The corridor was dark, the blackness that creeped along the walls and ceiling extending seemingly infinitely forwards. Purple-ish vines grew from small cracks in the metal ceiling, some sprouting small bulbs bearing a faint yellow glow, the only source of light they had. Occasionally, the faint chirp of a bug rang out somewhere in the distance, beyond sight.
"Ah, fuck!" Gillion hissed, snapping his hand away from a growth on the wall. It shifted slightly, one of the previously brown thorns now tipped red. He rubbed his hand, shifting the formerly white bandages that wrapped around his knuckles. The man frowned. There wasn't much bandaging - or any medical supplies - left, and he couldn't keep dirtying and swapping it out like this. The spot of red amongst the white expanded, and he winced. Going to have to keep these on a little longer.
Monty had decided to set up base on his shoulder, occasionally chirping or bouncing around, surprisingly light for his size. Right now, he was busy feasting on some kind of caterpillar, flapping his wings when his personal ride became too bumpy. For whatever reason, the bird had decided to stay with Gillion, never straying too far or for long. He, at least Gillion assumed it was a 'he', he hadn't checked, would occasionally fly out of sight, before quickly returning with a critter in clutch.
How the bird knew where Gillion was, or why he kept returning, the man did not know. Stranger still, the bird seemed to have learnt that he was called Monty, and would perk up or come flying back whenever Gillion called his name.
As for the Elite, she had taken the lead, marching forward through the overhanging foliage. At some point, the downwards slope that the corridor followed had ended, and they had begun travelling on even ground. A thin layer of water and soil had gathered on the floor, probably due to the rain and surrounding plants, so every step was punctuated with a loud slosh that reverberated across the walls. When they finally stopped descending she began running her hand across the walls, as if searching for something. This would go on for a while, until she'd sigh, apparently not finding what she was looking for. The pilot did debate, for a moment, asking her what exactly she was trying to find, but ultimately decided against it. He did, however, try to mimic her. The result was wet, red, and quite painful.
"These ruins are strange." The Elite spoke for the first time since they'd entered this place. "They are unmistakably relics of the Great Journey, and yet these walls seem abandoned and in disrepair."
Gillion stopped to push a particularly dense batch of vines aside, shivering when some eight-legged horror scuttled between them. "I hope they're abandoned. It feels like everything on this island is either messing with us or trying to kill us." He sharply stepped away when it hissed at him. "Even if there's something in here, I doubt it'd care enough to clean up."
She turned her head just enough so that one of her reptilian eyes peered at him.. "Relics of the Great Journey do not go in disrepair, even if they become absent of care. Though I have not been present in as many holy relics as I wish, I can remember their vivid glow nonetheless." Sidestepping a glowing bulb, she made a sort of soft sigh. "Though this place bears resemblance to a holy site, I am uncertain if it is one."
Gillion followed closely behind her, slipping past greenery she'd pushed aside, ducking when the same green bulb shook at him. "Well, I've personally never been to any of these ruins, but..." He hesitated for a moment, unsure if he should say what he was about to say. Gillion looked up at the elite, still wary of anything under his feet, and found her looking back at him.
"Perhaps you are unworthy of commenting on them, then. The Great Journey is not open to any wandering being, and the relics let only those guided by it enter." She snorted, flexing her mandibles. Maybe calling it a 'ruin' wasn't the best idea.
Gillion remained silent for a moment. They were probably sticking together, for better or for worse, and the hostilities between them had died down. She was amicable enough given who they were to each other and what they should have been doing by now. A totem representing all of the murder and death that the Covenant caused, but also a being that walked before him and acted as a ward between him and the rest of a hostile unknown. Were she truly like the rest of them, he thought, she would have long gutted him. Maybe she was simply waiting for when she no longer needed him, or for when another pair of hands was necessary.
In a way, he was the same, right? He would have preferred any one of the men from the crash in place of her, and he was sure she would rather take another Covvie than him.
Or maybe none of that was true, and he had absolutely no idea what she was thinking. Still, the rest of the Covvies were fucking murderers. If she was like them, then he'd only be proven right.
"But I'm here, am I not? Inside, right behind you. Chosen and let through just as you've been."
"Then you must have committed a great enough deed to cleanse the heresy your kind bears." She flatly retorted.
"I've only defended my home from your kind. I'm no war hero or storyteller, and I sure as hell ain't a genius. You think I'm some kind of exception chosen to help you do whatever it is you think you need to do to walk some shiny path when you die?"
She was staring at him, mute, but listening.
"When, if, you do get there, and it turns out that all of it was for nothing, what then? Will you– "
She stopped ahead of him, one of her hands stuck halfway through the motion of tearing down a green vine in the way. Gillion bumped into her, taking a step back, his head craning upwards. Gentle taps from talons walking on metal rang out somewhere in the distance, but Gillion couldn't focus on them.
"I will not."
…
"We must push on."
At some point, though he couldn't exactly say when, the walls began clearing from the overgrown fauna, and the cracks that permeated the surrounding metal became steadily less frequent. Eventually all that was left were strange metallic columns lining engraved, now noticeably wider and taller, walls; the only remnants of alien flora being an odd purple moss that lined the corners and crevices of more distant corners of the corridor.
The shift was sudden, and while it made moving forward far easier, Gillion also briefly wondered what exactly made the plants not spread further in.
"It's worrying how little the growth has stuck to these walls. There must be something here that pushes it back." The Elite looked around.
"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing." He brought a hand up to Monty, much too busy with grooming himself and sorting out loose feathers to pay attention to anything else. "But this fellow seems fine, and if there is anything too dangerous here he'd probably be the first to tell us."
"Perhaps. I've never seen your kind tame creatures." She remarked.
Monty hopped down from Gillion's shoulder, landing with a sporadic flap of wings. He hopped over to a nearby patch of moss, pecking at it. Probably looking for food.
"I wouldn't really call it taming. The little guy just started following me around." He pulled out one of his arms out of the strap of his backpack, pulling out a metallic flask and taking a hefty swig. "Want some?" He stretched out the canister to her.
She inched away from it. "What is this?"
Still didn't trust him then. "Water." He wiggled the flask a little, as if that'd somehow make him more convincing.
She reached for the flask, and Gillion suddenly realised just how much bigger her hands were than his. Obviously the whole of her was a lot bigger than any of him, but he hadn't really paid attention to just how different they were, bar her being at least two or three heads taller. Actually, she was so much bigger than him that, were there anything at the end of this place that wanted to take a chunk out of him, he could probably use her as a meat shield.
And leave him alone on this bit of murder rock? Yeah, no, better not do that.
"Here."
"Huh?- Oh, right." He grabbed the flask from her outstretched hand, noticing that it was now significantly lighter, almost definitely absolutely lighter to a concerning degree. "So, you know what this place might be for?"
"Not truly. These halls, though we revere them, often hide from us their truest purpose. Most commonly a caretaker of the relic will be present, and only through them are we bestowed the purpose of these sites."
They reached the end of the hall, stopping in front of a large metallic door. Blue lights streamed through it, weakly pulsing at slow intervals. Patches of moss dotted the cold surface, growing in number closer to the floor. The thing, despite bearing several scratches, splotches of decay and odd, unnatural colours, lay flush against the wall, and the same weak pulse of light that permeated through it seemed to carry onwards and extend into the wall around it in a thin, almost circuit-like pattern. Gillion took a step toward it, and a metallic circle in the middle of it rotated, glowing more brightly for a moment. A slow screech followed, and the door split in two, stuttering open.
Monty squawked, hopping off Gillion's shoulder. The bird stared at the doors, his wings splayed outwards in some kind of odd stance. Gillion crouched "Monty?" The bird didn't react, warily staying further back. "Don't want to come, huh?"
The bird squawked again, and Gillion stood, giving up.
"It looks like it is wary." The Elite said.
"Yeah. I kinda grew attached, really don't want to leave him behind. Guess it also means we should probably be careful from here on out." Oh well.
Gillion turned around, the pitter-patter of claws growing more distant behind him. "Well, whatever this place is, it looks like it still has some power." He stepped through, following the Elite as they moved through another, this time much shorter, corridor and then up to another door. "These caretakers, have you ever talked to one of 'em?"
Stepping through it, they entered a large chamber, much larger than the one before it. Octagonal in shape, it stretched so far forward that, were it not for the several strips of familiarly blue lighting stretching across the walls, the other side of the room would be out of sight. The floor dropped slightly, a small ramp leading downwards from their current position. Panels of dirty and in some places shattered glass lined the furthest side of the room, stopping exactly at the halfway point on each side of its perimeter. The ceiling extended far upwards, bearing a large circular light that served as the end point to the centrepiece of the room. This centrepiece was a large hole in the ground, the same octagonal shape of the room simply scaled down to a much smaller size. From it rose a large column of the same blue light that was present on every surface of this place, stretching both to the ceiling and dropping further below out of sight. It held an octagonal platform, similar to the angular shape of everything else Gillion had seen so far.
Unlike everything they'd already passed through, this room was almost entirely clear of growing vines or spots of odd colouring, with only hints and traces of what was probably rust lining some of the harder to reach corners. It was as if somebody had meticulously scrubbed every inch of the hall, or kept out whatever caused the vines and the odd splotches to appear in the first place.
Gillion looked up at the elite, wincing when he saw the rows of teeth lining the four mandibles that now hung wide open.
"Well, have you?"
"...No. Someone as– lowly as I would never speak to an Oracle." It took her a moment to respond to the question, as if searching through her memories and looking at the structure were entirely independent activities that had to be performed with isolated reverence, lest she forget even the smallest part of the hall and forever lose the chance to ingrain it into her mind. He was getting better at reading her, he thought.
"I'm assuming you don't know what this place does either?"
Gillion took a slow step forward, entering the large room proper. It was colder than the previous rooms, so much so that even through his relatively thick clothing he felt a shiver run up his spine. A moment later he heard the Elite follow him inside. Her head slowly swivelled all over the place, devoting as much of her attention to scanning the beam in the centre of the room and the platform that hovered in the middle.
"Unfortunately, no." Her head never left the glowing beam of light. "The Prophets would be much more likely to discern the purpose of this room given their knowledge of the Great Journey, but I was never given such wisdom to decipher the meaning of these artefacts myself."
"So… what next?" He didn't want to rush too far ahead for fear of the possibility that he would violate some unknown rule that the Elite held or tarnish this supposed relic in some way, but this was the only way forward. Eventually, the alien glided past him, slowing down to a crawl as she approached the edge of the hole in the middle of the room. Like him, she seemed to hesitate, shifting and hovering near the edge as if the light emanating from the beam ahead prevented her from moving further.
As he approached, leaning over to peer across the edge, she snarled, her mandibles flaring, and marched further back into the room, indecisively.
"We venture further in." She suddenly said, crossing the gap between her and the platform in an awkward half-walk half-jog, landing on the hovering octagonal shape with a light thud. The platform hovered just as still as before, despite the sudden weight put upon it.
Gillion followed her, slowly stepping over the bottomless gap between the alien and solid ground. Immediately, and without any prompt from him or her, the platform began slowly descending.
Scenery changed slowly, their descent beginning with a long tube-like corridor downwards. The walls were identical to those that made up the structure they'd travelled in so far, though they were curiously absent from any of the blemishes and scratches that dotted the hall above. Both the light below them and the streams of blue that lined the walls pulsed slower now, as if something had eased the rapid pace they held before. A steady hum came from beneath the pair's legs, faintly increasing in volume with every pulse of light.
"Nervous?" Gillion made an attempt at a grin.
The Elite looked down at him. "No. Perhaps cautious, as any warrior should be."
"Ah. I see. Never heard of any warrior psyching themselves up before stepping into an elevator." He gestured with his hand in a vague, airy manner. "But that's just my experience."
"I do not see a fault in preparing for one's departure into a hall so closely tied to the Great Journey." She nodded smally, a brief frown passing her face.
The conversation fell silent after that, overtaken by the steady hum of their surroundings. The Elite seemed to falter more and more with every conversation, her words sparking bouts of insecurity. It was an odd pattern, Gillion noted, given their approaching artefacts of her belief. Her expected confidence was absent, as was the usually unreadable and war-driven expression all elites wore.
The platform stuttered in its steady descent, and both pilot and alien jumped back closer to the centre of it. She drew the Magnum from her hip, whipping her head around. Metallic walls still surrounded them, and everything seemed fine, yet Gillion noticed that the weapon never returned to her side.
Maybe he instilled that doubt within her. The Elite shuffled on her feet, a slight thud following every step. He doubted that was true. Her kind was too unrelenting and merciless to be swayed so easily. He'd heard pleas of mercy before, and they never seemed to work. No. No, it wasn't him.
All the same, her increasingly obvious unease continued. It was off-putting, and so silence remained.
A while passed before the scenery around them changed. At some point during their descent the walls simply ended, replaced with a dark expanse that stretched beyond what Gillion could see. Occasionally, lights would speckle in the distance, flickering for but a second before they extinguished. The humming quieted too, only noticeable if he strained his hearing. Regardless, the octagon lowered still.
Eventually, they slowly came to a halt. He got off first, hopping down onto a depression in the ground. He heard the Elite follow, a second later. Ahead of them was another room, smaller than the last. A wall encompassing window let Gillion peak into the same void that surrounded them before. More interesting than that, however, was a strange pillar that protruded from the middle of the small hall.
Gillion approached it, looking behind him at the Elite. She didn't say anything, so he slowly raised his hand toward it. Curiously, it was naturally the right height for his hands, a small rectangular engraving on the tilted surface facing him reaching just above his hips. The monkey in his brain dictated that he try and do something with it, fighting against the more reasonable parts of him. Behind him, the Elite still remained silent.
Looking around, Gillion confirmed that there were no other doors. The platform behind them stood perfectly still. There were no other options other than going back up to the surface. He hesitated a moment longer, and slowly placed his palm against the protruding thing.
A thin, blue light ran over his hand, as if scanning the skin pressed against it. Gillion flinched, instinctively pulling his hand away only to find it stuck. A pang of panic struck him, a cold sweat flowing up his spine. It emitted a beep, the light reaching the tips of his fingers. Of course he'd be stupid enough to just walk up to an alien thing and start probing it. The light disappeared, replaced with the sound of whirling…something.
"Hey, you have any idea what's going on?" Gillion turned around, his hand still glued to the object. His fingers were starting to feel uncomfortably tingly, like something was scratching at them.
"...No. I have never seen anyone personally interact with any of the relics." She said.
"But I thought you said this wasn't one of your relics." She wouldn't have let him touch the pillar otherwise, would she?
"I.." an uncomfortable pause followed, "I may have been wrong. These walls are absent from taint or dirt. The same light flows through them that does through those relics I have seen before." She came to his side, one of her hands slowly grabbing his wrist. "Which is why I do not… understand this."
"Well-" a sharp gasp of pain pushed out from between his clenched teeth. He pulled at his hand, feeling the Elite tense around his wrist and gently pull with him. His palm pulled away from the grey surface, relief flooding his body. He quickly flipped his hand over, a small red prick now in the middle of it. "It stabbed me."
"Be on your guard, I hear something coming." The Elite suddenly spoke up.
"Wait what-" Gillion felt his head spin as the much larger alien pulled on his arm, spinning him around and behind her. She dropped to a slight crouch, the magnum in her hand pointed directly in front of her. He steadied himself, straining his eyes into the abyss, looking for something. He couldn't see anything. "What are you doing?"
The Elite didn't acknowledge him, leaving both of them in tense silence.
This was pointless, there was nothing here. They'd made enough noise on the way down to have already attracted anything that cared for them being in here. The small wound on his palm flared, and he rubbed it with his thumb. "Look, how about we go back to-" and then he heard it.
Small, barely audible humming. Had he not focused, he wouldn't have heard it. Slowly it grew louder, and a few seconds later he could just make out a blue dot steadily floating toward them. The Elite in front of him raised the gun to it, her other hovering near her waist.
"I can never get peace around these parts. Always someone bugging me and wanting something, never a single 'how are you doing' or 'why are you so sad?'" A distant voice grew gradually louder, its owner coming into sight. It..he? A he, given by the tone of its voice, was a strange thing. It was a sphere, three of its four 'sides' open and slightly squared off. Facing them, it had a single blue sphere that seemed to act as some kind of eyeball. The thing was grey, much like the floor around them, and seemed to have the same light pulsing through the core at its inside and the eyeball on its front.
"Okay, what is it now?" The mechanical creature came to a halt in front of them, floating by unknown means.
Gillion looked ahead at the Elite, only to find her hands drooping down her sides. Her four mandibles were partially open. The magnum she'd taken from him lay on the ground, mindlessly discarded. "The Oracle…" She muttered.
"Oracle? Mhm, no, you must have mistaken me for someone else. Which is honestly quite hard in these parts, so I hope I don't offend you too hard when I say that I'm somewhat concerned!" The strange orb bobbed around, emoting through the various turns of its 'body'.
What was this thing? He'd never seen anything like it in his life, which could have been said for everything else in this place so far. It turned to him, zooming down to hover at face level. "And who might you be?"
Gillion stuttered, backing away. "I… I could ask the same of you!"
The orb twisted, mimicking a head tilt, then the blue orb eyeball on its face lit up, as if it'd just had a realisation of some variety.
"You stand before the Monitor of this Installation! Yes, yes, withhold your excitement, no need to bow. I am called-" his cheery voice dropped several octaves, becoming steady and monotone, "[Expunged] Vigilant Shine." Just like how it dropped, the cheery thing's dialogue regained its energy again. "Okay, now you."
"Uh." Gillion suddenly found himself entirely absent in the speaking department. The thing was just hovering there, one step away from presenting a handshake. Nevermind that they were in the middle of some place, stranded on some island in some ocean on some planet. It all seemed so normal that he briefly thought he was back at home, applying for his first job at some fast food place. "I'm Gillion, UNSC pilot. I fly things."
"Hmmmmmmmm." The creature spun on its axis, clearly thinking. "Okay, Gillion from UNSC, are you by chance...Human?" That last word was drawn out, as if the mechanical sphere was waiting for Gillion's answer with baited anticipation.
"I mean, yes?"
"Aha! I knew it! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it deep in my core! The blood and the weird hair and the pink skin and oh I knew you were a human! Are you here to activate the installation? It would be wonderful if you did– but also very bad! Very very bad! So don't do it. Maybe."
"Okay, Vigilant Shine–"
"Call me Shiny! All my friends do it." The orb, Shiny, shot forward and hovered right in front of his nose, the eye on his face glowing intensely.
"Alright, Shiny, where are we?" Gillion asked.
"Mmmmmmmcan't say." Shiny shook his frame sideways. Like a head, except if it was his whole body, which it was. "Not. Allowed. Prohibited!"
"By who?"
"It's curious that you ask because I also can't say. And don't ask why either, you'll be reeaal disappointed."
That was less than helpful. "Okay, what information can you give me?" Gillion crossed his arms, absently looking around for any other entrance or exit that he might have missed. These places were always so…flush. It made things hard to see.
"Well, friend, what do you want to know? You gotta be specific, see, this many years and eventually enough little knick-knacks pile up that I don't know what lies where."
The Elite came up behind Gillion, seemingly more collected. Her mandibles shifted, a rather audible swallow following. "...Oracle…"
"A nickname! Oh but we've only met, young lady. I don't even know your name! –But I do suppose it could be fine, we're friends after all, mhm, yes."
The words Shiny threw at her seemed to float past the Elite's head, her eyes transfixed on the glowing being. Curiously, Gillion noted, they seemed dilated from their usual slitted shape, if only barely.
"I must know…" she finally continued, "will I be accepted at the end of the Great Journey..?"
There was a specific yet unexpected sobriety, no, not sobriety– aimlessness that drifted through her voice. It made Gillion's eyes glue to her, and tugged at a deep, small thing in the back of his head. There was an attempt for him to scratch it, to reach out, for whatever reason, and yet he couldn't call to her.
So he didn't.
"I'm not exactly sure what this Great Journey is, friend! And, even if I did, I still don't know your name. Nothing to search for, you see." There was a clear expectation for the Elite to answer, but she didn't.
"So, Shiny, you said something about me activating this place? What did you mean by that."
The monitor zoomed above them, excitedly dancing above their heads. "Oh, yes yes yes yes~. You, Gill, can I call you Gill–? Yes, you Gill, can activate the installation. My makers passed on the Mantle to you, no?"
The first question that came to the pilot's mind was what a Mantle even was. No, back on track. "Okay, what does that mean I can do."
"Hmmmm. Do you want an exhaustive list? Because we'll be here for all of time! Ha!" The monitor made a kind of laughing noise. "Well, no, you probably don't. Humans don't live too long. Right, yes, the installation. You can activate any mechanisms within, open doors, activate elevators–" Shiny tilted his frame at the platform behind them "- and a bunch of other things. Well, most of those things. Some."
"Is one of those 'some things' a distress beacon?" Gillion was getting kind of tired of this thing.
"Yes, actually! Look at you, first guess, real lucky. One's inoperable though, and it's also the closest one!" The orb did a kind of shrug, though it was really another weird bob in the air. "I guess you'll have to go down to the lower levels of the installation, then."
Shiny zoomed over to the platform, idly flying above it. "Well come on then, follow me!"
Gillion looked over to the Elite. She was staring at something in the distant void, a flat, empty expression on her face. Gillion nudged her arm, carefully, and she faintly turned her head in his direction. A silent beckon ought to work. He nodded over to the monitor. She looked up at the orb, and then at him, slowly nodding.
Together, they stepped on the platform, the pilot handing the alien her magnum. She looked it over, giving him a silent thanks.
As the platform began moving, descending further down into more wide halls and long corridors, he turned to her.
"You've never told me what to call you." He said.
"I have not."
Shiny had floated further below, ahead of them, leaving the two of them alone.
"I guess–"
"Sela 'Ludamee"
It was alien, obviously. An odd arrangement of sounds that came together to form something oddly…pleasantly coherent. He wasn't sure what else to call it, or how to dispel the odd significance that came from knowing what this being was called. He noticed Sela stare at him, her slitted pupil focusing on him through the corner of her eye.
"Well, I guess… It's nice to meet you, Sela 'Ludamee. I'm Gillion Fletcher." And that was it. They fell back into silence.
Though he did not see, a small smile tugged at Sela's mandibles.