Author's Note: Good morning, people of the internet! Or is it evening? Whenever you happen to read this! This is my first time publishing anything for others to read, review, and criticize, and I have to admit I'm a bit nervous. This story, while not the first I've written, is the first one I felt confident enough to put out there. Please read, please comment/review/critique/whatever, but most importantly, please enjoy. Because that's ultimately what everything that's ever been written is for: to be consumed by others.
So, without further ado, I present to you, He Who Guards the Avengers!
Chapter 1
The day you come into this world, something else is also born.
You begin your life, and it begins a journey toward you.
It moves slowly, but it never stops. Wherever you go, whatever path you take, it will follow.
Never faster, never slower, but always coming.
You will run; It will walk.
You will rest; It will not.
One day, you will linger in the same place too long.
You will sit too still or sleep too deep, and when, too late, you rise to go, you will notice a second shadow standing next to yours.
Then, your life will be over.
-Heaven Sent
The Ascendant Realm, a dimension of ruin and darkness that was hidden from most, but accessible to a select few. It was here that everything; living and artificial, that was consumed by Darkness resided.
And here in this Ascendant Realm steeped in darkness, where the Light was barely a flicker in the dark, a single individual stood on a floating rock platform. Cloaked in a dark robe and an intimidating Hand Cannon in his hands, he waited patiently for his prey, his last target, to arrive.
His last he considered it, because he knew that there was little chance the Last City and the Vanguard would accept what he was about to do.
And if he failed, he could only hope that it would be a wake-up call to his arriving foe.
Habitually anticipating the coming fight, the cloaked man twirled his Hand Cannon in his right hand before holstering it. If, when, he won, he would win knowing it was fair. This Guardian, more than any other, deserved that much.
He felt before he heard the disruption in the air and then saw the swirl of the Void energy on the other side of the rock platform suspended in the emptiness of the Ascendant Realm.
And then he arrived; the Warlock, the God-slayer, the Young Wolf, landed out of his Blink and immediately had his own Hand Cannon trained on the cloaked man.
The cloaked man pulled his hood off and said, "You made it."
The Warlock said nothing; he merely ensured his footing was secure and his target was in the middle of his crosshairs.
"Right." The cloaked man said. "The strong, silent type. Cayde always did make that joke about you."
The Warlock's hands tightened on his weapon and an audible growl could be heard even from where the cloaked man was standing.
"Bit of a sore spot, huh?" A glint from the very little light on the Warlock's weapon drew his attention to it , and the cloaked man felt his own bit of fury. "So, the rumors were true. You did find it. Thorn, weapon of my most hated enemy, and you wield it like another freshly resurrected Guardian's first toy?"
The cloaked man drew his Hand Cannon then, holding the Last Word on his hip but knowing it was trained on the Warlock's head, like his Thorn was trained on his.
"Weakness must be purged," the cloaked man said. "The Darkness can grow from even the smallest seed in a person's spirit. Even Guardians, especially Guardians in some cases, are susceptible to its seductive words." He pulled the hammer of the Last Word back with his left hand, and said, "One of us will leave this place, and the other will call this place their tomb. Out of respect for your accomplishments, I will make it quick."
"Shin Malphur," the Warlock said, reaching behind his back and drawing another Hand Cannon to aim at his target, "shut the hell up."
The Man with the Golden Gun dry laughed and fired.
The Warlock, dual wielding Lumina and Thorn, Light and Darkness symbolized in his hands, returned fire.
Outside the Ascendant Realm, among the war-torn ruins of the recently reclaimed Dreaming City, three Sparrows could be seen speeding through the ruins of Rheasilvia. Over barely standing bridges and under broken arches, they sped toward their destination like the Darkness itself was on their tails.
While not entirely accurate, they were running against the clock. The Darkness might not have been hanging over them, but it was hanging over a very good friend of all four of them.
At the head of this group was a young woman; well, as "young" as a Guardian could be considering their effective immorality. Ana Bray, fellow Guardian and a Hunter; while she had not known the Young Wolf as long as some of their colleagues, she would say she was quite close with the man. Comradery and friendship was inevitable after they killed a Hive Worm God and saved the planet of Mars together. It was she who had received the Warlock's Ghost's secret message; a desperate attempt for someone to stop him.
Close behind her was two of the Vanguard, Zavala and Ikora. The Awoken and Human, respectively, were the first two Ana Bray had contacted when she received the Ghost's warning. The two were immediately on guard when she informed them thee Young Wolf was venturing into the Ascendant Realm, something they know he's done before but couldn't exactly forbid him from doing, but they grew frantic when she said he was meeting Shin Malphur.
Given the Young Wolf's…animosity toward the man, it wasn't hard to imagine the nature of the meeting.
"Alright fireteam. According to the coordinates in his previous mission reports, the entrance he used to the Ascendant Realm should be coming up soon."
"I hope to the Traveler we're not too late," Ikora said as they navigated around a boulder. "Shin Malphur is not one to be taken lightly. Even Cayde couldn't deny his skills as a Hunter."
"The man's an obsessed mad dog!" Ana shouted, unnecessarily, over the comms. "Why would he go after the Warlock like this and why was the Warlock stupid enough to accept his challenge?"
"Because if he didn't," Zavala answered, "Malphur would've struck when he was least expecting it. At least with a challenge, they'll both see each other coming."
Their arrival at their destination cut the conversation short. They had no idea what awaited them, none of the three having ever taken this journey with the Warlock before, and they had no idea how long it would take them to get to find their friend. Every second counted and, until they found him, the best they could do was hope he was good enough to handle one of the deadliest Guardians in history.
One did not earn as legendary a reputation as Shin Malphur's without cause.
The Warlock ducked behind a boulder for cover as he reloaded his guns. As much as he hated to say it, this wasn't going as well as he'd hoped. After the opening shot, Malphur had landed a couple good hits on him while landed one on Malphur. Unfortunately, the one shot came from Lumina; a great gun in its own right, but not one designed to take down Guardians.
That was what Thorn was for.
Holstering Lumina, he twirled Thorn in his hands before sneaking a peak around his cover before ducking back, barely avoiding the shot the showered him in pieces of gravel.
"You're quick," Shin Malphur said as he warily approached his target's cover. "Most people on the other side are usually dead by now."
"My heart bleeds for your boredom," the Warlock sarcastically said before blind-firing around his cover.
Shin Malphur had anticipated that, but the familiar poisonous green shards that were flying in his direction forced him to cease his advancement and duck behind his own cover; a smaller nearby rock. He pulled out an incendiary grenade from his belt and threw it at one side of the Warlock's cover and aimed at the other, where he knew the Warlock would run to avoid the blast.
But when the grenade exploded and no sign of the Warlock was seen, he momentarily was thrown off guard. Sensing the danger, he dodge-rolled into the Warlock's cover and felt the heat of the Warlock's fired Thorn shots grazing by him.
"You slippery bastard," he chuckled as he figured out how he did that. "You ran after you forced me into cover."
"Forgive me if I'm not overwhelmed by your compliment, Malphur," the Warlock said from his new position across the rock platform.
"You're forgiven," he replied. "Are you almost charged?" he asked knowingly.
"You tell me," was his cryptic response.
It took longer than Shin Malphur would ever admit to figure that one out.
He ran to the side and narrowly missed the Cataclysm Nova Bomb that disintegrated his cover. The resulting explosion knocked him off his feet, causing him to drop the Last Word, and he spent the next few seconds rolling and dodging the seeking orbs of Void energy that he knew very well could end him easily. Just as he avoided he last one, he rolled to his feet and was about to retrieve his fallen weapon when he felt the barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his head.
"Oh, that was good." He said.
"I hope this was all worth it, Malphur," the Warlock growled out with fury in his voice.
Turning around, unconcerned with the gun pointed at his head, Shin Malphur said, "It's always worth it, weeding out the weak and the corruptible from our ranks. We need to be strong to stand against the Darkness, not give into it. Not surrender to what we've been fighting for centuries."
"And all the lives you ruin in the process? All the lives you've taken, Guardian and others, for your crusade?"
For a moment, a very brief moment, regret flashed in Shin Malpur's eyes, but just as quickly was extinguished. "I know who you're talking about, believe it or not. She was a casualty-"
"Don't talk about her like that!" the Warlock shouted before he shot Malphur in the leg. "She was more valuable to the Guardians – no, the Last City – than you will ever be! She's being mourned by millions, while you are going to die here; alone and forgotten."
The shock of the shot to his leg brought Malphur to his knees. Just because he saw it coming, that didn't make it any less painful. And a shot from Thorn? He could feel his Light and body wasting away by the second. The Warlock meant to hit him nonlethally just so he could be in pain.
He had to respect that. He would've done the exact same thing were their roles reversed.
Groaning, he said, "Maybe I'll die here, hero. Maybe I won't. One thing's for sure, we're going down together." He straightened up from his hunched position, which revealed the snub-nose Hand Cannon he'd always kept hidden on his person when the Last Word was unavailable.
Their two guns were simultaneously fired, resulting in one gunshot that echoed throughout the empty, dark realm.
It took longer than they expected to navigate their way through this plane of the Ascendant Realm. The three of them combined had little experience in this plane of darkness and none in this specific place. Fortunately, they were able to follow the trail of spent shell casings and empty gun magazines that – they hoped – belonged to their Guardian.
A particularly angry and half-dead Taken Minotaur led the three of them to believe that the Warlock wasn't as thorough in his eradication of the forces of Darkness as he usually was.
He was in a hurry.
Something that only worried them further.
Having expended his Super in an earlier fight, Zavala was currently occupying the Minotaur's attention by taking potshots from behind a ruined pillar while Ikora and Ana moved into position to take it by surprise.
"I hate Minotaur's," Ana grumbled from the floating platform they were on. "Always a pain to take down."
Eyeing her favorite shotgun, Ikora said, "Yes, which is why you always make sure to have the right tool for the job."
Ana's unasked question of what she meant was answered when a rocket launcher replaced the shotgun in her hands.
Ana merely eyed the large piece of hardware with an appreciative look and simply said, "Badass."
Ikora, amused, simply rounded her cover and fired.
"Excellent work," Zavala said from the ground. "Let's keep moving."
No matter how fast they moved, however, it wasn't fast enough.
When they reached the obvious battle site, they only found one body there: Shin Malphur's, dead. The spike in his head was an obvious sign as to the cause. Neither Zavala nor Ikora were entirely sure what to feel about his death. The man may not have had the cleanest file in the Tower database, but he was still a Guardian.
Ana, on the other hand, had no problem being glad to be rid of the man who had been a source of pain and grief for her friend.
"Where is he?" she asked, not seeing a second body nor another Guardian anywhere.
He was dying.
He supposed he shouldn't have been so surprised.
After all, in his line of work, only an idiot of epic proportions would be in this line of work and not expect to die at some point.
Of course, an idiot of epic proportions would also not have lasted nearly as long as him in this job, even with the pesky little side effect of being immortal. Considering the countless scrapes, fights, and galaxy-ending threats he had gone up against in the years since his "rebirth", he has been killed and technically dead over a hundred times over.
But this time, it looked like it was going to stick.
Still, he had always hoped that he would go out in a blaze of glory. Something honorable and memorable enough that his friends, the ones that managed to outlive him, couldn't find something to make fun of for the rest of their lives. And it looked like he was going to get it.
He could think of plenty of times in the last month alone where a lesser man – or Awoken, as he was – would've met his end. Any one of them could've done the job and landed him a place of honor in the Last City's crypts where the bodies of the Guardians and Ghosts they managed to recover were lain for eternity.
But it looks like he won't even get that.
No, after everything he'd done, everything, the way the legendary Vudren, Warlock of the Guardians, Awoken, was going to die was bleeding to death in a dark, dirty cave in the distant wilds in the Dreaming City, no less, while his Light was suppressed by the Darkness that permeated the cave.
The battle that resulted in this fatal injury was hard but successful…and…worth it…he hoped.
If he weren't so busy trying to get back to the real world and keeping his life force from dripping out past his fingers while ignoring his Ghost's panicked words, reassurances, and apologies, he would laugh and agree that he deserved to be mocked for dying so…unimpressively.
But that was overrun with his desire to live.
He was not ready to die yet.
But it seemed like he was going to anyway.
His vision had begun to get blurry, resulting in him tripping on a rock half-buried in the ground.
He fell to his hands and knees, groaning in pain, and his wound now bleeding freely. He pushed himself up to a kneeling position and was about to continue when he suddenly lost his strength. All at once his body decided to give up on him and he collapsed face-first back on the ground.
He felt his breathing getting shallower, his vision getting darker, and his Ghost getting louder.
And then, releasing his last breath, Vudren died, as so many Guardians before him have: alone.
In the years since his Guardian's rebirth, the Ghost of Vudren had resurrected him dozens of times from just about every wound and injury imaginable. Gunshots, stabbings, blunt injury, falls to death, explosions; just about every way one could die in combat he had experienced and was brought back from death by his loyal Ghost.
But these were not the only threats to a Guardian. What was more dangerous, certainly, than any gun or grenade was the Darkness.
And it was the overwhelming presence of Darkness in this cave in the Dreaming City that was ultimately the cause for the death of Vudren. A shot to the heart from a Vex gun was nothing to a Guardian…with the Light.
Ghosts were capable of many things. Unfortunately, combat was not one of them. But perhaps their most important function was their ability to resurrect their Guardians. Without that, if they couldn't do their most important job…
"…What good am I?" The Ghost said, its sole robotic eye staring forlornly at its Guardian…its best friend.
"I'm…sorry." It said.
It did not know how long it hovered there above its friend's corpse, slowly lowering to the ground as it lost its will.
"I'm sorry." It repeated, as it finally dropped to the ground.
Its eye slowly closed, nestled in the dirt, its Guardian still well within its line of sight.
Just as it was about to close, however, Ghost's eye snapped open as it felt it.
In the air about them, Ghost and its Guardian, it could feel the air become charged with Light, and, despite its down spirit, it suddenly felt rejuvenated.
Ghost had only felt this specific sensation once before in its life and that was when…
"The Traveler!" it shouted, before it and its dead Guardian disappeared in a flash of Light.
Unknown
It was white. That was all that the Ghost could see as far as it could see. Not that it could see very far. With no discernable features, wind, or anything, the Ghost couldn't tell if there was five feet of space in front of it or if it went on forever.
Though it was positive it recognized this place, the Ghost had no memory of ever being here.
Still, it felt…familiar.
"Where am I?" the Ghost wondered out loud as it rose back into the air.
"Where are you?" A woman's voice said.
"Who's there?" the Ghost demanded, turning this way and that to try and find the source.
"Why, shouldn't that be obvious, little one? Look around you and see. Where else could you be?"
"Look around me?" The Ghost did so, taking a close look at its surroundings. Though it had no inkling in is extensive memories of his place, now that it thought about it, it had the strongest feeling it had been here; once, a long time ago.
Gusts of physical, tangible Light surged around it from nowhere, kicking up a small whirlwind, before it gathered several feet away from it and Vudren's body. A vague outline of a humanoid figure at least three times as tall as any human or Awoken began to form before it solidified. The body was completely made of Light with no discernable features, but the upper portion of its body seemed to disappear in the white surroundings.
"Are you…?" the Ghost hesitantly began to ask, afraid, or anxious, of the answer. "Are you…the Traveler?"
Despite having no face or displaying any signs of hearing his question, the Ghost somehow knew that…She…was smiling at it. Not in mockery or amusement, but paternally.
"I am your creator, my child. With my last breath I created you and your siblings to be candles in this dark universe. All living things touched by my Light are my children."
"You're the Traveler?" the Ghost exclaimed; its voice filled with emotion. "Then please, save him!" The Ghost looked down at its Guardian's body. "Please. He's my best friend."
She stepped closer to its Guardian before reaching down and scooping him up in both of her hands. Lifting him up to her "head", a feeling of sadness permeated the Ghost. It took a second for it to realize the feeling was coming from her.
"I know all my children," she said. "All those born of and from my Light. I know - I feel - their spirits rise and fall with each victory and defeat. I feel their joy, their contentment, their pain. A parent should not have favorites amongst their children, but I can't deny you two hold a special place in my Light."
She gently placed Vudren back on the "ground" with the care of a newborn, and said, "You accepted the burden of guiding this one when you found him, my child. Do you still wish to continue carrying that burden with him?"
"Yes," the Ghost said, without a moment's hesitation. "He's my Guardian, my best friend. I will never leave him."
Feelings of happiness and acceptance filled the air. She was pleased with its answer; pleased with its devotion and loyalty to the one it chose.
"Very well," she said.
She held up her left hand for a moment, seemingly performing some action the Ghost could not see or sense. After a moment, she closed her hand but held up her index finger. The Light that made up her hand seemed to drain slightly into the tip of her finger. An orb of pure Light swirled just on the tip.
"Rise, my Guardian. Rise out of the Darkness and into the Light once more." She lowered her finger to Vudren's body. "Accept this gift, this blessing, this burden, and stand as a Guardian against the tide once again."
She flicked her finger, dislodging the orb, which fell to Vudren's body. It landed perfectly in the hole in his chest; in the wound which had ended the life of one of the greatest Guardians who ever lived.
The orb swirled on the wound for a few moments before bursting into a little display of fireworks, the Light shattering into a mosaic of glass fragments, hovering over his whole body. Slowly, the fragments lowered, disappearing into the Guardian where they fell.
Nothing happened for a minute, and the Ghost was about to work up the courage to say something, when Vudren's chest started rising. The Light started shining from the wound which began to close. A scan from the Ghost allowed it to see everything that was happening.
Bone formed, blood flowed, and flesh knit itself together, before finally the hole in his robed armor closed, leaving no trace of the fatal wound.
And then Vudren's eyes opened, and he was alive.