Chapter 1
There were laws in Winter declared for the sake of survival. Even without a Kell, a Prime Servitor, or an Archon, those laws were to be held onto with such conviction that they would appear to be the only laws that mattered. For Grayris, that was more than true. Ever since Draksis fell, she held onto those laws like a lifeline. Those laws had kept her alive where all else failed.
The first law: keep your crew close. If a Ketch is Kin, then a crew is family.
The second law: never brave the wilderness alone. A single call for help will go unheard if no one is around to hear it.
And she had failed both of them. Her crew were gone: killed by shadows. Without her crew, she was on her own with nothing more than the armour on her back, the swords at her hips, and the shrapnel launcher in her claws. The Devils might have said 'a warrior needs nothing else,' but that was on Earth. Venus was different. The only thing that mattered on Venus was numbers. And she didn't have the numbers.
Winter was dying. Skolaskel and the Guardians had gutted her house with war. And what came after Winter? Grayris didn't know. She didn't think she wanted find out. A life without a banner was no life at all.
Then why continue to fight?
She didn't know the answer to that either.
The Shattered Coast was familiar to her. A good place to hunt. Vex and Lightmongers both roamed the abandoned ruins in search of hidden secrets. Many a construct had fallen to her blade. Many an Earthborn thief burned before her launcher.
Now she was the hunted, fleeing from shadows with rending claws and screaming eyes. She was faster than they were, and she knew this land, but they were too numerous to escape with any ease and she imagined they knew that too. After all, some of those shadows used to be part of her crew.
She leapt onto a rusted out human vehicle. She didn't care for the loud, metallic crunch that echoed throughout the street, but she needed a vantage point. Grayris looked behind her. Nothing close enough, but alien eyes peeked out from cracked windows like hungry stars. The Skiff, her Skiff, was past them, but she didn't dare try it.
Forward was the rocky headlands. To her left was the briny, boiling sea. The her right was a city full of Vex and death.
The headlands sounded like her best option. There was a landing zone there; maybe she could steal a ship.
An unearthly howl split the air. Grayris tensed. Not a panther. Not a batadactyl. Not even a machine. It was death-come-calling, wearing the twitching form of a Hive Knight.
Grayris stared at it from her perch on the crushed car. It stared back - at least until flames billowed from its eldritch eye. She cursed and jumped away, landing heavily on the cracked road. A sword so sharp that it sliced through reality itself came for her head. She rolled away, drew her own blade, and sank it into the Knight's glowing eye. It screamed, again, and dissipated into particles of decaying Darkness.
That was enough. She had stuck around too long. Grayris offered the horde of hungry, hungry shadows a final burning glare, and ran.
Running solved nothing. The shadows weren't fast, but their reach was everywhere. And they wanted her. All fleeing did was burn through her ether reserves. She was low. Too low. The last time she'd ingested the life-sustaining substance in any satisfactory quantity was before Skolas. She'd made do since then, but now all her options were as dust in the wind.
Where were the ships? Where were the Winter Skiffs, Wolf Skiffs, and human-Guardian ships?
A Cabal Centurion wreathed in the filthy Hive magic came at her with fist and slug rifle. She crushed his glowing helm beneath her foot. His compatriot, a Psion who wouldn't stop SPLITTING took his turn. Grayris swore as shadowed microrockets bounced off her Arc shield. It took her precious seconds to destroy the multiplying pest with carefully judged shrapnel fire.
She hated the haunted puppets. Anger overrode fear. Her blood boiled and her ether ran cold. Grayris let loose a bellowing roar and swiveled to face her next opponent.
It was an Ogre. A hulking, ugly thing. The shadows had done little for its appearance. It moaned pitifully as it lumbered ever onward, headed straight for her. Grayris pulled out her blades and went about putting the poor thing down. It gave a mighty struggle, but ingrained pain slowed it and made it clumsy. Killing it was nothing short of a mercy. That's what she told herself as she planted her swords in its neck. More mercy than any Hive deserved.
In truth, all she wanted was to take as many of them down with her as she possibly could.
A teleporting Thrall leapt for her from behind a rock. She grabbed its head and smashed it against the rocky ground. It fell apart. A shadowed Hobgoblin fired at her from half a rikha away. The screaming Void beam grazed the side of her helmet. Grayris dove behind the Thrall's rock and waited. Another shot slammed against her cover. And, a few seconds later, another.
The shadow beasts weren't very intelligent. And this one had to pause between shots, which gave her an opening.
The force of the fourth reverberated through the rock and marked the moment Grayris took action. She seized the opportunity and scrambled away to another obstacle, larger and farther from the cursed Vex construct. It wasn't much of an improvement, but it was still one step closer to safety.
Even if she had little idea where to go on from there.
Her eyes roved the deadened headland. Her heads-up display found nothing of note. It was devoid of... there! A trail of superheated air left by a Skiff. She followed it, but it disappeared somewhere north of her position. Winter turf.
Wolf turf now, she grimly reminded herself. The Wolves were no friends. Not to her.
Even if she wanted to chase the Skiff down, there was the matter of the Hobgoblin. Her rock was the only thing keeping her alive. Without it, the construct's Line Rifle would lance right through her. And there were no more barriers to cower behind.
Cower. She was cowering. The shame of it gave rise to a wave of white-hot rage. Was she a quivering drekh or a mighty noble of a Great House of Riis?
Grayris clutched her shrapnel launcher close. It was a powerful weapon, but it suffered at long range. It was designed to cow and break enemy formations, not eliminate foes from entire rikhas away. She cursed under her breath. A Minotaur or even another Hive Ogre would have been preferable to the fragile Hobgoblin. An open brawl would have been honest and fair. This wasn't fair.
In the end, she came to the conclusion that she had two options left. Attack or run. Both of them would get her shot. One of them was certain to kill her. She pushed her anger aside and took charge with ice-cold rationale. The Hobgoblin had chosen an easily-defensible position on the ridge. Fleeing was her only chance of getting out alive.
Grayris dropped one hand to her teleporter. It wasn't anywhere close to Vex-quality, but it suited her purposes just fine. The alternative was to wait for the rest of the horde to catch up.
The ninth Line Rifle round slammed into the other side of her boulder. Grayris leapt away and raced away as fast as she was able to. She could feel the shadow glaring at her with its hateful eye. It promised nothing less than total destruction.
She counted. One... Two... Three... Four!
She activated her teleporter. The device grasped her every atom and forcibly shuttered her to the left. Not a split second later, the Hobgoblin's beam pierced the rock upon which she'd been standing.
One... Two... Three... Four!
She teleported again, just in time. Her teleporter bleeped. It was spent. Her heart beat uncontrollably fast.
One... Two... Three... Four!
She jumped to the right. The beam scarcely missed her helmet by inches.
One... Two... Three... Four!
She rushed across the ground on all six limbs.
She didn't hear a shot. Grayris's mind whirled. She swore and threw a snarl over her shoulder. Smart psesiskar!
The Void beam shattered her overshield. She stumbled and almost collapsed as the wild Arc energy ran its course through her, making her limbs twitch involuntarily.
There was no strategy after that. She bolted away in a wild winding run. She glimpsed a canyon ahead, vaguely familiar, but it was still so far. She had-
Pain, sudden and unrelenting, surged up from her side. This time Grayris did fall - and into a heap. She pressed her fangs together and hissed out a shriek. In the small part of her mind that wasn't dominated by pain, she knew what had happened. The Hobgoblin had finally found its mark.
She couldn't feel one of her arms. It reminded her of the distant memory of docking pain, but a hundred times worse if only for the searing burn of Void. Her vision swam.
She had to get up. She had to keep running. Grayris pulled her mandibles against her jaw and forced herself to move. The pain only intensified, yet she persevered.
Two... Three... Fou-
She ducked. A beam twanged right overhead. She barely withheld a gasp. It had come far too close for comfort.
Her sight snagged on something. She squinted past the red veil thrown over her vision. Something bright... and blue.
Wire rifle.
Grayris threw herself onto the ground. The familiar shriek of an Arc round seared past. A nightmarish scream split the air, then nothing.
No. Not nothing. Shouts - in Eliksni! And the hum of Skiffs readying for flight! She almost shouted for joy; the Great Machine was smiling upon her.
More screams came from far behind. The other shadows were on their way. Her blood coolled and her ether frosted.
"Iirsoveks!" She bitterly swore, the giddiness of relief little more than a discarded memory. Grayris picked herself up - not without some difficulty - and trudged forward. She waited for the Arc bite that would end her life. None came.
The shockshooter stood a rikha away. Though she couldn't discern the colour of their cloaks, their raised arms were impossible to miss. A gesture of welcoming. They must have assumed her to be one of their own. Foolish. And to her advantage.
They, and presumably the Skiffs they hailed from, were far, but not impossibly so.
Grayris started marching. She cringed as pain lanced up her side. Only with the Hobgoblin dead did she dare to look down. She almost wished she hadn't. Her flank was painted with ash and blood. Her lower right arm hung uselessly at her side, tendons severed. It was bad. But not fatal. She could survive it.
All she needed was ether. And a Skiff to escape from the shadows. She glanced back to the ridge. If it was a Wolf, she had more kills to commit. If Winter...
Winter is gone.
Grayris limped onwards. She hardened her heart. Her blood roared with fading battle fury and her side twinged with pain. Every movement jostled the wound, dragging the sting to new heights.
Winter was gone, but she reckoned it was better to brave whatever danger lay ahead than wait for the shadows to take her. She marched, wincing with every step and cursing the Hive, the Wolves, and the humans all at once.
AN: Am I insane for doing three fics at once? Quite possibly. Is it advisable? Probably not. Am I going to care about that? Nope.
So here's... this. I have a tendency towards Crossovers, because a story that marries together two different universes seamlessly is nothing short of a gem and no one can convince me of otherwise. Not this, though. This is a straight Destiny fic - and Eliksni centred. Mostly. I'm doing here what I always like to do, taking a minor side character and making them not-so-minor.
Grayris was a Taken Baroness we hunted down during the Taken War for Petra. Nothing known about her other than a single flavour-text on the bounty. So... uh, mine.
PS: I like Eliksni fics, and I like writing about the awesome aliens, but I was inspired (and hooked) by Intrepid Dream's excellent Diplomatic Ties to do one centered solely on an Eliksni. She tells the story in such a fantastic way that I'm just left yearning for the next chapter every single time it gets an update. I highly advise taking a look at that. It's a wonderful read. *Chef's kiss*