"You know, I still have nightmares about going into Hive spaces."
Rega-7 rolled her optics as she sighted through her scope across the chilly chasm, deep below the Martian surface. "You only let us know this every time we go into one," she pointed out.
"Yeah, because going into one brings the nightmares back." Morgan glanced around the stone tunnel. Ice covered almost every surface, and likely would for ages. There was light down here, but it was either of the orange-reddish hue common to the Braytech that Rasputin had co-opted, or it was the sickly green glow that accompanied the Hive everywhere. Neither really gave the Titan much comfort. "Why are we always the ones the Vanguard sends into Hive territory?"
"Because we're good at killing Hive," Rega slowly worked her sight-line back across the expanse of the chasm, doing another sweep. "And because we always come back."
Morgan grimaced and compulsively checked his weapon. "Great. Can't wait to not sleep for weeks after this."
At last, their Warlock looked up from her examination of Hive runes left in by block of worm spoor. "I'd like to hear about your dreams," she said brightly. "Oneirological studies have shown that a Guardian's dreams, in addition to giving insight into psychological wellness, can sometimes be prophetic-"
"Not the time, Wahei," Rega interrupted her. She rose from her crouch, slinging her sniper rifle as she went. "Way looks clear for now. But I think I saw some acolytes and knights prowling deeper on. I couldn't get a clean shot on them." She turned to the Warlock. "Anything you've found so far?"
Wahei Ohr shook her head. "Nothing that we don't already know. Typical Hive mantras." She gestured at the runes. "'Burn the Sky. Serve the Deep. Crush, kill, destroy.' Things in that vein." She squinted as she peered into the deeper ice. "But Vizier says that there's Hive construction beneath all this ice. Nokris and his brood were making themselves at home here. I think they knew they were in for the long haul."
"It's more than that," Vizier, her Ghost, piped up. "I'd swear the construction here is as old as the Lunar temples. Maybe older." The Ghost swiveled to look into the ice as well. "But it's always so hard to tell with the Hive. Even freshly spawned Thrall give the appearance of being long-dead things."
Rega-7 shrugged. "I'm sure you guys could spend days studying it all," she jerked a thumb toward the long winding slope down the chasm into the deeper tunnels. "But this is not the time. We need to go deeper, find out what else the Frozen Hive have down here."
Morgan turned to his own Ghost. "Eyeball, think you can do a pulse-scan, give us a general map to go by?" With a bob in the air, the Ghost floated out into the space above the chasm, the facets of its shell opening as pulses of light emitted from its core. Collapsing the shell back into place, it zipped back over to the Titan.
"Guys, I think we're gonna have problems," Eyeball sounded worried. "I'm getting a lot of movement below. A whole lot of Hive. Including a few champions. You know, the big ones."
"See?" Morgan shook his head. "I knew coming down here was a bad idea."
Rega slapped him in the chest with the back of her hand. "Suck it up, Titan. We've dealt with worse." She took a running start before leaping across the chasm, landing below on the slope.
Morgan shouted after her. "There's always worse!" He turned to Wahei. "Seriously, does she forget the time we woke up that Abomination on Luna?"
The Awoken just smiled at him. "I'm sure she hasn't. Relax, Morgan. It's not as if you're down here alone. Now come on, we need to find out why there's so many Hive down here." She leapt out into open space, gliding down gracefully.
The Titan miserably slapped on his helmet. "Sure, because the reason is going to be good to know."
The cavern opened into a sort of an antechamber. Wahei looked at the columns and the carvings on the stone walls, pulling her journal from her pack. "Hmm. Archival runic... not dissimilar from the etchings beneath the temples on Luna... this must be their version of the World's Grave."
"Fantastic," Morgan grumbled. "We found where Nokris keeps his diary. Can't wait to read it. 'Dear Evil Diary, today I killed a bunch of pink apes. Praise to the worm god. Tomorrow I think I'll do it all over again. The end.'" He leaned away from Rega's reflexive swat toward the back of his head.
The Hunter eyed the antechamber below. A squadron of Knights stood in a semicircle, facing inward toward the great, chained doors, their swords thrust down into the floor. Even more Acolytes knelt in between them all. In front of all these, facing the doors, there was hunched a form in a shroud with an ornate headdress, chitinous mass twisted up into gnarled horns. Metal links wrapped around the figure and even pooled around where it knelt.
"Got a witch down there," Rega-7 informed the others. "Looks like an important one. Chaukeedar, check intel. We got any info on who it might be?"
"'She,'" Wahei corrected her. "Hive witches are female."
Rega shot her a look, and without breaking her gaze, repeated, "Any info on who it might be?"
The Hunter's Ghost piped up. "Checking records..." The green-shelled Ghost blinked his eye and looked up at the fireteam. "I actually found something, buried deep in the World's Grave." Chaukeedar indicated the Wizard below. "That's Kateäk, the Queen of Chains."
Morgan checked the magazine on his shotgun, reflecting, "Been a while since we killed a Hive royal."
"Always supposing they stay dead," Wahei tapped her stylus against her chin thoughtfully. "That's always the tricky thing about high-ranking Hive, they tend to be Ascendant, with throne-worlds and oversouls, and so they have that trick of just coming back if you manage to kill them. I mean, if you just look at the mess going on in the Dreaming City-"
Rega interrupted, "Not the time, Wahei." Something occurred to her. "Chaukeedar, I thought all the records of Nokris and his brood had been struck from the World's Grave."
"It's true there's no records of anything about Nokris in there," her Ghost confirmed. "But the library there is not comprehensive." His shell-facets twitched a few times before he blinked again. "The records of Kateäk are sparse, but there's something here about her ... imprisonment, I think."
Vizier, Wahei's Ghost, piped up. "If that's what it translates to. I've studied a lot of Hive lore and records, but Chaukeedar's right. It's pretty sparse, and we don't have a lot of context."
The team's Titan coughed. "Does it matter? I see a Hive witch down there, and any plan that takes one of them off the field is a good plan, yeah?"
"Morgan's right. You leave a witch in play, they'll start doing rituals, and if they start doing rituals, then bad things start happening." Rega lined up her rifle. "Once I pull this trigger, shit's gonna kick off. You guys ready?"
"Ready to give 'em the Business!" Morgan gave the barrels of his gun a quick rev.
The Exo rolled her eyes. "Really?"
"C'mon, that one never gets old."
"It was old before you started saying it the first time."
Morgan shrugged, then started to move off. "Gonna get in position. Stay in touch on the comms."
Wahei, meanwhile, was consulting notes in her journal while in conference with her Ghost. "If the intel we got from Rasputin is right, there should be some Clovis Bray facility down here. Something related to mining, I think."
"Must be what's behind those doors." Rega settled in behind her sniper rifle. "Now, let's deal with these Hive."
Morgan posted up behind a stalagmite as he ran a final check on his weapons. "I'm in place. What's the play, Rega?"
"On my go, 'nade the hell out of those knights, then keep the acolytes busy. Wahei, pick them off with your scout rifle, and get ready to pop a Nova in the witch's face. I'll keep shooting her in the face until she goes down, but she might go down hard."
"She's a Hive queen," Wahei pointed out. "Not clear which of the Sovereigns she serves, but none of them elevate anyone to royal status without reason. So, yes, she's gonna go down hard. Also, I'm ready to go."
Rega's voice was steady. "Okay. In three, two-"
They heard the click of the trigger over their comms before the air thundered from the round's passage across the distance between the Hunter and her target. Then they saw Kateäk lift her head, turning with a languid air that belied the impossible speed with which she reacted. The witch raised a hand to intercept the bullet, a shimmering green field of energy blossoming into view. Her eyes gleamed with a frigid hatred through the gnarled headdress as she rose into the air, lengths of chain slithering off of her arms.
Rega cursed and her trigger clicked again, but again the witch flicked a hand and the green field of energy intercepted the round mid-flight. Around her, the knights and acolytes rose from their supplication, drawing their weapons. As one, the knights roared a challenge as they brandished their swords. The Hunter's voice broke over the comms, "New plan, just kill!"
Morgan stepped out of cover, spinning up the barrels of his weapon before unleashing a barrage of bullets toward the nearest knight. It staggered under the assault with a growl, trying to pull up a shield in front of itself, but it crumpled into ash and cracked chitin before it could finish. Across the antechamber, Wahei lined up a shot with her scout rifle and began pulling rounds through acolytes. Above, Rega kept trying to penetrate the witch's shield under a fusillade of sniper rounds, but Kateäk simply floated there, robes fluttering as she turned to regard the other two threats that had disturbed her.
Suddenly, Kateäk swept her arms out, her namesake links shooting out and into the walls around the antechamber. As Rega watched, these slithered over columns, and up over the ceiling, before locking into a Hive disk set into the ceiling. A deep bass note thrummed through the chamber as Hive runes glowed in the disk. "Lightborn..." The voice was high, dripping with cold malice. The Queen of Chains lowered her arms. The eldritch bindings she'd called forth to encircle the antechamber's boundaries had detached themselves from her, but this still left plenty to hang from her robes, to slither over her arms and around her deceptively frail body. "You should not have come here."
Rega's Ghost wobbled in the air. "Uh oh," Chaukeedar muttered, turning a terrified eye to the Hunter. "She just restricted our access to the Light... we're in one of those Darkness Zones now..."
Morgan blocked out the words of the Hive witch, instead hearing the Sweet Business click dry on its magazine. A surviving knight leapt toward him, but the Titan snapped up a shotgun and blasted its helmet off, along with a good chunk of its face. He racked another shell into the chamber as the knight fell, hearing the shrieking of thrall approaching, but turned first to the next knight that slashed at him, side-stepping its swing before pumping a hole through its armor.
Their Warlock seemed to dance under a knight's slash, one palm raising and catching a leaping thrall by the face. The Light of the Void flickered around her as the wretched creature shrieked before withering in her grasp. With another movement, she ducked in close under the knight's thrust, slapping a Void grenade to its chest, then Blinking away as the knight detonated, taking a swarm of thrall with it.
Kateäk began to weave her arms as she hissed another incantation. A Hive ritual circle glowed in the floor, and then showed a formless abyss within it, before the hulking mass of an Ogre rose up to the surface. It shuffled forward two ponderous steps, but it was hampered by the chains that bound its body tightly, its legs shackled together, and its arms curled against its body and lashed there. All of the necrotic metal wrappings connected to the crude collar and cage-helmet that enclosed its head. It turned its head blindly until the witch touched a hand to its collar. With a crack, the chains attached to it shattered, and the beast's arms swung free.
She leaned down and hissed something Hivespeak into an earhole, then turned to regard the Guardians. "Slaughter them, Gorunak." The Queen of Chains twisted about in the air, vanishing from the room. "Do not allow their Light below."
The monstrous ogre stretched itself again, reaching up and wrenching part of the cage encircling its head free. Gorunak bellowed, chains jangling from its arms as it swung around and turned to look in the direction of Rega-7's perch. With another howl, a stream of vile energy poured forth from the cracked cage surrounding the creature's face. The Exo Hunter dove away, leaping off the air and drawing out her submachine gun as she went. The fusillade of shots she sent at the beast caromed off of its helmet and seemed to merely annoy it as it turned that hate-spewing gaze after her.
"Morgan, get its attention!" Wahei called as she loaded a drum into her grenade launcher. The Titan raised the minigun and bellowed a challenging roar of his own at Gorunak before the stream of bullets started chewing into its thick, mutated hide. The ogre swung around toward him, swinging a claw toward him, and the length of chain still hanging from its wrist slapped into his belly. The thick links knocked Morgan off his feet, but before it could turn its fury on him, their Warlock pumped a salvo of grenades at it, which detonated around its head. Gorunak screamed with pain and rage as the concussions made the cage ring.
More violet energy poured out from that helmet as the ogre turned to Wahei now, raising a claw to shield its face as she emptied her magazine of grenades at it. The floor shook as it started to lumber toward her, but then flames blossomed, the light flickering across the walls and ice. Rega flung two handfuls of burning knives into Gorunak's exposed spine, drawing out another scream of agony. Wahei drew the Void around her before teleporting in close to the monster and unleashing a wild burst of Light under its jaw. The ogre staggered back, which was when Morgan's ballistic flight crashed into its belly with the sound of thunder and the fury of lightning.
The explosion of energies sent Gorunak's smoldering carcass crashing into the great chained doors of the antechamber. The Light shimmered and flashed up along the chains until it reached the Hive disk in the ceiling, which cracked and fell to pieces around them. As it did so, the spectral bindings that Kateäk had woven into their surroundings vanished, and all three Guardians took in a deep breath as they felt their connection to the Light surge back.
Wahei turned to look at the shimmering of the Light fading into the ice and stone, and then to the shattered remnants of the disk. "So, the Hive are up to something down here." She prodded Gorunak's corpse with the toe of her boot. "Between a Hive royal and a baby abomination, that says to me that they have something to hide down here. That bodes ill, considering the sorts of things we've seen down in the Hellmouth, or in the Dreadnought, and then what sort of secrets that the Witch-Queen might keep buried-"
"Wahei, this is not the time for one of your streams of consciousness," Rega admonished. "Not when we have a witch to hunt."
As one, the fireteam turned to the doors leading deeper into the caverns, which swung open at their Titan's kick.
Trapped. Locked away. Buried. Sealed in darkness. Bound behind chain and stone and fury and fear.
Not always. Freedom once. Family and fellowship. Mirth and plenty. Prosperity and Light.
Death descended. Dread power dredged from Deep. Dealing death and doom.
Desperation. Loss. Treachery. Betrayal.
Consumed by hatred. Dedicated to war. Steeped in Light. Visited destruction. Swore their doom.
Snared by Enemy. Broke loose. Annihilated the hunt. Continued their doom.
Surrounded by giants. Whetted blade with them. Slaughtered giants. Gifted them with doom.
Tracked the Enemy. Fought across realms. Slayed their multitudes. Brought them their doom.
Hate. Rage. Power. Doom.
Ambushed at last. Carved through Enemy. Tricked by witch. Spell woven. Swallowed in stone.
Unable to slay. Unable to move. Unable to die.
Felt the ages pass. Felt the Enemy thrive. Felt the rage burn.
Freedom. Relief. Escape. Light.
A room. A cell. A stone casket. Broken chains.
An Enemy. A thrall. Nothing. Smash.
A cry. A howl. Acolytes. Victims. Rip.
A snarl. A battlecry. Swords. Knights. Prey. Tear.
Free to hunt again. Free to slay again. Free to bring doom.
With a twist of reality, Kateäk, Queen of Chains, emerged into the realm of matter and mortality. She had felt the power thrum through the caverns when the Guardians slew Gorunak. While her children and followers awoke and went forth to hunt down the Lightbearers, she sailed through the tunnels and down into the Oubliette. To feel the Sky seeping into the blessed Deep from the Guardians' clumsy emanations... there would be consequences of such a thing.
Arriving in the darkened cell, the witch went still. Chitin and crumpled death-ash littered the floor. Shattered swords strewn about, half-embedded in the floor and walls. The Sarcophagus lid lay beside it, amid the broken chains that had previously held it shut. The space within the Sarcophagus stood empty, and the doors to the cell itself had been wrenched open, torn from their massive hinges.
In all the nightmares that Kateäk had visited upon the worlds across the universe, in all the dreams in which she had seen the fates of all things that did not fit the Final Shape, none had been as chilling as the one in which she now lived. The worst nightmare had become a reality. The Slayer was loose again.
"We have to contain this."
Afterword: I had this idea almost a year ago, and it's just been lurking in the back of my head since then. I finally got this chapter done, and I hope you enjoy it. This is not an indication I'm done with my other Destiny fanfic, "Not All Who Are Fallen Are Lost," I'm just struggling a little bit with how I want to continue it. Ideas still keep coming to me, but a new job has cut into some of my writing time.