Vibe check. It's been a while, Tenno. I'm still around, and I'm still writing. Not much of late, I've been spending too many hours learning to sculpt anime figurines from polymer clay, but Warframe is life. Update by update, from old man Entrati's chilling account of the Void between worlds, to the tale of Vala Glarios and the Dark Helmsman, I am reminded how much I love this fandom – and why I keep coming back.
Spoilers
The Heart of Deimos – MAJOR
They'd not concealed themselves in the Void… not precisely… but it was somewhere on the threshold, where that terrible unlight shone beneath the door. Unlight. Untime. Unreality. It was the strongest in the back rooms, in the workshops and abandoned apartments. The servants were gone. The housemaids and the valets. All gone.
Only Loid and Otak remained.
There were times when Loid couldn't remember how it'd been since they'd pulled Deimos out of phase. Not because he was forgetful, perish the thought, but because it was difficult to measure time in a place where time had no meaning. Hours became days, became months, became centuries. It had been tolerable at first. House Entrati had soldiered onward despite the isolation. Theirs were an old bloodline, after all, and well-used to the capricious vagaries of fate. Their patriarch's research into the Void had once catapulted the Orokin Empire to its greatest height – and inevitably brought its Downfall, for it was that penetration into the profane, the Solar Rails and Reliquary drives, that set the stage for the Zariman disaster… and the unholy children that gestated in its womb.
Loid creaked the door open with his shoulder. It should have opened automatically, but like so much else on Deimos, decay had taken a heavy toll. It'd been a nice room once. Loid could remember when the third-story atrium had commanded an impressive view of the planet orbiting below, staining the room in shades of carmine and ocher. Natural lighting had been very important to Son.
"It's necessary for my work. Glow panels are so harsh. Ruins the colors."
He'd had such a wonderful grasp of colors. Translucent blues and golds, fiery reds and luminous greens. Every detail of the eye rendered in exquisite detail. Loid floated his way up the destroyed staircase, the soft glow of his repulsors playing over squelching, writhing walls. The terraglobes had gone dark, but one or two cast fitful sparks, shadows mixing with the fevered orange light slanting down from the high, shattered windows of the atrium.
"Um… Loid? You're not gonna actually try to clean in here, are you?"
"Hush, Otak."
He had not been trying to wipe a dirty rag on the banister, searching for any trace of the milky Thassos marble it was made of. Certainly not.
Something slithered near the ceiling, but they reached the second floor unmolested, dipping to avoid a low-hanging clot of growth. The easel was right where the boy had left it… four, five centuries ago… maybe longer. Loid maneuvered closer. The half-finished painting was wrapped in pulsating ichor, but enough was visible for him to recognize the landscape depicted from the family's summer villa on the edge of Mare Nectaris, an incandescent lunar sunset captured amidst mile-high spires. There was no atmosphere on Lua, no particles to scatter light, and the beyond the class-ten containment field, the dying glow appeared as a cold and luminous white.
"…Loid? Loid!"
"What?!"
"Could you hurry? I think something's watching. It wants to eat us, I just know it!"
Loid worked to free the crusty painting, but with only rudimentary appendages to work with, progress was slow. The Infested had done more than just grow over it. In many places it'd fused to the canvas, assimilating each cotton fiber before moving on to the next one. Movement again. Something with too many legs that cast a skittering shadow. Loid freed the painting with an overzealous tug that sent him spiraling backwards into the wall, torn canvas swinging like a pennant. He hastily rolled it up.
Spit dribbled from the ceiling.
"Loid!"
They shot forward, soaring back down the destroyed balustrade as fast as their repulsors could carry them. The juvenile carnix scrambled to follow, snapping at their metaphorical heels. It leapt after them just as the fleeing Cephalons sluiced sideways through the gap in the door, two and half meters of mutated chitin accordioning up against the frame.
"Ha! Take that you- you bitey Scratchykins you! AH!"
Otak yipped as the carnix shoved its head through the breach and snapped murderously at them.
"Run, Loid!"
"That's what you get for taunting it," said Loid primly.
He leaned into the door, well out of reach of the scissoring jaws, and shut it as best he could. It was getting harder and harder to wander the household as more of the outer rooms fell to the Infested. Subsequently, Loid had also gotten very, very good at avoiding the unsavory denizens of the place.
They set off down the corridor, heading towards the east wing. There'd been a time when Deimos had been the envy of the Empire, its unique aesthetic admired but never duplicated. It had been a hub of science. Of discovery! Scholars of every conceivable discipline had graced this moon with their presence, and Loid had helped entertain them all with wine and good conversation, as befitting a Cephalon of his station.
No one came to Deimos anymore.
Not willingly.
The only guests they saw these days were the shipwrecked survivors of vessels that wandered too close to the moon's concave reality. Loid watched and cataloged, and measured the centuries by the devolution of their attire, their equipment, their language – the music of the Orokin syllabus slowly decaying to harsh consonants and glottal pauses. Factions fell. New factions arose. As things decayed on Deimos, so too did the outside world.
No one came to Deimos anymore.
Not the Archimedians.
Not the Executors.
No one.
"Loid?" Otak's voice was soft. "You're being gloomy again."
Loid did not comment on the obvious. Otak could not understand what he could not remember, and perhaps that was for the best. Was it better to have had and lost, then never had at all? Loid didn't know. They moved through the halls at a slower pace now. No one occupied this wing anymore, either. Loid passed huge workshops filled with armor plates and weapons crumbling to rust. For Father, the Downfall had taken place long before the palaces and promenades of Lua ran with Orokin blood.
Despite their outward simplicity his Necramechs had been marvels of engineering, the latest in Void technology. People remarked on the prestige Mother's new husband had brought to House Entrati. When the Sentients first fell from the stars, Father's Necramechs were among the first battalions sent to defend the System, their plain and, some would say, unsophisticated machinery immune to the pulses that crippled the Empire's more advanced equipment. But for every Murex they sent packing, every Orphix they brought down, another materialized to take its place – again and again and again in an endless hoard pouring from some gargantuan assembly line in distant Tau.
The Outer Terminus fell, and the Empire was slowly but surely being pushed to the brink.
Then the Warframes appeared.
Loid remembered the celebrations, remembered the unreadable gleam, the burning worlds in the Executor's smile as he'd accepted his accolades with aplomb. The whispers of high society were quick to change. Compared to the grace and brilliance of the Warframes, Entrati Necramechs were ugly, brutish machines deemed too rigid to face an enemy that was constantly adapting.
Father had never really recovered from the disappointment, retreating into his workshops, into the confines of his own head, long before ruin had come to Deimos. Father was what they called him now. Father was the only thing that remained, a hollow title for a hollow soldier who wandered the suppurating plains of Deimos, Necramechs at his side, jousting with the Infested as though his private little war would make up for the one he'd lost.
Loid realized he was still holding a dirty rag.
He slopped it against a piece of abandoned machinery, rust and rancid fluid sloughing off onto the floor. No matter how hard to scrubbed, he couldn't keep up. The stains came back. The decay kept spreading. Yesterday he'd gone down into the cellars in search of a bottle to pour for Daughter. House Entrati had once boasted such a collection! Spiced date-wines from Mars, garnet brandies from Ceres. Icy juniper spirits from Lua.
No more.
The Infested had taken those, too. The bottles had been tipped over and smashed, the racks pushed out of place by swollen nodules of disease. Loid's appendages drooped. Somewhere in the back of his weave, in that liminal space he shared with Otak, he felt the other Cephalon mutely nuzzle closer.
"Tch. Surely you don't intend to actually clean in here, Loid. What a waste of time."
Loid whirled around.
She had no name because she'd forgotten it, and Loid could no longer bear to speak it. Mother was who she was. Mother was all that was left. Pincers clacked and shuffled wetly in the gloom, like the carnix that'd pursued them from the atelier. It was not often she wandered the corridors like this. Loid wondered why she was doing so now.
"Hello, Mother!" he said quickly. "Can I get you anything?"
"He's never here anymore," she replied, ignoring the question. "He's always preferred the company of his damnable machines. Husband. Hmmpf. Always running away, my husband. From me. From us. From the jeers I had to endure on behalf of this family."
Loid remembered the snickers, the poison barbs hidden between the silken folds of civilized discourse. Her father had been mocked for his research, her husband mocked for losing face. No one remembered the triumphs such endeavors had brought, or what sacrifices had been made to achieve them. Mother's long fingers scraped against the seriglass shard she carried with her. Blood pattered on the floor. There's always blood these days, the skin raw and sore, muscle torn like ribbons against an edge so sharp it'd once cut its way between worlds.
"Would you like me to fetch a glass of something of calm your nerves?" Loid hedged nervously.
She fixed him with an icy look. "Don't lie, Cephalon," she hissed. "I know there's nothing more than swill in this house. I've seen the cellar, seen the ruin that idiot boy has wrought upon this family."
Fingers raked against seriglass again. Scraping. Scraping.
"Loid… the painting," Otak warned.
"Ah, but there were a few bottles I was able to salvage-" Loid began quickly, but it was too late. Mother's gaze fixed on the canvas dangling from his appendages. There was a manic gleam in her eyes that set Loid's circuits on edge.
"Is that one of his ugly little pictures?" she sneered. "Useless. Just like him. Wasting his time painting and flirting when he should have been learning from the Archimedians. I want you to dispose of it immediately!"
She'd called his paintings beautiful once.
Hung them on the walls where all the guests could see.
No one came to Deimos anymore.
Dripping fingers stretched out as though to tear the artwork from his grasp. Loid inched backwards out of reach. He was small, but not particularly quick. And she was blocking the door. His internal receiver chimed.
"Hello? Loid? Hate to be a bother, but could you be a dear and stop by for a tick?"
Grandmother's aged but still beautiful voice was unmistakable.
Mother's twitching hand stilled.
"Sorry, Mother. Duty calls!" said Loid quickly. "I'll be sure to dispose of this on my way!"
He whisked forward before Mother had a chance to recover her thoughts. He could feel her jagged glare on his back as he zoomed down the corridor, trying not to look like he was fleeing the scene of a robbery. She didn't take her eyes off him until the corner mercifully hid him from sight. Otak wilted with relief.
"Whew. Close one."
"Indeed."
After a brief search they found Grandmother in her garden at the rear of the house, its massive, sweeping balcony and flimsy containment field overrun with Infested palpators, thick as climbing ivy, trained to grow along the marble balustrades.
"Ah, Loid dear," said Grandmother. "You needn't have rushed."
"Oh, we weren't busy," Otak chipped in helpfully. "Mother was just about to murder us!"
"Otak..." Loid forced air through his vents in a good approximation of sigh. He pulled himself up in what he hoped was a dignified manner. "It wasn't a problem, mum. How may I be of assistance?"
Grandmother smiled at him. Despite the ravages inflicted by time and the Infestation, her face was still regal, her eyes still sharp. She gestured to a pile of creepers with her pruning shears.
"I'm afraid they've fallen over."
Loid set the rolled painting aside and moved to hover over the tendrils. Many were thicker than Grandmother's wrist, and most were adorned with pulsing orange buds. He gathered up what he could and hoisted the bundle towards the trellis.
"A little higher- good! Now if you could just hold there..."
Grandmother's garden had been beautiful once, an exotic oasis filled with dozens, if not hundreds of rare blooms twining and tumbling around one another in a riot of perfectly imperfect chaos. If he concentrated, Loid could remember the roses and waxen plumerias, the pond overflowing with endangered blue lotuses transplanted from the oases of Mars. As a child, Daughter had loved the pond more than anything in the house. She'd spend hours lying with her nose mere inches from the water, crushing the grass and the delicate purple phlox beneath her stomach, attention fixed on the fish sliding around in the darkest, deepest depths. Loid had dredged her out of it more than once, her sodden tunic clinging to gangly prepubescent legs as she beseeched him not to tell Mother.
Looking over there now, Loid saw a shattered marble basin filled with the slow bubble of exocrine oozing up from Infested aquifers. Any fish it contained, if it contained any at all these days, were of the aberrant, mutant sort – carnivorous predators that rose by the light of Fass to feed on their smaller and weaker cousins. A far cry from the gentle spotted koi that'd once called it home.
Loid felt an odd choking sensation shudder across his weave. He was a Cephalon and Cephalons did not cry – having no biological functions to speak of, and therefore no tear ducts with which to shed saline – but they possessed something of an equivalent.
Grandmother's shears rasped in the silence. "Loid, dear. Whatever is the matter?"
"Nothing, mum."
"Liar," Otak accused in a whisper that could be heard twenty feet away.
Bits of Infested foliage dropped to the ground as Grandmother pruned, tending the polyps as she'd once tended an arbor of roses. "This new strain is finally starting to take hold, you know," she said conversationally. "Over there, by the vases. Do you see it? Isn't it a pretty blue? Makes such a lovely contrast to all this orange."
More palpators fell in wet, meaty plops.
"Such a shame the Heart's been acting up lately."
Loid jolted unpleasantly. His thoughts began to race, searching for signs he'd missed, duties he'd neglected. The Heart was buried deep in Entrati Vaults; no one had gone down there for centuries, but surely any problems would not have been subtle!
"But the Heart is in good working order!" Loid protested. "It's power outputs are normal, and there have been no local disturbances in the Void. I would have noticed if anything was amiss."
"It's not your fault, dear. A stitch in time saves nine, and you're the only one that's kept up with the sewing while everyone else runs about in rags," said Grandmother. Her soft, spidery fingers twined amongst the Infested.
"The Tenno are bound to notice! Such marvelous things, the Tenno. You remember them don't you?"
"...Yes, mum," said Loid slowly.
"They were our allies once, before the entire System went to rot. Can you imagine, that floating fat man asking for my granddaughter's hand in marriage? The nerve of him. As if she could do no better! Honestly, I expect he got exactly what he deserved when they kicked in his door."
A humid breeze sighed through the garden – not the gentle, katabatic zephyrs that'd once played across Deimos – but the living heat of the Infested itself pulsing and writhing across the surface. Grandmother gestured with her sheers.
"A little to the left, if you please."
Loid stared at the side of her face. Stared for a long, long time. Most days her memory was the best of all of them, but on other days, Loid wondered if she was altogether there. He obediently floated close enough for the Infested to twine against the trellis.
"Ew," said Otak.
"The Tenno are not our allies. Not anymore," said Loid slowly. "Surely you haven't forgotten."
"My body may be blunted, dear, but my mind is as sharp as ever," Grandmother replied. She snipped off a gnarled clot of growth and gently arranged the remaining shoots to wrap around the trellis. "And a mare can only limp on a broken leg for so long before she must be healed, or put down."
A fresh surge of exocrine welled into the fishpond, followed the shattered canal, and dripped from the balcony in fat spumes of mucus. Daughter no longer came to the gardens. Not after she'd looked into the empty basins and saw nothing but twisted life, the promise of reseeding them turned to a handful of ash. Loid shifted uncomfortably. What had been a reprieve from Mother's delirium had turned sour and heavy with the weight of things left unsaid.
"I- I don't understand."
It was a lie, of course; he'd been programmed to interpret social ques, his software meticulously calibrated to feed him a constant stream of data suggesting whether or not someone was being truthful, and Grandmother was oh-so-casually avoiding his gaze, denying him the advantage of reading her eyes.
"Oh, don't mind me," she said delicately, flapping a hand at him. "Half the time I don't even understand myself, prattling on like an old woman. Run along now, you two. Thank you so very much for the help."
Loid slunk away without another word, stopping only to retrieve Son's painting. He did not throw it out like Mother had instructed. He took it into the baffles and narrow attic spaces of the house, where it joined his sad collection of other forbidden items. Piles of notebooks and anatomical sketches belonging to Daughter, each one bound in the finest skate-leather. She'd never had much taste for Vitruvians, choosing instead to feel the paper beneath her fingers. Another painting by Son. Mother's wedding ring, hurled spitefully away. Loid had never been able to find Father's.
He unrolled the painting and tried to spread it open against the wall, but without a frame it only flopped into a pile. Loid said nothing. After a long moment, he settled on the floor amongst the neglected, broken things. Otak took the opportunity to organize everything he could reach. A cup there, a glossy weapon part there. A collar embossed with the name of Kalymos long dead. He waited for Loid to notice the artistry of their new arrangement. When the other Cephalon did not, Otak's pincers drooped.
He was a broken thing, too. Something else Loid had rescued from the ruin of Deimos. Words confused him. Emotions confused him more. He could not remember the way things had been, but he knew they were getting worse.
"What's going to happen to us, Loid?" he asked quietly.
"I... I don't know, Otak. I truly do not know."
Otak fidgeted with a pile of zodian beads. It was… it had been… a necklace. A net of stars that'd once graced Mother's neck. Loid had said so. Or had it belonged to Daughter? Otak couldn't remember. He moved the beads around in little circles, watching how they caught the light.
"Things will get better! You'll see!"
The silence stretched. Round and round went the little broken beads, the string long since rotted away. House Entrati had lost so much. Their dignity. Their memories. Loid wondered how much more they could stand to lose before they were no longer themselves. How long before only he and Otak were left, drifting through the Untime in an empty, rotten house until they finally turned on each other?
Loid shuddered. He promised to overheat their black box and destroy them both before it came to that, but now it seemed the choice was being taken out of his hands. He was not obligated to participate in what was coming – Grandmother had given him no direct order – but he had served House Entrati since the beginning, and he would do so until the end.
He opened his internal database and scanned a list of private carrier frequencies. Once he'd boasted a library of over a thousand individual contacts. Now it contained less than a hundred, everything else lost to fragmentation and corrupted partitions. Even he had not escaped the ruin of Deimos wholly intact. He scanned the flickering haze of pixels.
The Council of Executors: Dead.
The Archimedian Colleges, destroyed. Their alumni, dead.
Everyone dead.
The Grineer would be of no help. Even if they were so inclined, they were mere servants, cannon fodder bred to protect the true soldiers of the Empire, the Dax and the Tenno. And the intervening centuries had not been kind. Nowadays they were barely intelligent enough to identify the business end of a rifle. No aid would come from there, and Loid almost barked a laugh at asking the merchants for help. The Corpus Guild had better technology and the acumen to use it, that much was true, but the idea of allowing them to see their once proud family forced to stoop so low-
No.
Pride was all House Entrati had left, and Loid refused to barter it away. He could attempt a general SOS, of course – there were other factions who might be convinced to assist, even if they had much less to offer – but such a broadcast would be heard across the System, and as Grandmother had said, the Tenno no longer dreamed. Time was they'd been the pride of Empire, the living manifestation of both sword-arm and shield. Was there truly no means of persuading them to show clemency? Considering how things had ended, Loid very much doubted it. Exiling Deimos from reality had been an act of survival, not an exotic holiday to some unspoiled beach on Old Earth.
Still...
With a few efficient swipes, Loid brought up another tab and set it alongside the first. Details of the Warframe mandate were forbidden to all but the Seven, but there was information to be had nonetheless, and it wasn't as if the Tenno had been hidden from the public eye. Loid's visual sensors traced each of them in turn.
"Burns its victims, buries its victims, chokes its victims. Turns its victims inside out," Otak chortled.
"Otak! You are not helping!"
"What? Isn't it good to know how we're going to die?"
There wasn't much Loid could say to that. Esoteric and eternal, the Void itself given form, a mere hundred Warframes had laid waste to hundreds of thousands of Sentients, and went on to murder the ruling body they'd been created to serve. House Entrati's chances were slim as it was, to say nothing of the dire straits of Deimos itself. Loid recalled the verdant gardens of colonies overrun with Infested – and the cleansing fire of the Warframes.
"The Tenno are not cruel, Otak," Loid reminded him quietly. "We… will not suffer."
No more than they had already, at least. The sputtering list continued to roll. Loid brought it to a halt. One number stood out amongst the rest. Not five people in the Empire had individual access to it, but the nature of House Entrati's research had once afforded them certain privileges. Loid scrolled to the frequency and tapped it. His databanks opened accordingly.
"The Marshal?" Otak asked meekly.
Loid remembered the parties, the sparkling galas where champagne poured from the fountains. The Executor had been the picture of Orokin grace as he'd danced with Daughter, as was only polite. Mother had delicately tried to suggest marriage – but Ballas had graciously declined, the flashing golden band in his hair suggesting his heart belonged to the memory of another. He'd often come to speak with Mother, to inquire after her late father's research notes. There were many late-night conversations over many a glass of apothic crimson cognac, which Loid had faithfully served.
All the while, a Warframe lingered in the corner, never straying far from the Executor's side. Whatever was said in that room had been said before the Marshal of the Central Altar, and as the war dragged on, the System whispered of a burning thing. It was said that wherever he went, things were not as they seemed, that a minor skirmish on some no-name backwater had just become a turning point of utmost importance, that it was swifter to send the Marshal rather than update battle-plans in realtime. A clarion of hope for a war-torn System.
If there was one Tenno that might, possibly, be convinced render aid, it would be this one. And if no quarter was given, death would be a kindness. Loid closed his databanks and slipped from the crowded cubbyhole. He went slowly, walking through the memory of the house as it'd been centuries ago, when the walls sparkled and laughter filled the halls. Outside on the Drift, the sky was the color of an old bruise. The only light that fell on that horrible place came from the embered glow of Fass. There were no stars, no sun. The sky was empty except for the whorls of colorless energy that billowed at the edge of reality. Loid had not seen the face of Mars in over a millennia.
He floated in place and waited for something to happen.
Loyal servant of the great and Glorious Orokin Empire...
On second thought, perhaps he shouldn't have phrased it quite so. Deep beneath the surface, the Heart gave a cavernous ka-thump. The Infestation began to writhe, keening with a subsonic resonance beneath the range of normal hearing. Loid had no mouth to set in a hard and determined line, but he imagined himself doing it anyway. He was not betraying the family. This was for the best. He was doing this for everyone's own good. Otak said nothing, and Loid was left to reassure himself in silence, repeating the litany until he'd almost convinced himself of it.
You are hereby commanded to honor your oath and render assistance without delay.
The Tenno were commanded by no one – not anymore – but Loid knew of no other way to address them. It was proper protocol, after all, and the potential end of the world was no excuse for bad manners. The Heart convulsed again. The veins of energy crisscrossing the sky flickered and burned. Deimos shuddered to its foundations.
At first Loid was afraid the ill-kept machines would misfire and tear the moon in half, stillborn as an infant whose umbilical had wrapped around its neck. The tiny moon quaked again. Unreality loosened its sticky hold, and Deimos slipped back into reality as easily as it'd left. All across the System, heads turned to behold the lost moon of Mars; a pulsating tumor with a burning, embered heart, silent but for the ancient carrier wave pulsing out from its seething core.
An ancient code pleading to an ancient ally.
We await your arrival upon this, the most cursed moon of Deimos.
Your star chart shows the way.
I am Loid, Cephalon Servant to House Entrati
"Please bring guns," Otak added in a small voice.
No one came to Deimos anymore.
No one except the Marshal.
SURVEY TIME! I'd love to know what chapter of Hail to the Jewels has been your personal favorite so far! Because I have a thirst for knowledge that only Synthesis can satisfy. This being is current object of my curiosity. ;)