I had the most vivid dream
My feet had left the ground
I was floating to heaven
But I could only look down
My mind was heavy
Running ragged with worst case scenarios
Emergency exits and the distance below
I woke up so worried that the angels let go

Six – Sleeping at Last

May 25, 2957, 10:18; The Cradle, Echo Mesa, Io

The man stood on the edge of a crater. A gentle breeze stirred the air around him, playing with the Titan's mark hanging from his belt and raising small, twisting columns of dust from the ground around his feet.

He stared out at the landscape. The crater was bowl-shaped, unnaturally even, like the backsplash of a water droplet caught frozen in stone. In the center the stone pulled upwards, forming a blocky mass of pillars and obelisks. It looked like a half-rendered computer model, completely at odds with its surroundings.

This was a familiar sight. The Cradle was a sacred space. For centuries Guardians had made pilgrimages to Io to think, to commune, and to feel the Traveler's energy. This was the last place it had ever touched. Anyone who came here could feel the Traveler's purpose, its unfinished work like a melody held one note before resolution.

But now Sylas-4 had no Light. He felt nothing. It was just a desolate crater, hundreds of millions of miles away from anywhere he could have called home.

"Why?" he shouted at the empty air. "I came all this way, I gave up on everything I knew, for this? For you." He kicked a fossilized shell. It rattled down the cliffside. His toes throbbed. "For nothing. Why did you call me out here for nothing?"

He was angry. He had every right to be angry. The dreams had spoken to him like a promise, but he'd been conned. There wasn't anything to be gained here, no power, no answers. Just a semispherical depression in the ground and the Traveler's Light which no longer spoke to him.

It was quiet. If he hadn't been yelling at the crater like a madman, he might have heard the Sparrow earlier. As it was, he only had time to turn and watch as the vehicle careened onto his little ledge. Its rider jumped off gracefully, landing with a delicate impact. She watched her Sparrow tumble off the edge and down the cliffside, where it dematerialized.

He recognized her instantly. If it weren't for the cloak, or the Sparrow, he'd have known her by the way she stood. Like her body weighed nothing, shifted onto her toes like she could float away at any moment. She was lithe and balanced and she so obviously had her Light. It wasn't fair.

"Azra Jax," Sylas growled.

"Sy," Azra said with a relieved familiarity. "It's good to see you again."

"What are you doing here?" the Titan asked, accusation in his voice.

The Hunter pulled off her helmet. Her face was a mix of regret and warmth, head cocked just a little to the side, heels finally coming to touch the ground as she relaxed her posture. "I came looking for you," the Hunter said. "And Ikora," she amended. "We could have sent Veera, but I had a feeling…"

"A feeling," Sylas muttered. He crossed his arms in a rejection of the notion, but could not help but turn and look out over the crater again, searching.

"I'm sorry," Azra said. It wasn't clear exactly what she was apologizing for. The list was a complicated one.

Sylas spoke. "I left the City, I abandoned the people who needed me, like you did." He couldn't keep the loathing from his voice, nor did he try. There was no pretense of formality he could fall back on now. "I cobbled together a warp drive. I followed my visions, here. All for what? A hole in the ground." He kicked another rock off the edge. It fell out of view instantly. "How did it happen for you? How do you have your Light?"

"Well," Azra said, "I threw myself off of a cliff." She paused, considering the drop before them. "I don't think that's gonna work this time, though."

The two of them watched the windstorms below, so miniaturized by the distance they could be motes of dust caught in a sunbeam.

"Why are you here," Sylas asked again. Surely she hadn't been led by images of fossilized shells and silver-leaved trees?

"I left you behind," Azra said. "I… wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Do I look okay?" The Titan looked over to meet her eyes.

"You look like something's eating you," the Hunter said. "Or maybe-"

"Nothing's eating at me. Because there's nothing here." There were the Vex, the Taken, two Lightless Warlocks, but not a single thing that could actually help. He'd searched for days but had found no answer.

Azra scratched her head, peering out across to the opposite rim of the crater. It was so far away it was hazy and indistinct. "Why'd you think you were called here, then?"

Sylas shrugged. "To remind me of how useless I am? For no reason at all?"

"You think the Traveler is that cruel?"

"Do you think the Traveler did this?"

"What else could it be?" Azra asked.

Sylas had no answer.

Azra took a step closer to him. "Veera got her Light back, too," she offered. "Before me. But it's just us. The refugees are gathering in the EDZ- Commander Zavala's there. And-"

"I do not care," Sylas stated.

Azra was taken aback. "You don't-"

"How could I?" It seemed entirely too distant, like a story overheard. The future in front of him, the crater and nothing else, was too clear to imagine anything else. "That's… that's news for another lifetime, and I'm already dead."

"You look living to me," Azra said. "Or you're a very convincing ghost."

Sylas kicked another rock to prove his corporeality. It skipped twice on the crater wall before entering freefall. "I'm dead already," he said. "Every time I wake up, I know I'm going to die. I think, what am I going to do for the next me? The next one who wakes up? How can I make his time easier, how can I make sure he still has the people I have?"

"Doing favors for your future self," Azra said. "A good habit."

Sylas's voice was bleak. "I'm already dead, and there is no next me."

"Not with that attitude," she said teasingly.

"Not with any attitude, Azra!" The Exo finally turned away from the view and rounded on the Hunter. "I came out here, like you. But there's nothing here. I followed my visions, scrapped together a ship, flew out here, and there's nothing here."

"I'm here," Azra said.

Sylas had no retort for that. The two Guardians stood in silence.

"Maybe we should have sent Veera," Azra murmured. "I know there are answers, but I don't even know where to begin looking. I had a Shard of the Traveler. So did Veera. But there's no Shards here, we're too far from Earth."

"That Shard didn't give us the Light," her Ghost said, "It gave us a blessing. The Light is everywhere. When the Traveler was caged and our connection was cut off, you stopped being able to manipulate it. But it wasn't gone. Just out of reach."

The gears in Azra's brain were turning. "The Traveler is still connected to the bits of its shell, if barely. Spiderwebs. Gossamer. But I heard someone call this- the Cradle, they said it was an umbilical cord. If anywhere… do you think there's something down there that can help you reconnect to the Light?"

Sylas sighed in defeat. "I don't think so." He reconsidered everything he knew about this place. It was still full of mystery, however well-traveled this road had been. "I don't know," he amended.

Azra unclasped something from her belt and held it out to Sylas. It was a wicked dagger, long as the Hunter's forearm. It was dwarfed but certainly not useless in his hand. He slid the blade a centimeter from its sheath, noting the thinnest gleam of a sharpened edge. The rest was soot-blackened to keep its shine from catching enemy eyes. Certainly a Hunter-styled weapon.

Her weapon, he realized. And he knew what it meant for a Hunter to give you their knife.

"Do you wanna go find out?" the Arcstrider asked.

The first part of the journey was the most difficult one. The crater was too steep to walk down, too smooth to climb down (at least for a Titan), too tall to transmat and too electromagnetic for ship engines.

Sylas ended up riding Azra's Sparrow in reverse, feathering the engines to edge carefully down the slope, while Azra bounced down in Light-fueled bursts of momentum.

Of course, the Arcstrider lost her footing and ended up at the bottom with a few broken bones (quickly healed). The Defender's entrance was a little too wild for him to make any criticism, though. He screeched to a halt literal inches away from a wall of stone.

The pair dusted themselves off and started to make their way through the boxy canyon maze towards the center.

The light from the atmosphere was soft. It was dim down in the bottom of the towering forest of rock, but not difficult to see in once one's eyes (or optics) adjusted. The wind smelled of mineral cave-water and moss. The rock formations were oddly soft-edged, too bulbous to have been smoothed by erosion but much too clean to have been freshly-made. They looked like someone had haphazardly shaped the landscape out of clay.

The view from the top of the crater had been deceptive. From a distance, the passageways through the cradle were all sharp-edged and straight-lined. They reminded Azra of computer circuitry or that odd frost that formed when it froze quickly, a giant tangle of straight lines. But here beneath the main channels, the side passageways were an impossible twisting scrawl. The path forward was so convoluted even Azra got a little turned around, yet Sylas walked with purpose. He didn't hesitate at the branches.

There were murmurs on the breeze. The voices sounded familiar, almost-

"What are we ignoring?" Sylas asked.

"That," Tapio said. "It's like…"

"It's like," Azra growled, "losing your grip. If you start chasing the future like you can remember it, start feeling for the past like you can relive it, then you don't get to have a present anymore. So focus. It's just echoes. Associations. They don't mean anything, they're not important, so stop. Listening!"

"Azra?" Sylas asked. Azra had slowed down.

"Sorry." She shook her head and started walking again. The passage wound on. The wind whistled gently through the canyon. The Light prickled against Azra's exposed face. She let Sylas pick which turns to take, winding ever towards the center as the channels split and merged-

Passageways branched and coalesced as she ran. Left, right, up, down. Forwards or backwards? She picked at random, mind spinning with possible Vex machinations. She could be playing into their hands and never know. Perhaps this entire time, they'd been playing into the Vex's hands.

"Do you hear something?"

"Hm?" Azra shook off the premonition and listened, but nothing stood out over the murmur of the breezes.

"You keep stopping," Sylas stated.

"It's nothing," Azra said. "Keep going."

Sylas did, hesitantly. Azra noticed a shiny ammonite fossil by her foot and picked it up.

Azra took the chunk of moonstone from her pocket, feeling its unworn edges. They'd been cracked billions of years ago, but with no wind or rain they remained as sharp as steel. She placed the rock between a vaguely luminescent stone and a glittering piece of obsidian, then nodded firmly. "Deal."

"Are you alright?"

"It represents everywhere I've been." Azra touched the cairn gently. "Look, sandstone from Freehold, basalt from Venus- I've got Vex stone from the Vault and ammonite fossils from the Cradle. A bit of Traveler shell. Moonstone. Just looking at this brings back memories."

"Yeah," Azra said, blinking at the stone in her hand. "I just don't know why this is happening now-"

She paused in her climbing. "That… didn't happen for a while, huh."

"We'll really have to schedule some time to look into all of these mysteries," Spark said in a businesslike tone.

"We need to keep going," Spark said. Azra pocketed the stone and took another step forward-

"That's why I'm here," Azra said, performing a little bow and trying to keep the mocking out of her voice, if not her head. "I'm no diplomat, but at least I'm interesting."

"Azra!" Sylas snapped his fingers in front of her face. She startled a bit, eyes focusing suddenly. The Titan grabbed her by the shoulders. "What's wrong?"

Azra sighed. "It's just… echoes. Of what was, what could be. I've been having 'em all my life." She took an abrupt turn, deviating from the path Veera knew. "Didn't know they could happen to someone else, until then. Kinda worrying."

"I… I don't- I'm going to throw up," Azra stated.

"Back," Sylas decided. "We should go-"

She turns back and forces the word backwards to have meaning. Simple directions will be her way out of this. Her Light burns like a star.

?

She came to in Sylas's arms. His arms were hard and unyielding, but surprisingly gentle. She struggled to free herself-

"Hang on," Sylas said. Even without the Light in his frame she could feel his worry. He carried her like she weighed nothing.

The pressure in her skull eased a bit as he backtracked. The wind was at their back now instead of in their faces.

"Sy," she croaked. When he didn't slow, she shoved an elbow into his sternum. "Sylas. I'm good."

"You collapsed," Sylas said. "Don't scare me like that."

"I…" Azra trailed off, not knowing what to say. "I'm… not sure what happened. It gets worse further in, but I'm okay here." She pushed and Sylas set her back on her feet. A wave of dizziness came over her, but she stayed upright by bracing herself on the cave wall.

"This was a mistake-"

"No," Azra interrupted. She shook her head and breathed the humid air and forced everything to make sense. "No. You weren't affected, it was just me. I don't need to go deeper, I already have my Light. You go on."

Sylas did not look willing. Azra found herself a semi-comfortable place sitting against the canyon wall and shooed him on. "It's important, Sylas. I'll be here when you get back. I'm just…" she struggled to find an excuse, even the flimsiest one. "I'm watching the exit for you."

"We were meant to do this together," Sylas argued. He couldn't contain the fear in his voice- though Azra knew it was all for her own safety, not his.

"I felt a call. You feel it too," Azra said. "No arguing with that."

"But-"

"Sylas," she snapped. "Stop worrying about me. I'm not lying this time. I'll be fine. Just," she took a breath, feeling her own worries. "Be careful, 'cause I don't think I can go in after you."

Sylas must have believed her. She made another shooing motion and he left, hesitantly, pausing to look over his shoulder before he passed around the bend.

Azra and Spark sat in quiet for a moment, just breathing. The wind still ebbed kindly against her skin, cool but not cold.

The interference wasn't bad enough to block comms.

TYPE: LIVE COMBAT FEED
PARTIES: Three [2]. One [1] Guardian-type, Class Hunter, designate Azra Jax [aj]; One [1] Guardian-type, Class Warlock, designate Ikora Rey [ir]
ASSOCIATIONS: Cradle [Io]; Darkness; Jax, Azra; Light; Red War; Rey, Ikora; Vault of Glass [Venus]; Vex
/AUDIO UNAVAILABLE/
/TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS.../

[aj:01]: Ikora?

[ir:01]: What is it, Guardian?

[aj:02]: I'm… a little scared.

[ir:02]: Did something happen?

[aj:03]: Not really. I'm just realizing I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did.

[ir:03]: It's a common realization these days.

[ir:04]: But a burden shared is a burden halved. What troubles you?

[aj:04]: I just don't understand… Some Vexy things, they're worse here.

[ir:05]: There are Vex on Io. The Pyramidion is close to the Cradle. Is it the time distortion affect? How it was the day you first arrived back at the Tower?

[aj:05]: No. It's… I'm surprised you don't know, after all this time, surely you've been looking in at some point…

[ir:06]: I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about.

[aj:06]: I don't know if I can describe it. It's never really affected anything. Even now I can't remember what I just…

[aj:07]: It's not seeing, it's not remembering. But sometimes it's like I'm somewhere, somewhen else. Just for a second, then it's gone. It's been happening since forever. I never really looked into it.

[ir:07]: I'm more curious about the Vex than the average Warlock. I was Osiris's student and he was very much… obsessed. But this… remembering, but not remembering-

[aj:08]: Kind of like a premonition, like a gut feeling, but stronger, and it never really happens. Like reverse déjà vu.

[ir:08]: As far as I know, nobody has been in your situation before. I haven't heard anything like it.

[aj:09]: Always blazing new trails, I am.

[aj:10]: It just scared me. It got really bad there.

[ir:09]: Is it bad now?

[aj:11]: No. But I don't think I can get closer to the Center of the Cradle.

[beat]

[ir:10]: Not to be callous, but this seems like an existential exploration for after we retake the City.

[aj:12]: I'll manage, I guess. It's just worrying. This kind of blindsided me.

[ir:11]: You never know everything. The universe is abundant in mysteries to explore.

[ir:12]: You know of chemicals, then you learn the true smallest unit of matter: molecules. But then there are atoms, then hadrons, and quarks and beyond. There is complexity all of the way down.

[ir:13]: It is a lesson Warlocks must learn early, our relative ignorance. We are small. Though we strive, there are things we may never understand. We must come to accept that fact.

Azra must have dozed off at some point. She was awoken (to a heartbeat of terror) by a nudge at her foot. It took a fraction of a second to process the figure looming over her.

Sylas stood, straight and steady, casting a shadow down on her. It was obvious he'd regained his Light.

It was obvious he had something else on his mind.

"When we killed Oryx," he said, not bothering with pleasantries, "when Toland started talking about ascending to the Taken Throne, usurping Oryx's power, were you tempted?"

Azra straightened herself and pulled air in through her teeth, thinking, remembering-

Azra could still feel the ripples in timespace as the world around her collapsed back into reality. She watched Oryx's corpse as it slowly drifted away into Saturn's atmosphere. The (annoyingly) familiar voice of Toland the Shattered rang through the throne room.

"But you took it. And when you took it, you did not keep it. You set it free." The wraith-light flickered. "You fools! You disastrous, bumbling squanderers! It's not right! Who now shall be First Navigator, Lord of Shapes, harrowed god, Taken King?"

"No," she said truthfully. "Not really."

"Why not?"

Azra picked her words carefully. "Well, the Sword Logic has always seemed… wrong. Kill and kill and by ending others, prove yourself to be stronger… it denies that things can ever be greater than the sum of their parts. We worked together, we supported each other, and we did what no six Guardians could do individually." She shrugged. "And it seems to say that nobody could grow or learn in a way that didn't hurt others."

Sylas spoke ruefully. "That's too big of a prize to turn down just because it smells funny."

Azra shrugged again. "All of my problems never seemed to be solved by more power. And I'm not the leadership type anyway."

Sylas seemed satisfied with that answer, at least. He offered her a hand up and she took it.

"What about you?" she asked. "Were you tempted?"

"Sorely," Sylas admitted. "I… too often see everything wrong with the world. I wanted to fix things. Get rid of the battles for resources. Take back the Solar System, for good. We could have done it, you know," he said, sounding haunted.

"Why didn't you, then?"

"I was worried it would change me." He began leading the way back out of the maze of tunnels. "It was power stolen, not power earned. I was worried if I took it, I'd forget what was important to me. That if I could really handle something like that, I could find it and gather it myself, not just ride on someone else's coattails and loot it from their corpse."

An interesting thought, but one with a major flaw. "We don't earn the Light, Sylas," Azra reminded. It was a gift given.

"Don't we?" he asked. "Didn't you, by having faith? Didn't Veera, by ignoring the doubts and doing what she knew was right? Didn't I, by listening? And beyond that-"

Azra put a burst of speed into her legs to draw even with him. Sylas slowed just a fraction so they could walk shoulder-to-shoulder. The Titan continued with his thought. "The Light is an opportunity. Plenty of us waste it. We spend our lives on sport and politics. But to truly use this power, you must practice. Learn. Sacrifice. Devote yourself to something. In that way, this power is very much earned."

Azra hummed in consideration. "I guess the important question is-"

"You are too practical, Azra," Sylas chided. "Slow down for once. Take some time to smell the flowers. Philosophically."

It emerged suddenly from between the clouds. She didn't spare a single glance for the City. Azra's eyes were immediately drawn up to the sphere that overshadowed the mountain valley. It was huge. The shell was broken in places, showing dark gaps. The unmarred parts of the structure were dazzling and vaguely pearlescent. Azra's fingertips tingled. It seemed so familiar.

Azra obliged, leaving them to walk in silence for a few minutes.

"I'm sorry I left," she finally said. "You were right, I abandoned you in the City. But I'm more sorry that I lied about why I did."

"You wanted to make me feel better," Sylas said forgivingly.

"Didn't work," Azra pointed out. "I'm sorry I didn't trust you to understand."

"I don't think I could have, back then."

"It's hard to hope for the future when you're surrounded by so much despair and death," Azra agreed.

Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of glass breaking. Both of the Guardians drew to a halt on instinct. Azra was struck by a familiar sense of dread- any moment now the sky would split open like rotten sausage and death would come boiling out-

But instead, almost the opposite. There was a roar like a tornado approaching. The Light seared bright, blinding Azra's senses. The whisper of a breeze suddenly reversed direction, blowing towards the center of the Cradle instead of away. The wind built with alarming speed, forcing Azra to bend double into the gale of it, kicking up small rocks, almost forcing her off of her feet and grabbing at her cape like a malevolent hand-

The stink of ether and Darkness clogged her nose. She choked as the Baron yanked her backwards. She clawed to release the fastening of her cape so she could get clear.

Sylas grabbed her in a bear hug and forced her to her knees. His Ward of Dawn bloomed to life, blocking the wind and filling Azra's nose with the scent of fresh paint and gunpowder.

But all was not well. She watched in horrified fascination as the purple dome stuttered like a hologram in interference, warping and twisting. The leeward side of the Ward swelled but the windward side was thin, swirling with distortions like a soap bubble about to pop.

Sylas grunted in effort, but the shield shrank, giving up inches of space as the Titan struggled to keep it alive in the maelstrom of Light. Soon it only offered a foot of extra protection, then six inches. Sylas focused all of his attention on the wind, baring just a half-sphere forward. Still it shrank. Azra pulled her cape close and turned her shoulders to give even a few more inches of room.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. The wind gusted and died like a final exhale. What was left of the Ward of Dawn solidified, back to its usual smooth violet-blue. It was only a few feet wide, a slightly curved circle just tall enough to shield the two hunched Guardians.

Sylas let it drop. They stood.

There was the telltale roar of Thresher engines overhead. It was Azra's turn to call on the Void, casting invisibility over the Titan and herself. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him a few meters down a random side-passage. They pressed themselves against the dripping rock until the sound of the ships faded in the distance.

Azra took a deep breath, feeling her surroundings-

There was nothing. The rocks around her were just rocks. The breeze that had whispered about the past and the future was gone, the air still. Only the light of Jupiter and the natural ambiance lit their canyon.

"The Red Legion… The Traveler's energy!" Ikora called over the comms. "What have they done?"

"No," Sylas breathed. Then, again, he shouted. "No!"

He ran towards the center, desperation shedding off of him like sparks from an arc welder. Azra followed him without thinking. He ducked and weaved fervently through the passages, Azra close on his heels. It was only when they reached the central chamber that Azra realized she was firmly in the present. Nothing else begged for her attention, there was no catch in her breath or pressure in her head.

She took in the chamber at a glance. It reminded her of a cenote-cave, semispherical, open at the top. The walls were dripping with condensation and moss. The ground was marked with strange, shallow channels, like worm-chewed wood, twisting this way and that seemingly at random. The odd blue-white water of Io filled every dimple.

"What is this pattern?" Azra asked. "I don't recognize any of this."

"It's a labyrinth," Sylas said, voice thick with defeat. "One entrance, one line all the way to the middle. You walk it and you meditate, trusting the path leads somewhere. You've never seen one? There are some courtyards in the City-"

"Never spent much time in the City," Azra answered.

Sylas settled into a kneeling position, touching the ground in reverence. "You don't get it. This labyrinth… I walked it. And in the center, I found my Light. This was special. Almost like I could hear the Traveler speak to me."

"The Traveler has been trying to make connections," Spark posited. "To Veera, and others, by the Shard in the EDZ. To Azra, through the one in Portugal. Through you, here."

"It would have worked for other Guardians," Sylas said, sounding utterly exhausted. "I'm sure of it. Now it's gone. There's no Light here, the Red Legion… we lost before we even knew there was a battle."

With that context, this was a very heavy blow indeed. The Red Legion had scooped the Light out of this place like someone scraping the last good bite out of a squash rind. They could have had hundreds of Guardians to retake the City. Thousands. It could have been easy.

But Azra couldn't help but remember an hour ago, when the possibility of even one more Guardian was hopeful. "It's not all bad," she reassured, resting a hand on the Titan's shoulder.

Sylas was too easy to defeat. His grief rang off the walls like a physical echo. "We could have retaken the City! We could have gotten more Guardians their Light-"

"By my count, we did. There were two yesterday. Today, there's three." She grabbed his elbow and pulled, forcing him to his feet. "Even if it wasn't much, it's still something."

"Can three of us do it?" Sylas asked, fearful.

"Not with that attitude," Azra replied.