Jayesh flew off the starboard tip of Zavala's wing. Ikora took the port side, and together they flew in formation toward the Traveler. The Traveler, once a dusty white sphere, was now sliced with a triangular portal that extended from its north pole to its south pole. Their three jumpships looked like tiny darts against the vicious, poisonous magenta light.
At first, the Vanguard leaders had been resistant to the idea of Jayesh coming out of retirement to join them. Zavala had waxed eloquent about Jayesh's duties to his family. But Jayesh had been equally eloquent about his relationship with the Traveler and the Light, and his own venture inside the Traveler during the Red War. He argued that his presence might give them an edge over the Witness. Zavala had turned the decision over to Ikora, as warlock vanguard. Ikora, after a lecture about the risks, finally agreed.
Now they flew together to breach the portal and force a way inside the Traveler, following Crow's trail.
"This may be the last mission we ever fly together," Ikora said over the radio. The portal grew larger before them, laced with fractal patterns that shifted and flowed like a kaleidoscope.
"That's true," said Zavala, his voice heavy with the weight of what they were about to do. "If so, I'd like to say that it was an honor serving the Vanguard with you."
"Likewise," Jayesh said. "And Zavala, I hope you don't hold it against me that I washed out of Titan training."
"Jayesh Khatri, you were always a warlock," Zavala replied. "It was your own idealism that sent you to the Titans in the first place. I was hard on you to force you to reconsider."
Jayesh laughed a little, embarrassed. The portal stretched before them like a shifting sea of purple light. "Commander," he said, "just so you know, I really did want to be a Titan. I still admire them. But I just can't do the things you do, so I hope we can call it square."
Their ships hit turbulence and began to shake and bounce.
In the grainy video feed on Jayesh's control panel, Zavala smiled into the camera. "We're square, Guardian."
The portal engulfed them in purple light. Mara Sov shouted something about interference. Jayesh wrestled with his controls, but it had been a while since he'd flown in such conditions and he was out of practice. Solid objects flew past him. One grazed his wing and sent him spinning off course. "Phoenix!" Jayesh grunted.
His Ghost emergency-transmatted him out of his ship onto the nearest piece of solid-looking ground. Jayesh had a second to see his jumpship spiral by overhead before it collided with a floating cube and exploded. But the frightening thing was that the explosion froze in midair, the motion of the debris freezing in outstretched geometric lines. It was like a smaller version of his living room the previous night, his ship hardening into its final shape in midair.
Jayesh made a cry without words and spun in place, staring. He was only midway through the portal. Everywhere hung geometric blocks of half-formed matter in vivid magenta light. Further away hung pieces of land with chunks of buildings on them. Half a colony ship floated overhead. All of it had been sliced into long rectangles and cubes, everything in the process of flying apart and turning to stone.
"What is this place?" he exclaimed. "Mara Sov, are you there?"
"The Witness is resisting," Mara panted, her connection distant and grainy. "I'll hold the portal open for as long as I can. I've lost contact with the Vanguard, I think they passed through. Run, Jayesh Khatri!"
Jayesh set off on foot to try to finish his passage through the portal, running and jumping from block to block and debris to debris, flying in long warlock glides across nothing.
"Is it weird to anyone else that there's gravity here?" he panted, flying a quarter of a mile between two pieces of shattered highway. "I mean, we're technically still in orbit over Earth."
Mara Sov answered him. "You are yet in the threshold. Whatever lies between you and the Traveler's Pale Heart is a side effect of the Witness's paracausal mutilations."
Jayesh landed on concrete that changed to smooth black metal beneath his boots. "Mutilations, got it." He ran along the highway, reached the edge, and had to halt. Islands of stone and rubble clustered in the distance, but they were too far away to reach. "Phoenix, I need a path."
His Ghost scanned the area, calculating, humming tunelessly to himself as he worked. "Jay, this whole area is very chaotic, but there's something about it that feels like the ascendant plane. Try to imagine a path forward."
Jayesh focused, imagining a series of floating blocks in the magenta haze around him. It wasn't hard to do, and he almost thought the shape of a path formed in front of him.
"Almost," Phoenix muttered. "Do you remember reading about the principles of resonance last year?"
"You mean that paper written by the warlock who entered Savathun's throne world?" Jayesh asked.
"Yeah, the Arhun paper," the Ghost replied. "Remember his theory that Darkness powers accentuate the mental? And how that warlock learned to basically create things with his mind?"
"Sure, inside the throne world," said Jayesh. "The rules are different there, since the whole thing exists in Savathun's mind. Arhun couldn't use resonance outside of it."
"Well, new theory," Phoenix said. "Your mind is almost bringing the path into being. Try hitting it with Darkness."
Jayesh flung out a hand. Ice exploded from his fingertips and splashed across what was unmistakably a path. But it was not yet corporeal enough to hold his weight.
"So, remember that other paper by Ikora?" Jayesh said. "About how the Light grants form and life?"
He flung out his other hand. A burst of pure Solar light blasted across the half-formed platform. Instantly it hardened into blocks of rough matter.
As Jayesh leaped onto it and ran down its length, Phoenix said, "Imagine if we'd known this the last time we entered the Traveler!"
"I wasn't as well-educated then," Jayesh panted. He envisioned another path curving up to an island of floating land, threw Darkness and Light at it, and it appeared just as he'd imagined.
"I'm going to be writing my own papers on this," he said as he reached the island. "A study of Light and Darkness used in conjunction in a chaotic energy matrix."
"It'll make waves," Phoenix said. "The academic community will argue about it for months."
"If I don't cross this threshold, there won't be an academic community," Jayesh replied.
As he ran across the island, something white and glowing caught his eye. Upon the branch of a fallen tree sat a bird made of Light. As he neared it, it took off and flew ahead of him, guiding him toward another island he hadn't noticed before.
"Phoenix," Jayesh whispered, "I think the Traveler is leading us in."
He rounded the corner of a shipping container and almost crashed into a crouching alien. He and the alien both yelled in surprise. Jayesh drew Lumina and tried to shoot, but the alien flung out one hand. Green glowing strings appeared out of nowhere, tangled around Jayesh's arms and legs, and lifted him off the ground.
"What in the Traveler is this?" he exclaimed, struggling. The strings held him with the strength of wire, yet they were incorporeal, some sort of strange power like ice or fire.
"It's Strand," Phoenix said helpfully. "A new theoretical Darkness power some of the younger Guardians have been playing with. Apparently Osiris discovered it."
"How do I escape?"
"I don't know."
Meanwhile, the alien had been staring up at the ensnared Guardian in satisfaction. It resembled a Psion: a small, nimble humanoid with a single Cyclops-eye that were generally allied with the Cabal. They were powerful psychics and controlled weapons and various powers with their minds. It lifted its weapon, some kind of futuristic sawed-off shotgun, and blasted Jayesh in the center of mass. But what emerged from the gun were more green strings. They wrapped around Jayesh tightly, choking him.
At this point, the strings holding his arms and legs began to weaken. Jayesh ripped his arms free, aimed Lumina, and shot the alien through the head. Like a Psion, it was a delicate creature and dropped dead. The strings immediately released Jayesh and vanished.
Despite his need to move on, Jayesh paused for a moment to allow Phoenix to scan the alien. "Is it a Psion? It looks different."
"The DNA is all scrambled and changed," Phoenix said, floating over the corpse and sweeping it with his scan beam. "It's almost like … a new species. Can the Witness do that to creatures?"
"I have a feeling we're about to find out," Jayesh replied grimly.
Phoenix returned to phase and Jayesh hurried on, now watching for hostiles.
"For the record, I'm calling that thing a Weaver," Jayesh said as he leaped and flew to the next island.
"It's a good a name as any," Phoenix agreed. "We should probably learn more about strand, too."
"Too late now," Jayesh said as he landed. He ran along the top of a wrecked truck, leaped to another floating block, and narrowly avoided another blast of strand from a lurking Weaver. Instead of stopping to fight this one, he merely kept running, and the alien let him go.
Now the magenta chaos around him began to brighten. A bright hole appeared in the distance, all the purple haze and debris swirling around it. The glowing bird appeared and flew ahead of him again.
"You near the other side," Mara Sov's voice came distantly, strained with effort. "When you find my brother, tell him the Coalition will protect the City in the Vanguard's stead."
"Will do," Jayesh panted, leaping to a block that resembled a piece of a black pyramid.
Mara seemed desperate to convey her final messages before contact was broken. "Tell Crow we will join him as soon as we are able. Tell him … tell him that I …" she stammered to a stop, gasping for breath.
"He knows," Jayesh reassured her.
As Jayesh was in midair between two platforms, a strange burst of whispering filled his radio channel. Out of it, voices began to speak in chorus, calm, gentle, compassionate.
"You cling so desperately to your pain and your failures. You have lost. Let go."
A shudder ran through Jayesh to hear his own insecurities laid bare so suddenly, and in the compound voices of his enemy. But he kept his eyes on that white bird.
Mara Sov cried out, "It sees us! It sees us! I cannot hold this any longer!"
At once the magenta chaos around Jayesh swirled in, compressing around him, lifting him and propelling him toward that distant light. The bird stayed ahead of him, seeming to pull him along. He had time for a single ragged breath as the light drew him inward, faster and faster–
The white bird mantled him. Jayesh seemed protected by those wings, peering through its feathers, safe and sheltered. "Guardian Jayesh," came a whisper of that well-known voice.
"Traveler," Jayesh cried in a voice without sound. "I come to save you, Traveler!"
The wings fell away and they flew above the Traveler's white surface. Ghosts swooped in clouds above it as they had when newly made, gathering together in swarms and setting out to find their Guardians. Jayesh looked down to see that the devastated, burning Earth lay below them, fresh from the Collapse.
Dreamlike, the vision changed. Now he saw one of the first astronauts on Mars, standing in the rain brought by the Traveler as it terraformed a planet for the first time. The astronaut put out a hand to catch the droplets.
A single droplet rolled off and struck the ground. Grass emerged from the earth, writhing and climbing into the light, covering the ground. A white feather lay among the grass. But now a black, tarry substance crawled out of the grass and engulfed the feather, grabbing at the shaft and barbs.
A shadow fell across the Traveler.
The astronaut's hand filled with fire.
Black tarry roots climbed a graceful white tree, polluting and corrupting, hiding the good growth with parasitic overgrowth.
The astronaut's hand filled with ice crystals.
The shadow spread across the Traveler.
A Ghost shuddered and died, old and broken.
The astronaut's hand crackled with lightning.
The grass withered and died.
The Traveler was completely occulted by shadow.
The astronaut's hand laced over with green strand.
The white bird, covered in a net of sticky black tar, struggled and cried out.
The astronaut's hand filled with purple void, then suddenly a multicolored red fire broke out all over his body.
The darkened Traveler sent out a burst of Light–
Jayesh landed on something firm. He staggered and nearly fell, gasping air into his lungs. He hadn't seemed to have drawn a breath in centuries.
"Are we alive?" he panted to Phoenix.
"I think maybe so?" Phoenix replied, also sounding breathless. "I think we're inside the Traveler again."
Around them blazed the Light that Jayesh remembered so well. He stood upon a swirl of branches he recognized as belonging to the Tree of Silver Wings, their leaves made all of Light and supporting his weight. In the distance, among the curtains of Light, lay a single dark blot. As he turned toward it, a droplet of Light fell and pooled, forming another tree and another place to walk. He slowly made his way toward it, trusting the Traveler to support him and not let him fall. As he crossed the second treetop, a third drop fell, creating a road of silver branches that led him toward the darkness in the distance.
As he moved, the dark blot grew more horrid black roots, coiling and curling above and below, grasping at the path of silver branches that Jayesh walked upon.
"Traveler," he cried out, and his voice still seemed to make no sound in that place. "What has the Darkness done to you?"
"It resides within my heart like a cancer," the Traveler whispered to him through his Light. "You must excise it before it is too late."
"I fight for you, Traveler," Jayesh cried into the stillness. "And I won't rest until I've carved the Darkness out of your white heart!"
He stepped onto the black roots, for there was nowhere else to go. The roots coiled together ahead of him, forming a passage like a knot in a tree. As he stepped inside, however, the Light changed. The roots became earth and stone and he was traversing a cave. Now lush green ferns grew along the walls and floor. His boots sank into green moss like shag carpet. Now he was pushing through curtains of hanging vines and vivid growth, leaving behind the darkness and corruption. Light grew ahead of him as if the tunnel was coming to an end. He tried to move faster, pushing the greenery out of his way…
The lone warlock emerged from a cave mouth and stood upon the shores of a lake. It lapped the grass at his feet, verged with moss-covered rocks and ferny growth. Across the lake stood the skyscrapers of the Last City. Jayesh stood still and gaped at it for a long moment. A high blue sky arched over it, rippling faintly like the surface of the sea. A flock of birds flew against it, wheeling, calling, and settling again.
"Phoenix," he said after a while. "Is this real? Or am I seeing a vision?"
"It's all made of Light," Phoenix replied, equally stunned. "The rocks, the grass, everything. It's building it from your memories, I think."
"Can I remove my helmet?"
"Yes, there's air pressure and humidity."
Jayesh unfastened his helmet and pulled it off, then drew deep breaths of the air. It smelled fresh and cool, of water and mud, of grass and flowers. A gentle breeze ruffled his hair. The sunlight (was it sunlight?) touched his face with warmth, as if he'd emerged into a beautiful day in May.
"Why didn't it look like this before?" he asked, aware of the way his voice echoed against the rocks and lake.
"I … I think the Traveler is welcoming us back," said Phoenix. "Also we were here alone last time. Crow is here somewhere, and Zavala, and Ikora. Maybe it built this place from their combined memories."
This brought the urgency of his mission crashing back. Jayesh put his helmet back on and keyed the radio on all frequencies. "This is Jayesh Khatri to the Vanguard or Mara Sov. Anybody there? Hello?"
No answer.
"I'm not picking up anybody's signals," Phoenix said in a hushed voice. "We're completely cut off from the rest of the universe. Who knows where the Vanguard landed when they flew in. Maybe they crashed."
"They definitely didn't walk in on foot like some chumps I know," Jayesh said, pulling off his helmet. "All right, let's hike. Also, let's see if we can figure out where the Traveler's heart is, and where the Witness is."
"Are you sure we're not already inside its heart?" Phoenix asked as Jayesh set out across the grass.
"I honestly don't know," Jayesh replied. "I've seen artists' renditions of the Black Heart in the Black Garden, and I thought we'd be dealing with something like that. Kind of … a big pulsating ball of power."
"But what if the Traveler's heart is bigger than that?" said Phoenix.
Jayesh laughed a little as he passed into a glade beneath the trees, his boots parting dozens of purple lupins. "Are you saying the Traveler's heart is as big as this whole world?"
"Is it any surprise?" Phoenix replied, appearing beside Jayesh and flying at his shoulder. "You know how it loves its Guardians. All of humanity, really. Love makes the heart grow bigger and bigger."
"Then maybe we are inside its heart," Jayesh admitted. "I don't see any sign of those gross black roots here. Hey, maybe this is where Crow got in. I did tell him to think of the sort of thing he'd like to see upon his arrival. Do you think he envisioned this whole environment and the Traveler made it for him?"
Phoenix took a moment to gaze up at a cliff, which was in the shape of a giant Ghost, covered in moss. Its blue eye glanced down at him.
"I'd say this place is definitely the product of a Hunter's mind," Phoenix said. "Especially one that loves the outdoors. And notice the City in the distance? That's about as close as a Hunter likes civilization to be."
Jayesh took a winding path among a lot of rocks and trees, skirting the edge of the lake, always bearing toward the distant city. It wasn't as distant as it appeared, and soon he began to notice ruined walls and bricks among the grass. Phoenix paused to scan this or that object.
"Odd," Jayesh remarked, pausing to look at a wall that appeared suddenly amid the trees. "This is City architecture, but it's upside down." The address numbers on the wall were indeed inverted. He passed between a series of rocks and found himself in a hallway with lighting panels on the floor. Far overhead, on the ceiling, were scattered tables and chairs.
"Um?" Jayesh said, waving at it.
Phoenix flew around, examining everything. "I think this is the Witness twisting a memory. Look, down that hallway. Everything is right side up."
Jayesh ventured down the next hallway and was relieved to see that this was true. An alarmed knot in his stomach relaxed. Seeing such perfection around him had put him at ease, nearly erasing the visions he'd had while entering the Traveler, carried on its wings. But that inverted room returned the thought of black, parasitic tar and strangling roots, of a white hawk struggling beneath a gleaming coating of corruption.
He paused beside a closed door stamped with the Vanguard's coat of arms. He rested a hand on it. "This looks like the one door in the Old Tower. Remember, the one that led to the administrative offices?"
"Yes, we had to go through it all the time to get chewed out for failing at Titan training," said Phoenix.
Jayesh smacked a fist into his palm. A little fire swirled from the impact. "Remember the day we were training on the boxing bags? Titans were banned from using Solar back then because of the stigma about the Sunbreakers. Everybody was punching with void or arc, but not Jayesh Khatri. Oh no, he's punching with fire. Write him up."
"We didn't even understand why until Zavala yelled at us," Phoenix said, landing on Jayesh's shoulder. "Seems like that happened a lot."
"Oh, I was in trouble at least once a week," Jayesh said cheerfully, leaving the door behind. He followed the hallway by habit, barely noticing that it was the same hall he used to follow in the old Tower. "You know, I tried to keep up with the upper body training, even when I switched to Warlock?"
"Oh, I know," Phoenix said. "Until you graduated, that is. Then they kept you too busy with real missions to train."
They emerged from the hall into a grass-grown space between buildings. On the far side were several shops where the Guardians frequented for lunch and dinner. Jayesh stopped and surveyed them with a glow of recognition. "Hey look, the Traveler even did Lee and Frank's."
On his shoulder, Phoenix disappeared in a swirl of particles. "The roof!" he exclaimed. "Look at the roof!"
Jayesh looked up and jumped back into the shelter of the doorway, jamming his helmet on.
Perched along the top of the building were three creatures he'd never seen before. Each of them had a humanoid body, but instead of a head, all they had was a shape that looked suspiciously like the barrel of a gun. Bat wings arched over their backs, making a leather rattling sound as the monsters moved. Their gun-barrel heads were pointed at Jayesh, as if they were aware of him, but they had not yet attacked. They seemed to be waiting for him to notice them. When he looked up and jumped back, the three aliens leaped into the air, flapping their wings, and began firing hot energy bolts from their gun-heads.
Jayesh returned fire and managed to kill one of the things. It fell out of the air, but disappeared in a haze of particles before it struck the ground. Another took a wound and dove inside one of the shops. The third swooped back up on the roof and out of sight.
"Phoenix," he said through his teeth, "tell me I did not just shoot a demon."
"I … I don't know what it was," Phoenix gasped. "The signature matches nothing in my database. The energy is strange, too, very Darkness-aspected."
"Some new creature of the Witness's, I guess?" Jayesh said.
Jayesh leaped and floated in a long lateral glide across the open space and into the shop. The demon awaited him just inside the door. It leaped on top of an old vending machine, one wing hanging useless, and fired its gun-head at him. Jayesh had a chance to see its neck flex and open as energy traveled from inside the body and up the neck. He poured bullets down that biological gun barrel and watched the demon fall apart into dust.
"I don't like these things," Jayesh said shakily. He peered outside for the last demon, but it had vanished.
"It's following us from the roof," Phoenix said. "Head for that open space on the far side, it'll probably try to ambush us there."
"I love walking into ambushes," Jayesh said dryly, heading for the spot.
Sure enough, as soon as he stepped into the open, the demon dropped on his head, clawing with its feet and shooting wildly. Jayesh summoned an ice sword and knocked the thing out of the air, then shot it as it lay stunned on the ground. It shrieked and vanished, leaving behind a black triangular splinter, like the ones Jayesh had seen on Europa.
"Oh good, one of these sigils," Jayesh said, picking it up. "I'd hoped I'd never see one of these again, and here's one, inside the Traveler itself."
"Ugh, the energy is the same, too," Phoenix replied. "I'm picking up a Darkness barrier up ahead, you can probably break it with the splinter."
Jayesh found a doorway closed off with a shimmering energy barrier and with another Darkness splinter in the middle of it. He pressed his own splinter to the other, like a keycard, and both splinters fell apart into ever smaller particles and vanished. The barrier did, too.
"Now, why would there be a barrier here?" Jayesh said. "What were those demon things trying to protect?"
He stepped through and recognized the space beyond. It was the old control room in the Tower. In the real City, the control room had taken a direct hit from a missile and was collapsed in on itself. This control room was missing its roof and was overgrown with moss and vines, but still lay there like a museum piece. Its huge front window, which used to look out over the landscape outside the City, now looked across the mountains and forests of the Traveler's Heart to the giant magenta portal in the distance, still in a triangle shape.
In the middle of the floor burned a bright magenta spot, rather like the portal itself, but laced with crackles and sparks of other colors. Lines of Light and Darkness flowed into it from the land around it.
Jayesh stopped dead and stared at it, raising his gun. "What am I looking at, Phoenix?"
"It reads like a conflux," said Phoenix. "Light and Darkness together are being drawn into this spot. No wonder those demon things had it locked down."
Jayesh cautiously stepped forward, watching the trickles of energy flowing into the spot. "What is it, exactly? Some trick of the Witness's?"
"It's the Traveler interacting with Darkness, I think," said Phoenix. "Almost like it's thinking. You know the Dusklight shards we find around the European Dead Zone, with the Light and Dark mingled together in crystals? This reads a lot like that."
"What would it do if I touched it?" Jayesh asked, holstering Lumina.
"Beats me," Phoenix replied. "You're the Guardian. If you die, I can probably resurrect you."
"Thanks, so thoughtful of you," Jayesh said, and stepped into the conflux.
Light and Darkness combined flowed through him, and it was a strange sensation. He held out both hands, one of which lit with crackling flames, white the other frosted over with ice. As usually happened, he felt the split through his being, the uneasy duality of using two opposing elements. He had often used ice and fire together, setting his ice sword on fire, or throwing exploding ice darts at enemies. Fire had been his element since his rebirth as a Guardian, and ice he had mastered on Europa. But as he stood in that confluence, he realized that the Traveler was indeed thinking in this place. He focused, holding the two powers, and tried to attune himself to the Traveler's mind.
It's attention focused on him like a spotlight. Jayesh stood there, two powers in his hands, and gazed into that mind of Light.
"The Darkness lies and corrupts, it cannot create."
"What?" Jayesh said aloud.
"All the powers are good, Guardian. All powers are merely energy, even if the Darkness claims them for itself."
An image entered Jayesh's mind of a lone Hunter meticulously sculpting a rifle out of ice. He thought he recognized that shock of blond hair, the scruff of beard, the blue eyes.
"This Guardian's Light was sealed away inside of him. He learned to wield ice long before the pyramids came to Europa. Yet his powers are the same as what the Darkness calls Stasis."
Another vision, this time of a woman with a cloth over her face that barely concealed three glowing green eyes. She stood at the foot of a veiled statue, and ice filled her hand.
"This Guardian lost her Light and regained a fragment through the power of a wish."
Jayesh struggled to grasp this. "So … all that song and dance I went through on Europa … the splinters, the seduction, the crossing of lines … was for nothing? Ice powers already existed outside of the Winnower and the splinters?"
"All powers are manipulation of energy. The Darkness lies and twists. It cannot create. Do you understand?"
Jayesh stood in the confluence and looked at the fire and ice in his hands. "So ice … isn't Darkness?"
"All powers are energy and energy is of the Light. Let me show you."
Jayesh opened his hands. Ice and fire swept over him, racing down his arms and legs, mingling, overwhelming each other. Inside himself he touched that uneasy divide that always held his powers apart. As he did so, he felt the Traveler's power surging into him. Like a parent holding a child's hand as they start to write their letters, so the Traveler took his Light and guided him into harmonizing ice and fire. Step by step, fraction by fraction, the Light changed the way he used so-called Darkness powers, arranging them differently within him, linking them into his Light instead of the touch of Darkness, which was corruption. Almost he saw the Traveler's avatar beside him, grasping his Light, guiding it.
Jayesh gasped aloud and found that he had floated off the ground. Now he sank back down, panting, his blood racing with his new grasp of both powers. Ice, fire, lightning, and void crackled over him, their colors mingling in a prismatic aurora.
"Jayesh," Phoenix exclaimed, "the divide between Dark and Light is gone! You merged them!"
"No," Jayesh replied. "There never was a divide. It was a lie."
"How was it a lie?" Phoenix appeared and floated nearby, staring at him. "I couldn't ever touch your ice powers because they came from Darkness!"
Jayesh held out a hand covered in frost. "The Traveler said that all powers are good and come from the Light, not the Darkness. How does it read?"
Phoenix flew around him, scanning his Guardian with flicks of his beam. After a moment he remarked, "The quality of your ice powers has changed. That Darkness feeling is gone now. I … I can interact with ice and it doesn't hurt!"
"I had let the Darkness link it to evil within me," Jayesh said. "I thought it was the only way, but I was deceived. We all were. It's only by the grace of the Light I didn't succumb and take the whole Vanguard with me." He dropped to his knees in the midst of the conflux and bowed to the ground. "Forgive me, Traveler. And may the Light forgive me, for I've sinned against it by listening to the Darkness's lies."
The Light brightened within him, embracing him, mending the places in his heart that the Darkness had damaged with doubt and confusion. The colorful aura crackled around him as it had the astronaut in the vision, all the Light powers, all the so-called Darkness powers, and more yet undiscovered.
Jayesh remained on his knees for a while, praying, communing with the Light, letting it wash away years of tampering with Darkness. When he rose to his feet, the spark of blue Light that danced in his eyes was so bright, his eyes seemed to glow like an Awoken's. Phoenix danced around him, chuckling in delight.
Together they walked out of the old command room and climbed a set of stairs. They found themselves in the original Tower courtyard, all green and overgrown, but still very recognizable.
Jayesh had barely done more than look around when Phoenix vanished, exclaiming, "Enemies incoming! The Darkness knows you've rejected it utterly and is coming for revenge!"