As promised over a year ago in The Burning Cold, and hinted at in the previous chapter Their Butler, Commendable, a shard of Nezha's past, Marshal of the Central Altar, finally comes to light.

Spoilers

The Sacrifice – MAJOR

The Chimera Prologue – MAJOR

"Welcome back, Operator!"

Nezha exited the docking cradle, runnels of polluted rain trickling down his legs, and watched through the viewplate as fire erupted from the compound below, blasting out chunks of metal and burning slag as the explosion propagated through the corridors. With luck it would cripple Grineer activity in this sector for at least a few cycles, even if the respite would be short-lived. Like the mass-produced weapons they churned out, the Grineer lived out their brief but violent lives on an industrial scale.

The Liset arched away, punching a hole in Ceres' dirty yellow clouds. The dwarf planet was like a rotten apple held together by its skin, its metallic core plundered, its surface pocked with sulfuric lakes of acid rain. It had been an outpost once, an agricultural jewel that fed many an Orokin colony after old Earth had been abandoned. A breathable atmosphere had been inflated, the asteroid's briny mud made fertile, and grain from Ceres served the finest tables on Lua. During the Old War, the Sentients had taken great pains to smash that jewel into dust, cutting the Empire off from one of its main sources of sustenance.

Many lives had been lost retaking those fertile soils – now shrouded in filth and toxic waste, pocked with shipyards like so many pustulent sores. Ceres had become a battleground once again, a point of leverage over a war-torn System. Nezha angled his chin, a tense, unconscious gesture that popped the gristle in his Warframe's neck.

It is with greatest risk that I commit this recording. The codices within reveal the weakness of your greatest enemy…

With stiff movements, Nezha lifted a hand before his face. He commanded his fingers to flex and they did so without hesitation, with all the strength and dexterity of the living. Better than the living. A vessel created for a singular purpose, a battle envoy for a devil mind. The Tenno tamed, but only just.

Nezha turned his palm, forma glinting at his fingertips.

My creations.

My Frames of War.

Vitruvian memory-glyphs flickered through his head, and Nezha's thoughts ruptured as memory of the Executor's voice sundered the unstable weave of his mind. It had been days, weeks since that confrontation- but the dissonance had not abated in the slightest. Static filled his head as the somatic link began to fray, memories from completely different eras backing up behind his eyes, jumbling together until nothing could be clearly discerned.

Where is she? Ballas, where is the Lotus?!

I am here, Tenno.

His senses filled with the reek of blood and blackened petals, a forgotten garden turned sacrificial altar. Nezha grit the Warframe's recurved teeth. Somewhere far away, blood coated his Operator's tongue as he struggled to rein in his fragmented thoughts.

What have they done to you?

Nothing. This… is what I am.

Her answer had been a twisted caricature of that time when those same words had been used to comfort, when the Dream had first been broken. She'd tried to kill him. Might very well have succeeded if not for Umbra-

Can you hear me? Father? It's me, Isaah. Do you remember me?

Of course he remembers you, young Dax. Which will make this reunion all the more tragic… when you watch him die. I've had lifetimes to plan my defection. You spied on me, intercepted my communications, but I saw your move long before you took it.

And so… we come to the consequences.

Nezha shook his head as the foul memory reached up to swallow him.

I killed him, he thought bleakly. Isaah.

"Did you now? Is that how you remember it?"

The runaway train of Nezha's thoughts came to a grinding halt. His head snapped around, directing a fixed look into the back of the Liset. Below in one corner, the foundry whirred and revolved, sparks leaping onto the floor as it electroplated some new component. Somewhere in the back his kavat yawned and turned over in her sleep. It was the same sight that had greeted Nezha for years… yet an unseen weight pressed in, dark and mercurial, and the rear of the ship suffocated under a heavy sense of foreboding. The Orbiter was unoccupied... but not empty.

Come, Devil. Walk with me.

Words spoken centuries earlier echoed through the Void.

The reflection of a command, invoked as an invitation.

Nezha descended into the Orbiter.

Cold, chalcedony stars gleamed beyond the canopy viewplate, filling the hold with pale light, and his shadow walked before him as he moved into the dim recesses at the back of the atrium. The gleaming floor beneath his feet was as level as it ever was, but in the Void, the fabric of reality lay tilted on its side, urging him towards his personal quarters like water trickling down a slope.

On some level, he already knew what to expect – it was hardly the first time such visions had haunted the limbo at the corner of his eye, vaguely sinister, vaguely childlike, peering at him from around corners only to vanish the moment he truly gazed upon it – but when the door opened at his approach, Nezha jerked to a halt upon the threshold.

The entity admonished him with a laugh, a discordant, double echo that began in one reality and ended in another. Wreathed in smoke and crimson motes of energy, it sat upon the pedestal he'd constructed to hold the Lotus' headgear – wearing that same helmet pulled low over its dread eyes. It slapped its knee in amusement, then vanished in the usual fashion. The helmet remained, however, leaving infinitesimal vibrations in the air around it... like a distant, muffled heartbeat.

The invitation was impossible to resist, and Nezha did not try. He stepped forward and extended a hand to touch the helmet's polished surface. Fingertips touched, colors smeared, and the world dissolved in a blinding flash of light.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx-O-xxxxxxxxxxxxX

Cool air touched Nezha's cheeks. It smelled of rain and mist-drenched wood; the ozone anticipation of a thunderstorm tinged with the delicate florals of a sakura tree in full bloom. Water dripped and pattered from thick green leaves. Nezha opened his eyes.

He'd returned to that garden high above the overgrown jungles of Old Earth. Lua swelled in the sky, the cradle that held its shattered fragments – a feat of unnatural defiance only the Orokin could muster – gleaming in its reflected glow. The air was filled with nocturnal stirrings of coqui frogs, furtive and soft, as if the wildlife itself was wary of disturbing the fragile, dreamlike quality of the night.

"Hey, kiddo."

The voice was barely above a whisper.

The reverberating laughter that followed was not.

Nezha lowered his eyes and found his own reflection standing nearby. Waiting for him. Its- his hands were clasped demurely in front of his chest, delicate and straight-backed, the Lotus' helmet shadowed against the swollen light of the moon. Nezha defiantly lifted his chin, the specter of a memory pressing at the edges of his mind; fires raging on the lower decks, the sound of laughter echoed through a dying, derelict ship.

He took a step closer and his reflection streaked away in a blackened slash of Void-fire. Nezha followed the trail with his eyes and found that the specter had not disappeared, merely moved further along the path, where it was now sitting at the base of one the garden's monolithic stones. Knees updrawn, hands clasping at ankles. A child waiting for someone to come along and play.

Nezha descended the overgrown path. When he got within striking distance of the specter it flashed away again, reappearing another ten meters distant. Before him on the terrace, the garden's solitary sakura tree stood in full splendor. As Nezha drew closer, a sigh whispered through its branches.

Are you… are you…

Coming to the tree?

His own voice rose up on the breeze, haunting and darkly beautiful, the sound poised on a knife's edge that seemed to part the membrane of his skull. His doppelganger stood with one hand against the tree, head tilted to look back at him over one narrow shoulder. A coy smirk played about its lips as it sang to him.

"Are you… Are you,

Coming to the tree?

They strung up a man, they say who murdered three."

A familiar body lay crumpled at the specter's feet. One of the Executor's hands was pressed blindly to his stomach. The other was fisted next to him, grinding his forehead into the brittle grass. He was shaking, his chest heaving at an alarming rate as he tried to drag in another thin gulp of air. Dark, fresh blood glutted between his fingers with every tremor, pooling next to him on the petal-strewn earth. Nezha watched without expression. His had been the hand that'd forced Umbra's faltering resolve and he did not regret it. Regret was too strong a word.

"Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be,

If we met at midnight, in the Hanging Tree."

In the disjointed, nonsensical way of dreams, a lotus bloomed from the blood-soaked soil near the base of the tree. Ballas stretched his fingers towards it, struggling to cup it in his palm as another convulsion seized him from head to foot. Sandalwood and fragile narcissus pooled in the air between them, ghosts of the finest perfumes the Empire once had to offer. In the latter years of the Old War, Ballas had modified it to include the scent of lotus, too. Memory pulled like a wounded tendon, and Nezha fought to make sense of it all. The Lotus was not Margulis. Margulis had been put to death, sent into the Jade Light for railing against their mistreatment. How had Ballas possibly mistaken one for the other?

I told you not to speak out. If you recant, then maybe-

They're just children, not your proxy soldiers!

How can you defend these devils, Margulis, after what they've done to you?!

They couldn't help the outbursts. They had hurt her. Blinded her. And still she had loved them. The lotus had been her favorite flower, the cradle into which she'd lain them down to sleep, a whispered promise that something beautiful could grow from something ugly. After the Downfall, she had taken up that mantle – a surrogate for the love they'd lost, a new mother who'd given her children the moon.

Laughing, Nezha's reflection playfully swung itself out of sight behind the tree and reappeared high in its branches, hanging upside down by the crook of its knees. Swinging back and forth like a pendulum, it waved to him over the dying Executor's head.

"Are you, are you,

Coming to the tree?

Where a dead man called out, for his love to flee.

Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be…

If we met at midnight, in the Hanging Tree."

The sakura tree suddenly burst into flame. A ring of fire erupted around the edge of the terrace, presumably to forestall any thought of escape. Nezha tensed sharply, adjusting his stance in preparation for a fight as waves of heat buffeted his exposed skin, the air thickening with swirling embers. Dark silhouettes appeared in the flames, silhouettes with a feminine figure and a familiar petaled helmet, ratcheting forward like a horde of defective MOAs.

Horror trilled down the length of his spine and Nezha seized his wrist in his opposite hand, feeling a prism that had not been there a moment before. He waited, hesitating to fire, as the shadows of the Lotus closed in around him. They didn't speak, but they did make a sound, a ghoulish hissing that rose into an inaudible, breathy shriek. The closest one lunged forward, hands shifting like ragged streamers of smoke-

Nezha opened fire and the apparition burst apart as concentrated Void energy lanced through its gut. Another lurched in to fill its place. Nezha cut down another, and another and another. By the time he'd taken out a dozen, he was whirling in place to keep from being overwhelmed. Fear began to scratch the back of his mind. He might have been Tenno, but Tenno bled just like the so-called immortals that'd once held them in chains, and he'd come to this place without his Warframe. As the number of specters grew, so did the strength of the firelight. In moments the garden had retreated into darkness. The tree was gone. Ballas was gone.

And suddenly the ground was gone, too.

Nezha threw his arms out for balance, but despite the incredible rush of wind, he didn't fall very far. His feet lightly touched down on a protuberance of rock and he instantly sank into a crouch, counting out the seconds. Nothing else moved to attack at him. The shadows had disappeared.

Nezha took a deep breath, feeling his heart pulsing steadily in his chest. The tunnel that surrounded him was roughly angular, vaguely biologic, and stretched ahead for about fifty meters, pitch black except for the dirty amber glow radiating from a chamber at the far end. Moisture dripped and plinked somewhere in the darkness.

"No," a voice echoed. "My beauty, my grace, my… my humanity…"

The syllables were oddly strained, shimmering with a metallic resonance that echoed forlornly in the gloom. There was also something deeply familiar about it that Nezha couldn't place. He went to touch his prism and discovered, not only that it'd disappeared again, but that he could see right through his own hand. He held it up in front of his face, then directed a pointed look at the mouth of the tunnel.

It was obvious he was being led.

Moving within the Void, he traversed the tunnel to an outcropping on the other side, zigzagging his way towards the light. In seconds Nezha found himself overlooking an altogether different kind of terrace, one with a floor like the sutured cap of a skull. Fantastical, knobby spires and floating buttresses held the platform suspended over a chasm so deep that Nezha couldn't detect the bottom. All of it was built, not of metal or forma, but of bone and secreted resin, giving the entire room an unpleasant, weirdly organic sort of quality. A chill shivered its way down Nezha's spine. It had been centuries since he'd seen this kind of architecture, but there was no mistaking it.

Something moved off to one side and Nezha hurled himself behind a spire, not wishing to be seen by whatever it was that prowled the half-light of the chamber. Footsteps clattered, like a spider scuttling on metal legs, and even that image would have been a compliment to the malformed horror that picked its way out of the darkness. It stood on a Sentient's digitigrade limbs with the useless remnants of human legs flopping from its knees, it's right arm so unnaturally elongated, the sheer weight of it required the connecting shoulder be braced by an artisanal sunburst of pins embedded deep into the muscle – but that at least was familiar to Nezha, as he lifted his horror-stricken gaze to the creature's face.

Only half of Ballas' exotic features were recognizable. The other half was a puckered wasteland of scars embedded with a glaring red eye. The fatal wound in his abdomen was gone, his ribs spread open and fused directly to an amalgam of Sentient resin that left a ragged, fleshy pit through the Executor's naval. Forma gleamed in the baleful light, tangled in the snarl of his once perfectly coiffed hair as Ballas craned up on the pegs that now served him as feet.

"H- Hello?" he called plaintively, searching the chamber with his eyes. When Nezha did not respond, the Executor's hopeful expression crumpled. "No," he mumbled, shrinking back. "No hope. Only-"

His right eye suddenly exploded in a burst of light and the Executor wrenched as though he'd been struck. He stumbled back, breathy gasps wringing their way through his teeth as he rode out the discomfort. After a moment, the convulsion seemed to ease.

"Only suffering under her eye," he finished. An arc of light cut across the chamber as Ballas began to pace, cradling his right arm in the opposite hand. "But… she gave me the gift of life. Why would I betray her?"

He shook himself again.

"Fool," he sneered. "This… this is no gift."

With great difficulty, as though the aesthetic now caused him great pain, Ballas stretched his elongated arm above his head, made a fist, and tugged violently at empty air – as though he were pulling something down from above. A cloud of blue sparks materialized in time with the movement, swirling around a fragment that suddenly appeared on the dais to his left. Nezha's eyes cut to it, trying to decipher what it was and if it posed any kind of threat, but his investigation was cut short as Ballas began to swivel. If the Executor turned around now, his eye – that strange, blazing eye – would sweep directly over him and something told Nezha that being caught in its glare would be unwise.

He hurled himself to another, much higher outcropping towards the back of the terrace. And although he moved on the fold between worlds, the chill air shivered with his passing. Ballas whirled around.

"Oh? Is there someone-"

When the silence stretched without answer, the Executor's shoulders wilted.

"Only shadow," he mumbled. "Ah… only shadow."

He sounded so wretched that Nezha was overcome by an unexpected feeling of pity. He couldn't say how long Ballas had been imprisoned in this dread place with nothing but his own thoughts for company, but it had surely been several weeks. Long enough to have gone slightly mad. Giving himself another miserable shake, Ballas went back to his pacing-

-and Nezha found himself wishing to return to this place in his Warframe, not as a specter existing between worlds, not for something so noble as forgiveness – but to lay a blade across the Executor's throat and put a merciful end to his suffering. He hated him, resentedhim, but like so much that characterized his relationship with the Orokin Executor, those sentiments were murky and grey, their edge dulled by a complicated history. How strange it was, to miss someone you despised.

Ballas grasped at the air again and a second fragment appeared on the dais, stacking one atop the other.

"We saw what we wanted, those devils and I," he continued, holding court with himself. "A lover… a mother. But now I know. She's neither. She's a hawk calling with a sparrow's song. A viper, blending into wood. And her venom… it spreads not into flesh, but into your heart."

Nezha felt his pulse jump.

"Those devils!" The Executor scoffed. "What has their great awakening accomplished but the destruction of potential allies? Don't they see?"

A cold runnel of dismay trickled down Nezha's spine and pooled, heavy as lead, in the bottom of his gut. The accusation hung poisonously, touching on a nerve that he'd been wont to pick at in recent years, prompting him to maintain certain channels his fellow Tenno might not have been altogether comfortable with, if he'd deigned to share the exact details. But even so, Ballas was perfectly correct in his assessment. The Tenno had made friends, certainly – both personally and as a collective – but not with the powerful, not with those who commanded armies and resources. In fact, they'd gone out of their way to make enemies of such factions.

The Lotus had not expressly ordered them to do so, and it was unlikely that they would have chosen another path regardless, but even so, her opinion had certainly weighed heavy upon the decision. And why shouldn't it? They had trusted her. Surely she wouldn't have intentionally steered them wrong.

"And the Lotus… just some cloud in the sky, just some shape they imagined," said Ballas.

Another gesture towards the ceiling.

Another fragment on the dais.

"Only the Sentient is real. Only Natah," Ballas concluded bitterly. His back was to Nezha, displaying the twisted ruin of his spine, but as he spoke, he inclined his head toward one shoulder. "So… tell me, Devil. Do you understand what must be done?"

Nezha's teeth clacked together, his hackles rising. In that instant he knew Ballas was speaking to him and not the empty room. It was the change in his tone, in the way he'd pronounced the word, his Orokin accent adding a musical stress to the syllables so that it was heard with a capital letter: Devil. No longer a blanket statement, but a proper noun layered with scorn and twisted endearment.

Ballas turned towards the dais, looking up at the floating shards.

"The Paracesis. The Sentient Slayer," he announced gravely, as though he were committing the name to one of his Vitruvians. With great effort, he reached up and wrapped his spidery fingers around the uppermost piece, slamming them down – one atop the other – with a clang that resonated through the entire chamber. Sparks fled like startled fireflies, leaving behind what Nezha now recognized as a massive blade.

"Hurry!" Ballas urged, his voice taking on a note of desperation as he ducked behind his palm, hiding the piercing gaze of his eye. "Take this. The idea of it! It is the only way your war can end."

A surge of complex emotions boiled in Nezha's gut, but he hesitated for only a moment before warping down to stand opposite the dais. He was so close now that he could hear the labored gasp of the Executor's breath, the strain and creak of his mutilated body. Nezha lifted one hand towards the blade's ivory hilt, then hesitated.

Who was to say it wasn't another trap, peddled by another puppet master? He flicked a glance at Ballas, sensing his presence in the Void like a rotten tooth. Nothing had changed. The Executor's desolate aura felt as it had always had felt, like fangs sheathed beneath immortal grace and sophisticated conversation, but not empty of venom. A bargain had been levied, a hand extended in invitation – and oh, what a familiar invitation it was. Of course there was an angle, but were their goals not aligned? Did they not wish for the same thing?

"You needn't like it, Devil," memory whispered with the Executor's voice. "All you need do is obey me – until that day comes when you chew your own leg off to escape the snare, just like the animal that you are."

They'd both known the end was to be written in Orokin blood, whether the Sentients ultimately claimed victory or not, so when the Naga drums had echoed through the halls of Lua, petals and golden confetti raining down from the towers to celebrate what should have been a day of triumph, Nezha had stoically glanced up at the promenade, past the soldiers and the sycophants, and found Ballas waiting there to catch his eye. There had been no clemency, no intent to warn in Nezha's gaze, but the Executor's mouth had twitched into a knowing smirk and when the drumbeats had fallen silent, only Six of Seven were ever found.

He needed Ballas' permission for nothing-

-but in that moment, then as now, it didn't occur to him to refuse the Executor's blessing.

He stretched the last remaining inch and seized hold of the Paracesis' hilt. Sparks flared and scattered, and the blade began to vibrate as though it were trying to rattle itself apart. He and Ballas instinctively tightened their grip, while images poured into Nezha's skull until it felt ready to split from the pressure: flashing schematics inscribed in Vitruvian gold and Orokin script, like shimmering threads of spider silk.

I've taken their own bones and forged it against them-

Infested the blade until it curved, until it attained the most exquisite balance, and plated the killing edge in the purest forma, sharpened to a mono-filament edge.

A scalpel against the cyst, crafted as my Frames of War were crafted-

-in blood and steel.

Ballas began to shake, fighting to keep his head turned away. Half a heartbeat later, some unseen force wrenched it around against his will, the expression on his half-melted face slack with dismay. The light of his eye bored into Nezha's skull.

Tenno.

The light surged forward, and Nezha reeled away with a scream. The flow of images did not cease, coming faster and faster, slicing into him like shards of glass borne upon a raging flood. He saw the Sentients falling from the darkness between stars, larger than even the grandest Executorial Frigates, as battlegroups of Railjacks sailed forth to meet them. Nothing remained of that brave fleet – and beyond the Oort Cloud, the Sentients had only grown in number. The vision blurred and tilted, and the bulbous galleons scrapped together by the Grineer were torn in half as Natah's armada advance past Saturn. The Corpus fared little better. Obelisk Cruisers were laughable compared to the technology of the Golden Lords they tried so desperately to emulate.

Unchecked, the Sentients pressed forward into the System, their scouts falling onto the Plains like malevolent comets. Unable to break free of the vision, Nezha watched as the grasslands and hilly steppes were consumed by flame. The Unum stood, her shield flickering in the fitful light, but for how long? How long before the last bastion of Earth went to her knees?

In winter, we fell upon the stars and sang as one voice…

Natah recited the words like poetry, her voice echoing across the Void, echoing back from a future not yet come to pass. Grineer fell beneath the assault. Ostron blood pooled in the folds of fulgurite glass that dotted the Plains like crumpled scars, memoirs of the last time a Sentient had fallen from a burning sky.

A constellation… an army.

Something crimson glowed in the darkness of the Void, an upside-down triangle comprised of many segments, and another voice floated on the rising tide. An imminent threat grows. The enemy rebuilds. My crew- Dax. My crew- Gone. Tenno, you will do.

"Operator?"

Laughter swelled.

Burning eyes watched from the place beyond reality.

"Operator!"

A hand seized hold of his arm, and the vision shattered like a pane of glass. Nezha stumbled back, throwing both hands up in front of his face, and would have fallen in an ungraceful heap if not for the solid grip just above his elbow. After a belated moment of panic, Nezha lifted his eyes to meet Umbra's gaze. The Warframe was as rigid as a statue, giving no indication of the sentience that occasionally stirred within, but his posture broadcasted an aura of security that Nezha – crumpled in the former Dax's shadow – was wholly grateful for.

"Operator, are you alright?!" Ordis cried. "Your somatic activity just went off the charts! Would you like me to lead you in some breathing exercises?"

Nezha forced his racing heart to slow. It was not the first time he'd experienced such visions, except this one had been much more, not just a composition of memories from a past that had come and gone, but something concrete. Something real. Nezha flexed his hand and felt the ghostly press of a hilt digging into his palm. He sought the recollection of its design, and it found inscribed in perfect detail. With a growing sense of wonder, he turned the cunning glyphs over in his mind. The Paracesis was more than just a blade. Like the Warframes themselves, it was divine blasphemy, a sacred conduit for the unholy Void. Nezha clenched his fist. It would be difficult; the materials needed were rare and the crafting process was far from easy. He would have to make full use of the Helminth infirmary across the hall…

…but it could be done.

If Margulis had been a mother to the Zariman rejects, Ballas had been their estranged father – and of all his hated children, Nezha had been the Executor's favorite. Where other high-ranking Orokin traveled with a retinue of Dax soldiers, Ballas had been notorious for retaining a single Tenno, a shadow to walk beside him in dim laboratories where his twisted brilliance was locked away from prying eyes. Nezha had seen many of his comrade's Warframes crafted in flesh and sword-steel, knew many of the secrets forbidden even to the Council. Such knowledge had been given in the manner of one sharing a secret with a favorite cup, or a half-tame kubrow with a gilt collar around its neck – assured that neither possessed the disposition to repeat it – but knowledge it remained.

"Operator?" Ordis pressed meekly. "Ordis wonders… what are you thinking about?"

"A new war is coming, Ordis. We must prepare."

While essentially a novelization of The Chimera Prologue, I nonetheless felt it was an appropriate vehicle to finally delve into some of Nezha's backstory. Or, more precisely, our Warframe/Operator Prime. Feel free to insert your own main, of course! Out of many dozens of Tenno, Ballas gifts the Paracesis to YOU - the player - which is readily accepted despite the foulness of events portrayed in The Sacrifice. I couldn't help but think that this implies a history and some deeper, prior familiarity between the two. I was further egged on by the fact that in actual Chinese/Buddhist folklore, Nezha's official Taoist title is "The Marshal of the Central Altar" - which conjures images of Lua and the seat of Orokin power.

As for the Other flickering through the garden singing The Hanging Tree, THAT particular nugget is exactly what happened in an incredibly vivid nightmare I had some months ago - so obviously I had to share the trauma with all of you. Thank you, DE. Thank you for siccing that thing onto the world to haunt the corner of my eye. -_-