I thought that we would build this together
But everything I touch just seems to break
Am I your sail or your anchor?
Am I the calm or the hurricane?
I feel the ground start to shake
I hear a voice shouting, "Move!"
But there is no fucking way I'd leave you
House on Fire – Rise Against
October 22, 2958, 10:14 (Tower Time); Echo Mesa, Io
With a final heave of effort, Azra pulled herself on top of the mesa. Dust and loose rocks peppered the ground below. She paused a moment to beat the dirt from her gloves and stretch limberness back into her hands.
"Why are we going this way, again?" Sagira hovered herself over the edge and lazily returned to her usual spot above Azra's shoulder. She wasn't as perturbed by the steams of Taken energy nearby as she was by the rock climbing. It seemed unnecessarily involved.
Azra did a quick check of the terrain ahead through the scope of Adelante. Bushwhacking was slower going but there was less chance of running into someone. "I don't really want to talk to Asher Mir right now," she explained.
Sagira knew Asher Mir. She snorted. "Because he will waste our time and talk your ear off about dimension theory?"
"Because he will report us to Ikora and Ikora will recall us if we get on the line with her." Azra lowered the rifle and began moving forward towards an overgrown portion of the mesa's topside, seeking cover. It was best not to tempt fate when Taken Hobgoblins could be nearby.
Sagira whirred her shell and followed. She was aware that the Vanguard might try to stop them at this point, but actively withholding important information seemed a step too far. "We should probably…"
"Yeah," Azra said. "If this doesn't go well, the Vanguard is still in the dark. They wouldn't know what to do." Preparing an info dump would be the wisest idea. "We can send it off right before we go into the Pyramidion. Signal's been extremely iffy in there if you're not near a repeater."
The Hunter spoke from personal experience. It piqued Sagira's interest. "So you have been to the Pyramidion before. You mentioned killing Brakion-"
Azra looks upwards and, stunned, sees it. They are in a pit but above them is the glassy liquid surface of an inverse lake. For one terrifying moment she cannot tell which is real, the reflection or her. Vertigo makes her stomach clench. The picture trembles and Azra genuinely does not know if it's ripples in the lake, or if reality itself is quaking-
"Oh," Sagira said. "Weird."
Azra double-checked her motion tracker before ducking through a grove of Ioninan trees. "Really," the Hunter bragged, "You'd be hard pressed to find somewhere I haven't been." It was one of the few points of pride she allowed herself.
"Titan," Sagira immediately challenged.
She peered cautiously over the railing, squinting to try and see past the rippling surface into the depths below.
"Do you see it?" Cayde asked.
Azra leaned a bit further. "I don't think there's a sea monster down-"
Her skeptical questioning was cut off when Cayde's shoulder shoved her in the spine, hard. She had no chance- she was unbalanced already, half over the edge. The last thing she saw was his gleeful face getting further and further away as he plummeted towards the waves.
Sagira winced at the memory of death. Azra just laughed. "He'd taken a bet with Andal I would fall of the catwalks," she explained. "I'm still planning revenge for it." She wasn't, not really. She just enjoyed dangling the threat of retaliation over Cayde's head.
Sagira thought a bit harder. Surely she knew of some location where the Hunter hadn't visited, out of inconvenience or impossibility. "The Black Garden," she offered.
She scrutinizes the distance, wondering if she could make it across with a jump or if she was better off descending to traverse the bottom of the canal.
The choice is taken from her. The not-dirt crumbles beneath her heel, sending her sliding. Her shout of surprise turns into a joyous whoop as the cliff's edge disappears beneath her and she falls in true. The Hunter tumbles into the gorge, sending uprooted flowers fluttering in her wake.
"You do fall off of a lot of things," Sagira commented.
"It's a thing," Azra said. Only really because Andal had teased her about it constantly. It didn't help that she had a habit of climbing on top of things to get a vantage point.
Sagira wracked her memory. The Infinite Forest was focused mainly on simulating the Sol System. With several decades of time and an insatiable appetite for exploration, the Hunter probably wasn't inaccurate in her boast of having been everywhere. At least everywhere orbiting this star.
But outside the Sol System? "… 2082 Volantis," Sagira challenged.
Azra stood on a platform of Vex bronze and stared up at the alien sky. The sun was massive, blue-white and so bright Azra had to tint her visor down all the way. She was still half-blinded. The rest of the sky was black and glimmering with wisps of ionized gas.
"You have three minutes before the gamma rays kill you," ҉ reported over the comms. "Try not to let that happen." Her voice was muffled with static even though Azra stood but a few meters from the Gate. Her radio screeched with interference.
Azra didn't need three minutes. She was here. Standing in the place it had all started, staring out across Radiolarian lakes bathed in nuclear fire. "Some day we will walk in the light of other stars," she recited to herself. A prophecy. A promise.
"Azra!"
She opened her eyes. For a terrifying moment, she didn't know where she was. Stars danced across her vision. The metallic taste of blood was on her tongue. Blood and mineral water and food mold. She struggled to sit up, feeling her spine scream complaints. Her sense of balance reeled.
There was a flash of light and the vertigo evaporated. Her vision steadied. She blinked, taking in her surroundings and struggling to thread her memories together.
She was on the rough ground at the bottom of a rock formation. The Pyramidion loomed in the distance. Her Ghost buzzed around her head like a worried fly.
Not her Ghost. Sagira. Right. They'd been playing a game of sorts, and…
"What was that?" Sagira asked, half accusation and half blind worry.
Azra rubbed the back of her neck and groaned. "That was me falling off of something. Again." It wasn't the best of timing. The top of the mesas was faster walking, but it would be more trouble than it was worth at this point to climb back up. They were already decently close to the entrance they were looking for.
Azra stood, feeling her legs strong and steady under her. (At least this was proof that Sagira could still heal her properly). She paused a moment to make sure her guns were undamaged before starting forward through the tangle of the undergrowth.
Sagira trailed behind, still stunned. "Azra, you just collapsed and blacked out!" How could the Hunter be so nonchalant?
"Hey, blame the collapse on the time weirdness," Azra said defensively. "The passing out can be chalked up to blunt force trauma."
"Does this happen often?" Sagira asked. She'd been terrified for a few moments there, but her worry was fermenting steadily into frustration. Azra barely seemed to care that she'd just fainted.
"It's only happened a couple of times," Azra said truthfully. "I think you pulled too hard. Whatever that was hasn't happened yet."
"So you only pass out when you see the future," Sagira said, sarcasm practically dripping from her words. "Cool."
"I see the future just as much as I see the past," Azra pointed out. It had been the better part of a day- surely she had been there for a premonition or two?
Sagira hadn't thought it was possible to glimpse the true future, however briefly. The Vex only played guessing games with their simulations, but this... "I haven't been paying attention," the Ghost lamented.
"A good policy," Azra said. And one we should continue, she pointed out mentally. Unless you want me passing out in the Pyramidion too.
Sagira was aghast at Azra's casual disregard for her own visions. "You're just ignoring this?" she asked in disbelief. This was huge: a way to pierce through causality, directly gain information from the future. Unspoken was the accusation- Osiris would never let something like that go unquestioned. He'd find a way to use it.
"Well Osiris wouldn't have survived the Vault of Glass," Azra shot back. She was getting tired of the suspicion coming from Sagira. There was a reason she didn't usually talk about this quirk of hers.
"That was the future," Sagira exclaimed. "You just saw the future-"
"A future," Azra corrected. "Indefinite."
"Well," Sagira challenged, "have your visions ever been wrong?"
Azra just shrugged. "I don't remember."
"This is important!" Sagira exclaimed. "How can you just not remember it? How can you not care?"
"Because trying to remember makes me fall off of things," Azra said simply. "I rather like being sane, thank you."
"But-"
Azra pulled up short and settled her feet solid in the snarled tree roots. "Listen. The Light exists. The Darkness exists. There are paracausal forces in this universe. Anything I witness of the future has as much chance of coming true as a Vex simulation. There's no use in stressing about it."
"But-"
"Sagira," Azra interrupted harshly. She, to her own surprise, found herself angry. "This is not your quirk, it is mine. You didn't lose yourself in the Vault of Glass, I did. You haven't spent a lifetime questioning yourself because of it, I have. So when I say that I don't want to mess with this because I don't like the consequences," she jabbed an accusing finger at the Ghost, "You listen."
And Sagira, to her surprise, did. "Okay, okay!" The Ghost was taken aback, cowed into agreeable silence.
Azra turned and resumed her walk, doing her best to smother the anger still burning within her. She wasn't usually prone to such outbursts. The wound Sagira had unknowingly poked at was old, but very deep. Foundational. There was a reason she didn't like talking about it.
They walked in silence for a bit. Weaving through the undergrowth was a poor distraction from the anger sizzling in Azra's belly and the shock still making Sagira reel. The Ghost was stunned. She could literally read the Hunter's mind. How did Azra keep surprising her?
Eventually, Azra's anger burned out (as it always did). Sagira mused on her surprise for a few minutes. They didn't have long- the open space beyond the foliage was growing closer and closer.
The Ghost was the first to break the silence, right as Azra ducked under the last line of branches. "You should do that more often," she said.
"Huh?" Azra shook some leaves off of her cloak absentmindedly.
"Stick up for yourself like that," Sagira added.
Azra didn't answer that verbally, but she frowned.
"You have some strange sense of self-esteem," the Ghost commented. With the exception of a few specific topics, Azra seemed always and forever to be second-guessing herself.
"I'm glad," Azra said graciously, "that you and Osiris can go to bed at night and not worry whether you've done the right thing. I don't have that luxury." He took it from me, a bitter piece of her mind whispered.
"You're legendary," Sagira protested. "Didn't we just argue that to Osiris? You shouldn't have to keep looking over your shoulder- you've done so much."
Azra had little ego to inflate. "I am small," she said plainly. A truth. Just one person, a bit player in the grand scheme of the world.
"You've killed gods," Sagira protested. "You saved the world! You brought the Light back!"
"And yet I'm still small," Azra said. "Funny how it works." Sagira didn't have an answer for that. With the structure of the Pyramidion looming over them, it was easy to feel miniscule.
They made their way to the door with no further words shared between them. Azra waited impatiently while Sagira tricked the systems into opening, on high alert for any Vex. The door opened with no issue. Not a single Harpy came to crash the party.
Azra paused on the threshold. "You got that data dump ready?"
"I just sent it," Sagira said.
Azra nodded and stepped through the door.
They were met with no resistance as they worked their way through the Pyramidion. Even Taken activity seemed rather lackluster. Azra decided to not be worried about it for once. She was under enough stress without trying to question the motivations of every faction in the system.
The interior of the Pyramidion was unmappable, in constant flux, but Azra knew enough about Vex architecture to steer them towards a processing hub. From there it was simple to track down a prediction engine network and hack into its interface. Sagira did the hacking; Azra stood watch (again) and tried not to distract the Ghost.
"Ready," Sagira announced after several long minutes.
Azra breathed a sigh of relief (she hated standing watch with every fiber of her being) and dutifully shuffled around in her pockets. She produced a glowing cube the size of her fist and held it out for Sagira.
It had been a hard-won treasure- she'd had to fight her way through an entire spire of Vex and smack around a giant Cyclops to get it. It was a plain thing, simple glowing lines over a Vex bronze core. But however unornamental its storage container was, the source code for the Infinite Forest was no small prize. The fate of the universe rode on it, in some ways.
Sagira took the cube delicately, slotting it into a space in the conflux she'd made. She entered a few commands and then floated back to hover at Azra's shoulder.
"Give it a few minutes," she said. The Infinite Forest was massive. Even Vex Tech would take a while to process it. Azra wondered what it would look like. It would be fascinating to watch the tiny seed of the Forest blossom and swell into the complex shape it took today.
Unfortunately, this Vex processing hub didn't have any human-compatible displays handy. The simulation chugged along unseen. Azra passed the time instead admiring the structure of the room they were in. It almost looked like a garden back in the City- if made of chunky bronze and Radiolaria instead of the cool water and soft grass Humans liked to cultivate.
"It's been a long time since I've been to the City," Sagira said quietly. She missed it. The company of other Ghosts, the scholars debating in the courtyards, the comfortably cramped desks of the archives. Sage and incense. Windchimes. Even in simulations Osiris stayed far away from the City. He claimed the presence of Guardians and the Traveler made any predictions too unreliable to be useful. Sagira knew it really was because he missed the City too. He couldn't bear to stand in a facsimile of his old home, so close but so aware that it was fake.
"It's changed a lot," Azra commented. "Not just 'cause of the time passed. The Red War knocked down a lot of stuff. No more Tower." Sagira was sad at that thought, so Azra added, "they're rebuilding it, though. Better than before." So they claimed. Azra remained skeptical about everything, but seeing as she didn't actually live in the City, she wasn't in any position to cast doubt.
Sagira was still sad. And perhaps a bit homesick. After a moment's hesitation, Azra did the mental equivalent of putting a gentle arm around her. You'll go home some day, she soothed. The Ghost held herself back from truly relaxing, but she didn't pull away.
The conflux before them flickered and let out a low vibration. The results were in. Azra and Sagira separated, each putting on a not-quite-truthful air of embarrassment. They were both quickly distracted by the task at hand. If they'd done things right, their simulation should have tracked the growth of the Infinite Forest- and the location of Panoptes- up until present day.
But Sagira only needed one look at the data to know something was off. "This isn't accurate," she reported.
"What?" Azra said. "It's the original seed, run on Vex programming." The Vex had to be predictable to themselves. They followed their own Pattern.
"Well this claims Panoptes should be in a part of the Infinite Forest that doesn't even exist," Sagira snapped. She rifled through the simulation, noting flaw after flaw. Nothing about this was right.
All this effort, wasted. But how could it have gone wrong? The processors in the Pyramidion couldn't be different than the ones that directed the expansion of the Infinite Forest. It all had to follow a consistent internal logic. Were there bugs in the Pyramidion? Had the Vex tricked them into taking a bad code?
Azra frowned for a moment. Then, like dawn breaking, it came to her. "Wait. The simulation is accurate to the beginning of the Forest. It has to diverge at some point if it's not accurate to present day. Where does it diverge?"
Sagira commanded the simulation to reverse itself. "I only have a general idea of how it looked before me and Osiris showed up-" she paused the simulation. "That's accurate. Why isn't it-"
"Because the Vex can't simulate Light," Azra said. She put a hand on her face. It was so obvious now.
"What?" Sagira asked.
Azra connected the dots for her. "When you and Osiris entered the Forest- and Saint-14 too, for that matter, you introduced variables the Vex cannot account for. This is what the Forest would look like if you'd never started messing with it."
"Oh," Sagira said. She felt dumb. They'd come up with this plan. They should have foreseen this. "We were so careful to stay undetected," she said.
"Panoptes has changed its behavior because of you," Azra said. "And the effect would amplify over time. Even small changes would alter the course of the Forest after a few decades. And that's not even speaking to what Saint-14 might have done-"
"So what do we do?" Sagira asked.
Azra paused a moment to think. Was this plan at all salvageable? Could they obtain a more recent snapshot of the Forest? Would that draw any less attention than simply pinging Panoptes's location directly?
Because she was absorbed in her own thoughts, she didn't feel it right when it happened.
Sagira did, but only after it was too late. "Something's going on. There are pathways opening up," she reported. She closed their simulation and began combing through the network data coming from the conflux. "New connections forming faster than I can track. What is this?"
Azra looked up and knew. A hole opened in the air. A malevolent red spotlight shone down on them.
No, not on her. Just on her Ghost. "It's happening again," Sagira said in horror. It was just the same as it was in that simulation of the Vault- but there was no portal to escape through this time.
Azra physically grabbed her Ghost out of the air, turned to run- and faltered. It was already happening. There was an odd tug on her thoughts. Fingers like needles reached into her mind, probing for weaknesses, grasping, pulling. Azra staggered but somehow managed to not collapse as the force intensified. It felt like someone was taking a chisel to her skull.
"It's got me!" Sagira screamed. "No!"
The conflux flickered and then shone harshly. The Radiolaria hissed and bubbled. Inside Azra's brain, everything was screaming. Sagira shrieked in pure, despairing terror. Azra cried out in pain as her very consciousness was split. Panoptes was extracting Sagira from her shell like pulling the pit from a fruit.
Azra clutched her Ghost's shell and stared into its fear-bright eye. She held on with everything she had. She'd crossed wills with Vex Minds before. She should have won. She could have won- if only it was trying to separate her and Spark. But even though she'd reached some peace with Sagira, an unconscious part of her mind still rebelled against her presence. They were not fit for each other. A base impulse still pushed against the intrusion.
Azra fought back against her instincts, but it wasn't enough. She couldn't fight Panoptes and herself. Her mental grip was slipping. Sagira's thoughts dimmed, warping in bewildering and stomach-churning ways.
Her fear shone through loud and clear, though. She was being kidnapped. Panoptes would take her and kill her (or worse, twist her, tear her into pieces). Osiris would die. The Vex would win. She was helpless against it.
"I'm coming for you!" Azra shouted. "Hold on!"
"Azra!" Sagira screamed back. The threads between them were snapping. Neither of them could stop it.
"I'm coming for you," Azra repeated. It was a promise this time, an oath. Don't give up. I won't give up. I will find you, just wait. Everything is going to be alright.
And in the second before Sagira was gone, the Ghost felt a hint of relief.
Then reality asserted itself like a rubber band snapping back into place. Panoptes disappeared. Sagira disappeared. The scream of overclocked Vex computers cut out.
For a long, terrible moment, there was an empty spot in Azra's brain. It was a strange sensation. Ever since she'd been Raised, even when her symbiosis with Spark was dormant and untested, there had been something there. Now there was just an abyss yawning back at her. Nothingness. Azra was too shocked to do anything but gape at it. Sagira had said that Spark was just sleeping; Azra had hoped that all they'd need to do was get her back into the right shell and everything would be fixed. Well, Sagira was gone, but there wasn't anything in the hole she left behind. The shell in her hands was still, the eye blank in its core.
Spark couldn't be dead. He just couldn't. Azra refused to exist in a world without him. She strained to hear something, anything, screaming into the pit in her soul. Was there an echo, an answer? For a heartbeat, she thought she heard something whisper-
Then Spark woke up.
It was only then that Azra fell to her knees. Her horror quickly melted away into the bittersweet feeling of grief consoled. For an eternal moment, she didn't care about anything else- not the possibility of a Vex attack, not the Radiolaria hissing a few feet to her right, not the looming threat of Panoptes's plan. He was back, he was here, they were whole again. A Minotaur could have stomped its way into the room and she wouldn't have even noticed.
Spark was, to put it mildly, confused as all hell. But Azra held him and wept and there was no room for anything but singing relief. Things couldn't be wrong if they were here, together. Everything else could wait.
But they hadn't been together. And that disconnect was what eventually drew them out of their mental embrace. The last thing Spark remembered was the no-longer-secret bunker in the EDZ. How did they get to the Pyramidion? It was so strange- it wasn't very often that they weren't on the same page.
"You were gone," Azra said, voice thick with tears. She shifted from a kneeling to a sitting position, still cradling her Ghost in her hands. "That machine, it put Sagira in you, and neither of us knew how to get her out, and this… this thing with Panoptes is time-sensitive and she got Osiris to listen to me, but that might all be in the trash now, but you're back." The words spilled from her with no filter.
Spark was almost overwhelmed by the rush of memories. It seemed a lot had happened while he was gone. He took it all in with a bit of pride- she'd been worried and afraid but she hadn't backed down. That was his Guardian. He was still confused- and had several concerns- but they could wait. "But why are we in the Pyramidion?" he asked.
"We stole a copy of the Infinite Forest's original seed," Azra explained, drying the tears from her face. "We were using the computing power of the Pyramidion to simulate its growth up into present day- simulating Panoptes along with it. But Osiris and Sagira have been causing too many changes. It's not faithful."
A fairly brilliant plan. The Pyramidion was on a separate network from the rest of the collective- and the Infinite Forest on a different network as well. There was little chance Panoptes would notice them here.
"Except it did," Azra said. "It found her in the Forest and it found her here. I don't know why. But it took her." Which, while horrible, had the benefit of waking Spark up again.
"So what's the plan now?" Spark asked. "Is there some way we can account for the discrepancies? Could we use our permissions to-"
"No," Azra said. The plan was very simple now. Panoptes had taken Sagira. That would be its downfall. The Vex mind did not obviously stick out from the background noise of the Forest- that's why they had to go to such trouble to even find it- but Sagira was a sentient energy signature. A construct of Light, and one that Azra knew incredibly well at this point. There was nowhere that Panoptes could hide her where Azra couldn't sniff her out.
Azra stood. "I'm coming for you," she promised again to the empty air.
"We're coming," Spark corrected. "Panoptes is going to wish it never existed." I'm with you, he reassured silently. Let's go.