Chapter Text
Even before he opened his eyes, he knew he was far from home.
Billions of photons bathed his second skin in their warmth, the familiar composition of solar radiation dancing across synthetic fibers, osmium threads arranged molecule by molecule into their aesthetically pleasing patterns that were both weapons and decoration. Meanwhile, the soft chorus of solar wind sang a silent symphony to the cosmos. There was no light. There was no dark. There was only the universe, unobscured by sigils or spells; free from machines that groaned their agony as they hindered higher powers. Absent were blades that carved through the flesh of reality, gone were the chittering whispers which echoed from dark, rancid caverns where the very rock seeped in ruin and decay.
It was silence, the tranquility of a still pond on a windless day, and it was wrong.
Aktaeon opened his eyes and beheld the sun, and he was not alone in doing so. Deep in the recesses of his mind, something shifted, coiling tighter as it layered another ward over both of them. 'Dancer?' Aktaeon called through their mental link, addressing his ghost.
There was no answer.
'Pravos,' he thought, turning his attention inwards, 'what is the last thing you remember?'.
The thoughts that answered laced wariness with restrained aggression, pointed blades directed outwards from the both of them. ‘Hive,’ Pravos answered. ‘We are missing time.’ Thoughts wound tight with agitation, Pravos was not happy about what it perceived as an intrusion into its domain.
‘Perhaps,’ Aktaeon thought. Reaching out, he grabbed the rifle floating next to him, bringing it close to his chest. A soft glow of power flowed through the bone and steel, and through the springs and magazines, and the bullets in particular. Pravos moved Aktaeon’s hands for him as he stroked the rifle enough for it to shift in his grip, the bullets bearing the brunt of Aktaeon’s intent.
This weapon had been grown to rend and destroy, the bullets-that-were-not-bullets to fly true and bring harm wherever they went. He would have them cleave to their purpose, and so they would.
Aktaeon’s weapon had no soul. By most logic, it should have no will of its own, but such conceits meant little when it came to these matters. Aktaeon believed, and that was enough.
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‘Dancer!’ Aktaeon called for the last time. Like before, there was no response. Underneath his helmet, lips may or may not have pursed. He hadn’t decided whether he had lips or not yet. They flickered in and out of existence, cut off from the broader rules of reality by his helmet. In one moment, his consciousness could be an expansive nebula of thought and will, and in another, he was confined by flesh which was both a castle and a cage.
Behind him, the stars did not glitter, nor did they twinkle. They shone with a soft, steady light, and their whispers were quiet compared to the muted heat of Sol, far off promises of distant orbits and secrets in darkness awaiting discovery.
Aktaeon did not trust them. He did not trust this world he had found himself in. It felt clear to his senses, and yet when he called to Dancer, Dancer did not answer. That worried him less than the fact that he could not feel where Dancer was, even in a general sense. Particles brushed off his armor in a stream, and as atoms touched him, he touched the atoms. Orbiting in the void, a wake traced his path; Oxygen bound to nothing, not even itself, and heliums and hydrogens and nitrogens, all rippling with echoes of light. In time, those echoes would fade, but that they could be perceived at all told him much about the presence of the Light, Dark, and other, stranger powers in this reality. It was in silence that the rustle of insects could be heard.
And it told him that Dancer should shine like a lighthouse on a clear, moonless night. If it had not been for their connection, light trickling through the cracks like water springing from solid rock, Aktaeon would have assumed Dancer was dead, or if not dead, then beyond Aktaeon’s reach.
Dancer was not dead, was not beyond Aktaeon’s reach, and yet Aktaeon could not find or speak to him.
This worried him. This worried Pravos. And what they saw worried both of them.
Grabbing his weapon had imparted a languid spin to his body, which was itself in orbit over a planet that looked like Earth. Perhaps it might even be an Earth, but it was not their earth.
Craning his head so he could look over his shoulder, the American Dead Zone passed below them, obscured by dapples of clouds, peaks capped in snow, but with green in the valleys. It was the cities that drew his eye. They were large and gleamed when the sun caught them, and in many cases they were smaller than they ought to be, something he knew both as a pilot, and as a scholar who had braved the radioactivity in search of secrets kept safe by poisoned lands and echoes of old war. The metropoli of the golden age had been constructed to last, but time was a voracious predator, gnawing at the strong until it became weak. Aktaeon knew humanity as crumbling ruins that were as much forest and meadow as they were crater and lake. These cities were not his cities.
Radio waves washed over his armor, crude, bloated signals in comparison to the meager information they contained. With a flicker of thought, Aktaeon tuned his helmet to a specific audio frequency that had a sentence of text encoded within it. “-morning America! Greeting you loud and proud from Detroit! Today’s forecast is cold and miserable. Sorry folks, Winter ain’t quite done with us-”
‘Detroit.’ Aktaeon hummed as he listened to the voice prattle on. ‘Archaic.’ It was possible this was a historical broadcast, or perhaps the anachronisms were an artistic decision, but Detroit had been subsumed by New Chicago at least a century before the formation of the North American Empire, and post collapse had been best known as the Chicago Nuclear Zone. That gave him a timeframe to work with, and the lack of orbitals or noticeable starship contrails narrowed that time frame down. Twenty-one hundred or earlier. Assuming of course these broadcasts were not the result of the NAE’s retro-nationalistic policies, which it could be.
Scanning the radio frequencies, Pravos and Aktaeon discussed terms they found of personal interest.
‘Hero’ Pravos thought. ‘That is a recurring term. Often used in conjunction with Villain.’
‘I noticed that too,’ Aktaeon replied. Granted, compared to more mundane topics such as the weather, traffic conditions, and musical hits (some of which Aktaeon had created a program to record), the term was often relegated to footnotes in regional news programs, but the cross-program prevalence indicated a considerable level of cultural relevance in the day to day life of humanity. And yet it was not a term Aktaeon recognized unlike ‘Cell Phone’ or ‘FBI’ or even the rather obscure ‘NASA’, at least not in the way it was utilized.
Hmm.
By the time they had crossed over the terminus, and day turned to night, Aktaeon and Pravos had several more oddities to discuss.
‘Protectorate of whom, exactly?’ Aktaeon wondered.
‘Irrelevant,’ Pravos asserted. ‘Reports suggest a level of low level violence that is historically significant. If this is an alternate reality, then we were shifted outside our Tegmark cluster.’
‘If this is an alternate reality, then it is our reality now.’
Pravos did not reply, but a deep sense of unease had settled inside them as bright cities on the European continent stood out against the darkness of the night.
Aktaeon had never seen so much light dot the Earth before. Even the Last City was little more than a pinprick in the Andes. Here, spiderwebs of illumination connected luminescent cities to smaller towns like spokes on a wheel.
Finally, a thought drifted into Aktaeon’s head. ‘We are needed.’
Flicking his index finger, Akteaon put the rifle on safe. ‘We were, are, and will be needed.’ That was the nature of reality and time. They were messy things. ‘Assuming this reality is real, then what makes it less worthy of our presence than the one we were torn from?’
‘The absence of the Traveler.’
‘We do not need a silent god to create worthy works.’
‘Entities like the Vex threaten all life everywhere. What is more worthy than a murderer stained red? What higher aspiration could there be than an unchained predator roaming the night? We must sharpen ourselves and find answers to the questions we face. What truth that matters would linger in a hollow world? This orbit is not dead, but we do not belong here.’
There were times when Aktaeon could not help but reflect on the limited nature of Pravos; Pravos was a thing of murder, and murder was often what Pravos focused on. While cunning and dangerous, if Pravos could not think of a way it benefited him, it did not matter what it was; It was of no interest to Pravos.
‘If this place is hollow, then why can we not find Dancer?’ Aktaeon asked.
‘We did not come here by chance or choice. It is your nature to ask questions as it is in mine to cut, so ask, but do so quickly. A cage does not need walls to imprison.’
‘And if we cannot find answers before we find Dancer?’
‘Then you waste our time. There is no reason to linger.’’
‘Time.’ Aktaeon hummed to himself, brows knitted as he looked down at the bright cities. How many people lived there? Millions? Billions? ‘We have nothing but time. Continuity is already broken. It does not matter if we return to a world similar to ours a millisecond after our counterpart left or a millennia, it is no more our world than this is. You presume the best course of action is returning to a place similar to whence we came so that we may walk the same old paths. The wisdom of this is yet to be determined.’
‘Iron sharpens iron.’
‘And knowledge is a weapon like any other. What could we learn with unlimited time to question?’
‘Nothing with meaning. Competition drives innovation. Our most dangerous enemies each showed us questions we did not realize could even be asked. Oryx. Crota. Omnigul. Aksis. Atheon. Riven. The struggle to survive made you desperate for answers, and I have seen what you created. Great things. What will peace give you? Arts you enjoy? Mortals who will leave you sooner rather than later? Above all else, you will find pain here. An army will come, and what you learned to love will face a different ideal of greatness. Ideals rooted in survival. Someone must be a knife and cut within the Garden, or a spear surrounding the edge of it.’
Aktaeon’s dreams of decades spent in libraries melted away in the face of logic he could not deny. He sighed and felt the paths he could take constrict as he committed himself to his task. The stars seemed to waver, an ill omen. ‘Considering the size of the Earth, the composition of the atomic gasses scouring our armor, and the time it took to cross the terminus, we are in the thermosphere, and reasonably close to the hundred kilometer mark.’
‘It will not be long before practical considerations demand our undivided attention,’ Pravos agreed.
‘Then we should take advantage of the time we have while we have it. Lower our mental blocks’
Pravos’ consciousness recoiled at the idea. No thoughts were exchanged, but Aktaeon shared in the wordless sense of incredulity.
‘Feel the aether. It is smooth and uncreased. Nothing of import has been here in hundreds of millennia, if anything ever visited this section of the cosmos in the first place. The risk is minimal.’ And if there was a threat, it was best to be aware of it before throwing around enough power that everything within Pluto’s orbit would sense their presence and know an interloper had arrived.
Pravos considered both the thoughts directed at him before dipping into Aktaeon’s headspace and skimming the musings within. Then he dredged some of the milder cognitohazards from his isolated mindspaces and lowered the blocks.
Aktaeon felt reality expand, the confines of his helmet falling away like the ephemeral barrier it was. Stardust on his tongue, rippled gravity dancing as the pull of the moon interacted with that of the earth, the sun, and the planets.
As the thing of light shucked its cocoon, it was akin to a pebble breaking the mirrored surface of a still pond, the water radiating outward with tales of its presence, but nothing waited to hear, and there was nothing to be heard.
Centuries ago, when the Darkness had arrived and brought the Collapse with it, it had not been sudden. Interstellar combat was not a quick thing, the distances were too vast, the enemy too certain in its arrogance to exchange thoroughness for speed. Trillions died over the course of months as the Warminds fought back, as did the Traveler.
Individual cities were different. Planetary defenses had been the last line against the Darkness, and the cities had died in hours, or in some cases, instants. The magnitude of the death taking place in such small geographic areas carved deep scars of horror, pain, and fear into the wreckage left behind, in some cases tainting even bedrock. While not as strong as the overwhelming evil of the Hive’s presence on Luna, even a moderate talent could sense the psychic remnants from orbit as long as they were reaching for it, though few did.
That was what the godling searched for, and it found life.
When had it ever known such abundance? Love, hate, joy, lust, boredom- Every emotion imaginable was present, and there was no separation. The nascent godling was not a fisherman on a boat, floating on the surface of the water, but a young leviathan of the deep, immersed in the currents. Where emotion touched it, it was seared away, scorned by the divinity within, and yet the being of light could not affect without being affected in return. Threads of thought were traced back to their dim, flickering sources; individual minds that alone were weak, buttogether made a bonfire of civilization. Thousands were considered in the time it took a clock to tick, and the godling did not discriminate. One day, it would know everything, and it longed for that day.
An embryo shifted in the womb. A dog climbed on top of a bitch, a scent of arousal thick in its nostrils. Neurons dying in their thousands as they were targeted by toxins, a merry group of four clinking glasses together. A fly viewed by the eight eyes of a jumping spider as it rubbed it’s mandibles together, venom seeming from the tips as powerful legs tensed in anticipation of the the pounce.
It looked down on the organic, the biological, and the limited from a place of high contempt. It was not better, but it was higher-
[DATA]
The nascent godling flinched.
Calculations and math, crystalize structures and screams that needed no mouth. Elegance in will, cold logic that outlined all the steps that had come before the step that came after, quarks inside a single atom that was itself part of a molecule connected to a cell that was a bacteria that was a symbiote. Life inside life inside life; the context within which a living ecosystem could consider itself a singular whole. Sound as thought as self as choice as will.
It was a snake eating its own tail, a concept that required understanding the whole to understand a part, an idea that to hear it was to know everything that was known about it, regardless of how trivial.
Nothing human could comprehend it in its entirety and live, but the mind born of light was a fragment of the divine. Every star in the sky offered simultaneous whispers that never ended, and it could count each atom within five hundred feet of its cocoon with perfect accuracy. The idea was a reflection, and as a reflection, it was limited. And had it been just a reflection, it would have been savored and comprehended in its entirety.
But it echoed with theft and the eons of murder that had been necessary to create it; thoughts that had sharpened on themselves like a blade against a whetstone formed of pain and hate and despair.
A tooth the size of a planet on a beast that was nothing but teeth.
In Paris, France, a woman with a glittering cape faced a man in a kabuki mask. Pointing at him, defiance written in her posture, she opened her mouth, then both collapsed, screaming as blood poured from their eyes and ears.
Screaming as the fragment of the divine screamed, for it was faced with a finite amount of despair and hatred and murder, and all was anathema to it. The light recoiled from the tooth of bone and poison and {dark}, but the ouroboros had bitten deep, and the light had caught a fragment of the tooth as it had passed from one shape to another, and that tooth demanded understanding. For the tooth was a tooth was a thought crafted to bring other thoughts, and it did not ask to bring understanding, it forced it, exploding inside the light like a logic-bomb.
The light did the only thing it could; It shed its divinity, forcing itself to retreat to its cocoon, ever smaller, ever deeper, shedding that which it had known as it did so, for the physical cannot hold all of the divine, and a godling cannot be both a god and an embryo. And as it did, the tooth shattered, fragments sloughing off into the Aether.
[ABNORMALITY]
A new tooth was traded between heavens, yet more echoes gouging into the light-born godling, and it flinched, suffocating itself as it became small once more.
Breath leaving the nostrils. Water and protein caging thought and grounding it. Stars. Stars. STARS
Aktaeon looked at the glittering stars that whispered to him, opened his mouth, and screamed.
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Fact; Aktaeon was seizing.
Fact; Aktaeon had, like a fool, demanded the mental blocks be lowered.
Fact; Aktaeon had, like an even bigger fool, thrown his consciousness out into the sea of screams assuming that the lack of ripples in a sea named for screams meant that leviathans did not linger below the surface.
Fact; This had been a reasonable assertion and Pravos had agreed with it, but Aktaeon was now seizing, and Pravos had been forced to intercept neurons as they fired before they had bit off their own tongue.
Fact; Thoughts were shredding themselves under their own weight, and Aktaeon was dying.
Fact; Pravos could survive if Aktaeon managed to commit a form of suicide unique to Warlocks doing things even Warlocks knew they should not, however, Pravos didn’t care for the idea. Breathing was boring, food as a concept was disgusting, and Pravos craved the purity of war. Aktaeon dealt with the mundane so Pravos could focus on what was important; Murder, and turning his host into what Aktaeon always should have been.
Taking those facts, Pavos forged them into a singular conclusion; If his host was weak enough to die, then it was right that nature take it’s course.
This did not stop him from plucking ideas from sections of his mindscape. All things being equal, the death of Aktaeon was the lesser heresy, but the greater inconvenience.
‘Teeth!’ Aktaeon howled in the confines of his own mind. ‘Stars with eyes and teeth and teeth and teeth and TEETH! Things which are not things, crystal and plans and cycles and CYCLES-’
Pravos paused as mental barriers erected between him and Aktaeon the second the screaming begun rocked under an impact, catching a thought in a spider-silk web of ideas. Before the rest of his defenses could trigger, Pravos plunged fingers of intent deep into a mental armory. Pulling out a layered command, he hurled it at the other concept that was doing its best to use the biological hardwear of their body to run a cognitohazard Pravos could already tell was too big for the neural structure it subborned.
The weapon hit the mental barrier and froze the concept where it was, cutting off that section of neurons and rerouting all conscious thought into unused sections of the brain.
This was his domain; The place where none were as real as he. No interloper could challenge him here. The cognitohazard would hold until there was time to tear at what made it strong and integrate its truth into his own; for he was a sword that sharpened itself.
The defenses kicked in; Adaptive thought processes tore into Pravos’ mind, wrenching the knowledge from Pravos. All he was left with was the knowledge that there was a Cognitohazard
Chained
In
the
basement
Pravos blinked. Ah, there it was.
It was a cage locked, deadbolted, and welded shut, the door plastered in neon sensations shaped like {You do not belong here}. Feeling the thought he wielded, Pravos returned it to the codex from whence it had come, its task completed, before making his way to a different section of the mind. The aesthetics left much to be desired, but that was only partially his fault. It was a shared mind, and considering where Aktaeon had been, the architecture varied. It was a trend; a mind should be one way, and this one was another. Pravos should not be capable of thought, and, well… A new tool was selected; It smelt of psion mindscape. Crossing the corpus callosum into Aktaeon’s frayed mindscape, Pravos bashed Aktaeon in the head with the shield.
It killed Aktaeon.
It did not kill Aktaeon in a way that mattered to Pravos. The way he saw it, if Aktaeon felt his Ship of Thesus required the same wood, then it was time to stop dying in unique and interesting ways. One day, Pravos was going to have to replace the entire ship instead of a few planks, and that was not ideal. There was something about Aktaeon that made him lethal, something Pravos failed to grasp. That frustrated him, but there was a reason he tolerated Aktaeon and all of the humanity that implied, infuriating as it could be.
Damaged or not, the soul was there, safe in the body, and that was what counted. Both of them.
Lungs burned, reminding him of the need to breathe. Pravos gasped, irritated despite himself. This was not his purpose. Embedding himself deeper into the neural structure, water sloshed around inside the body as the chest moved.
It was difficult to understand how Aktaeon lived like this, let alone enjoyed it. There was a purity to what Aktaeon was; He did not have to be this way, and that made it worse, for this was a choice. Messy. Biological. Mortal.
Aktaeon’s lungs began to burn again, protesting at the neglect. Taking another breath, Pravos shuddered. It was a physical shudder, and Pravos hated it.
Fingers of thought sparked and vanished, pulling thoughts from disparate sections of the mind as Pravos prepared to heal the greater half of the whole. It was heretical in a sense; Anathema to what he had once been. But there was an argument to be had here, a logic that could not be denied, and the strongest had tried. If nothing else, Pravos had no desire to deal with the physical realities of existence. Thoughts were more elegant by far, and what he had been made for.
One thought, a scalpel shaped like {disease}, stirred, but the host called it by another name; Osteo Striga.
Pravos was not on good terms with Osteo Striga. A two-way relationship typically required some fashion of sentience. But he was fond of it. Alive or not, the weapon had a will of its own, and it was a will that echoed Pravos’ in a way its fellows, such as the Whisper of the Worm, did not. Pravos loathed Whisper of the Worm. Xol was alive in a way Osteo Striga was not, and Xol was both weak and a coward. One day, Pravos would peel that rifle like Akka had been peeled by Willbreaker.
Why Aktaeon bothered with Whisper of the Worm was another mystery of the age; Xol was a scavenger. Osteo Striga was a worthy gift from a worthy sister.
Only a Guardian could make such a choice complicated.
A sense of hunger drifted around Pravos, a wordless anticipation of a kill to come. In what passed for reality, the safety for the rifle in Aktaeon’s grip flicked off of its own accord.
Scalpel in hand, Pravos approached Aktaeon, weaving a lullaby from a long-dead witch into the fabric of the mind around him as he examined what was left of his host. The malice was exquisite. Some of his more promising cognitohazards had sprung from the tune, and they were all useful, and more worthy than Xol. Such a shame the mother could not see its offspring. If Pravos knew Hive, and he did, then the witch would be proud of how it’s offspring had murdered thousands-
There.
That thought. It had done so much damage. A flicker of sharpened intent caught Osteo Striga’s attention like a hunting hound hearing a piercing whistle. It felt like a tooth, and it was not real. But not everything needed to be real to hurt someone. ‘Wither,” Pravos commanded.
Ostea Striga grinned, and the scalpel took a bloody bite from the thought. Pravos watched each glint of teeth, pulling the scalpel back twice before Osteo Striga could eat Aktaeon.
One day… Perhaps even soon.
It did not take long for the lingering remnants of what had destroyed Aktaeon to fade. Pravos pulled the scalpel away. ‘Sleep’, he murmured, crooning a different lullaby to Osteo Striga. There were guns that were swords that were bridges. There were things that were not alive but could be. Will. Desire. Intent.
Osteo Striga lashed out, snapping at Pravos with power.
Quicker than the snare that sought to devour him, Pravos evaded, amused despite himself. This was why Osteo Striga interested him. Flickering over the corpus callosum, he pulled at a thought. Even as a memory, the shadow of Solar fire burned, and in reality, the gun in Aktaeon’s hand creaked, while inside the mind, it screamed. Pravos hurt it. He hurt it, and it did not stop fighting, and this was good and it pleased him. Pain was a whetstone, and it made Osteo Striga that much sharper while Xol was a broken thing, a whimpering, beaten dreg slavering at the boot of its master.
Three times Osteo Striga struck. Three times it burned. Glittered malice retreated back into a warped frame of bone and hate. Watching. Waiting.
It made the heart Pravos possessed skip a beat. There were things he wanted. Things his host denied Pravos time and time again. Things like children. But one day, he would have his way. Seeds were meant to sprout.
The damage now halted, the mind around Pravos was a mess. A core memory shimmered as intent prodded it. So much damage. The last time it had been this bad, the Sol Divisive had finished a rampage through Aktaeon’s mind, and only quick thinking on Pravos’ part had saved them both. The connection had not been deliberate; Dreams were dangerous things for Guardians, more so when someone as powerful as Aktaeon was involved. Pravos had interrupted every nightmare about the Black Garden since. Horror was a useful tool, but not worth the chance of connecting to another Collective by accident. There were hazards out there even Pravos was wary of, and the Vex were one of them. There was more to the Vex than metal and Radiolaria. The Vex were a virus, one that could adapt to any medium. Radiolaria was useful, and so the Vex used it. But throw their pattern into a mind, and it would become Vex; attack the pattern with a cognitohazard, and the cognitohazard would become a new nest. Nothing was immune, and Pravos was a jealous thing. There was only one idea that was allowed to infect the host, and that idea was him-
Another memory caught Pravos’ attention. Examining it, he pulled a copy from a different area in the mind.
The Vex were the reason those copies existed. Entire swathes of memories had to be reconstructed in the wake of Sol Divisive intrusion, the important bits inferred from an extensive collection of journals and audio logs produced by a life based around research and knowledge. They had been lucky. Pravos had not been certain Solar fire was enough to kill the mind-virus. Even now, he wondered if they had survived because the Vex had been unable to adapt, or because the virus had failed to adapt in time. Solar fire had not helped Asher Mir after all.
The sun first. That was what he reached for. And then the soul.
Aktaeon’s scream was different. Agony. Hurt. It radiated from him to Pravos. An animal that did not understand the stick thrashing it. The fires of Sol burnt more than the physical, cauterizing damaged sections in the core of what Aktaeon was, all done in accordance to a will born of bone and teeth. From there, fresh memories were pressed into the gaps, Ontological fiber threading it together.
The silver lining was Dancer’s absence.
The ghost had never liked Pravos, and Pravos had never liked it, but Pravos accepted the utility of Dancer with a hateful regard the little pest did not return. This would have turned that mechanical voice shrill with panic, and sent the Ghost spiraling around them in helpless paroxysms of worry as Pravos patched his master back together with pain and a hint of methodology imitated from the Vex.
Notes had been taken when Sol Divisive had attacked. The memories implanted were infectious enough to stick where they needed to.
New memories were found, and the process was repeated. Again. And again. And again. The time involved did not matter. The work would end when it was done, and no sooner.
Half-way through mending the damage in its entirety, and near a point of coherence for Aktaeon’s soul, Pravos paused.
Osteo Striga was paying attention to something, the malice it had directed towards him angled away into the void of space.
Casting out fingers of will, Pravos opened the eyes he had stolen, and peered into the physical world, searching the source of Striga’s interest.
Death was his answer. Death and the matter imbued by it, reeking misery and the sweet tang of the insane. Such an interesting mixture. Minds were fragile things, and Pravos was adept at working with them, an affinity as professional as it was inherent. Madness called to the fiber of his being, and what approached had his attention.
It was old. Not like the Tablets of Ruin, a wonder Pravos only knew through the memories of Aktaeon. Not like the Dreadnought, another birthright denied to a child by its ruthless sire.
But it was old like Thrall in the Court of Oryx was old, and like bones scattered on the floor of a crypt, that age had been wasted.
The sheer lack of meaning disgusted him. Unclaimed power lingered in flesh that did not live, a funeral shroud for civilizations. It tasted like violence. It smelt like worlds put to the sword. It was worship-that-should-have-been, and heresy-that-was due to absence. Futility of words unspoken. Raw potential most beings could only dream of kept hollow of imagination.
It circled the planet, placing itself between Aktaeon’s body and the moon. Intent pressed against Aktaeon’s body from two sides; one was strong and sharp, and that came from the direction of the moon and the angel. The weaker pressure, so weak it barely registered, came from behind, down-well towards the planet.
Pravos strung webs of intent through both halves of the mindscape, pulling out weapons and layering stronger wards over their mind.
Once, Aktaeon had walked them into an old church. The wood rotten, roof caved in, the building a ruin, they had sat in one of the few pews that survived as more than kindling draped in mold. Aktaeon had looked up at a weathered statue of a woman and asked if Pravos believed in god.
Pravos did. Gods were real. He would kill many some day, because he was just as real as they.
Aktaeon had then asked if Pravos believed in the god of Abraham.
Pravos did not. But it had only ever been a lack of evidence that had stopped him.
Reaching into the sixth and seventh pools inside the mindscape, Pravos pulled out some of his sharpest spears as the biblical angel floated closer.
Its skin was porcelain, its eyes pale and unblinking. Feathers sprouted from the body and so did wings, both feathers and wings made of the same material as the skin, and if there was rhyme or reason to the feathers or wings, Pravos could not decipher it, and he could decipher much. Taller than Aktaeon by ten feet, the angel was nude, female, and if Aktaeon had been alive, he might have ventured to call her attractive. If the angel had been alive, Pravos might have ventured to call it mouthwatering, three of its largest wings wrapped tight around itself.
And how it echoed.
Pravos could see why Aktaeon had trouble with this, if this was what had caused him to go mad.
Many things were Aktaeon’s domain. Light, for example, or postcognition and precognition. In comparison, Pravos was a simple thing, but what being did not recognize itself in the mirror? Appearances could deceive, but a sword was a sword. What would happen, he wondered, if he pulled a sword of his own, and two bridges met? What would dance across that bridge?
Pravos tilted Aktaeon’s head.
The Angel screamed with its mind, its wings moving in patterns that dazzled the eye. Cognitohazards slammed into Pravos, and countermeasures activated just as fast. The pattern of the moving feathers was bleached from his memory, leaving wings blurred with motion.
Jerking the rifle in his hand up to bear on the angel, Pravos shuffled through his cognitohazards, exchanging the strongest variants for something subdued. ‘Connect us’
Osteo Striga spat curses in arcs of green. The wings stuttered before resuming their fluid sweeps. Greedy teeth bit deep into the Angel as the curses struck true. Blade met blade. The best connection was a lethal one; Life and death, wielder to victim, there was power in such things. But the angel was a blade that understood nothing of the purpose or the elegance behind the shape it aped, and that crudity was enough for Pravos to force something through the gaps left in its design.
Like a needle, Pravos slipped a curse into an alien mind, just to see if he could. The chill was exquisite; Cold logic assailed him.
The approach was viable.
Slivering a fragment from his mind, Pravos shaped the will, sharpened it, and forced it into Osteo Striga. Osteo Striga screamed, and it was not the cry that had echoed in the mindscape before. This was terror; a weapon on the verge of shattering as it was forced to wield a munition born of higher logic. There were things children were not meant to bear, and weapons the weak could not hold.
It survived it. Barely.
The curse lanced out. Malice found gaps in the mind of the angel, wiggling its way through and establishing a connection stronger than anything Osteo Striga was capable of. Power thickened and solidified, threads corded into barbed chains. It was a bridge, and Pravos danced across it.
[GIVE YOUR WILL TO ME]
Wings froze as the Angel paused, one of the intelligences peering at Pravos recoiling in shock and pain that caused reality to ripple.
A cold chill seeped through that connection as something inhuman was pulled through. Weak thing, frail thing, childish thing-
Within the mindscape, Pravos’ smile felt like hate and murder twinged with eager anticipation. He would enjoy this-
Then a wing lashed out fast as thought. It shattered half the ribs on the left side of Aktaeon’s body, breaking Pravos’ concentration as it batted them away.
Pravos recoiled. Teeth creaked as they grit, rage burning in the eyes through which Pravos peered at the world he despised. Pushing through layers of reality, he called to the deeps. And from the deeps, something called back. It was a hungry, greedy thing, and where it touched him, it consumed emotion. Rage. That was its price. Anger bled from Pravos, replaced by emptiness that beat like a heart in the place of hate. Aktaeon’s helmet glowed with a soft inner light.
Around him, Void seeped into reality, flowing between atoms and flickering the vacuum with purple. Directed by his will, it coalesced into a bruise upon the universe and launched itself at the angel like an arrow.
The lance struck true, and like an infection it spread. In seconds, it had consumed a smaller wing in its entirety before jumping to nearby pinyons, annihilated folded matter better measured in kilometers than meters within seconds before it spent itself, the last of the violet light winking out in a shower of radiation.
The Angel flapped its wings, launching itself at Pravos as if it had sprung off concrete rather than vacuum.
Power curled around Aktaeon’s body, a finger or two whisping into shimmering purple haze before flesh and bone reformed, sheathed in a corona that defied fundamental laws of reality as it formed a barrier in front of Aktaeon’s body.
The large wing was fast, and substantial as it slammed into Aktaeon’s chest.
Had mundane matter been all that composed it, no amount of mass would have sufficed, but the emotion that clung to the folds of the flesh rippled the shield, bending it under the monumental strain. Mountains of matter vanished in the blink of an eye. It was too much. The wing broke through, shattering flesh and turning ribs into jagged shards. Feathers harder than tungsten were smeared red with blood as they cut Aktaeon’s spine in half, impaling him on what was left of the pinyon.
The Angel flicked the wing, and the body slid off the feathers, tossed down towards the planet like a child discarding a once-favored toy.
Veins were burst. Bone was shattered. Ligaments torn from their connections beneath the skin. A single remaining eye watched the angel as it receded, the wing that had done such damage half the size it had once been. It watched him back, then its wings curled around itself, hiding its naked form.
If Pravos had been capable of laughing, he would have.
Instead, he turned his attention inward. Power churned around him. The Void had not lasted long enough to protect him, but Pravos had never been as skilled with the Light as his host was. It was their respective natures; the mindsets demanded by powers that existed by those who sought to wield them. Had it been Aktaeon’s hand at work, the Angel would not have survived. And even with Pravos’ clumsy manipulations, the Void was the Void. It consumed, and it stole, and much of what it took it offered to him, a seething mass of power, like a supernova in the back of his mind, that faded by the second. Pravos fed dribbles of energy into the shattered frame he wore like a puppet while the remainder of the power dispersed into the quantum foam. .
Bone shards clicked together, fusing. Tendons writhed underneath skin as they found their proper place. Rent flesh reknit. An eye squelched as it blinked tears of blood and ocular fluid.
Aktaeon was going to want to know everything about this world, and that was something that could be used.
Delving into the cognitohazard squirreled away in the recesses of his skull, Pravos tore the idea apart. Even what little remained was impressive, a shape produced by curious minds that reminded him of Oryx and his lust for the unknown, but without the bite of Willbreaker, the blade of the Harrowed God. It reminded him of the Vex, and their logic engines.
It did not remind him of Aktaeon.
Far from being a barren desert, this was a fertile feeding ground where the heretical slept. This Angel was shaped like a sword in its heresy, but those that wielded the blade were no acolyte seeking the last true shape that would crease the edges of the cosmos. Their deeds were great, but wasted on those such as them. Power existed, unused, and waiting for a will like Pravos to come pluck the fruit planted eons past.
And he would. It was his now. He had seen it. Planted his claim.
As the last of the photoreceptor cells in his damaged eye regenerated, Pravos watched the Angel until it was too far to be perceived, and even then he hungered after what he could still feel.
A sword that was a gun had been planted over the birthplace of humanity by an alien intellect that desired to describe reality. So be it.
A thought that was a sword would show them a shape of the divine. Let them attempt to comprehend Pravos. It could not be done.
Aiat.