I have seen what comes after death.
And I am terrified.
You hang there, motionless, bodiless. Alone. You are nothing, and yet you are. Endless emptiness - a grave nobody will ever know, and a ghost no one will ever see.
This war is hell. That is the only way to describe it. We fight demons and monsters and the broken shards of gods, and we die, and die, and die, until the only thing we have left to learn about death is how to survive it.
I would rather a thousand years of hell than a single year in what comes after.
...I suppose I should explain what led me to this realisation.
First, you must understand that I am a Warlock. I obey the laws of reality the same way I do the Traveler - secure in the knowledge that I can stop whenever I so desire.
I have seen the Void. Twisted it. Taken it. Condensed it into shards and used it to rip open holes in the world.
I have seen the Light. Burned with it. Been burned by it. Wrapped it around my body and used it to ignite the heart of a god.
These are the least of my powers. Parkour tricks my brothers and sisters use to pass the time as we gorge ourselves on deeper mysteries.
I also have a gun. Scratched onto the barrel are the words 'More Light! More Light!' - the last is shaky, the letters rushed and their carving shallow. The Exo who gifted it to me said its name was Light/Beware.
Never before have I heard something so fitting. To a Guardian, the Light is our strength - it makes us stronger, faster, bends the universe to our whims, heals us when we hurt and restores us when we die. We can always do with more Light.
But it is also dangerous. Too much Light, and the universe does not bend. No. It breaks. The Warlocks who have learned this, we call the Fireborn. I should know. I am one of them.
Do you know what it means to be Fireborn?
I will tell you.
It means that, when your bones burn beneath your skin, and it feels as though your blood is nothing but liquid Light, you become somethingmore. A shadow of divinity. Stories left over from the Golden Age tell us of myths like the phoenix, the fire-bird that lives and dies and lives again. Firebird, Fireborn, they are one and the same.
When we die, supercharged by Light, we do not end the way others do. We do not cease to exist until our Ghosts restore us. No. Our bodies collapse but our minds do not. Instead, they burn on, somehow capable of seeing even though we no longer have eyes, somehow thinking even though we no longer have a brain.
And through it all, something lingers. One word. Live.
We scream it into the silence and are reborn in fire and wrath.
It would be inspiring if we were not screaming in fear.