Chapter 9: Run boy run! This world is not made for you

"Run! Therin, run!"

Grayris's voice screamed after him, telling him to flee, flee, flee while he could, get away, get away before She gets you!

He tripped.

He ran.

He ran.

He fought.

He ran.

Running, fighting, occasionally tripping - all on instinct. All mere companions to PURPOSE. And PURPOSE was run run run get away run keep running.

She was behind him. He could feel Her breath on his neck. Feel Her fangs scraping across his throat. His lungs hitched. His skin crawled. It was War - it was Her, it was Her, She was in the system, in the network, riding after them on a dark horse of matter-plague and pure willpower, it was Her! - and She was laughing. Sound shattered. The otherworldly equations he ran upon cracked and halted.

Light ahead. Brassy constructs too - borne of bacterial colonies and stone-cold analysis. Vex sprung from weathered perches and snaps of digital lightning, and they opened fire with their own singular, fearless PURPOSE. Not on him - no, he was a lesser threat, barely even that, they didn't fear him as they did the Other. They fired on what lay behind him - Her claws, Her teeth, Her will.

He ducked and rolled as particle jets and antimatter rounds streamed past. The thing behind, the things that spoke with Her voice, ate it up. Shadows shrieked and hissed and died, but there were more, always more. And yet the constructs marched on, never halting, never pausing. He admired them. Adored them, in that moment. When he flitted past the first few ranks of sure-to-die Goblins, he thought about throwing them a hasty salute. But, in the end, it was pointless - not like they'd return it. They were willfully ignoring him - as best a compliment one could get from the Vex. Certainly the safest.

Let them ignore him. Let the shadows sate themselves on run-of-the-mill constructs. All he wanted, all he could do, was to run run run.

There. Ahead. A Hydra with arms and five burning red eyes. Gate Lord? Close enough, because it was floating beside another whirling gate of limitless possibilities. Maybe one of those possibilities was escape.

PURPOSE had changed.

The Hydra ushered him on with ill-fitting humanisms, simulated from a long-dead civilization he only ever dreamed of. The gate grew, opened up like a stretching maw and then...

It swallowed him whole.


The portal roared behind him and, as sharply as a lashing whip, snapped shut behind his back. Wind howled. His boots scrabbled over rough rock, and then... grass crunched underfoot. Grass. Actual grass, red as dried blood. And trees! Ivory-bark trees topped with orange sacs of blooming bioluminescence. Sparkling reeds flowering with wild iridescent grain. A creek of crystal-clear water. It was paradise - that it was alien and wrong didn't sway his opinion in the slightest.

Therin was, once again, utterly astounded by his good fortune. He hissed into his helmet's rebreather, choking off the cheer before it could manifest. He looked around to check for foes, and was startled by all he saw. The colours were wrong - oh so wrong - but they were real plants! LIVING PLANTS!

Then he heard it. Buzzing. Singing. Nothing human. Nothing remotely close - no speech patterns, no whispers, no discordant screaming. It was... no, not birdsong, but it was animal-song!

Tears dripped down his face. Therin fell to his hands and knees, no longer capable of holding himself up. He'd been running for so long. Years. Centuries.

An eternity.

A part of him whispered and you're still running, but he forced it from his mind. Ignorance was, as they said, bliss.

Alas, the bliss and wonder was short-lived. Tales of false-life worlds barreled through his mind - of simulated farces thought up by ancient newborn Vex minds and twisted orchards of such extreme brutality and cruelty they could only exist in the custom-built throne worlds of Ascendant monsters. Either could have been the work of War, as clever as Her Sister and just as playful.

His momentary high spirits effectively doused, Therin gave into instinct and checked himself for wounds and equipment. He couldn't see any damage in his suit, and his helmet's speakers weren't blaring klaxons into his ears, so... he was still in one piece. Lucky, that.

His cannon was missing. A spike of alarm ran up his neck. Had he-?! Wait, no... no, he remembered dropping it. Dropping himself with it too, all in an attempt to avoid a thrown cleaver. And then, to top it all off, dropping the fiend responsible with a fan of flaming knives. A pity, really. It had been a solid piece of hardware.

At least he had his...

Therin reached over his shoulder. He heaved a sigh of pure relief when his fingers touched cold metal. He pulled the rifle over and checked its mag: almost full.

"Glimmer?" he quietly asked.

"Couple of batteries' worth. Not enough to waste willy-nilly. So, uh... conserve your ammo."

Therin nodded, suddenly exhausted. He looked around, again - hoping for a familiar face, someone, anyone, and there was no one in sight. Not a single soul he knew. Not a single soul - at all. The sheer alien-ness of his surroundings was both reassuring and unnerving. There was life. Even if that life couldn't have been farther from what he knew even if it wanted to be, it was still life. Still an uneasy comfort.

He wondered if there were people about. Sapients of any kind - not just those he knew. It was probably a stretch to presume the others had crashed through before him; there had been an explosion, a wink of unnatural light, the hiss of Vex data compromised by Dark will, and.. and...

Where was everyone else?

Where were they?

"Air's clean," Smudge quietly informed him.

"Really?" Therin's eyes widened; oh, he was so quick to focus on something else, something other than the sinking feeling that maybe, possibly, he was the only one - the only one to get through, to escape, to live.

"I think so."

"What, you're not sure?"

"Lots of variables to account for. Want to try it out?"

Therin looked around him for the umpteenth time. He was nervous. Lonely. Afraid. "If there's... Hive near, this rez will draw eyes."

"Big risk for something small."

"... That a dare?" Therin straightened. He reached up and unclipped his helmet before he could be talked out of it. Air - blessedly fresh and sweet and natural - flushed against his face. He sucked in great lungfuls and giggled - hysterically, nauseously, but it was mirth all the same. "So worth it!"

"Suppose it's fine, then."

"Oh, now's when you say that..."

"Hush you."

Therin grinned, tears of joy still streaming down his cheeks, and checked over his rifle on instinct. The firearm's black frame and gold trim was scratched up but still a thing of beauty. He adjusted the sight's lock on a whim, then reverted it back the way it had been before. His hands roamed all over it, tinkering here and there uselessly. After a couple of minutes, Therin stopped, closed his eyes and shuddered. "We're out."

"Maybe."

"The others... do... do we have a beacon of some kind? A radio? Wait - our radio?!"

"I still have it," Smudge assured him.

"Good, good..." Therin nodded to himself, sighing with half-hearted relief. "... Well, what now?"

"Scout this place out. If the others are around to hear it, it wouldn't do to plant a distress beacon only to find out we're sitting on a nest."

"Fair." Therin got to his feet and shaded his eyes. The world's sun was a bright, pale, shining thing, and it cast over him the gentle embrace of a warm summer heat. He missed summers - the Earth kind, at least. "This place must have an ozone layer or some equivalent."

"Why, because you aren't flaking?"

"Yep." His fingers idly traced shapes in the sky. "Look: high clouds, sparsely packed. Good temperate weather. Liquid water. Breathable air."

"This place is alive," Smudge observed.

Therin breathed out his nose, slow and shallowly. "Yeah. Wonder how far that goes..."

"Certainly sounds like there's animals about. Small ones. Or maybe big ones who sound small."

"Don't," Therin muttered warningly.

Smudge made a curious sound. "Scared?"

"Yes." He didn't even try to hide it.

"Me too... but we'll be fine. The death-machines wouldn't send us here to die."

"Oh, I wish I had your confidence. This could all be some big experiment of theirs."

"They're desperate too."

"A big desperate experiment."

"Maybe. But we won't know it until after we've had ourselves a looksee."

"Suppose so." Therin slid his helmet on and pulled his hood up over it. "Why not?"


Wide-eyed with fear and grinning with excitement, Therin Vai, former Coyote and famed Cosmodrome navigator, explored his surroundings with a soldier's caution and a child's wonder. His fingers - gloved and secured in latticed hadronic fieldweave - brushed over a field's worth of glittering wheat. Soft, crystallized nectar crumbled and fell away from the summit of the stalks with even the barest of touches. The grain was soft, dusty, and chock full of a strange sort of low bioluminescence.

There were birds, too. Or bug-birds, rather. Fat little things, tending to fungal-flowers the size of his head. Like great hairless bumblebees, as ugly as houseflies and infinitely more bearable. One of them buzzed around his helmet, but finding no nectar it zoomed off for greener - redder? - pastures.

There was life by the gurgling stream too. It came to him in the form of a cat-sized creature waiting by the water's edge of the opposite bank - if a cat had the tail of a whip-scorpion and the rending arms of a praying mantis, coupled with the grisly jaws of a feral Eliksni poacher. It clicked its measly murder-mandibles at him in animalistic affront, as if to say Oi! Spot taken! Jog on!

Therin couldn't say no to that. As intrigued as he was with watching the cat/mantis/whip-scorpion catch the native equivalent of freshwater fish - some shrimpy little tadpole bugs - there was still so much to see. Besides, he was a most courteous gentleman at heart; when presented with so politely worded a request, how could he ever refuse?

He wandered further downstream. The air was full of a clicking sort of chirp. Again, he would have likened it to birdsong, but no, too discordant. More... insect-racket.

"I like this place," Therin acclaimed with honest appreciation - one undercut with a faint current of unease. He wasn't used to being on his own like this. Even being the roamer that he was, he'd always rolled with a gang. Always. "I like how it looks and I like how it sounds." There were no Blights from what he could tell, no towering growths of whispering chitin, no dragon bones. Not even a scrap of Vex-ified metal. It seemed to him to be nothing short of a hidden paradise. "Incredible."

"Let's not lose focus."

"Right. Let's give it a few days. Can we, uh, start preliminary scans?"

"We can certainly try."

"I'll mark a perimeter." Therin's gaze caught on one of the trees. "Might pick some fruit..."

"You think that's fruit?"

"Isn't it?"

"I don't know."

"Then I best investigate."

"If it melts you down, I'm going to say I told you so."

Therin paused, weighing the pros and cons of FRUIT and LIQUIDIZATION. He resumed his approach not a moment later, already caught up in his false confidence. "Sounds fair to me."

From out of the aether - or transmat, depending on worldly and unworldly views - a bird, black of feather and artificial of intelligence, came into being. The false-avian, a surviving Crow-Drone missing more than a few synthetic feathers, stretched its wings and gently said to Therin, "I shall map your new home."

Therin kept his silence, for while he was bubbling with renewed hope he also knew the cost of making such bold claims. Pain and disappointment oft followed those same overconfident boasts, and sorrow with them. Therin was afraid of the latter most of all. Sorrow was a cursed term - in every manner of the word. The Crow took to the air, cawed once, and fled his sight altogether. With it went the pressing weight of duty, and left with no more than his over-cautious inquisitiveness he set about investigating his tree.

The bark was as white as bone and possessed a texture of the same. Therin rested his hand against the trunk, hoping more than anything that it wouldn't eat him. No jaws sprang forth. No teeth closed in. Satisfied, he grasped for a branch and clambered up the alien plant with springy strength and ceaseless vigour. The bone-tree stolidly held his weight. As he climbed, Therin craned his head around and studied the world from up high.

The bone-tree forests carried on forever, tipped with orange orbs. The only breakage in the eternal expanse of alien vegetation was to the east, where a dark sea churned and boiled, and to the south, where a mountain shaped like a broken fang jutted up and pierced the tender blue flesh of the sky above. The fruit at the top of the canopy, if it was fruit at all, were of a tough-skinned variety. It took some tugging to break one free of its branch. Only when he had three of the solid growths clutched under one arm did he vault down from the bone-tree. Therin landed with a flourish, for the benefit of a totally enraptured - and utterly nonexistent - audience.

"Show off."

Therin grinned cheekily. "Like that?"

Smudge laughed. "Come on, hero. Let's see about that fruit. This is so exciting! New life!"

A short stroll later, he was back where he started. Therin sat down on the red grass, cross-legged, and arrayed all three maybe-fruits on the ground in front of him. At a glance, they seemed to be formed of some sort of orange gel, what with their translucent skins and juicy insides, but there were tiny darker shapes within.

Smudge hummed. "Okay, um... To call them fruit would mean there's seeds in it. I'm not picking up on any seeds."

"Are you sure? There's little... bits in there." Therin poked the middle orange-thingy.

"'Bits'. Not seeds," Smudge gently corrected him. "I don't think those trees are angiosperms. They're more like a particularly resilient form of fungus."

"A giant mushroom?"

"Not all fungi are-"

"I know, I know." Therin rolled his eyes. "I'm just having you on."

"Well, they aren't fungi either. That's just the closest analogy I can get to. Think... maybe if there was this missing link between the fungi and animal kingdoms. That's what you're looking at."

"How'd you get that?"

"Look inside. Proto-veins and pseudo-organs. Even a couple of semi-advanced nerve-centres... It's less a fruit and more a brain. One designed to catch sunlight."

"... I think I've lost my appetite."

Smudge chortled. "Ah, c'mon, give it a try! For science."

"Science can feck off. Nah, I'm grand." Therin stood up. "Give me a ration bar."

A small nutrient brick manifested in his open hand. He ripped off the wrapping and let it fall in his haste. It was degradable anyways - not like his presence would leave any lasting damage. Besides the lobotomized bone-tree, that was.

Therin removed his Nighthawk helm and stuffed his face with the tasteless snack. It was as detestable as he remembered; he washed it down with a chug of his canteen. The water was as bad as the bar - that was to say, stale and beyond reproach. Used to be he liked cometary ice-water. At least when it had ice; the palatable cold had long since melted away in the recesses of his pack.

He missed ramen shops. Missed the little diners at the corner of the street, few blocks down from his apartment. Missed homecooked meals. Nadiya could make a deadly fajita. And Micah's iced pastries? Works of culinary art, those.

He missed his Fireteam.

"We'll be with the others again." Smudge assured him "Soon."

"How soon?" Therin whispered. "We've been running so long."

"As soon as we find a suitable place to drop a beacon. We'll be together again, on a new world. Somewhere... better."

"Anywhere's better than Sol. Hell, I'd have taken a dusty lifeless moon over that." He nudged the brain-fruit away with the toe of his boot. Surely something else would come along and eat it. Something less picky than him. Circle of life and all that. With a thoughtful, mournful sigh, Therin turned away and strolled off.

His cloak was heavy. It was weatherproof, naturally, so no soot or water dirtied it or held it down, but that didn't account for the weight of symbolism. And symbolism, Therin knew with a grim sort of certainty, was made to strangle. For however long he dallied about, however long he didn't explore this new alien world, it was time everyone else might not have had.

Maybe they needed him.

Maybe they...

No, they were all in the same place, right? There had been an explosion, yeah, but... He hoped the Vex were kind enough to have accounted for that, merciless machines that they were. It was one thing to give him time to sate his curiosities on his lonesome, quite another to give him forever. He needed his people. What was he without them? What if the problem lay with him, being a Lightbearer and all? For all their planet-spanning networks, all their pooled radiolaria-thoughts, they just couldn't compute him or his kind. Even the most foolproof of causal equations buckled beneath strain of the incalculable.

Which made his new reality - new world, no Hive, no Scorn, no Darkspurs - so much less comforting.

What about Grayris? It had been a risk for her, to try and stem the flow of blighted energy from catching hold of their trail, following them to their next destination, and he... well, he wasn't entirely sure the risk was warranted. Risky was a double-edged sword; Therein usually liked risky. Risky meant reward. And that was still somewhat the case. A second chance! But the risks... oh the risks. And Grayris! She fought, she fought, but it was War, she couldn't-! … No. Not that. Couldn't even think about that; she was alive, she had to be!

"Evening's on its way."

Therin looked about. He thought it over, gave their predicament and drained, frazzled status into consideration and decided, "We'll ride the night out here and move in the morning."

"You're the boss."

Damn right.


Evening fell. Therin bundled his Europan Eventide sleeping bag against the bough of the very same bone-tree he'd desecrated. He'd marked it by harvesting its not-fruit, and found comfort in the simple causality of the action. Causality was good, as far as he was concerned. Boring causality was predictable. Something he could count on.

As the sun's persistent rays of light died away, so too did the music of life. Alien invertebrates scurried away to their burrows and nests to ride out the dark and all it brought it with it. Taking it as an ill omen, Therin nestled into his sleeping back with his rifle in his hands, knife halfway out of its sheath, and one eye open. It was well worth the loss of sleep; watching the foreign stars twinkle to life gave him a long sought after peace. A contentment, of sorts. Fulfillment? No. Not quite so far. Not yet.

A cry shot through the air. It was distant and muted, but it was there. Therin tensed, pulling his Symmetry closer. It was just some kind of animal, he told himself. People didn't yowl like that. Just an alien jackal or something. Nothing to worry about.

Therin still worried.

Especially when other yowls joined in. A soft whisper of wingbeats passed overhead, blanketing the stars. Nothing hit him. Nothing so much as swooped down for a closer look, but something was up there, in the air.

Searching.

Hunting.

Hungry.


AN: Huge thanks to Nomad Blue for going through and editing this!