Anything can be weaponized. The question is, how much damage does it do to the wielder?
The trees were strange to Eris, tall stalks and leaves folding back in on themselves. Eriana tripped wards as soon as she came within a kilometer of Toland's bunker, but she shielded herself and Eris slipped in, driven by an irritation that had come upon her suddenly. This person was going to make it difficult for them to find him, was going to observe the Hive instead of hating them, and that seemed like a waste of time. It was a very Hunter way, although the exile was a Warlock. It was also a cruel trick at a time like this.
Both Toland and Osiris had been removed from the rans of the Guardians because of their own actions, Eris thought as she brushed past the trees. Osiris had run farther, taken stranger paths than Toland. A branch nearly snapped under her foot, and Eris blinked a few steps, folding reality to land silently on a patch of grass. A quick look around showed the trees thinning to her right, letting some of the watery gray moonlight in. Here at the edge of the tundra, just far enough away from the Tower to be out of its sphere of influences but not so far as to make return impossible, the wilds were capricious and prickly.
Eris was impatient, and Toland the Shattered was not.
Something bomb-shaped whistled past her ear and embedded itself in the ground.
She blinked away, but she was used to moving just precisely as far as she needed to go, and this thing didn't have the blast radius she expected. White strands like spiderweb filled up her vision, and the air felt suddenly thick. Eris bared her teeth, and her Ghost, quicker, manifested and shouted that it was a friend.
It was another electronic voice that answered. "Stay where you are. Do you know how long the stasis lasts?"
Eris thought the voice had been a Ghost, but when the fog from the bomb started to dissipate, a person stood there too. The bomb did not make her limbs feel heavy, so it wasn't an aerosol, or anything mental: just trapped air, forcing her to move sluggishly through the blue-white blur. Stasis. It could have even been here before the war, although she'd never seen this type before - and for her, a Hunter, to walk into a trap? It must have been buried deep, or, more frighteningly, too strangely made to be on her radar, either with her helmet or her eyes.
When she tried to move her limbs, she swam slowly forward. That had to be Toland standing there, just watching her, and for this reason she raised her gun but propped her finger away from the trigger. What would he respect? Bluster or kindness? Eriana would give the latter most of all, Eris thought, but she was also devious, and Eris was also wise.
The effect wore off after long seconds, in which Eris counted her own breaths and felt her arms ache under the weight of the gun. The figure in front of her approached cautiously. It was shaped like a human indeed, a man skinny and cloaked like a Warlock. He listed to the left, toward his still-holstered gun. To her relief, Eris' Ghost reported that Eriana was moving uneasily in from the other side.
The Exo emerged behind the stranger just as the blurring effects of the grenade wore off. With the obscuring fog gone, she could see the person in front of her more clearly. An ex-Guardian for sure, his sleeve not even stitched where his Warlock bond had been torn off.
"Toland?" Eriana said. "We need your help."
The figure tipped its head.
Toland the Shattered wore a deep black cloak and a helmet studded with metal pieces. A Ghost hovered close by his right ear, but the voice had come from the mask.
"Emissaries," he drawled. "Or thieves from the Tower? Which are you? Which do you think you are?"
"Neither," Eriana said immediately.
"Heavily armed thieves."
"You didn't see what the Hive did," Eriana said.
"This time? The Hive do a lot of things. Sing many songs." Toland dropped the pretense of ignorance then, and started questioning back. He looked back and forth over his shoulder between Eris and Eriana, to all appearances comfortably. "Why did you come here?"
"You know more than anyone else about the Darkness," Eriana said, rushing.
There was something unsettling about Toland's tone, or about his stance. Eris couldn't name it, but it was more than the usual Warlock aloofness: a sense of unbalance. There could have been no face at all behind the mask.
"We came here to find a weapon against the Hive," Eriana said. "They've taken the moon, and they're approaching too close to Earth. You know more about them than anyone."
"Guardians want me to join them." He laughed quietly. "I was forbidden from returning, you know. The ivory tower is a horn pointing."
Eriana's voice was strong, her stance disarming. She could have been in a circle of friends. "We do. We're putting a team together. We can provide any resource the Guardians can give that you might need."
"And the Vanguard?"
"They don't know."
Toland tipped his head, then laughed - a small, nasty sound. "Were you exiled also?"
"No," Eriana responded, immediately but not defensive. "We've just returned from Mare Imbrium."
Toland's Ghost twitched, maybe checking to see whether that was true. Toland said, "Follow me, lost Guardians. So, you came to compare notes." This he said as if to himself. "I saw that, you know. The flashes on the moon. The spectra were consistent with the Hive Knights spotted on Earth. Did you hear the singing?"
Eriana looked at Eris.
"There was no singing," Eris said.
"But there was a lot of dying."
He lowered his helmet as he walked in front of them, so that the first Eris saw of Toland the Shattered was thin black hair, longer than her own, and the red scars that ran from the back of his neck to his chin.
"I interrogated one of theirs," Eriana said, loudly, and so when Toland turned around the first expression Eris saw on his sallow face was one of startled approval. "I heard no singing."
This disappointed Toland again. His hand drifted toward his gun, and he turned away from them.
He had a hideout built into the side of a cliff. Judging from the writing on the thick door the place was pre-collapse, hardened against radiation and stocked with food. She didn't know what state it had been in when he had been exiled, but from the black scoring on the door she thought either its inhabitants or the door itself had been contested. Toland hesitated at the door, unlocking wards Eris couldn't see but that made Eriana whistle.
In the bunker he had shelves of books and stones, cloths draped over strange shapes. The air was stuffy but filtered: she could see the vents in the high corners. The walls looked pre-Golden Age, heavy and rusted. Toland moved between the stacks carefully, but Eris and Eriana had to work in order to not knock anything over. The place gave an unsettling impression of contortion, and the three people standing in the middle of it were odd-shaped puzzle pieces.
"I suppose threatening to kill you won't matter much," Toland said, moving into the bunker with his cloak flaring behind him. "So if you fight me here, I'll have to keep you."
There was a thrall tacked to the wall.
"How did you find me here?" Toland asked, turning abruptly to Eriana. Whether he could tell that she was the leader by body language or her own bearing, or had chosen her because she had not tripped his trap, Eris did not know. Pulled from the shadow in which she usually fought them, the thrall was bone-white and porous, its thick exoskeleton poked with lacunae and black scabs. Armor almost indistinguishable from the skeleton hung off its ribs.
"The Vanguard isn't ignorant of where they sent their exile," Eriana said. "There are records."
"You stole from the Vanguard?" Toland tipped his head.
Then thrall's eyeless face looked back and forth, the skull like a white cap. Wires had been driven through its hands, but it was bound to the wall with electrical tape, its feet a handspan off the floor. Eris' lip curled. Why keep this inside where it could nearly explode at any moment? Why torture it?
"I did worse to the Hive," Eriana said, and Eris jerked her head toward her in surprise. Eriana was ignoring the thrall completely, even when it made a small, gurgling sound.
"We have a bargain for you," Eriana said.
Toland folded his arms, glanced at Eris, or perhaps the thrall.
"We need your expertise, and you need to get to the moon," the Exo continued.
"People have tried, before Mare Imbrium and after. And why would you succeed in doing that?"
"Frankly, because of you. But also because we'll have the best Guardians I know, and we will go straight in. No patrolling, no waiting for their leader to come out on its own terms. Straight into the pit, if we find a way."
"You know about the pit." Toland seemed curious again.
"I know the Swarm Prince's name."
That information tolled like a bell in Toland's head: Eris saw it widen his eyes, and he stared at Eriana for a full three heartbeats.
"What things we can learn from names," Toland said.
Eriana was blunt. "You want that."
"I have my suspicions. Patterns, waves on the ancient ocean."
"We have it."
The Warlocks looked at one another, and Eris felt that she was looking at them from a distance - herself and the field and the dead thrall staked to the wall, somewhere else.
And Toland agreed to go with them, to be smuggled in to the City. Toland turned a corner and came back with a pack, as if he had been ready to go at any time.
"What about the thrall?" Eris said. Her voice seemed to echo.
"Ah, this."
When Toland moved toward the thrall it tried to thrash, lifting bony knees and turning its head. "My loyal power supply. It's dead current, but it provides."
He touched one dangling slab of armor, running his finger down the broken edge until his black glove picked up dust.
He killed it with a snap of Void energy Eris could feel like a puff of cold wind. The walls shuddered, and Toland motioned as if he was gathering the Void back in, stabilizing it.
"You just kept that?" Eris said.
He turned to look at her full-on for the first time. "Only for a few weeks."
Of course he studied the Hive. She just hadn't expected him to pin them up like butterflies to cards.
After that, Toland followed them home.
He took the move into the City with a calm that Eris and Eriana found suspicious, and several times they discussed whether he was leading them into a trap, despite the overwhelming appearance of the opposite. Eriana had numbers. Eriana had the City, and Toland still gave the impression, somehow, of having the upper hand.
The apartment Eriana had somehow claimed in the City became a home to them, although Eris and Tarlowe were the most outspokenly nervous about operating outside of the Tower. Their mission was authorized, Eriana said repeatedly. She was still speaking to Ikora Rey with some regularity, and there was no law to say they couldn't go back to the moon. No law other than the law of the Hive, anyway, the law of one army crashing against another and creating new boundaries and borders. Eris did not often speak to Andal Brask, and so felt that her mild relationship to the Vanguard was unchanged, except for bringing in the exile.
One of the first long conversations she had with Toland the Shattered came after he had been in the City for a few weeks, with all the books and trinkets moved with him. The result was a cluttered two-room home on a block in the City where bad infrastructure or bad connections meant that power outages struck weekly. She, Eriana, and their Ghosts had scanned them for corruption or explosives. Toland spoke of possessing secrets that could not be explained without deconstructing Guardian dogma, and having seen his collection, she believed him.
Eriana and Toland scoured the archives for the name Crota, for anything Toland might have missed or which could be unlocked now that they knew the Hive leader's name. Eris sometimes ranged out in the field, looking to kill more Hive instead of study them, but almost as often she was tasked with flipping through books to find one sigil, one mention, in a language she couldn't read. No one asked about the angrier red of Toland's branching scars.
He happened or conspired to appear at the end of one of the stacks, and looked at her with a gaze that could have been assessing the books instead of acknowledging any human presence. He had told them of the hierarchy of the Hive, and how Crota was only a prince, and his eyes had grown distant when he spoke of the Deathsingers.
"Haven't found anything yet. There must be more information here, " Eris said, and when she did his eyes lit up.
She would think about that recognition later that day, considering the platonic spark. It was the same kind of hunger with which Toland addressed Eriana's inquiries about the Hive, but perhaps directionless in comparison. Toland's research was pointed, not meandering, but Eris could not see all the connections between the various arcana yet.
For now, he put a hand on the spine of a book. "Eriana mourned. But you … there's something incomplete about your relationship to that battle."
"I wasn't there," Eris said, pressing her lips tight together for a moment as she realized her mistake. She wrestled the other words out, staring at the shadows over his shoulder. "That is to say, I was there, on that plain. I was driven away from the central battle before the Hive leader arrived on the battlefield. When the cleaver came down I was in cover. Fighting off thralls, more and more of them, but still, over a ridge that gave me cover."
Toland drew himself a little taller. "Incomplete indeed. You misplaced your war."
Eris felt her cheeks burn. "My friends were there too. Close friends. Don't think I'm not just as driven as her."
"Of course not. You're almost Warlock in that drive. I admire the … efficiency of that."
"Thank you." She put a hand on the shelf too for a moment, turning away from him to look at the spines of the books. "And are you fighting out of curiosity?"
"Usually. It's so hard to explain some times, so hard to explain … "
He looked away for a moment, and she thought she saw fear in among the anger. Maybe that was some of the strangeness in his eyes.
She jumped after it. "We've all died before, you know. Some Guardians get cynical. They become either thanatonauts or hermits. I don't think you're either of those things." She turned toward him, and now he shrunk back, lowering his shoulders. "That exploration bores you, and you aren't out here by choice."
She put more fire than she expected into the last word, and it was apparently enough. He eased back, settled, folding his arms. Let her go.