27th of November, 3754
Europa, Jovian space
Europa was cold.
It nipped at his shell with teeth colder than cold, with razor-sharp blades of flaking ice and buffeted his flight with the heavy weight of falling snow. Radiation scoured the surface, burned everything in a way invisible to the eye. Flaming debris still rained down; the Morning Star's remains still pummeled at the moon below. It was inhospitable - even, almost, to him.
Odys hated it. Hated Europa more than he ever expected. With a vehemence that did not fit. It didn't matter; the ship that had brought him there had already run back to the inner system, supply run over and done with. He didn't know how he'd catch his next ride. Ask Variks, maybe. Maybe. He didn't know what the scribe would do if he caught him, but... yeah, Variks was his best hope if he wanted an early trip back home.
He didn't want an early trip.
Well, maybe he did, but he'd come here with a purpose. The Eventide colony was another ruin full of death. Full of dead humans and dead Exos. It hadn't been possible to visit when the Reef owned it as an extraneous territory, but now...
Now Odys could see if his Guardian was here, hidden among the scorched ruins and frozen bones.
There were Exos everywhere. Many were earlier models, less personalized physical traits. All were dead. Sometimes the ice had snuck into their frames if they had been left outside, skewering them through and through. Others were sprawled in the laboratories and other facilities of Eventide. Just left there. Lying about. Dead.
Why hadn't anyone recovered their remains? The Exo-Vex war, as he understood, had occurred before the Collapse. Shortly, maybe, but definitely before. There was time for people to comb through it all, put the dead to rest. But they hadn't. Were the Vex really that frightening?
Yes, something within him said. Yes they are.
To causal mortals, maybe. The Vex stalked the snowbanks and corridors of both Eventide and Riis-Reborn, hunting. House Salvation met them with fierce battlecries and Arc-crackle bite. A war was being fought below the radiation-shelters. One where Eliksni bearing terrible gifts waged a glorious, hopeless crusade against the ceaseless flood of machines. It frightened Odys - the sheer savagery of it. Vex were cold, ruthless. When they put their minds to it, the Eliksni could be worse.
Neither were on friendly terms with himself. Sometimes the Vex shot for him - but they couldn't account for his paracausal state and often missed or lost track of him altogether. The Eliksni were more dogged in that respect. They hunted him as the Vex hunted them. Riis-Reborn quickly became a no-go zone. Odys doubted he'd find any prospective remains in there anyways. He shook off the packs of murderous Vandals and ambitious Captains, and left Salvation to their ill-fated war of attrition. There was still plenty more moon to go.
The Eventide ruins had nothing for him. Plenty of bodies, sure, but no spark worth the trouble of kindling. Asterion Abyss was desolate and empty, and Cadmus Ridge was almost too dangerous to brave. Even the Exoscience sector and Perdition laboratories were too treacherous to attempt. Fallen occupied one, Vex the other.
Odys found himself wandering in the shadows of Riis-Reborn once more. Braving the fringes of the old human colony. Seeking out anything, anything, pertaining to Exo production. He hoped his Guardian would be an Exo. He wanted the resilience to fall back on. And, if for nothing else, to avoid the pain of having to revive a vulnerable human over and over again amidst the near-constant Europan blizzards.
There was a place simply called Restricted on VanNet systems. Little ways north of the Eventide colony. There was a brief spell of tundra in the way, with the occasional Pike gang riding through, but Odys found relatively safe passage by flitting between the fissures between the towers of ice. He didn't dare look down, though. Tried not to think of the frigid oceans miles and miles under, quite possibly inhabited by ancient leviathan intelligences. Like that... thing on Titan.
Fish, he realized, scared him.
It was their eyes! Either big and googly or dead black. And their gills! Weird way to breathe. Their quiet way of going about living. Their simple mercilessness. Crabs were the worst of the lot; they scared him silly, what with their big armoured spider-like legs and rending claws. Their pitiless eyes and squat shelled bodies. Just... too much for him. Too many limbs to keep track of, and each one looked like some horrifying weapon.
They tasted nice, though. Or so he'd heard. Odys wondered what it would be like to eat. The entire concept was a strange one, but he'd seen humans do it enough that it'd become semi-normal. Ingesting foreign material to provide energy to a biological body. Or simply for the pleasure of it, as Exos so spectacularly proved.
The place marked Desolation finally came to a stop - and the sparking, crumbling remains of Restricted's famed crash sight loomed overhead. Odys flew up and crept towards the place, but at a distance it looked abandoned. The first thing he saw was the battlefield - and then the body in the centre, some abomination of flesh and machine merged together as one. Odys looked long enough to make sure yes, yes, the bogeyman is dead, he's dead, he's not going to get up and grab me and quickly looked away.
He flew past to reach the wreckage of the Morning Star. It felt wrong to keep the monster unwatched, but neither could he look at it a second longer. It was a nightmare realized, even dead. A monster to its core.
But that fine. As Odys moved deeper into the crash site, he almost forgot about the murderer left behind. He could focus on other things with it out of sight. Like-
Like that Exo arm, peeking out from beneath a collapsed wall. White plating, black components. Hand most ripped off. Purple-white fluid frozen around it in a puddle; Alkahest and a couple of other choice mechanical lubricants. Probably a nearly-complete Exo model, abandoned in the Collapse and brought down with the rest of the orbital station. Was there anyone in there, anyways?
There must have been - because Odys started to feel something. It was... a sensation he knew, and yet didn't. From before the time he was aware of anything at all; from when... when he was part of a greater whole. Whatever this was, it was only a fraction, a sliver, a broken little thing that couldn't compare, but...
It was there.
It was a spark.
And it may as well have been a blindingly bright beacon of hope, because Odys yipped and laughed and flew in circles in his best approximation of those giddy little dances the City's children did when they received good news.
"I've found you!" he giggled. "I've finally found you!"
His shell expanded. His Light flushed out, hoping, hoping, hoping...
A connection was made.
The link held strong.
A neural pathway, weak opened up between them.
Odys forced more Light into it, as much as he dared, as much as he could with all the heavy weight of Darkness hanging in the air around them.
The collapsed wall shuddered. His Guardian - his Guardian! - shoved it off with a strength he could scarcely believe and stood up.
Odys's cheer disappeared in an instant.
...
...
What?
His Guardian blinked at him with pink optics. Confused. Bewildered. Even... afraid.
"Ve-," it started to say, almost whimpering out the word. "V-velask?"