered the temple.
Bile and blood swept into her eyes. Eris let the sword drop, her abhorrence of it returning along with the cold. The pain hit and shook her down to her shoulders, but she used it to run forward, driven by the delusional belief that if she just moved further down the path, she would be able to see again. A cleansing, an opening of gates. Instead, she realized that she had been thinking of the sword, how it would die and flake away into green shards if held in human hands too long. She couldn't see.
Twice she lifted her hands to feel her face, but lowered them again out of some horrified instinct as pain rose and crested. Her feet shuffled to a stop when she heard movement in the distance, although, she realized a moment later, it might have simply been her cowl rubbing around her ears.
Had the tunnel widened, or had the air just gotten colder?
A few times, the pain on her face downed her. She would wake up huddled in what felt like a corner but could have been a tiny, cupped alcove on the edge of an arena or a pit. When she tried to blink her eyes, something felt gummy and sticky, but she was not sure that it was her eyelids moving. Strange weights slid toward the healthy skin near her right ear, and she pressed together cracked lips to keep from screaming. That was not difficult. Even just after she died she had not been prone to screaming, but it was more difficult than usual. But she couldn't see -
She moved forward with her hands first. With each step she would pat at diamond-edged ridges natural or made, wondering whether she was heading forward toward some fortification or deeper into the nearest approximation of a natural cave. She refused to be a dead thing even though she had thrown herself into a crypt.
Once, she wrapped her fingers around a spike of rock that she knew would have cut her bare hands, and she set to breaking it off, pulling this way and that until what felt like natural, laterally sheering stone fell onto the ground. After a moment of scrambling around for it, she had a knife a bit shorter than her palm, stubbly and blunt but showing three angular edges.
She began to see spots, like the ones that appeared behind her closed eyelids just before she went to sleep.
Another time, she thought she heard the rustle of fieldweave. Eriana? Eris raised her head. Could it be Toland? A moment later she realized that in her blindness she was panicking.
The pain grew the further she stumbled. It wrenched her around without her permission when she heard the sound again, tucking her head down between her arms as she braced against the wall. Her legs had started to shake several steps ago. She should have kept the cursed sword, but it might have dissolved by now, telegraphing her location further. A blind woman waving a glowing stick. Eris almost smiled, and then she heard the blast.
Force and heat pitched her backward, not into the pit that she feared, but onto the ground. Wizard, she thought. She wouldn't have been able to describe the sound it made, but something in her knew how she was supposed to react to that sound: fight or flee. More air passed her, hot and sluggish.
The Hive didn't attack again. She could sense it hovering, but an edge of fear made her think she shouldn't trust her paranoid triangulation. It was probably a bit to the left instead of right in front of her, where she most worried it would be. She pushed the stone shard further out from her palm.
"Is she alone?" the creature hissed. Wizard, from the height alone. Probably floating.
"Yes." She hadn't heard the second speaker moving.
(Eris, alone? No. Crota was with her, as Crota was with all of them, and the whole world blinder for it. She should have noticed that before, when she was feeling along the wall.)
The smaller voice - an Acolyte, maybe, not the mindless Thralls but not a proper monster either - grumbled in a language that Eris either did not know or did not hear clearly. Something passed close enough to her that the movement of the air enflamed the skin around her wound. She cringed away, tucking her hands under her clammy arms, and thought of Cayde, the master of sleight-of-hand stealth in plain sight. The Vanguard hid thousands of things just by looking directly at someone. This straightened Eris' spine.
"What is she?" the Wizard said.
The second creature darted forward. A hand closed around Eris' upper arm and held her, but she braced her feet and determined not to let it back her against the wall. Another blast of heat scoured her blind eyes, though, and Eris slumped long enough for the Hive to grab her forehead.
She saw green, and it was a beautiful color. Patches of green floated in the dark, overriding the bursting white specks that occasionally flared in her ruined vision. The beautiful green surrounded her, and it felt like the Light.
It imitated the curl and smash of electrons moving. The uncountably dense field around her spoke to the same senses she used when she blinked into voidspace. That power adhered to the world and infected it, though, instead of moving the way the Light that she knew moved so unobtrusively as to be almost undetectable.
The pain digging deep in her eyes and up onto her forehead was still there, but distant.
Movement beside her became a violent shove. She smelled the stink of a creature not yet a corpse, reduced to its component atoms and spiraling. The Wizard had killed the other Hive. Eris heard its body hit the ground in pieces.
The Light muttered and dug at itself. The same necromantic energy powering the magics in front of her had been corrupting the fireteam all along, slowing their movements and dimming their sight.
Maybe this was just a tiny scrap of what Toland understood. Maybe this was what Omar had felt as the Heart of Crota took him apart. All through the Temple, the Hive covens had woven Light like string or pulled it like entrails, and now Eris better understood what Toland meant when he had characterized the Light as chess pieces played by one side or another.
Eris would not get lost in it. Instead, vengeance.
She had always felt that Toland looked too far into his own darkness. Eris would wear hers on her skin and acknowledge it like a wound, or an inconvenience.
With the knife in her first, she punched out and hit nothing.
She leaped to the right, and rolled to put distance between her and the Hive. The pain flared, dizzying her, but the knife remained in her hand. How to use a stone blade against this? She had defeated the Knight by using its own weapon against it, but the Wizard had none except its fire and its curiosity.
It wanted to keep her alive for now, or she would not have been held still. So she stood with her hands at her sides, and it did not kill her.
That was all the weapon she needed.
It could still move forward, though. It descended, bringing more of that hot, ill wind. When Eris instinctively tried to close her eyes the pain grew, and she thought she heard blood fall onto the floor in a splash so weighty it turned her empty stomach. Her raised hands met something cold and wet, then slid over it and allowed the Wizard to reach under her guard. For a moment she thought it was trying to knock her over by force. If it had breath, she couldn't feel it over the fuzziness of her pain or sudden, alternating numbness. Something pressed against her eyes and hurt worse, and Eris blinked again.
The weight over her eyes traveled with her, almost bending her over backwards with how unexpected and heavy it felt. She scrabbled at it with her empty hand as her skin crawled and her throat constricted, and brought the knife up from behind her.
One blow smacked against the Wizard and brought forth a confused, cackling sound from its fraying lungs. That strangely charged Light hummed around her, and she felt that she could use it as a third limb that stretched through space, connecting angles like the facets of a diamond.
Her second blink took her above the Wizard, falling, driving the knife and her hands down with gravity alone. She dented its skull and blinked again before she hit the ground, whipping around dizzy and seeing spots.
But seeing. The back of the Wizard's neck was buried in scaled plates and lumps that might have been an inflammation at the top of the spine, so she hit just below the largest tumorous pile and then again at the top of the skull. The Wizard turned, power flaring in its hands. (Eris could see that now, could make out blurry outlines and silver reflections. Something was flapping around near her ear again, but thank the Light, she could see.)
At the end of the arc of the Wizard's last turn, she finally smashed through the armor. The desiccated skull was easy.
When the Wizard's body landed she landed with it, sure that she had fallen toward the pit that may or not really have been behind her. Colors were coming back, brown-gold and oily green but mostly a black that differentiated itself from her blindness only by occasional green and silver reflections. The body dissolved as she braced herself on it. A new pain skimmed the surface of her wound, sharper and more raw, like a surgical cut instead of blunt trauma.
She grabbed handfuls of the Wizard's dusty wrapping for a tourniquet, pulling out scraps laying criss-crossed under cracking armor, then pushed away with her feet and slid onto the place she had once perceived as a pit.
Touching her forehead took bravery, touching her eyes a grim disgust. She saw her fingers as blurry spears edged with light, then moved them away, assured that her distance vision was normal. The wound still ached as it had before, from the bridge of her nose to a hairline that had been burnt back almost an inch.
Around her eyes the Wizard had placed a chitin, now adhered.
When she touched the place where it met her skin, it moved and seemed to sink away from her fingers.
The center of the skull plate didn't hurt, but she wasn't interested in tapping on it. The urge to clear the dust and grit from her eyes was gone, replaced by a pervasive itching that she could not reach. The pain was still dizzying her, or maybe the blinking or the exhaustion had done it. She would need to wrap the tourniquet around the top of her head without blocking her eyes, and then to find out whether they had been healed or infected.
The room opened up around her as she had expected, gaping darkly to her right. If the Wizard had come from another tunnel in that direction, Eris couldn't spot it. The walls were pockmarked with natural-looking holes, though, some of them overhung with stalactites or the overlapping spikes created by horizontally cracking stone.
Tourniquet in hand, Eris made for a tunnel that looked small enough for her to crawl backwards and fill all of it. Any Hive that entered the cave wouldn't be able to see her unless she sat in the tunnel's entrance. She backed in, and immediately imagined something lurking in the unknown stretch of cave behind her.
That green Light was so close, like a hand in a pocket. She took it out and looked at it as it settled on her palm. The tunnel behind her was long but empty, terminating in a tiny crevasse where perhaps water had once run. It didn't have the sliced look of Hive-fabricated architecture.
Eriana would have known something about this, Eris thought as she backed into the tunnel with the green light in her hand. The Exo would have read about it in one of a thousand ancient libraries. Someone who could heal themselves, could tear themselves back from the void without bringing anything back with them, would be better suited to handling this than a far-ranger like Eris. Vengeance, though. Vengeance spurred adaptability. Eris could handle that, as she knew Eriana had done also.
Through the Hive plating, her eyes saw in color, with clarity the same or more than before she had been struck. Each color and surface conferred a sense of something like weight, an awareness of the Darkness-Light she now held. She wondered whether this was Warlock talent or Wizard magic, or whether it mattered. She rolled the green Light between her hands like putty. It helped her not to panic further, not to recoil against what she was sure was some kind of mask adhered to her face. The Speaker would be able to understand this, or the Vanguard. Eris just needed to make sure it didn't kill her.
When she lifted the strips of cloth up, flat and stretched, to place over her forehead she thought at first that it had slipped through numb fingers; then she saw the flecks and realized that either it was sheer or her restored vision was very bright. She wrapped all three strips over her eyes and under her hood, momentarily stymied without any way to tie them. Eventually she pulled her hood as far forward as it would go and tightened the collar by tucking it under her torso plates, but it didn't feel like that solution would last.
She would just rest for a moment. The last few minutes, when replayed, seemed fast and inconsequential. It was more important that she had dropped the sword than that she had killed the Wizard with her hands.
She couldn't wear the Darkness, couldn't both look at it and avert her gaze all the time. There was something else, something missing that hit her too fast to see. It was moving in the shadows, gently reminding her that Crota was still watching his army grow. Oh, yes, the others. The Ghost. Gone.
The bridge over the Hellmouth awed Eriana the most.
She paced it, as if wanting to claim every step for herself and her revenge.
Eris took a deep breath of air that smelled like ions and regolith, cold even through her filters, and almost called the Warlock back to the center. Eris had not, historically, thought of the endless war for the Moon or any other place as something like sticking her hand in a barrel and killing anything she found there. She did today. She did not need to remind her team of the final-dead Guardians killed when Crota took the Moon, of the gray smoke rising from massive white pipes that bled ore slurry and water. After all, Earth was close enough to see.
War! What is it-
Toland cut Omar off absently before the young Hunter could reach the atonal mumble he would have made of the verse. Starlight silvered Eriana's helmet as she turned to look at Omar. He caught his breath, tense, and looked out over the Hellmouth.
"Stay together," Toland said. "Share what Light you'll have left."
"Our focus is on Omnigul and Crota," Eris said.
"You said Omnigul wasn't even here," Vell said, a slow observation without malice. He looked sidelong at Toland over an armored shoulder, shifted heavily from foot to foot. A long scar roughened his cupped-oval shoulder plate.
"I said that she seeks the construct," Toland said without malice. "Rasputin is not here, but this is the Hive's palace and their fortress. If we hit here, we hit her."
"She may be here," Eris said. "Their forces gather. You all feel it."
Sai Mota nodded regally, Omar bobbing his head a moment later as if her reply had given him the confidence to share his own suspicions. Vell and Toland remained impassive. Again, Eriana's gaze had wandered, but Eris had no doubts about her focus.
Eris said, "Tell me about Rasputin. Why that Warmind?"
"Rasputin is vulnerable," Toland said. "It thinks its own thoughts in the deep, and does not tell of them. But that gives the Hive thought-siphons a lot of avenues to work. They will hit all of its securities, all of what it once thought was safe. And it is a frightened machine. "
"What about the others?" Eriana asked. She tapped a metal foot against the crystal floor, and Eris could see even in the tip of her helmet that Eriana was reconsidering her scorched-earth ideas from when she and Eris had first met. Eris had dissuaded her of their first plan's plausibility, not its theoretical effectiveness. Eriana's desire for revenge could fill the pit below them.
"Churchill is beyond us," Toland said. "Segmented. Spiritually disparate, like water with a hidden source."
"So we don't need to worry about that," Eriana said. She propped her gun against her hip. Toland looked at her out of an asymmetrical mask, inscrutable and prickly. Toland, Eris thought, who believed in infiltrating the enemy.
The group was following Eris and Eriana, who followed Toland out of necessity. It was a messy structure, an exploration without a map and with only tentative familiarity with the ground. Eris remembered Sai Mota reaching over Eriana to drag a plastic cup across a table the night before, while Eris silently worried over the Exo's wounded faith. On her other side, Vell and Omar had been muttering close under their breath, then laughed almost nastily.
"Keep an eye on the shadows," Toland said. "They'll teach you the way."
"In order to do that, there must be sunlight," Eriana said.
"Yes," Omar said, glib. "Stare into the sun."
She was losing them. "We must do this," Eris said. "You know what is at stake."
"Life, liberty, and reputation," Vell said, as if mocking.
Toland said, "Then you go first."
Didn't he say 'keep an eye on the shadows?'
Eris found the gun in an empty, hastily constructed workshop. Dark hewn alter-tables looked like they had been extruded out of the ground. A Shrieker had been set to guard the area, but Eris had found that it did not see her at first. She got as far as the table holding the jagged rifle before the construct rose up and flared purple.
She had thought that it was broken and dormant, perhaps brought to the armory for repairs, but she was not so lucky. She threw herself behind the table, and the first shot scattered shredders and boomers across the flagstones. The ambivalence of the enemy was reassuring after the intentional experimentation of the Heart of Crota and her Wizards.
Murmur hit the ground nose first. Eris got both hands around the gun'ssquare grip while the Shrieker was still throwing fire at the table, and sat down heavily to brace her legs against the floor and aim.
Aligning her eyes with the sights was nearly impossible, and she did not know why. She raised the weapon without thinking about it, snapping her arms up in the natural movement she had used for many years, but when the sights neared her face she found herself developing blind spots. Looking too hard at one place made black shapes appear, like X-marks growing darker the more she tried to concentrate. Her depth perception decreased and increased so quickly that it disoriented her, clarity and confusion alternating within seconds.
Her first shot splashed off the table. Welts raised on her chest and forearms, and heat added to the general haze of pain on her face. Most of the ache in her eyes she had shoved to the back of her mind, but with the new pinpricks of pain she became aware of it again, and grimaced. She pushed backwards with her ankles, scooting along the floor, but couldn't gain traction. The Shrieker redoubled its blasts. Again she felt the Light, heavy, hove around into new and strange channels. Her hands glowed emerald beside the gun's darker green casing.
Eris rolled to her knees and edged around the table on bent legs. She fired twice almost blind, once striking the Shrieker. The second shot flew out the door. The Light around her hands rolled like waves.
She moved back, staying crouched behind the tables.
As she knew they would, Acolytes heard the sound and crowded into the room. They kicked through the remnants of the blasted armory while Eris waited, hidden two rows of tables away, moving the rifle sights up and down in front of her eyes to see whether the blind spots changed. Behind her, bronze stairs lead upward to an empty passage.
A sightless Acolyte peered over an overturned table. Eris fired once at the Shrieker, felt a blast from the Acolyte take the edge of her cloak. Even at the edges of the sights, the missed shot disappeared into a shifting blur. She fired again and heard the Shrieker's hull crack.
Eris blinked onto the top of the steps. She heard the released Void charge vaporize an Acolyte, while others herded toward the stairs. Purple charges struck the walls while Murmur hung from her fingers. She couldn't see clearly anyway, so she might as well turn away. One Acolyte got close enough to her that she stabbed it in the chest on the thorny end of the rifle, dust drifting through the air in the Light. The three green eyes gaped at her, shot through with silver threads.
There was something different about this weapon, something more pure than the sword or the Shrieker. Maybe it held a dead Guardian's soul, Eris thought. Maybe it was like a Ghost. Would she use Hive weaponry again? Would she had it to another Guardian, to let them live with the guilt?
After that, she started to look for a way out.
It took a long, long time.
She crawled to the surface as soon as she found it.
Sunlight clued her in. It was simply the randomness of the caves that had defeated her for so long, along with the disorientation and the small, endless sagas of attack and escape. She tried not to think of the parts of Omar she had found, and not the traces of Toland either, although for different reasons. She tried to concentrate on the knowledge she would bring back to the Tower.
She could only imagine that the Wizard she had encountered had been setting her up for a similar fate as Omar's. Maybe the mask would have immobilized her if the Wizard had had the change to manipulate it. Instead, it had given back her sight. In the tunnels she saw other bodies with Hive limbs grafted to them, as if the Hive were trying to learn how Light and life could be used in concert with their magic.
At one point she had seen her own reflection in the side of a tombship. She had found an alcove and not moved all the rest of the day.
Afterward, at a Tower both different and the same as the one she had left, she wondered whether she had hesitated a fraction at the end of the tunnel before walking out onto the Moon's surfcace. Some part of people, she thought, sometimes hesitated to satisfy themselves. That part had grown feral and accustomed to the tomb-tunnels, and had wanted her to stay with her vengeance and her experiments.
The rest of her was hungry.
She sped up for the last few steps and walked onto the silver regolith with a straight back, like a newborn Guardian. Wind caught her hood and touched its edges to the scarred ridges around her eyes. The sun was rising, she noted with bitter ruefulness. She pulled her bloody cowl over the eyes.