I remember when I first made love.

The emotional and physical closeness of another, to literally and spiritually become one with someone; to take two halves and join them together in a bond so deep that it seals their souls into one mind, one thought, one life together … it is an act of the utmost intimacy, one that many strive for but may never truly achieve in their lifetime.

I recall how cold it had been that night. The sheets were nothing compared to the warmth of his body, providing me with a sense of comfort that I had never known I'd needed. In my mind, I thought that this was the ultimate form of validation; to have someone want you, to have someone need you, to have someone become your other half.

In a sense, the red is making love to me now.

It is close, pressing in around me everywhere; in my body, in my mind. It has taken this act of boundless intimacy, one that I cherished, and corrupted it to its own depraved purposes. It has joined us through a bond of death, so that one cannot live without the other. We have become one not by merging the two of us into one new entity, but rather by it consuming me and reshaping me into its image.

The red wants me. The red needs me. And it has become my other half; but it has done so through oppression, not consent.

This is the only love it knows, and so it has become that this is the only love I know; the love of the red as it forces itself upon my mind, body, and soul, my only purpose in existence now to be its pawn, a tool of its perverse machinations.

I scream, but no sound escapes me. I am no longer the master of my destiny.

The red is.

The Javelin circled around the scene of destruction with caution. Below them was the massive blast site that Paskin had warned them about, where an incredibly large section of the wall had been blown away to reveal what they'd been searching for; something to do with the sanctum.

Matt stared at the monitors of the Javelin's cockpit, analyzing the area with great scrutiny. The wreckage of the wall lay scattered across hundreds of meters in any direction, with a great majority of it stretching to the interior rather than outward. Parts of it were sunken beneath the surface of the sea, while smaller, more shrapnel-like chunks had washed up on the beaches some distance away.

But that wasn't what they were after, no. Their target was below, where the wall had once remained intact. Beneath where this section of the wall had once stood, a plateau of rock stood above the vast expanse of sea and almost beckoned to them with its defiance to the rest of its environment. Along a narrow path that it led down, one could see that the mountainous foundation upon which the other side of the wall resided on was cracked open. A cave-like entrance awaited their arrival, but nothing beyond the first few meters could be seen from up here in the Javelin.

Sighing, he let go of the controls and trusted Seraph to keep them steady in the air until they were clear of the ship. At his presence, the docking ramp of the ship descended and allowed him access to the open air. He took a few tentative steps forward, trying to picture his jump before going through with it. When he was satisfied with the trajectory he'd chosen, he took a deep breath and leapt off the ramp.

The air around him screamed as he tore through it, streaking downward with as little wind resistance as he could manage. The ship pulled away and into the upper atmosphere where it would wait until he returned.

If he returned.

His descent coming to an end, he channeled as much of his shields into his feet as he could, and angled himself properly to absorb the impact. He may not have thrusters like a Titan or Warlock, but that was a Hunter's strength; they found workarounds for their flaws in their wit.

The ground rushed up to meet him, and all of his momentum was dispersed through the shields and into the ground beneath him. It shook slightly from the force, but other than that remained as it was. He stood up from his kneeling position and checked his systems to make sure they were all in order. As far as he could tell, no damage had been done.

Now ready to proceed, he stared ahead at the cave into which he'd be entering. Seraph appeared next to him, and glanced at him out of the corner of her blue eye.

"Like I said; together."

He took a deep breath to steady his nerves again. Among his emotions were fear, rage, and desperation, none of which would help him to succeed. He needed a cool head, and a steady hand.

"Together."

Stepping forward, he walked across the thin bridge of rock that connected this outcrop to the main body of rock that the cave led into. Upon venturing a few meters past the initial walls of the entrance, he found that a hole had been carved downward into the ground, unknown depths waiting for someone to delve into them. Hesitation absent in his behavior, he took the plunge.

This time, rather than using his shielding to absorb the impact, he held onto the natural curves of the hole as it rounded every so often, using his hand to guide his body down without hitting anything and his feet to scrape along the side and slow his descent when necessary. Finally, it evened into a straight drop and he fell for several meters into the open air of a large cavern before his feet made contact with the ground and he bent low to brace against his fall. Standing once more, he took the time to examine his surroundings with care.

The open cave into which he'd fallen was rather ordinary, even if unusually large. The only remarkable thing about it was the wreckage of what appeared to be part of a Warmind bunker, or at least some kind of structure with the same sort of structure and appearance that they held, built into the rock. Black panels and silver struts lay cast aside as the Fallen had presumably torn into the side of what they could see until they finally revealed an entrance.

The sanctum awaited.

—X—

The Hunter gave a tired sigh, and looked out the large window of the cabin. Clara followed his gaze, noting that it was getting dark out and there wasn't really much to look at outside. This gave her the idea that maybe he was just trying to appear like he was looking at something; did he not want to continue?

"Are you alright?" she asked softly, her concern for his mental health only becoming more genuine with every day she spent with him.

He did not answer her, not at first. It took him another minute before he inhaled sharply, and rotated his masked head to stare at her once more. "Yes. I'm sorry, it's just- well, none of this is really pleasant to think about."

She mulled that over, having to retell a story of your friend's doomed journey to rescue his friends. Living through it must have been bad enough, but it was Woods who apparently drew the short stick; all of the others were dead now, and he was just left to carry on their memory in a world that didn't care to remember them.

"If you don't want to keep going, you can stop-"

"No, it's not that," he quickly replied, dismissing her offer. "I just needed a minute. I think you're right, I- I think I've been needing to tell someone about this for a long time now."

She stared at him innocently, still unwilling to push him into something he didn't want to do. He saw it in her eyes, her reluctance to bring him any distress, and he chuckled lightly.

"Honestly, it's alright. Now, where was I?"

—X—

He clambered over the rocks and into the rhombus-shaped hallway that was so common amongst these kinds of bunkers. Only this one wasn't well-lit and illuminated with blue lighting like the others he'd visited. Instead, almost every panel and tile on the walls and floor was black, and there was an almost hazy fog that enveloped everywhere he walked. It was not visible immediately, but could rather be seen on the edges of his vision as well as farther distances in front of him.

Dammit, he didn't like anything about this.

Seraph hovered close to him, unwilling to venture far from safety in such an ominous location. "So, uh … this is terrifying. I know you said you were making this up as you go, but you have to have some semblance of a plan by now, right?"

He was unsure of how to answer her; indeed, his mind had been turning certain ideas over in his head but he was unsure of how well they would play out in practice. He decided to elaborate as they walked, hoping that if anything it would help him to solidify a proper plan of action.

"Well, we know that the Messenger expects me to find him; so I have a good feeling that he's prepared for anything I can think of." He shrugged, though he was much more uneasy than the nervous facade he was presenting to her. "Not much we can do about that. But if he's really planning to spread this to the rest of the Darkness's armies, then be prepared for us to be facing a bit more than Fallen down here."

She looked at him in worry. "And … what about the others?"

His heart ached at the thought of what the Messenger could have done to them … but he knew what the most likely outcome was. Rather than answering, he kept silent to avoid from having to voice it aloud.

Seraph understood the gist of his fears from that silence, and looked down dejectedly. "Matt … you don't think-"

"The fact of the matter is that we can't let the Messenger move forward with this attack," he said with gritted teeth. "If SIVA's let loose upon the City, it's all over. We have to stop him … no matter the cost."

She was shocked by that sentiment. "After all these years of trying so hard to protect everyone … you're willing to give up on them?"

He was shaking his head before she'd even finished her sentence. "Not a chance. I just know that breaking down isn't going to give me a better chance of rescuing them. If we're going to pull this off, we need all of our wits about us. I'd rather be braced for the worst and be right than have unrealistic hope and be crushed."

He gave a wavering sigh, his voice trembling in spite of his words. "But that doesn't mean that I'm not still desperately hoping that they're alive."

Seraph had no answer for that, and decided to just stay silent.

A door slid open with a smooth scrape of metal, and they walked through cautiously. Before moving on, Matt made sure to check their surroundings for any infected Fallen that may have been awaiting them. Thankfully, all was silent.

"What is this place?"

He turned to get a better look at the room upon hearing the Ghost's question, and furrowed his brow. A single path led forward before splitting, with every side and space not on the path taken up by rectangular pillars that connected the floor to the ceiling. But they didn't look like they were there for structural support; lights winked in and out of existence along their exteriors, and they seemed to be more machine-oriented than they appeared at first glance.

"I don't know," he muttered, "but I'm more worried about what those things are."

They meandered along the path, erring on the side of vigilance around the pillars. He glanced at a few of them, noting that most of them had glass containers built into them, little flowers of that same red growth that was signature of SIVA blooming inside of them. With a bit more fear, he realized that some of them were broken and their contents were gone.

"Mathias?" Seraph whispered with an unsettled edge in her tone. She never used his full first name, not unless she was discussing something with a deadly seriousness … or deadly level of fear. "What the hell is this?"

He remembered an image from long ago, and compared the similarities to the room they were standing in now. The only differences appeared to be their purpose. "They're servers, data servers; but they're not just being used for software or storage … you said that the sanctum was the birthplace of SIVA?"

"That's right," she confirmed, her voice still wavering. "What about it?"

"Well," he murmured, tension creeping into his own, "I think that this is some kind of server farm, and it's growing strains of SIVA."

But why would SIVA need to grow? Was it organic? Everything about this plague took what he knew and flipped it on its head. If it had been designed as a tool to be wielded, how had it become the one now wielding those it merged with?

They left the path, this room turning into another with a massive black and red rhombus taking up the center of the room. Catwalks split along the side of it, allowing passage around the enormous anomaly. Red SIVA-fied cables and wires stretched out of the bottom and into the floor, giving it the appearance of a grotesque bud. As they continued beyond it and into the next hallway, he tried to make some sense of all this.

Due to its nature, he was sure that it had a certain 'programmable' aspect to it; otherwise, it wouldn't have been promoted as a tool like Seraph had stated its original intent had been. You couldn't properly command something without some sense of control over it.

He looked at the Ghost hovering next to him, a line of thought crossing his mind. Seraph was definitely not organic, but she was certainly alive. She'd been born from within the Traveler, a combination of metal and light. The thing that separated her from a machine was that she had a mind of her own, thoughts and ideas that belonged to her.

Inside those glass containers, the SIVA sprouts had been grown from hundreds of different variations and experimentations, potentially for many different purposes. The relationship between a user and tool was simple; a tool had power, but could not use itself, and a user did not have power but could use a tool to harness it.

So what would happen if the tool was given a mind?

He couldn't imagine that SIVA was inherently some weapon of the Darkness; but if Ghosts could be created from metal and light … who was to say that, out of all these hundreds of different variants, one of them had meshed its code with … something else?

Nothing was certain, whatever had happened was the result of a process that took place over thousands of years. But if he was right, and this mutated form of SIVA that the Messenger and his allies were using was more than what it appeared to be … then perhaps things were worse than even he'd foreseen-

The final door of their passage slid open, the sight taking away any thought he had in his mind.

The chamber they'd entered was easily more than a kilometer in width, length, and height. He couldn't even properly see the walls of it due to an ominous fog and red lighting that hit it, obscuring a clear view of the absurdly large room- if one could even call it a room, the word hardly gave an accurate description of the place's enormity.

In front of them, a single stairway held up by thick cables awaited them, leading down into the center of the room where a diamond-shaped facility awaited them, a monumental-sized version of the smaller caps that grew along SIVA tendrils. He knew what this capsule of containment truly was.

They'd reached the sanctum.

A/N: We are reaching the end of the first arc … and now we're somewhere around just before the halfway point of the book.

I hate to do this, but I'm going to be taking a slight hiatus to focus on work and a film project of mine; hopefully I can finish the film and free up some more time for this.

Let me know in the reviews what your thoughts are so far, and any predictions you might have; is this how it all ends? Can he save everyone, or even anyone? What about the Trinary Star, and their whereabouts while the Last Hunter is relaying all this to Clara?

That's the cool thing about this book; it's two different worlds in one, and both of them come with conflicts aplenty.

Until the next time,

- Matteoarts