And all of your wind has gone
And all of the paths you've drawn
Have sunk to the ocean sand
Where no one can see you stand
Don't let the dark embrace
Cower the dreams you chase
Under the rust and blood
Don't let yourself
Give up
Far Away – Tristam & Braken
October 21, 2958, 21:56 (Tower Time); Fields of Glass, Mercury
The Vex were waiting for them this time. Azra hardly had a chance to adjust her climate control to the blazing Mercurian evening before the hairs raised on the back of her neck.
"Vex incoming!" Sagira warned as space began to visually distort.
"I know!" Azra called back, desperately casting around for cover. There wasn't much. A couple of stone blocks, the Lighthouse itself-
The Vex crashed into existence: Precursors, again. Their clean gold and white shone brightly in the harsh light of the Sun. Two dozen Goblins zeroed their sights on the Hunter. Harpies spun to her flanks. Hobgoblins took aim from vantage points. A giant Minotaur crouched and warbled a battle-screech.
"Gate Lord!" Sagira warned again.
"I know!" Azra called in frustrated response. She was surrounded, no cover, no backup.
But they were all right here, within reach. Wasn't that convenient?
She didn't even reach for her guns. She reached for the Light. The first wave of laser-fire was swept out of the air in the wake of her Staff. The second was chaotic, Goblins aiming in every direction as they tried to track her Arc-fueled speed.
She fought through them with elegant efficiency. The Arc, to her relief, felt the same as it always had. A lot had changed, but this hadn't. She let her reflexes take control, dodging between the Gate Lord's legs, striking at its weak points, absolutely shredding the minor Vex that pushed her position.
When all that remained was the Gate Lord and the out-of-reach Hobgoblins, she dropped the Arc and drew Adelante instead. A few retorts took care of the snipers. She dodged out of the way of the Minotaur's stomp, switched to her Mythoclast, and emptied the magazine into its core.
The Gate Lord screeched one final time and fell apart. Azra reloaded her guns- Mythoclast first, then Adelante, and took in the terrain through the Scout Rifle's scope.
Sagira's surprise broke through her concentration. "Wow. That was…" Impressive. Awe-inspiring, almost. She'd cleared an entire contingent of Vex, including a Gate Lord, in under half a minute.
Azra shrugged off the admiration and re-slung her guns. "I do this for a living, you know."
"Right, right," Sagira said, pulling herself back into business mode. She was very used to Osiris's ego- stoking that was usually a mistake.
"Let's just get this over with," Azra sighed.
The pair traipsed their way towards the giant triangular Gate, Azra keeping a watchful eye out for more Vex, Sagira beginning to sort through her inventory. They were getting better at distracting themselves from the other's thoughts. Azra still had a hollow knot of lonliness and worry under her ribcage, but she managed to breathe around it.
"Why do you have your Sparrow in here?" Sagira asked, almost sounding accusatory. "It's better to leave it in the ship and transmat it in when it's needed." It took up nearly a third of her available space.
"Better, except when there's no transmat signal and you need to make an escape." Azra turned to check behind them, walking backwards a few steps before swiveling back around.
"Where is there no transmat signal?" Sagira checked just to be certain, but even without patrol beacons the signal from their Jumpship read loud and clear here.
"A good portion of the ADZ," Azra listed off. "Lots of the EDZ, too, though they're trying to fix that. The Arcology on Titan. Ishtar Academy. Bits of the Cosmodrome. A handful of Nuclear Exclusion Zones. Chicago. Most of the Outer System, just from the magnetic interference."
"Okay, okay," Sagira said. "You'd still have room for more ammo or supplies if you'd left it in your ship."
"It's personal preference," Azra said. "Supplies can be scavenged. Ammo can be synthesized. You don't exactly find functioning Sparrows lying around in the bush."
They were both very glad to have found a non-upsetting topic to discuss. It was talking shop to the both of them, discussing the use of ammo synthesizers versus saving more room for reserves: Azra appreciated the flexibility synths offered in terms of loadout, while Sagira was wary of being caught in a situation without enough bullets and noted the relative inefficiency of the synths. They both gave their views on the perennial 'Hand Canons or Sidearms' debate. Azra caught Sagira up to date on the newest advancements in Swordsmithing. The back-and forth soothed their nerves as they waded through the coarse sand.
The Gate was hard to miss, though the entrance to the Infinite Forest was supposed to be a secret. Its location was hidden in the Network and the Forest itself was completely cut off from the rest of the gate system. It was too bad for the Vex that they lacked any sense of subtlety. The door to the Forest was shimmering blue, triangular, and tall enough to fit the Gate Lord Azra had just demolished. Azra put a hand forward, not really surprised to feel resistance push her back. "Security protocols," she muttered. "How quaint."
"I can get through them," Sagira assured. "Just give me a second."
Ikora, who'd been quiet since they'd left the radio tower, spoke up. Her voice on the comms was full of a dry regret. "Azra. I'm sorry to inform you that the Praxic Order has officially requested-"
"What's that, Ikora?" Azra spoke loudly. "Gee, this Gate sure is causing a lot of interference. I think- chhhhzrt- I think we're breaking- czzzzt."
Azra continued to approximate static into her microphone. Ikora sighed, sounding an awful lot like a beleaguered Zavala. Sagira giggled, surprisingly. She found the exchange hilarious.
Get the Gate open, Azra scolded mentally. Before she says the words recall or cancelled or something. She did not want to get pulled back to the City to get poked over by Warlocks. Not right now.
"Done," Sagira announced.
Azra reached forward, no longer feeling the resistance. "Oh, sorry Ikora, it looks like I'm going through a tunnel. I'll call you back later."
"Traveler Bless," Ikora said, unable to keep the humor out of her voice either.
Azra stepped through.
The hallway was familiar, yet unfamiliar. Sagira whizzed along while Azra trailed behind, noting the patterns playing on the walls, the odd statue enshrined in the center of the corridor.
"What was that you did?" Azra asked, looking back and forth between the Gate behind them and the one that lay ahead. "It was too fast for me to catch."
"Oh, it's simple." Sagira spoke confidently, almost bragging. "The door opens sometimes for the Vex. I just tricked it into thinking that right now is actually the last time it opened… which was actually two hours ago, by the way. Unfortunately it tends to automatically reset after a few minutes. The tricky part is being able to find the last time index the Gate was open."
"Huh," Azra said. It was inventive, to say the least. She jogged to catch up with the Ghost.
"How were you going to open it?" Sagira asked. "Ikora sent you to find us. What was your plan?"
"Well," Azra scratched her nose as she scrutinized the simulated floor. "I'm a Gate Lord. So I'd just tell it to open."
Sagira was shocked. "You're-"
"Well, we have the permissions," Azra said in dismissal. "Had? Have, I guess. I don't know if you can access them." She paused, remembering the last time Sagira poked at that part of her memories. "I think I'd prefer if you didn't."
She shook her head and pulled herself back on-topic. "So. Osiris saw trouble. What was it, exactly?"
"I didn't see," Sagira said. "And things got… complicated before I could find out." Azra was trying hard not to ride along with Sagira's memories, give her a little privacy, but she still felt the sting of betrayal as Sagira contemplated the event.
"I'd like to know what we're up against before we go charging in after him," Azra grumbled.
Sagira hovered by the corridor's exit. "Maybe… I know the coordinates he was searching for. We could see for ourselves."
Azra pulled her Scout Rifle, readying herself for battle. "Let's do it."
Azra stepped through the portal and her heart almost stopped beating in her chest. She stood on Mercury, she knew. The sand and the gravity felt right. The place was utterly dull and flat in her Lightsense, like the entrance corridor had been, but there was something more here.
It was a nighttime atmosphere, but as she stepped out of the simulated ruins she'd spawned in, the scope of this reality hit her. It was day on this Mercury, but the sky was dark. A bare few stars twinkled in the cosmos. It was a far cry from Mercury's usual brilliant tapestry. An empty black shell of a sun took up half of the horizon, letting out quiet streams of dead plasma.
She pulled back, opened her eyes, and saw him: dead, dead and gone, forgotten dust. The sun was a lifeless husk above them, devoid of warmth or light. The ground was frosted infertile rock and dirt. Wind whistled through the stones. It was an empty, lonely sound for an empty, lonely world. In her heart, Azra knew that this was it. Everything was gone. Everything. Not even so much as a blade of grass still lived. Much less Tevis. Much less the Traveler, or the City, or even her.
"I've seen this before," Azra whispered. "Traveler."
"This is bad," Sagira said. "This is really, really bad." She flitted back and forth, scanning bits of simulated Vex architecture, looking for some clue of when this was, how this had happened.
Azra just stared out at the horizon. "The end of everything," she murmured. "No Light, no Dark, no life at all. Just…" Just nothing. And this wasn't some immaterial Void-vision. She was here, staring it in the face.
Sagira despaired. "They found how to win. After everything, everything we've done, everything we've learned, they still found their equation."
There was a moment of quiet. Azra was disturbed by how faithful the simulation was. The breeze was nothing more than the suggestion of a tug on her cloak. The sand ground beneath her boot soles exactly as sand always did. Focusing on her Lightsense gave her a slight hint of vertigo- the Vex didn't know how to interact with it, so some part of her felt as if she was floating in a featureless abyss.
Sagira was still fretting. Azra took a deep breath to settle her nerves and felt her resolve strengthen. It was a relief, almost, to come here and find this. "Well," Azra mused. "It makes our job pretty simple, doesn't it?"
The Ghost turned to face her. "What?"
Azra fixed the dead Sun with a stern glare. There was no complicated scheme here, no trickery. There was a clear problem, however insurmountable it seemed. There was something to shoot at. "We kill Panoptes," the Arcstrider declared. "Before it perfects this plan. Before the Vex can act on it."
"You want to kill Panoptes," Sagira said skeptically. "You."
"I killed Atheon," Azra said. "And Brakion. And the Undying Mind." A chorus continued in the back of her mind- and Crota and Oryx and Ghaul and SIVA and Skolas and Elyksul and Vosiks Prime- a litany of victory after victory stretching back across the decades. She felt conviction light a fire in her belly.
Sagira had first known Azra Jax as a confused, skittish Kinderguardian. That impression had never quite faded. She was faced with the stark wrongness of that assumption now. Sagira remembered the fight she'd just witnessed twenty minutes ago: the quick, balanced, and vicious way the Hunter had destroyed the Vex frames sent to stop them. The nonchalant way she brushed off the affair, like it was just another Tuesday to her.
The Hunter reminded her of Osiris in some ways. She had the same steel in her gut, the hardened determination, the force of will bared like a weapon. She had a similar curiosity. The same relentless drive that kept her going through setback after setback. When she pictured Panoptes's defeat in her mind's eye, she wasn't thinking of the acclaim or the accolades. She wasn't even thinking about Ikora's approval or the pride in Cayde-6's optics. She thought of the Vex broken, of a future guaranteed, of a City continuing to rebuild and prosper. She wasted not a second to haggle for her own benefit.
There would be no convincing her to stop now. Sagira found that she didn't want to.
"We need to find Osiris first," Sagira said.
"Could you convince him to help?" Azra asked. She still wasn't sure about him. Osiris had spit in her face a few too many times for Azra to be easy with the idea of an alliance.
The Ghost was confident in her answer. "He'll listen to me."
Back in the hallway, they ran into an immediate snarl.
"You're sure there's nothing," Azra said.
Sagira clicked in annoyance. She was projecting the data as she scanned through it. Azra could see just as well as she could that there were no traces of Osiris in the Vex network. "He knows how to cover his tracks," the Ghost replied. "And he's being careful. The Vex are looking for him."
"How are we supposed to, y'know, talk him into this if we can't even find him?"
Frustration flared into anger for a second. "I don't know," the Ghost snapped. She felt Azra's own frustration rise in response to the terse words, like heat from friction. Sagira didn't have any answers. The Hunter still hounded her for them, getting upset when there were none.
She was reminded that despite their common goals and the unsteady peace they'd managed to broker, Sagira and Azra were not meant for each other. They thought differently, approached problems differently, their emotional language wasn't the same. They couldn't help but clash.
Sagira felt the Hunter begin yet another round of breathing exercises, counting slowly and methodically in her head. Sagira repressed a wave of annoyance. Compared to Osiris, Azra was unstable, volatile almost. She was scared of everything. She seemed to be always teetering on the edge of some kind of breakdown.
"I'd like to see you go through what I've been through and come out stable," Azra muttered. There was a small hurt in response to the Ghost's callous musings. Sagira was mortified- how did Azra and her Ghost get anything done hearing every stray thought that popped into the other's head? There was absolutely no privacy to be found.
Azra counted until she reached ten, heaved one last sigh, and graciously put the remark behind her. (That, Sagira had to admit, was something Osiris had never mastered.) "I wasn't looking for answers," the Hunter said calmly. "I was looking for options. Suggestions. We can't track his network activity. How else can we look for him? What other angles do we have?"
"Well," Sagira said. "We could always let him find us." She spun a careful elaboration in her head. "If we cause a big enough row, he's bound to send a Reflection to check eventually."
"Reflection?" Azra asked.
"Oh, he uses Vex Tech and his Light to make copies of himself." Saying it out loud made it seem a lot more… egotistical than it was. "To help explore the Forest. If we draw enough attention from the Vex he is sure to dispatch one."
"I don't think drawing the Vex's attention is a good idea," Azra said warily. "And we don't need to talk to one of his projections, we need to talk to him. Before he draws the wrong conclusion."
"It might be our only option," Sagira argued. "You can't physically track him between the different simulations. And he's hiding from the Vex, so Vex methods aren't going to find him."
Azra closed her eyes and thought. There had to be another way. Sagira in the back of her head was put out- Osiris would look at the available paths ahead, pick the best one (however undesirable it might be), and fight for it. Azra outright rejected all of the options and kept searching in the dim hope that something else might turn up. She was cautious where Osiris was decisive, forever turning around and reviewing and changing her plans. And yet here where Osiris would be pragmatic she instead was stubborn. There had to be another way.
The Hunter leaned her head against the cool nothingness of the simulated wall and felt the breeze flutter against her face. The air wasn't real. It was a faithful enough simulation to fool physics, but in Azra's Lightsense it was a bland void. The entire world here wasn't real- fake sand and fake starlight, fake water and fake walls. She felt like she might let a foot fall too hard one of these times, take a breath too deep, and accidentally punch through like a fist through cardboard.
She turned her attention back to the problem at hand. Azra Jax was no stranger to tracking prey. Understanding how your quarry thought was a powerful tool when physical methods failed you. Where would he be? What would he be doing?
She pictured Osiris as she had known him. It wasn't that vivid; it had been eternity and a decade since she'd last seen him. She pictured the burning heat of his Light, attention as oppressive as the Sun over Mercury. His conviction. Banners whipping and snapping in the wind, flight feathers, closed fists.
The wall wasn't real and the air wasn't real, but he was. And no amount of firewalls and shielding could ever stop the Light from shining through. She'd spent forever living in the cracks in the glass, she knew how to look for it.
And she saw him, suddenly, like an image drawn into focus. He was a constellation, a thousand tiny cinders scattered over the surface of the Forest. Reflections, each carrying sparks of intent and will.
But one star blazed far brighter than the rest.
"There. Do you see it?" Azra could practically taste the salt breeze on her tongue.
"Yes," Sagira said, awed. "How did you do that?"
Azra didn't dare open her eyes again. "Stars are only visible in Darkness," she murmured. She'd spent lifetimes in Darkness. "Let's go, before he moves."