FeatherWriter

She managed to get her eyes open enough to start focusing, and her suspicions were confirmed. She was lying down in the half-shelter of a ruined building, but she was… outdoors. And alone. Off in the distance, haphazard structures coughed thick black smoke against a hazy sky. The Plaguelands, she realized, back in old Russia. Near to where she’d originally been disappeared. Looking down at herself, she found she was wearing not the flimsy slave’s tabard, but her lost armor: the thick, sturdy synthweave of a warlock’s robes, tailored to her perfectly. The comforting pressure of her bond rested once more around her left arm. 

A shuddering breath caught in her throat as the realization struck her all at once. She was free ? After so long, was it truly over? The very concept seemed incomprehensible to her now, her freedom a thing so long sought, so long dreamed of, that she could no longer recognize it. 

As she continued to take in her immediate surroundings, her eyes caught a glint nestled in the snow, a glass canister of a very particular size. With a gasp, she shoved herself up to her feet, slipping against the snow-muddied ground in her haste to get over to it. Kneeling in the snow, she clawed it from the drift which half-covered it, her heart turning over as she saw Mandala suspended motionless within. A frantic, animal desperation overcame her as she tore at the complicated hatch at the top and found, with incredible relief, that while the stasis mechanism of the device was still engaged, it was not actually locked.  A pressurized hiss escaped when she finally managed to release it, and the lighted mechanism disengaged. 

The small Ghost’s shell fluttered, twitching as he too returned to awareness and began floating of his own power. On instinct, thin lines of light briefly blanketed their surroundings as he scanned the area close to him, trying to get his bearings. Likely searching for her latest corpse, she realized, as that was the only time their captors had ever released him. His shell flared open when he sensed her, warm and living, right beside her.

“Mandala,” she whispered, as though speaking his name too loudly might cause him to shatter. 

“G-Guardian? You’re alive?” He turned, starting to float out from the glass cannister, quickly scanning their surroundings again, showing the same confusion she had. “Where is… Are we actually…?”

She reached for him slowly, still not fully able to trust that this was real, but as soon as her fingers brushed his shell, she was seized . Her body convulsed, back arching as a wave of power lifted her from her knees. The tips of her boots barely brushed the ground as a connection, their rightful connection, snapped back into place and Light, sweet and searing, flooded her. She’d thought the sunlight too much to bear against her eyes after so long underground? That discomfort was but a sputtering candle compared to this deluge, this consecration, this radiance. She’d been kept at the edge of starvation, what meager scraps she’d had torn from her to sate her enemies, now the Traveler’s benevolence returned to her with such ferocity she feared she would be torn apart, unmade in a moment of paracausal sacralization.

When the Light finally settled within her, fell back to the muddied ground, catching herself on hands and knees, bowed forward like a penitent disciple, chest heaving as her whole body felt alive with potential for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. Wisps of Light arose between her fingers, swirling eddies of Voidlight, tongues of Solar flame, and skittering chains of Arc current mixing together and dancing up her arms, the energy inside her volatile in its exuberance. 

Mandala floated down into her eyeline, tipping to the side with concern. “Guardian, are you alright? I-I didn’t realize it would be so—”

At his nervous inquiries, a sob broke free and Sylvanni took his shell in both hands, clutching him tightly to her breast. To hear his voice again, after so long of their only interactions having been silent resurrections and being forced to obediently hand him over to her captors to be locked away once more… she thought she might burst with relief.

“I’m alright,” she forced out, her tears cold in the wintery air. “Finally, I’m alright. M-Mandala, forgive me. I couldn’t… All those times, I wasn’t strong enough to… I just gave you back! ”

He bumped gently against her hands until she finally pulled back and opened them, cupping him between her palms instead. “Please, Guardian. Sylvanni. There’s nothing to forgive.” She shuddered slightly to hear him use her name, a rarity in their relationship even in usual circumstances. “I… I can only imagine what you endured without me, seeing what they’d done to you each time I woke up. But for me, it was nothingness. You lived through it; I was merely… asleep. Please don’t blame yourself. We’re together now, and we’re alive. That’s what matters.” 

He tipped sideways, looking around at their environment again. “How are we alive and together, exactly? What… happened? How did you get out? The last thing I remember, we were in the throne room, and it looked like you had been… crushed? Then they took me back again. What happened afterward? Was it… Did Uldren do something?”

Uldren. The name snapped her thoughts back into context, remembering the throne room. His secret scheme all along, his orders to have her ‘handled’ when her guards knocked her out. How had she ended up here, alone outdoors with Mandala’s containment instead? Before she could find a response, the soft whirr of a Servitor’s movement sounded on the other side of the ruined wall beside her, a sound so intimately familiar to her now, it made her blood immediately turn to ice. 

She froze, panic seizing her, wondering if this had all been some kind of sick trap, a way to get her to let her guard down again, to give her hope only to snatch it back and haul her away again for more torture. But the intangible grasp never fell upon her, no presence forced its way in to rip away her Light this time. The sound came again, but no closer, as though her Servitor was simply hovering in the same spot, doing nothing to come after her despite the fact that she and and her Ghost had been speaking clearly. 

With excruciating care, she slowly crept to the crumbling edge of her half room, trying to keep her steps from audibly crunching the snow, and peered into the space beyond. There, the wretched machine floated, a Servitor she would know anywhere now, from that little dent on its upper-left plate to the three scrapes on its undercarriage. The one light in the display of its eye-ring that flickered with that distinctive pattern. Her Servitor. 

It noticed her, the lens on its front shuttering open and closed in something like robotic surprise. The whirr of its motors sounded again, but despite bobbing in place, the Servitor didn’t actually move, and a faulty series of rapid clicks echoed from its chassis as well. Sylvanni watched it try again, but whatever it was attempting, nothing happened. Slowly, she straightened and stepped closer. 

A bright beam flared to life, just above the Servitor’s eye, and Sylvanni dove backwards with a cold jolt of fear, however the light resolved into a simple projection instead. She stood again slowly, feeling slightly foolish for her still-racing heartbeat, staring at a translucent image of none other than Uldren Sov. 

He too was no longer dressed in dirty prisoner’s garb, but instead had well-made leathers and a short cape over one shoulder. Frowning, she moved to the side, noticing that his eyes didn’t track her. A recording? 

The image stood silent for longer than she would have expected, Uldren running his hands through his hair and shaking his head. It seemed to take him a moment to find the words to begin.  “I’ve never been very good at apologies, Duv. And yet, at the end of our time here together, I find myself owing you a number of them. Ah, where to begin?"

He started to pace slowly as he talked, but the way the projector captured him, his image stayed mostly in the same place, so his stride failed to match his movement. Sylvanni went to stand right in front of him, arms crossed, trying to imagine if he'd been here in the flesh if she'd have given him the courtesy of letting him speak without interruption. 

"First, I suppose, for what I said in the Kell's chamber. It was true, just as you'd guessed: the knowledge of how to disable Ghosts came from me. I let my torturers believe they had extracted that information under duress, but I'd known from the start that I'd need to give them something to ensure they thought me valuable enough to keep. Valuable enough to show off. Never got a stay wrapped around me like you did for my contributions though. I suppose a Guardian would always be the greater prize. 

"I admit, when I told them of my technique, I hadn't thought they'd be capable enough to operationalize it, much less have a team coordinated enough to subdue a Guardian long enough to put it to use. But I hadn't been particularly… concerned by the possibility either, I admit. If they caught a Light-bearer using my snare, that would simply offer me more credibility, of course."

He sighed, spreading his hands and offering a thin smile. "I certainly hadn't expected they'd snatch someone I knew. Nor that I would so dearly regret the part I played in her capture. For that, my first apology. You needn't have suffered so for my plans, but my carelessness made it so."

Sylvanni stepped into the recording's eye line as he kept talking, straining to weigh the measure of sincerity in his voice, in his expressions. Was any of this contrition offered in truth, or was it all just more smoke and mirrors, trying to twist her into doing what he wanted?

"As for those plans themselves," he said, "It was not out of malice that I left you unaware of them. By the time you were brought in, I'd already been laying seeds for this end state, though i couldn't know for certain how we'd get here. I knew the Eliksni, and the House of Kings specifically, well enough to get what I needed of them. I couldn't risk you unintentionally interfering if you'd been made aware of everything I had in motion. Neither did I wish to give you false hope that I could promise a way out. After all, this was always going to be one hell of a gamble. They feared you far more than they did me. Had they thought us actively colluding, I might not have won the support I'd needed."

She gave him a withering glare, thought it was far less satisfying knowing he couldn't see it. "You are bad at apologies, Sov," she muttered.

"So, I gambled on a long shot, and you paid the price for it without having been asked and without having been informed why. For that I thank you, even as I beg your forgiveness. I don't suspect you're in a very forgiving mood, but the apologies are owed regardless of how they are received. I can't do much to make it up to you, but I give you a few offerings as you head on your way.

"The first is, of course, your freedom, long overdue. Disappointed though the Eliksni will undoubtedly be to lose you, I've no intention of detaining you further. You should find your Ghost placed near to where you awoke. His containment should be unlocked, you need only disable it to free him. What I was able to find of your possessions, including your weapons, are in a chest around the corner linked to your biodata. Should spring open at a touch. I can't promise it's everything, but it's all that was left.

"Finally," Uldren said, gesturing behind him toward something not captured in the recording, "I leave you this. If you hadn't realized, it is the one that was connected to you, though you'll find I've disabled most of its functions. It turns out techniques capable of rendering a Ghost inert work rather effectively against Servitors as well."

Sylvanni started, realizing what he was saying. A gesture not towards something behind him in the recording, but to the Servitor projecting his message. 

"Its offensive capabilities are entirely removed, it is no longer authorized to interact with its paracausal connection to you, and its ambulatory systems are quite thoroughly crippled. In case my borrowing of its power bank to deliver this message had not already made this clear: it is utterly incapable of posing threat to you."

He swept his arm back, gesturing with a bow that seemed only half sarcastic. "I'm sure you can understand how valuable a Servitor is to a House and how dearly the Eliksni protect them. I'll have to tread carefully when they realize this one is missing, but it was important to me that it make its way to you, considering the… special bond you share. I thought you might not wish to be parted from it.

"By way of reparations, I know it's far from sufficient for what you've endured, Duv. But it's the best I can do for now. I hope you're able to find some measure of satisfaction in finding its proper place." He gave her an easy smirk. "For what it's worth, I can't think of anyone else I'd have rather be tortured beside. Let's have our next meeting under more pleasant circumstances. Though compared to this, I think we'd be hard pressed to do worse."

He gave her a wink and a little wave as he signed off. "Stay safe, will you? I'd hate to think all my language training had gone to waste after all." He turned away in the recording, and the message blinked off, leaving her alone with her Ghost and the Servitor.

Mandala floated up beside her shoulder, concerned. "What… what was he talking about, Guardian? Was he saying he chose to be captured?"

"So it would seem," Sylvanni said, her voice toneless. Her eyes remained locked on the Servitor in front of her, listening to her Ghost's questions with only half an ear. 

"To what end? What was he trying to do?"

"It appears he did not deem it necessary to share that information. The purpose for which we were made pawns is not ours to know." Her voice could have cut steel. 

She stepped forward slowly, hearing the Servitor spin its useless processes, desperate little clicks and whirrs. It inched backwards as she got closer, but even at her drawn pace, it could not get away. She stared into its single mechanical eye, placing both hands on the top curve of its spherical body. The little projector which had played Uldren's message was not a normal part of its circuitry, it seemed, but had been grafted on just above the eye. It was a simple enough thing to pluck free the wires connecting it and slip the small device into her pocket. She had a feeling she might want to see that message again later.

Mandala floated forward as well, poking into her line of sight again. "What was he talking about with this? He's giving you a Servitor? Why?"

Sylvanni stroked small circles with her thumb on the Servitor's surface, feeling the cool metal of the smooth chassis through her thin gloves. "Debts paid for a wrong done. Reparation." An old conversation with Erxaris drifted to the front of her mind. "Recompense."

She leaned in close to the hateful machine, until her nose was nearly touching it, and whispered: "I was never able to tell if there was a mind within a machine like you, or if you were nothing more than empty, automated processes. Is there anything in there that is aware? I admit, it never seemed to matter before."

That overabundance of the Light, returned to her after so long absent, still churned within her, danced across her forearms and fingers. The Void, which always seemed to rest closest to her soul, answered first, violet energy pooling within her skin, settling beneath her palms. It was as simple as letting out a breath to let it pour into the Servitor. Her Light was a dam overfull, an airlock released to the vacuum, a pressure release so natural it could not help but flow. Some of the Void Light crawled across the surface, spreading like rime as it suffused the thick metal. The greater part of her power, however, dove deep within, down at the Servitor's heart, raw gravity pulling ever more gravity into the core.

The Servitor let out a mechanical whine as the Light invaded it and Sylvanni gently shushed it, even as a dark part of her savored that panicked, helpless sound. "Please believe me when I say that right now, more than anything else, I hope there is something in you that is alive. Something that gets to feel what it's like to be so wholly at your enemy's mercy. Something that experiences my power forcing its way into every hateful crack and crevice of what you are. And by the Traveler… I hope every moment of this hurts. "

The singularity at its center continued to build, growing more and more dense and hungry as Light continued to spill from her. The metal itself let out an unnatural groan as the forces mounted upon the individual pieces keeping the Servitor together. The spherical surface popped inward suddenly in a massive dent, then another, and another; the strength of the metal itself enervated wherever her Light had touched it. The Servitor started to screech as its functions failed, torn apart from within. Sylvanni offered it one final little smile, and gently pushed with both hands upon its increasingly warped hull. That little nudge was all it took to break the last remnant of structural integrity the chassis possessed and the proud, sacred Eliksni machine imploded into a jagged ball of useless scrap, its metal plates crumpling as easily as tin foil. 

Sylvanni stepped forward again, bringing her hands in close around the much smaller remnants of her mechanical tormentor, now suspended in a maelstrom of Void Light. Power continued to pour from her, pushing what had been a massive construct down to something half its size. Then down to a quarter. It was dead now, destroyed beyond repair, she knew, but something in her wanted more. She wished to see it unmade, transformed beyond recognizability. The pressure bearing down on the Servitor’s remains redoubled. 

So many Guardians spoke of the energetic flash of Arc, the searing radiance of Solar, dismissing Void Light as quiet, empty, unimpressive. Those who did not wield it regularly never seemed to understand. In that moment, watching what remained of her enemy compress beneath her onslaught, Sylvanni was transcendent. Hers was the power which stitched together galaxies, which birthed and broke stars, the crucible in which fundamental dust of the universe was forged into every possible permutation of existence. In this moment of pure vindication, she thought to herself that this was the last time this Servitor would take from her every last scrap of Light she possessed. But this time, on her terms. 

When the Light finally ran dry, she slumped forward, breathing heavy as she cupped the small globe that remained in both hands. As the raging swirl of her hand-crafted black hole dissipated, she could see the hyper-dense ball of metal she’d created at the heart of it all, its surface forged glassy smooth as it was hyper-compressed under the onslaught of cosmic pressure. Wavy bands of black and grey swirled throughout the remnant, and tiny specks of what might have been the dust from the crushed glass of its lens-eye sparkled in the wispy remnants of her Light. 

The Void clung to the surface, suffused through every atom of the little sphere, small enough now to comfortably rest in the palm of her hand. Under normal circumstances, she knew the remarkable density she’d forced it into meant it would be heavy enough to make it a struggle for any average person to lift. Under the remnants of her power, however, it was all but weightless, subject to the influence of no gravity but its own. She passed it from one hand to the other, letting it dance lightly over the tips of her fingers, taking in the deep comfort of knowing it was all that remained of a thing that would never hurt her again. 

Mandala gave a small beep, reminding her of his presence and pulling her from the reverie. “Guardian? What do we do now?”

She gave her head a shake and grabbed the former-Servitor orb from the air, tucking it away. Though she’d drained herself dry, here up on the surface, reconnected to her Ghost, the Light was flowing to fill the emptiness quickly once more. With a quick glance around, she picked out the chest that was supposed to contain what remained of her gear, and started to make her way towards it. “How… How long were we in there?”

He took a moment to process. “My… internal timekeeping registered only three days, for me. But, connecting to the nearest VanNet access… it appears that the date is eight months, nine days, thirteen hours and five minutes since I was taken offline during the first ambush.”

Sylvanni let out a slow breath. Eight months. It seemed at once too short a span to encompass the eternity it felt like she’d suffered, and yet unfathomably long to have been removed from the world. What had changed while she was down there? What had she missed? What had been lost in her absence?

She swallowed, pushing down her worries, emotions, and all lingering thoughts of Uldren, the Eliksni, and what she’d endured. She was a Guardian. She had a duty to be done. Nothing to do now but to keep moving forward and find her focus once more. 

“Call the ship from orbit. We make for the Tower. We go home.”

Somewhere off to her left, she could hear Uldren being similarly marched by his own guards. He didn’t speak, but the sounds of a moving body clad in skin rather than chitin were familiar, and she picked them out in the shuffle. He hadn’t been in his cell when they’d retrieved her, but she was relieved to know they’d be facing this together at least. 

Despite her covered eyes, she recognized the route they were taking: their destination was the Baroness’ throne room, where she’d been brought any number of times. Or, perhaps Sylvanni realized, it was not her throne room at all, but the absent Kell’s. Her suspicions were confirmed when the hood was yanked free, and she found herself at the front of the familiar chamber, standing before a throne-seated Fallen even larger than the Baroness: the massive Kell himself.

She quickly took her usual attentive pose, arms behind her, eyes lowered; though through this indirect gaze, she tried to study the rest of the room. Just in front of her, the Baroness was chittering out a grandiose presentation, telling the story of how a valiant strike team had captured Machine-thief Silveks, and saying how perfectly obedient the Kings’ most valuable slave was now, after she had been properly tamed. 

The Baroness held Mandala’s stasis canister in her lower hands, which she proffered towards the Kell, praising the Kings splicers’ ingenuity in its design, how it entirely disabled a Machine-shard, explaining how Silveks now lived and died at the House’s command, how her stolen Machine-ether was now siphoned away to be rightfully returned to the most worthy members of the House. 

Sylvanni stopped listening closely enough to translate after that; she had a feeling she knew where this presentation was headed. Instead, she tried to surreptitiously study the reclusive Kell himself, who dwarfed even this large seat as he lounged across it. Though it was hard to tell with him seated, she guessed he would be at least a full head taller than the Baroness standing, and she was already twice a human’s height. Sylvanni had faced Kells in the past, hunting Skolas after his treachery in the Reef, though she had never been so powerless before one as she was now. A creature like this felt far more intimidating when she had no weapons or armor and with her powers stripped away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Uldren being held by two guards off to the side, presumably waiting his turn to be shown off to the court. He looked much worse than when she’d last seen him: grey skin mottled with black and purple bruises, his own dark blood smeared across the side of his mouth and staining his dirtied clothes in several new places. Whatever they had been doing to him this morning, it clearly hadn’t been pleasant, and he sagged with a heavy slump between his two guards, their arms holding him upright almost as much as they held him in place.

Clearly the Baroness wished for both of her prized prisoners to appear powerless and debased when brought before the Kell: a Guardian stripped of her powers and coerced into obedience beside the Awoken Prince thoroughly interrogated and beaten to a bloody, impotent pulp. Despite his clearly terrible condition however, when Uldren caught Sylvanni’s sideways glance, he winked once, with the tiniest fraction of a smile.

She turned her eyes forward again, to the floor before the throne, and tried to interpret that. Did this mean Uldren had a plan? Dared she wait for him to make the first move? Perhaps he hoped to cause some kind of distraction, and in the chaos she’d be able to grab Mandala’s containment and free him.  

Her ears pricked as she caught the Eliksni words she was listening for from the Baroness: loyalty-showing and offered life. She straightened, steeling herself for what was to come, looking to see who would hand her a weapon for the deed. To her surprise, the Kell interrupted, standing from his chair. 

[ No, ] he growled in Eliksni, slowly crossing floor to stand right in front of Sylvanni. It took every shred of her remaining will not to step back or flinch away, but she stood her ground, craning her neck to stare up at him with her coldest expression. [ To kill these deathless thieves is great pleasure, why should Silveksslave have such privilege granted? It shall instead prove loyalty by offering life to its Kell. ]

The Baroness looked taken aback by the unexpected interruption in her carefully scripted pageantry, but she quickly recovered and motioned for Erxaris to translate a command to Sylvanni not to resist. They still thought her incapable of doing more than repeating the rote Eliksni phrases she’d been drilled in.

With an intent, four-eyed gaze, the Kell seized Sylvanni with one immense hand wrapped around her waist. She gritted her teeth, keeping herself silent as the roughly shaped prisoner’s stay pinched and cut into her skin. The metal began to creak and groan around her as the Kell slowly started to squeeze. 

[ So pitiful and weak, these creatures. Soft like a molted hatchling. Great Machine would never choose such pitiful race. Proves its theft by sickening unworthiness. ]

His grip tightened and the stay crumped, making a shredded mess of her abdomen as she bit back the sounds that tried to rise in her throat. She would not give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream. She kept her gaze locked hard on his, and through bloodied lips rasped: To House Kings , in Eliksni, the final phrase of the recitation she’d been taught when ‘proving loyalty.’ 

She spit it as a bloodied curse, wishing that every member of this vile House should be subject to such a slow and painful death as this. The Kell seemed to take her meaning regardless, and with a cruel smile he clenched his hand, thick claws spearing her through from all sides. In a way, it was a mercy, the cruelty she’d goaded from him had ensured she’d fade quickly. 

With a dismissive flick, he tossed her ruined mess of a body off his fingers and down to the floor. She vaguely heard him start to order the Baroness to bring out the Ghost, and then Sylvanni closed her eyes and slipped into the soft darkness of death.

As ever, her respite was all too brief, for the next thing she knew, she was seized from quiet rest and dragged back into existence. She dropped back into a renewed body, her livery robes and the ill-fitting stay restored to their original condition as well. She let the momentum of resurrection drop her to one knee, trying to hide how unsteady she always was when getting revived with no warning like this. 

For one moment, she let herself feel Mandala’s presence, reconnected to her even briefly, Ghost and Guardian once more. It was an indulgence she rarely allowed herself in this routine, but something about being here before the Kell, the sense that something was going to change, she let herself consider what would happen if she simply kept him, refused to hand him back over for containment. She already knew there were Vandal guards watching her for any twitch of aggression or disobedience, ready to drop her in an instant if she showed any hint of becoming a threat. In as dark a place as this, bereft of shields or armor, she had to remind herself that her Light would be curtailed long before she could muster enough to pose a threat. 

And yet, she hesitated, and ever so briefly looked for Uldren out of the corner of her eye again. He shook his head with a wince of sympathy, and she understood what he meant; that unwise hope dying in her chest. This isn’t the time. Don’t make your move yet. 

She bowed her head and smothered her treasonous emotions, letting the mantle of Silveks settle upon her again. She was as the void within: cold, vacuous, hollow. A space in which light and life could not exist. Nihility itself. She held her hand forward, calling her Ghost to it—just a thing, just an object, allowing herself no emotion in the act giving him over. The Baroness greedily snapped his canister prison closed and Sylvanni felt the connection between them snap within her as it was severed, leaving a dull ache behind. 

Mandala was once more an object without meaning taken from her. And, in like manner, she too became an object unto herself. The Kings’ prize, the decorative trophy, a thing merely shaped like a Guardian. She could not bear it otherwise.

The Kell watched this routine with an air of satisfaction, settling back onto his throne as the Baroness began to lavish praise upon the ingenuity of the splicers whom she had led to discover this new invention, that which could ensnare the most loathed Machine thieves. She started into a self-aggrandizing account of how she had found a way to bind Silveks to a blessed Servitor, that the stolen Light ether might be reclaimed for the Eliksni.

Sure enough, Sylvanni heard the all too familiar whirr of mechanics floating up into place beside her. She closed her eyes, trying to slow her breathing as she waited for the Baroness to give the order. Trying to fight the Servitor’s grasp only made it worse. With a hard whine, she felt its power fall upon her, and her muscles seized as she was lifted from the floor. The paralysis was only relief the experience offered: in that she did not have to hold herself back from screaming. Under its terrible auspices, she could not have opened her mouth to cry out even if she’d wanted to. As ever, the Servitor extracted her Light with an agony so comprehensive it wormed its way through her soul, seeking the parts of her nature beyond causality. 

That power felt as though it pried every tendril of her nerves from her flesh, and she could do nothing at all to fight it off, nothing to be done but suffer until finally it completed its awful work and dropped her limp to the floor again. She simply lay there, body spasming in the aftermath, ostensibly uninjured but feeling just as broken and devastated as when the Kell had shredded her chest and dumped her to die.

She distantly heard the clicks and chitters of Eliksni speech, but was nowhere near coherent enough to bother trying to translate. Likely the Baroness promising the Kell the first of this ‘Machine ether’ harvest, once it had been synthesized for Eliksni consumption. She numbly felt clawed hands take hold of her arms and drag her away from the spot before the throne. Thankfully, they did not attempt to force her to stand for the rest of the proceedings. Grateful that she was no longer the main event, she settled into a kneeling position off to the side and waited for her strength to slowly return. 

In her place, Uldren was dragged forward and tossed roughly to the floor before the Kell, who leaned forward with great interest. Uldren Sov, it appeared, needed no introduction, for no sooner had the Baroness attempted to explain her next prize’s pedigree but the Kell cut her off, already sneering through a cruel smile. 

[ Such shame must it feel, ] the Kell snarled, using the lowest, most derogatory register as he spoke. [ Broken prince of broken people. Blood of Mara-Falsekel, who failed to lead House of Wolves. Usurped by own prisoner, Skolaskel. Falsekel who died leading House of Reefwalkers to useless death. And that which falls now before the Kingskel, it is lesser sibling even still, lesser to an abject failure. Pitiful survivor of a people unfit to exist. To see such weak royal blood stain my floor is great pleasure. ]

Uldren slowly pushed himself up off the floor, wiping a smear of that ‘weak royal blood’ from his face. His Vandal guards stayed flanking to either side, ready to grab him again if he tried anything, but he simply settled into a lazy sitting posture. 

And then looked up at the Kell, met the four eyes there with an intent look and smiled. 

The Kell roared at the disrespectful expression, throwing himself to his feet and bristling with threat. [ You are nothing! Less than nothing, less than worthless! Your House crumbled around you, you fall to the hands of your enemies, you suffer at our behest! ]

Sylvanni slowly lifted her head to watch, feeling the energy in the room shift. She noticed how his language slipped as he addressed Uldren, from the lowest form—how one would address a prisoner or slave—to one slightly higher: How one addressed an enemy. 

Something’s changing here, she realized. Is this somehow Uldren’s doing?

The Kell continued his brutal tirade, all four arms waving in fury as he spat insult after insult upon Uldren, but the prince simply settled back, smile broadening. Smugly waiting for the tantrum to be finished. Sylvanni watched the exchange rapt, waiting to catch some sort of signal from Uldren, and fearing that the Kell in his fury might kill the prince right then and there. 

When finally his anger seemed to have run dry, the Kell stepped up, daring Uldren to respond to the accusations against him. That infuriating grin remained as Uldren craned his neck up to meet the Kell’s eyes, then said plainly: “I think your Baroness is going to regret never learning my people’s language, as I tell you that this little pageant she’s putting on is a prelude to your assassination. That ether she extracted from the Guardian, which she plans to offer you next, has been poisoned.”

The Kell pulled back, snarling at the unexpected response from his beaten yet un-humiliated prisoner. Clearly, he understood what Uldren had said, though the Baroness simply looked confused to hear human speech in the room. More telling however, was Erxaris, who flinched quite clearly, and stepped forward to speak. She, the Baroness’ faithful translator, had certainly understood what Uldren said.

The lone member of House Judgment waved her staff in a threatening motion at Uldren, who looked utterly unimpressed. [ Hold silence! You shall not speak such filth before the Kell of Kings. Great Kell, this feeble worm speaks lies to you in false tongue! It thinks to divide your majestic court on the joyous occasion of your return. ]

The Kell looked between Uldren on the floor and Erxaris, narrowing his outer eyes, perhaps noting how quickly Erxaris had jumped to the Baroness’ defense. [ Is this so? ]

Erxaris started to step back, realizing the ploy was out in the air, and there was little chance of it being covered back up. She turned to the Baroness, starting to call out a warning that Uldren had revealed them, when a small blur flew from the waist of a watching dreg and buried itself in Erxaris' throat, cutting her off mid-word. The shock dagger, telekinetically thrown, hummed quietly with energy as Erxaris twitched and slumped to the ground.

Uldren lowered his hand, not even trying to hide the wrist flick he'd used to accomplish the feat. Sylvanni could hardly believe he was capable of that kind of mental focus considering his state. His guards seemed frozen with shock, one staring at the swiftly dying Judgment Vandal, the other at their charge, though neither moved to grab him again. 

"How quickly she tries to warn her traitorous mistress," Uldren said casually. "So much for Judgment's impartiality. That makes another House… fallen. But if you disbelieve me, Great Kell–” The title dripped with insincerity. “–test the ether for yourself."

With Erxaris’ death, the Baroness began to back away from the Kell, still not fully comprehending the exchange happening, but realizing something here had gone terribly wrong. When the Kell turned upon her, she crouched down to all sixes, sensing a fight, ether hissing from her rebreather. She clutched the Ghost containment cylinder under her lower right arm protectively, perhaps thinking it might be her only bargaining chip.

The Kell stayed upright, cruel and imperious as he walked toward the last ranking member of his court. [ This tribute of Machine-ether, Baroness: First draught will be yours. ]

The Baroness, despite realizing she was caught, still tried to demure. [ Such great honor, Magnificent Kell, should… should belong to you. ]

The Kell suddenly lunged, moving far faster than his size seemingly should have allowed. The watching courtiers scattered away from the fight as he crashed into her, the two of them struggling in a fierce scuffle. The Baroness faltered during the bout, clearly used to being the largest Eliksni in the room, but now simply outmatched by the stronger, heavier Kell. She reached for a charged sword at her back, only for the Kell to seize the offending arm and—with a sickening, wet crunch—tear it free. The weapon slipped inoffensively from its sheath, halfway drawn, and clattered to the ground. 

The Kell seized her other lower arm, and wrenched this one free as well to complete the docking. He started to growl something about treason and traitors, but Sylvanni barely heard it, watching the severed limb tumble to the ground… along with Mandala’s containment cylinder. 

Enervated though she still was from the harvest, she dared not waste this chance. In the chaos of the House turning upon itself, she wouldn’t get another opportunity. With a sudden heave, she threw herself forward, but her guards were not nearly as stunned by the outbreak of violence as Uldren’s had been. Perhaps it was a matter of their difference in threat: a beaten, mortal Awoken going rogue might harm a few Eliksni before he was subdued, but a Guardian managing to fight back could potentially take out the entire room.

Whatever the reason, when she lunged, a clawed foot planted immediately itself in her back, pinning her to the floor before she could get more than a few feet. [ Stop now! ] a panicked voice yelped in Eliksni above her. When she continued struggling to get away, the fearful guard stabbed his shock blade through her shoulder, hoping the arc energy would incapacitate her. She struggled to try to push through it, ignore the pain, desperate not to lose her chance, but after everything she’d been through, she simply lacked the strength. Succumbing to the electrocution, her limbs spasmed, helplessly out of her control, until the guard finally relented and pulled his weapon free.

She turned her head as she remained pinned, watching as the canister rolled with improbable convenience right to where Uldren still sat on the floor. She wondered how long he’d been keeping that telekinetic aptitude from their captors, saving it for these crucial moments. He rested his hand atop it, keeping it close, and she tried to take some meager comfort in the idea that at least it hadn’t ended up with another Eliksni. 

The Kell had eyes only for his recently docked Baroness, completely ignoring the rest of the court in attendance. He held her fast with three arms, leaving his fourth to pull the intake from her ether rebreather with a swift yank. She struggled to get away, but his grip was unyielding, his free hand bringing a hose connected to Sylvanni’s Servitor over and connecting it to the mask instead. All four eyes wide, the Baroness shook her head vigorously, trying to dislodge it before her held breath gave out, but the Kell’s hand wrapped around her head, keeping it in place. 

Eventually, her lungs gave out and involuntarily, the damning breath was drawn. Uldren’s accusation against her was revealed almost immediately as she convulsed, a breath of aerosolized poison dosed strong to kill a Kell flooding her body along with the sweet, precious Light-ether. Sickly black veins spread in sinister tendrils across her skin, visible between the plates of carapace. The Kell dropped her to the floor, and the mask finally popped free, just in time to reveal a brackish foam beginning to well up in the Baroness’ maw, spilling over her chin as she choked. 

It wasn’t a quick death, but the Kell stood over her the entire time, watching as her own plot consumed her. Only after she finally stilled did he look away, his gaze sweeping over the silent, fearful members of his court, who cringed away when he turned towards them. Then, finally, he saw Uldren, still sitting on the floor there. Beaten, bloody, and battered, but the only person in the room who met the Kell’s eyes.

And once again smiled. 

Sylvanni thought she could see the moment the situation dawned in the Kell’s eyes. His last real member of the House Court, dead after a failed coup. Their House Judgment representative, her impartiality compromised as she assisted in a political scheme. Ether reserves critically low, no one left but a handful of Captains at size now. The Kings too, it turned out, were a House breathing its last dying gasps. The House which had hid its weakness from the rest of the world, in hopes that out of sight they would be believed strong. Now, at the moment of his return, its weak Kell revealed he had done the same in hiding from his people. 

Now, both Kell and House were revealed for enervated things they truly were. Everyone who had witnessed this scene knew it. The truth rang out in the silence, impossibly obvious, irreparably damning. 

With heavy steps, the Kell crossed the room, coming to stand in front of his throne over the person before him who was not subject to the Kings’ shame. Before that throne, and before his lowly prisoner, the Kell dropped to one knee and bowed his head. 

Uldren’s smile widened, satisfaction writ plain, and in that moment as his posture straightened. He somehow seemed to stand tall while on his knees.

[ You broken, beaten thing, ] the Kell rasped miserably, four eyes fixed to the ground. [ With nothing at all, with no pride, you will do what I cannot. You will lose nothing when you give the word that must be given. It is twilight for the Fallen, and we must lay our banners down. ]

Sylvanni looked up slowly, hardly able to believe the words she was hearing. In particular, she caught the term he used to describe his people: not “Eliksni” in their tongue, but their equivalent of the human name. A word in Eliksni to refer to one brought low, an enemy defeated, a thing bereft of value or honor. “Fallen.”

[ ‘Broken prince of broken people.’ ] Uldren said simply, turning the Kell’s own words back upon him. [ ‘Broken ruler of a broken House.’ ]

The Kell snarled in derision, a sound somehow both anguished and pitiful, realizing how thoroughly the trick had been played upon him. [ ‘Usurped by own prisoner.’ So clever, you must think yourself. Knelt down on floor in chains, you have unraveled a House. ]

[ House Kings unraveled itself, ] Uldren said, voice raising as he addressed the entire room in effortlessly fluent Eliksni. [ As all Houses have. None yet stand worthy to be called such, nor any Kell worthy of its title. All present are witness to this moment, an end to Houses. A new era thus dawns for Eliksni. ]

The Vandal guards beside Uldren, the same pair who had tossed him roughly to the floor before their Kell but minutes earlier, now leaned down, carefully helping him to his feet. Despite his injuries, Uldren stood unassisted once he was up, with that same confident, imperious posture he’d had when Sylvanni had first met him in his sister’s throne room: the regal bearing of the Awoken Prince. As the Vandals took up positions behind Uldren now instead, falling into parade rest at his back like an honor guard, Sylvanni watched ripples of movement as other Eliksni in the crowd shifted positions as well, responding to the change in power. 

Those Eliksni, including the very guards who’d brought Uldren forward, had been ready for this, she realized. A contingent of sympathizers seeded amongst those in attendance, prepared to secure the scene during this quiet coup. How had Uldren swayed so many to his own cause as a tortured prisoner in a cell? Perhaps they had only agreed to act after the Kell had been brought low, but the fact remained that Uldren had carved out and primed his own faction here for a regime change, right beneath the noses of the current leaders. 

What Sylvanni truly struggled to understand, however, was how and why he had done all of this without informing her of any of it. She had thought he had  some sort of plan of escape he might be working, but this? A full-scale insurrection, with allies recruited from among the guards? How could he have left something if this scale unsaid? 

She’d thought them allies. She'd trusted that he was working with her to look for a way out, that they were on the same side. Yet all this time, he'd been scheming at great length in secret to his own ends. How quickly I forget, she thought bitterly, remembering the feeling of his knife sliding into her neck on Mars. Uldren Sov is only ever on his own side.

If there had been any doubt of that in her mind, his next words sealed it, as he turned to regard the Baroness' corpse with contempt. [ She thought to raise herself to the top of something grand, unaware that it was naught but a crumbing ruin. A chance to sit upon the pinnacle of a heap of debris. And she hoped to claw her way there upon stolen achievements, false victories. ]

Uldren's nail tapped the glass of Mandala's containment, which he held in one hand. Sylvanni's heart clenched. [ No splicers of hers discovered such power, the means to tame your most hated and feared enemies. That knowledge was mine. She believed she had wrested it from me by force, never realizing she was but leading me to this moment, exactly as intended. ]

Somehow, unfathomably, the betrayal still felt fresh, sharper than the arc blade she'd just endured even though she'd suspected it from the start. After so long down here with him, she hadn't wanted it to believe it anymore. She hadn't wanted it to be true.

"Uldren…" she breathed, low and full of venom. Her own guards still held her down, two clawed hands on each side encircling her arms. They too, must have been Uldren's creatures, she realized. No wonder they'd been so quick to snatch her while his own pair had been 'stunned.'

The prince did not deign to look upon her. 

[ What becomes of us now? ] The humbled Kell demanded softly. Even knelt and bowed forward as he was, he was still slightly taller than Uldren standing at full height.

[ Now, the scraps of this once-House shall be reforged, fit to a new purpose. A grander destiny. ] With a smirk, he continued more softly, dropping out of Eliksni to address the Kell alone. "The details of such purpose need no longer concern you, but rest assured, I've no intention of squandering them as you have."

The Kell hissed at the insult, but did not raise his head. Instead, his lowered gaze moved to the side, fixing upon the other Awoken in the room. [ And what becomes of it? ]

Sylvanni snarled softly and stared the massive Eliksni down, the sound from her making the guards' grips on her arms tighten. She fixed Uldren with a savage glare, letting the sight of her caged Ghost within his hands fuel her rage. All along, he'd lied. She'd never been anything more than a token for him to barter to arrange his own plans. Well, she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing how much that betrayal had hurt her. When he looked in her eyes, she hoped viciously that the only thing he saw within was his own death.

For only a moment, something flickered in his expression: Pity? Regret? The last tiny wisps of his rotten conscience finally crumbling away? Whatever it might have been, a moment later it was gone. Only that unaffected smirk and practiced confidence remained. [ This one… Succulent though the Light-wielder's ether may be, I have a different purpose in mind for her and her little Machine. 'Tis a shame your Baroness saw fit to befoul the final extracted reserve. ] He made a motion to her guards, who obediently began pulling her to her feet. [ Handle Silveks as was discussed, please. ]

She shoved herself forward as soon as her feet were beneath her, trying in vain to break free. "You cowardly traitor ," she howled, tears slipping free as she tried to get to him. "Give him back to me, you da–" She was forced to cut herself off, snapping her mouth closed as she tasted something sharp on the air: the heady scent of the Eliksni soporific they always used against her.

Her guards pressed the dampened cloth over her mouth and nose, but she stubbornly refused to breathe, glaring at Uldren in silence all the while. Let these Fallen see how their torture had trained her, how clearly she'd been forcibly taught that she didn't need air to stay alive. She didn't relent, breathing out the rest of her air with slow control and then leaving herself empty even as her lungs burned. She had a horrible thought that she knew exactly what the Baroness must have been feeling in her final moments, with the poisoned ether mask forced upon her face.

Uldren's smile widened just a touch as he realized what she was doing. Clever, he mouthed, just for her. Then he gave another little nod to her guards, and she felt something sharp stick her arm. 

That's… cheating, you bastard. The room swum despite her diligence, and as she lost control, her body gasped for the air she'd denied it. That breath damned her, and between one heartbeat and the next, everything fell to darkness.

On some occasions, when the Baroness truly wished to show off the command she wielded, Sylvanni would be commanded to make another bloody showing of loyalty. Just another death, she’d tell herself when handed a weapon for the deed. That it was by her own hand made no difference, other than that she learned how to do the deed quickly and cleanly. On the other side of the resurrection, she would kneel and hand back her Ghost silently to be contained once more, trying to empty herself of thoughts and emotions as she did so. 

He was there in the audience room with her most of the time, locked away in the containment canister. The Baroness liked to keep the little prison under-claw, tapping it in a clicking wave every so often to draw attention to her prize. Sylvanni tried her best not to look, not to think about him. Sentiment was a distraction she could ill afford before an opportunity to escape came. At this point, keeping herself fully blank was an almost meditative process. There was a strange kind of comfort in it, in the nothingness of it all. 

She watched days of the Baroness’ proceedings without speaking, without reaction, keeping the loose attention pose Erxaris had taught her. The Fallen of the House seemed to find her empty stare intimidating, and she took comfort in that even in this humiliated state, she could still inspire fear. In fact, those who bore witness to her acts of forced self-sacrifice often seemed even more nervous around her than before. She took satisfaction in that as well.

Her silent observations gave her plenty of time to try to decipher the Eliksni conversations which took place around her. Between her appearances in the Baroness’ chamber, when there was no need of her decorative function, she was returned to her cell. Whenever she wasn’t sleeping, she worked with Uldren to study the language, committing the alien sounds and overly intricate grammar to memory with practice and repetition. The lessons gave both of them something to work on, something to focus on other than the circumstances of their captivity. 

During one such lesson, Uldren paused to give her a long look. “May I ask where you were raised, Duv?”

She shifted her posture, trying to find a different position where the metal edges of the stay would dig in at least somewhere else from where they had been. There was never a comfortable position for the ill-fitting contraption, but she’d grown used to shifting it periodically to spread the discomfort out. “You know I have no childhood to remember, so when you say ‘raised’ you mean…?”

“Your first time, back from the dead.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is this somehow relevant to the usage of the neutral-tone interrogative?”

He gave her a stern smile at the cheeky response. “Indulge me, if you would.”

She let out a long sigh, shaking her head. “It’s not exactly a pleasant story, Uldren.” She looked at him for a long pause, hoping he might let her out of the question, but he simply stared back, expectant of her answer. 

“Do go on.”

“Fine. My Ghost, M-Mandala–” It was still difficult to say his name down here, too present a reminder of his absence from her. “–he found me floating in ship wreckage, 83rd sector on the inner edge of the Reef. Most Guardians would tell you their first resurrection was a difficult, shocking experience. But I can say with certainty that the experience is even less enjoyable when done in the void of space with nothing to breathe.”

Uldren sat up a little more, leaning forward. “What happens in a situation like that? Do you just immediately decompress and die again?”

“No, not exactly.” Sylvanni rubbed a hand over her upper arm, finding the memories difficult to recount. “With the Light, we’re… we’re more resilient than you are. A Guardian doesn’t technically need air to continue living. The Light alone can sustain us, can heal the damage to our bodies constantly enough that we don’t pass away. There was no decompression because there was no air in my lungs to begin with. My corpse was as pressureless as it could be, and so too was I, once I was returned.

“But even if we can survive in the vacuum, it isn’t pleasant. The… the body remembers its former need to breathe, your instincts scream that you’re choking, suffocating, dying. But it doesn’t actually end. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know how to make it stop. Just… trying to gasp for air that wasn’t there, everything empty and silent and agonizing.”

Uldren made a small hum, considering. “I’m surprised a Ghost would do such a thing to his Guardian, especially upon her first resurrection. Would it not have been possible to bring you somewhere with atmosphere before waking you for the first time?”

Sylvanni looked away, her shoulders curling forward slightly. This was a difficult thing to talk about. As terrible as it had been, she couldn’t blame her Ghost for it. She couldn’t. “It… It wasn’t his fault.” She forces firmness into the words, trying to reinforce them for herself as well. “He’s just a little machine; floating through the vacuum of space is no different from him than strolling the streets of the Last City. When he finally found me, after so long searching, he was just so excited to meet me, and Guardians can survive in such conditions. He just… He wasn’t thinking about what it would feel like.

“When he realized what was happening, realized I couldn’t even hear him to explain what was going on, he immediately put out an urgent distress call for ships in the sector. Another Guardian found us eventually, took us both into their ship and ferried me to the Last City. My first real breath in, well, I don’t even know how long it was, it was the most wonderful thing I could imagine. 

“Mandala felt terrible about the whole thing. My first few moments in that ship, catching my first new breaths, were such a mixed jumble of apologies and introductions and explanations about being a Guardian. I don’t like to bring it up, at least not around him. He still feels guilty that my earliest experience as a Guardian was so distressing. Like I said, it wasn’t his fault.”

“That’s quite forgiving of you, Duv. I didn’t realize your resurrection was so… unpleasant.” 

“I did tell you so at the start.” She bristled slightly, wondering if he was mocking her somehow. “Are you satisfied? Have I indulged you well enough, Your Highness?”

He ducked his head. “I’m sorry to have made you recount it then. Though it does offer me some insight. The reason I asked in the first place.”

“And that reason was…?”

“I have a theory,” Uldren said, a touch of his humor returning, “which I believe your experience may corroborate. I think you may have been Reef Awoken before your death.”

Sylvanni stiffened. Given the location of her death, she’d thought along the same lines herself, but never for very long. Seeking out information about one’s life before was forbidden. “Guardians aren’t meant to know our pasts or question what our lives were before. Whatever we once were does not matter. It’s not a topic to speculate upon.”

“Oh, come on, Guardian. You can’t tell me you aren’t even mildly curious about who you once were. I’m certain I would be, if our positions were switched. It’s certainly not impossible to figure some things out.”

“What?” she asked, lifting her chin in a challenge. “Are you saying you think you knew me before I died? Is that it?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “Nothing so specific. I very well may have, but no, you aren’t particularly familiar to me in that way. I simply have a theory that you may have been fluent in Eliksni in your former life. Many Reef Awoken are. I’ve been suspicious of how quickly you seem to be picking up what is, at its heart, a very complicated alien language. We can’t have been down here much more than a month and I’d say you’re at basic fluency, Duv.”

“I, well… I had previously studied some of the written glyph structures. That’s probably what it is.” Sylvanni’s brow furrowed, unnerved by the idea that she might have retained skills from her previous life to such a degree that they would be noticeable to someone else. “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“Studying glyphs wouldn’t explain how you learn to pronounce things so well so quickly.” He narrowed his eyes at her, smiling as though pleased to think he might have struck a nerve again. “You seem offended by the implication that you might be Reefborn. Would it really be so bad if it were true?”

Sylvanni took a moment to stand up, pacing a little bit to try to get her blood moving again. Constantly sitting in the cell was terribly stifling. “I simply prefer not to think about it at all. The past is the past, it doesn’t concern me. We should continue the lesson.”

He chuckled, much to her annoyance. “As you wish, Guardian. I believe you were asking about the neutral interrogative?”

The lessons were useful when surrounded constantly by Fallen and their chatter. Clearly, Sylvanni learned, those guarding their cells didn’t care to pay attention to the fact that their prisoners were practicing their language and many in the House seemed to believe she couldn’t understand anything they discussed in front of her. To their detriment, as steadily, more and more, that was becoming no longer the case. She wasn’t by any means a highly proficient speaker, but as Uldren had noticed, her comprehension had come a long way in their short time taking lessons, and she listened in Eliksni better than she spoke. She could grasp the overall meanings of most conversations, and she often kept note of any wholly unfamiliar terms or phrases to later ask Uldren what they meant. 

Between the time in her cell learning with Uldren and her time as an intimidating decoration for the Baroness, only one other assignment was routinely given to her: participation in the arena for the House’s entertainment. These occurrences weren’t frequent, but Sylvanni savored whenever they were given. Against the emotional blankness of most of her days, a chance to fight, to feel even her meager trickle of Light sing to her in the contest, it was the only time she ever felt like herself again. 

It always seemed a tossup whether or not they would give her a weapon before sending her out, but she learned to be just as ruthlessly efficient with only her hands as when armed. Even small amounts of Light, it turned out, could be put to devastating use when employed with precision. Against these hapless foes they sent to die before her, she was wrath unbridled, destruction unchained, and she relished that. She didn’t always win; sometimes the groups she faced managed to rally enough coordination to overwhelm her, but she usually emerged victorious. These days, there were no stealthed swordsmen waiting for her in the wings of the arena. If she made it through alive, she was expected to bow and then make another ‘show of loyalty’ for the audience’s amusement. In those cases, she was always raised again in the preparation room, away from the eyes of all. 

The one true constant of her new life’s routine was that terrible, accursed servitor. Every few hours, she would be subjected to its influence again, draining her reserves of Light before they could get high enough to be dangerous to her captors. Always immediately after her times fighting in the arena, the servitor was ready to catch her in its grasp as soon as she was back to life. This was another detail she wouldn’t have expected the Fallen to know about Guardians: how her Light flourished within her more quickly when she fought and killed enemies. Yet somehow this secret too was known to them, and they were always prepared to ensure she couldn’t use that Light against them after a fight. 

That moment, she realized, was likely her best chance at escape. She could gather Light in Erxaris’ makeshift Prison of Elders, sparingly using her voidlight to pull as much life as she could from those she slayed. She would have her Ghost back after the resurrection, and assuming she fought wisely, she might have enough Light to fully unleash her abilities on her guards and make a break for it. All it would take was a bit of sloppiness in the transition from raising her to the servitor drain, enough of a pause for her to make her move. Their greed for the Light-derived ether they synthesized from her would be their undoing. It would just take one mistake. 

She watched carefully for an opening, but despite her vigilance, time and again it failed to manifest. Over and over, with terrible efficiency, they bade her fight, resurrected her, and then drained her Light away immediately, before it could be useful. 

As these weeks passed, Sylvanni learned of House Kings, all the important conversations she bore witness to, quietly putting these scraps of information together into a picture of what her captors were really like. The House of Kings, despite the Baroness’ showy displays of power and spectacle, was struggling. Its most important members had almost completely retreated down into these warrens to try to escape the scrutiny and scavenging of the other Houses. The crowds Sylvanni saw in the broken arena were apparently almost the entirety of the House, its membership having dwindled to only a few hundred fighting soldiers and half that of untrained civilians.

The Baroness was the only Fallen of her size in the House—aside from their reclusive Kell, of course—and she hoarded their scant ether rations, raising none any higher than captaincy. One of the Kings priests had recently been named an Archon, but had not had his rations increased in measure with his new station. The Baroness herself was greedy, paranoid, and ambitious. She distrusted most of her advisors, aside from the unwavering Erxaris, who apparently was spared suspicion by virtue of technically not being a member of the Kings. House Judgment’s claims to service through neutrality towards the other Houses was a powerful tool in politics, it turned out. The Baroness, meanwhile, saw Sylvanni’s Light-ether as a final opportunity, perhaps, to get out of this mess. It was clear she hoped to glut herself and grow strong enough to supplant the Kell and take his place, whenever he deigned to return. 

Sylvanni thought it clear that the House’s problems almost certainly stemmed from such selfish, short-sighted leadership, but of course made no comment to anyone. She had no desire to see the Kings’ fortunes reversed, after all. She didn’t know whether or not to feel insulted to have been captured by such a weak House, or grateful that their crumbling hierarchy would hopefully lend her greater opportunity to get away. She suspected Uldren had guessed some of the internal political problems here as well, even though he didn’t have nearly the same level of access she did. She never missed how his eyes tracked every exchange from their cells, every expression, every morsel of gossip passed between bored guards that he could witness. He often asked her if she’d heard any valuable information during her time in the audience room, and she shared what she’d learned with him as she could. He turned out to be right after all: down here, they were all each other had. House Kings thought the Prince as beaten down and broken of will as their pet Guardian, but Sylvanni knew he yet had some kind of scheme he hoped to undertake. 

One of them would make it out of this hellish nightmare, of that she was certain. And after months of patience, waiting for something to change, some opportunity to make an attempt at freedom, a whispered rumor brought hope. The message spread quickly through the ranks of the once great House, from the official scout report to the Baroness, overheard by Sylvanni listening blankly at her side, to chatter among the lowest dregs as she was walked back to her cell. The same news was on every alien tongue she passed:  

The House of Kings was to make its highest preparations. The Kell was coming home.

She slowly pushed herself into a sitting position and was surprised when something pinched at her lower chest. Frowning, she looked down, noticing that her garments were different. Rather than the undershirt and soft pants that she had been wearing during her captivity up to this point—the same things she normally wore beneath her armor in the field—she had now been dressed in something distinctly more Fallen.

A rough-spun garments of loose brown fabric tied tightly with marigold wraps acted as a makeshift sleeveless shirt and trousers, though the rigged contraption of cloth pulled in strange places when she moved. She half-feared the whole thing would come untied and fall off if she pulled it the wrong way. Over top of the awkwardly assembled clothing was a more presentable long tunic in the House Kings golden color, painted with the white House symbol at the knee-length ends. Upon closer look, she realized it was fully open on both sides, more of a tabard than a tunic. 

Securing this tabard—uniform? livery?—was a strange contraption wrapped around her lower chest and upper waist, and the source of the pinching discomfort she’d noticed. It appeared to be one solid band of a bronze-colored metal, bent and warped to completely encircle her body. It had been fitted to the narrowest part of her waist, and therefore dug in sharply at her lower chest and at the top of her hips, ill-fitting on both sides. 

Reaching behind, she felt around at the back of the flat plate, trying to find a joining mechanism, some kind of lock or a clasp. Instead, the metal felt crumpled where the two ends met, almost as though it had been wrenched into place by force. This thing, whatever it was, wouldn’t be removed by normal means, she realized with some discomfort. At the very least, the pain from the poor fit of it was nothing compared to the tortures she’d been through. She could deal with an over-tight wrap of metal if it meant no one was killing her in slow, creative ways anymore.

She pushed herself back to lean against the rough stone wall of her cell, pulling her knees up in front of her and trying not to think about being drugged unconscious while her Fallen captors stripped and redressed her in their colors. The thought of Eliksni claws on her skin made her nauseous, despite the endless other violations they’d inflicted upon her already.

Lowest of House, Erxaris had said. Kings Slave. And Sylvanni had promised to serve, hadn’t she? Paid their price in blood by her own hand, even. Not that the empty words about “loyalty” held any kind of weight after what House Kings had put her through, but if it would mean an end to the ceaseless cycle of pain and death, she could play the role. She could duck her head, let her captors believe they’d tamed a Guardian into something docile and obedient, endure whatever other humiliations they had in store for her. She didn’t have shame left, after all that. 

That is, after all, what I’ve always been good at, isn’t it? Following orders. Doing what I’m told. She’d bide her time as long as she needed to. 

“Well, well, Duv. I thought for a moment there that we’d lost you.” Uldren’s face appeared in the barred gap between their cells, clearly wondering where she’d been. His eyebrows raised when he saw her. “You’ve clearly found yourself something like a promotion. New clothes, even a cot to sleep on. What’d you have to give them for that?”

Sylvanni glanced beneath her, not having even noticed the rough bundle of a cot she’d been lying on. It wasn’t by any means comfortable, but it was technically softer than the floor. She sensed the hook in his question, trying to goad her into giving him an answer. He wanted to know if they’d broken her, if she’d given in to their demands. After everything that had happened, though, Uldren Sov’s needling barely registered. Nothing mattered anymore, not him, not the Fallen, not anything.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said blankly. She just kept staring forward at an unfocused spot between her knees.

He cocked his head, eyes narrowing. “Don’t I? You couldn’t have been gone for more than a week and then you come back wearing their colors, offered even a meager bit of comfort. Is this the measure of the Traveler’s chosen?”

“Maybe it is, then. What do you care?” She could hear that same empty tone in her voice, the words feeling as though they’re spoken by another person entirely.

He scoffed. “One week, that’s all it takes to break a Guardian, then. I’d have thought one with centuries of war and blood behind her would have greater fortitude than that. After all, I’ve been here longer than you, and yet, somehow they didn’t break me.”

“You have no right to judge me,” she snarled, a hot anger flashing within her unexpectedly. She started to lean forward toward him and then winced when that awkward band cuts into her again. “You couldn’t fathom what I have endured, Sov, because you’re still alive. Whatever you think they’ve done to you, it couldn’t even begin to come close. Do not speak to me of fortitude!”

He smiled then, but it wasn’t the hard smirk she was used to from the stuck-up prince, but something softer. Sympathetic. She thought the torture must have made her delirious, the expression was so inexplicable. “There she is,” he said gently. “Keep that spirit up, Duv. We’re both going to need it.”

Her face twisted, realizing what he’d done, how intentional the goading had been. She curled inward again, feeling a terrible vulnerability in how easily she was manipulated right now, even if it was ostensibly for her benefit. “For all you claim you haven’t broken,” she said with a quiet bitterness, “you seem to have been plenty loose-lipped with secrets about me.”

The statement seemed to catch him off guard, and he pulled back from the bars a bit. “What are you talking about?”

She laughed once, an empty sound again. “You’d deny it? House Kings all of a sudden knows things like how much sedative it takes to knock out a Guardian, knows how to disable Ghosts? You’re the only person I’ve ever met who could do that. How convenient that the Kings’ Splicers can do it too, now that you’re here. But no, just a coincidence. You haven’t broken under the pressure, right?”

“I….” He paused, eyeing her more closely. “What is around your waist?”

She almost snapped at him again, knowing he was trying to change the topic, but the knowing tone in his voice stopped her. She changed her sitting position to make it more visible, looking down again. “I don’t know what it is. I woke up with it. Some kind of… decorative armor, maybe.”

“Would you look at that,” he said cryptically, making her seethe again. “They must have needed to make it custom for you.”

“I know you only talk like that just to taunt that you know things that I don’t,” she says. “And I don’t appreciate it.”

Uldren didn’t answer that accusation either. “If you wish to know if I could identify it, you only need to ask.” As she opened her mouth to do just that, he cut her off with the answer. “It’s a prisoner’s stay, I believe. I’ve not seen one used before, but I’ve heard descriptions before. Curious that they would place one on you.”

“That isn’t exactly descriptive, Sov.” Her patience with his toying responses was wearing very thin. 

“By all means, Guardian, allow me to elucidate.” He leaned back, settling into a more comfortable position as he started to talk. “When a House takes prisoners, as you are no doubt already aware, standard practice is to dock their lower arms, a demotion to drekh.”

She rolled her eyes at his clearly Eliksni pronunciation on the last word, but didn’t interrupt. Show off.

“For higher ranked prisoners, however—Barons, Archons, possibly a Captain if they troublesome enough—docking arms on its own isn’t sufficient. Large Eliksni like that have such ether-rich blood that their arms would simply grow back after docking; it’s the starvation rations of a drekh that keep them from regrowing theirs. So, after docking a powerful prisoner, the stumps are wrapped in a stay like that to forcibly keep them from regenerating until their ether levels have dropped to a much weaker state.”

She put a hand to the side of her waist, trying in vain to adjust the uncomfortable tightness of the stay. “That doesn’t make sense. I don’t have an extra pair of arms under here to regrow. And even if I did, Guardian healing on its own doesn’t regrow limbs the way the Fallen can. You need a resurrection to fix something like that. They… specifically tested that.”

Uldren made an interested noise at that, like it was a fact he was tucking away for later use, then continued. “Well, as you might guess, a stay is more than just a practical restraint. It is also a symbol. It’s a status symbol for the capturing House, to have taken a prisoner powerful enough to need one. They’re usually constructed of bright metals like yours, to draw the eye to the docking, a way of shaming a once-great foe. It is a simultaneous humiliation of the prisoner and a trophy for the captor. In truth, Guardian, you ought to be flattered, I think.”

“Flattered, to be paraded about as a powerful enemy laid low,” she said bitterly. “Somehow I don’t see that as a compliment.”

He chuckled. “To each their own. Being a prisoner of status is still some kind of status. I say use whatever advantages you can get your hands on down here. I doubt we’ll have much chance of getting out of here if you don’t.”

She gave him a very long and hard look at that phrasing. “We, Sov? What makes you think I’d break you out if I was escaping? I feel like I’ve learned my lesson about what happens to people who try to rescue you.”

He feigned hurt, an insincere little pout on his face. “After all we’ve been through together down here, you’re still hung up about the tiny disagreement we had on Mars? You wouldn’t really leave me behind in here when you make your grand Guardian break out, would you?”

“You tell yourself that, Your Highness. See if I don’t leave your royal ass to rot.”

That got another smirk out of him. He always seemed most pleased when she was being snappish back to him. “You’d miss my sparkling sense of companionship in your travels.”

“I think we should resume that language practice we were working on, actually. Can you tell me how you’d say ‘Go fuck yourself’ in Eliksni?”

He laughed, and then to her surprise, chattered and clicked an Eliksni phrase back to her, which her vague grasp of grammatical markers let her deduce was probably exactly what she’d asked. “You should note,” he said mock-seriously, “that the phrase in our language may be an imperative, but in Eliksni, it is interrogative. Technically, it’s a suggestion grammatically. In case you were confused about the conjugation.”

“I’m sure it would have kept me up at night wondering,” she said, rolling her eyes. 

“In fact, if you want to be really vulgar about it in Eliksni, you should actually put the phrase in the most formal register, which would be–” Another set of clicked words followed, similar enough in sound for Sylvanni to recognize that they were the same phrase, if slightly tweaked. She tried to repeat the sounds softly to herself, trying to figure out where the word breaks were, what order they were appearing in. This might have started out as a way to insult him, but she did have a lot of learning to do still. 

“You should repeat it back louder,” Uldren suggested when he noticed her mumbling. “If you’re wanting an instructor’s corrections, that is. You’ll never learn just talking to yourself.”

She looked him dead on, then with as much precision as she could muster, she told him to go fuck himself in Eliksni. With a grin, he corrected her vowels, to which she quipped that vowels in Eliksni should hardly count since there were so few of them. From there, it was easy to slip into simply another lesson, and though Sylvanni would never admit it, she was unspeakably grateful for the distraction it lent. 

For all Uldren Sov’s flaws and their thorny history, he was the only ally in this place that she had.

They started with their own weapons first. Shock daggers, then lances, then swords. She was cut, stabbed, and sliced in all variety of ways, until they found something lethal. Sometimes it was blessedly quick, such as the time a lance found her heart on the first thrust. Others were agonizingly slow, as her healing factor—weak though it was—continued to try to mend her, keeping her clinging to life through wounds which would kill a non-Guardian. 

Her main tormentor was a burly Captain, but Erxaris watched over everything, with the canister trapping Sylvanni's Ghost in stasis clutched in her lower arms. Whenever Sylvanni died, her Ghost would be released to resurrect her, and then Sylvanni would give him up again. At first, they'd tried to communicate in those brief moments before she had to turn him over, but every time they did, it got a little harder to let go.

Eventually Sylvanni had to turn that side of herself off. She couldn't bear to acknowledge him at all, couldn't think of him as hers. The motions of letting Erxaris trap him once more became rote, empty, meaningless. At least, she told herself, he couldn't see or feel anything in the stasis. He didn't have to watch what they did to her, just fix her in the aftermath. 

Erxaris and the Captain tried every method of wounding her with their Fallen melee weapons, even 'docking' her arms a few times, a punishment Sylvanni assumed was meant to be humiliating. After one such time, Erxaris held up a hand, curiously watching as Sylvanni's meager healing tried to seal over the amputation. 

When the wounds healed new skin over a stump, the Judgment Vandal frowned. "Doesn't grow back? Such… pitiful things, your kind. Without Machine, is nothing."

They moved on to firearms: shock rifles with their lazily homing bolts, wire rifles with quick precision, a Captain’s shrapnel launcher. They even brought in that accursed Servitor in and watched it blast her from close range. She was shot in the limbs, in the chest, in the head, from the front, back, and sides. Every way they could think of to destroy her, they did.

Then they tried more. They sealed the room and watched from the other side of their barrier as they pulled the air from the room and watched her try to suffocate. That one—agonizingly—didn’t even work, her scraps of Light managing to keep her clinging to life even as her lungs burned for oxygen, but Erxaris and her hateful assistant watched Sylvanni gasp and writhe in the airless chamber for the better part of an hour before giving up on that one. At full Light strength, she’d routinely run missions in the vacuum of space with only mild discomfort, but down here with so little, it was cripplingly tortuous. 

The Fallen picked up what alien technology they had on hand to try as well. They flushed  the room with Hive Witch’s poison, though how they’d managed to distill that, she couldn’t fathom. They had a few Vex weapons on hand, a few severed Goblin and Hobgoblin arms grafted to external power sources to make them fire. Cabal slug rifles, no doubt scavenged from a firebase somewhere. The Fallen were nothing if not thieves and scavengers at heart. 

The torments were endless but Sylvanni said very little through it all. At the start, it was pure determination which held her tongue. She was a Guardian with centuries of battle to her name; she was no stranger to pain and death. She could muster the will to force her way through this without giving her captors the satisfaction of seeing her break. Or so she had believed.

The relentlessness of the torture was something far beyond the violence of battle, however. When connected to her Ghost, her deaths were always quick, sparing her painful ends more often than not. The deaths she received at Erxaris’ command were anything but. The agonies were ever-changing and endless, broken only by the dark, blank stretches of disconnected death. There was nothing she could do, there was no end in sight, no escape from the hell. Dying was only a temporary reprieve, for they always brought her back to suffer again.

Her stoic resolve could only endure so long, but rather than breaking down, begging for mercy, crying, pleading, Sylvanni found her mind drifting instead. It started with that mental break of her Ghost. She couldn’t think of him as himself, couldn’t acknowledge what he really was to her. What she handed back after each rez was only an object, a thing, meaningless to her. It had to be, because if it wasn’t, she’d never be able to give him back, and then they both would die. 

Then she began to disconnect from herself. Each time she resurrected, she felt a little further, her mind gently drifting further and further from the reality of her situation. It was reminiscent of being tethered during a spacewalk, drifting in the abyss of space, floating further and further from her anchor. What would happen if that tether was severed, when the tether was herself?

After all, could pain truly be considered pain when it was simply a constant state of being? There was no end to it, it was just the way things were now. Her nerves kept firing those signals, kept screaming at her to do something to stop this, but there was nothing to be done, and so her mind stopped listening. These things could happen to her body, but she consciously observed herself as though on the other side of thick glass, until it was almost as though she felt nothing at all. 

Just as her Ghost was only a thing, an object, so too was she a thing herself.

Time was meaningless: there was no way to tell how long between her deaths and resurrections anyway and the monotony of pains simply blurred together. It wasn’t as though there was anything which required her attention. They weren’t torturing her for information, making demands, or asking questions of her. They didn’t care about making her talk. They just wanted to see how she might be killed and enjoy the satisfaction of tearing her apart again and again.

At some point, Erxaris’ torture assistant was replaced by a team of King Splicers. These, unlike those of the House of Devils, hadn’t endowed themselves with SIVA augmentations, but they were interested in biological information. Her anatomy, alien to them, was a secret they wished to unravel, and they opened her up, a live dissection. They poked and prodded and rummaged about her body until they’d cut or stabbed something they shouldn’t have, collapsed a lung or compromised an organ, and then they wrote that down and started again.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Sylvanni just drifted through it all, mind so very distant from the endless horror, barely making a sound. She was increasingly certain nothing would ever matter again. Time was meaningless, not even the barest circadian hint in this bleak, crumbling ruin, and she had no way to tell how long they left her dead each time before bringing her back. It might have been days; it might have been months. They never offered her food or water anymore, as they’d realized they didn’t need to. Just pain, in endless, infinite, multitudinous, myriad forms. 

If there was one relief, it was that the Servitor didn’t come to drain her again. The constant wounds were such a drain on what meager Light she could get, there were no reserves for the Kings to siphon off. 

After one resurrection, back in the smooth stone room, she was left alone, still chained to the floor. They brought her back from death, took her Ghost away, and simply abandoned her. As time passed, heartbeat after heartbeat, that drifty, floaty little piece of her at the edge of her distant mind could have laughed. Were they hoping to study the effects of isolation, glean some psychological insight? She simply sat, staring at nothing, absently noting as her body slipped physically closer to dehydration, until she was lying down, back to fluttering on the edge of life, burning through those sad little wisps of Light within her to stave off death. This one, she decided emotionlessly, was at least not as bad as the endless suffocation had been.

In that fragile limbo, she found herself thinking of Osiris of all people. It had been centuries now, she realized, since the last time she’d seen him, but she’d once been new to immortality, foolishly enamored with her Vanguard Commander and the dangerous ideas that would lead to his eventual exile. 

Dangerous ideas that were… not entirely unlike this. He’d encouraged thanatonauts, who thought they could glean secret wisdom or insight from death. Warlocks who intentionally lingered on the edges of death, or flung themselves into its depths repeatedly. Perhaps one of them could have found this torture useful. After all, it was practically what those kinds did to themselves anyway. 

She drifted in the haze of memories, of imaginings, of dreams and nonsense. Maybe visions like these were what thanatonauts sought, or maybe it was all just the hallucinations of a mind and body pushed far beyond their breaking points. If there was thanatonautic wisdom among it all, she couldn’t summon the mental effort to try to remember any of it. She couldn’t really believe any of it mattered.

Somewhere in that fugue state, something must have killed her again, because at some point, she was brought back to life yet again, no longer alone. Erxaris stood in the chamber, lower arms crossed over her Judgement-green tabard, upper arms holding the stasis capsule. Her only weapon was a shock dagger at her waist, but the power Erxaris held within House Kings wasn’t truly martial anyway. 

By rote, Sylvanni held out her Ghost, offering him back once again. Had Sylvanni been herself, she might have noticed how he still turned to look back at her, every time he was taken, she might have recognized the mix of pity and fear in the tilt of his corners before the capsule froze him again. 

But she didn’t register any of that. She couldn’t. She was adrift, and the Ghost was just a shape, just a thing to hand back as part of the routine.

Erxaris clicked the container shut with a small click, then handed it back to someone waiting outside the chamber for safekeeping. When she turned back, she tipped her head as she regarded the blank-faced Warlock standing before her. “Wish tests to stop?”

Sylvanni didn’t answer. A part of her couldn’t really believe that there would be an end to the pain they put her through. She just stared straight forward, unmoving, waiting until the suffering started again.

Erxaris chittered a laugh. “Stoic, it becomes. Answer, Machine thief. Opportunity not to be offered twice.”

“What.” Sylvanni forced the word out, her own voice a foreign rasp to her ears. “Do you. Want.”

“Fealty.”

The word was so surprising, so out of place, it shocked some part of her back to enough awareness to look up, meeting the Vandal’s four eyes with her two. 

“Renounce Machine-right. Your Tra-vel-er.” The drawn-out emphasis of each syllable couldn’t be anything other than mocking. “Swear to House Kings. Loyal donor of ether.”

In the distant drifting, a piece of Sylvanni could hardly see the point in answering, couldn’t muster the will to care about what happened to her. A smaller, desperate, animal part of her, the shreds of her self-preservation, begged for a respite, willing to give Erxaris anything she demanded if it would mean an end to the suffering. 

Neither of these were capable of a real decision, neither were capable of true survival. The Void, as ever, held her salvation. What Light she held was faint, but within it she found that calm stillness, the centering of self she needed. A singularity around which to gather herself once again for just a moment, long enough to think. 

House Kings wished to make their Guardian prisoner a Guardian slave instead? There could be opportunity in that, she realized. So be it. If she was going to find a chance to escape and retrieve her Ghost in truth, it wouldn’t be done in these passing, powerless moments of life between endless, captive deaths. She didn’t expect they’d be sloppy in this, but it only took one moment of lapse for this to work. 

As for the oath, the renunciation? Meaningless. She didn’t think Erxaris was foolish to believe endless, repeatedly lethal torture had inspired anything resembling loyalty within her for her captors, but that wasn’t what this was really about. They both knew that. It was about the power of forcing a Guardian through the shame of saying such a thing. But what did Sylvanni care about shame, after what she’d been through? Whatever dignity she’d thought she had was long gone in the eyes of these Fallen, and she wouldn’t have let something as worthless as pride keep her from seizing a possible advantage, anyway. 

She was, for just a moment, cold clarity once again, the void’s resonant reassurance within her. The decision made. Sylvanni let out a long breath, then forced the words out. “I… accept.” 

Erxaris drew herself up, a sense of triumph clear even in her alien posture. “Renounce.”

Sylvanni fixed her eyes on the floor and swore the lie. “I renounce the Traveler, and my right to its gifts.” Even saying it felt like poison, but she’d endured far worse toxins recently. 

“Swear,” Erxaris said, punctuated with anticipatory clicking. “Swear loyalty to House Kings, its great and regal Kell. Swear your stolen ether to the service of your House.”

“I swear… loyalty to House Kings and its Kell. I swear my Light to its service.”

The rebreather hissed as Erxaris drew in a full draught of ether, her lower hands clasping together. “You will be lowest of House, beneath dregs, beneath shanks. Silveks, Kings Slave.”

The butchered eliksnization of her name felt like a final insult, but Sylvanni gave no reaction, no response. From this point forward, she followed orders, nothing more. This void-drift she’d cultivated could serve her in this as well, she thought. These Fallen would surely seek further ways to humiliate her, new ways to hurt her, but now she would feel nothing of it, give them no satisfaction of a reaction from her. 

The shock dagger clanged to the ground between the bowed Awoken and the looming Vandal, sliding into Sylvanni’s still-lowered gaze. Sylvanni didn’t reach for it, though she had a sinking feeling she knew what was coming next. 

“Prove loyalty,” Erxaris hissed cruelly. “Your Kell demands more than Machine-ether. Demands blood. Demands life, Silveks. Then, oath accepted.”

Sylvanni slowly reached forward, picking up the small dagger. For the barest moment, she considered turning on Erxaris, but as satisfying as the idea might have been, the other Fallen outside this room would surely turn out in force to put her down permanently. In the end, there really wasn’t much of a choice. At least when she was the one holding the knife she was able to make it quick.

After all, what was one more death after everything?

The things he’d expected were there, of course, the battle rush, the thrill of a fight. The smells of viscera, and sweat, and human terror. The taste of copper in his mouth. But he couldn’t have possibly been prepared for the heavy weight of insignificance that came with it. The crushing fear of being one among thousands, sent to kill and suffer and die, just like everyone else. War cared not who survived and who did not. It was a thirst slaked only by blood, and it would drink the lives of all foolish enough to enter its domain.

As Zagreus yet reeled from this brush with war, true war, for the first time, its divinity greeted him warmly. He wasn’t certain what he expected of the God of War—someone brutish and aggressive, perhaps?—but Lord Ares was anything but. Dignified, yet dangerous. A crown of laurels, like shards of black glass, rested atop a swoop of silver hair, framing a handsome face with sharp, strong features. The refined image of the god ran his fingers along the sharpened edge of his sword, and blood, weightless as smoke, curled upward from the surface. His words to Zagreus were perfectly polite, introducing himself as “a fellow student of death,” and yet the barest gleam in his eye spoke of bloodlust, violence. 

Devastation.

Ares’ power flowed through Zagreus as he accepted the boon, and Varatha felt lighter in his hands, the weapon itself eager for the next strike. Zagreus pushed on into the next room with a smile. 

✦✦✦

As his forays up into the underworld lengthened, bit by hard-fought bit, Zagreus found himself drawn time and again to that bellicose power, accepting the blessings of Ares whenever he could find them. There was just something about having that edge of battle thrill coursing through him with each fight. Wherever his blade struck, Ares’ power followed swiftly, finishing off foes in Zagreus’ wake. It was like fighting with an ally at his back, a deadly dance of blood and death as together they sent shades back to dust.

Though he took boons from all the Olympians when he could find them, there was something different about the God of War. Ares seemed to savor the violence Zagreus inflicted, though admittedly he seemed equally enamored with the violence Zagreus received. 

After a particularly difficult struggle, flagging from a dozen different cuts and bruises, Zagreus forced himself to straighten to accept the offered power, putting on a strong face. He hadn’t expected Ares to sound quite so euphoric to find him in such a state. “You seem to be upon the verge of death, my friend,” the War God’s voice said, dripping with delight. “I cannot wait to hear of it! The experience of death, time after time! You are one of a kind.”

There was something entrancing about winning Ares’ favor, as though each foe slain were an act of worship. Perhaps it was, Zagreus told himself. After all, he didn’t know much of how that sort of thing worked. Could one god worship another? His father and the Chthonic Gods didn’t have much care for faith and followers, rites and rituals. He didn’t know how it worked for the gods up above. Zagreus had certainly never had anyone pray to him. 

At times, he would pause to pour out an offering of nectar before the bright nexus of power, sending a prayer of gratitude with the sacrifice. “You are a flatterer, my death-inflicting kin,” the smooth voice returned, offering a suitably bloody token in return.

Zagreus found the little vial still in his hand when he next dragged himself up out of the pool of Styx, dripping his way down his father’s great hall. The glass felt hot against his skin, even with his ever-warm temperature. He’d find a place for it in his case after catching up with everyone.

Ignoring the chirped greeting from Hypnos and a biting taunt from his father about yet another “ignoble” death, he made his way to his mentor, looking forward to a friendly face instead. 

Achilles, however, blanched as he approached. “Lad, what is that you’re carrying?”

“This?” Zagreus held it up. “Oh, a gift from Lord Ares. He’s been quite helpful out there, after all. I think, despite our conversations being almost entirely one-sided, we might be developing something of a rapport.”

Achilles brow knit with sharp furrows, nausea tinging his expression. “So I feared,” he said softly, before continuing in a stronger tone. “Far be it from me that I should tell you how to conduct yourself out there, lad, but if I might give a warning?” 

He paused, reaching forward to take Zagreus’ hand in his own, closing the prince’s fingers around the glass to cover it from sight. “Don’t trust that one. I’m sure powers such as he offers are… seductive, especially on a task such as yours. But War is a friend to none, Zagreus. Remember that.”

“I think you may be right on that front, sir.” Zagreus ran a hand through his hair, straightening his laurels as he did so. “At times I think he’s as pleased to see me dead as my foes. But you’re also right in guessing the power is useful.”

“Too many mortals spend their lives worshipping War until the moment Ares takes everything from them and casts them down here. I was one such fool. I would spare you being another, if I can.”

“Luckily, I’m far from mortal,” Zagreus said lightly, then gave a more serious nod. “I’ll keep your words in mind.”

Achilles’ fond smile returned. “That’s all I can ask, lad.”

✦✦✦

Despite his mentor’s warning, Zagreus found his path continued to cross Ares’ out amidst the shifting rooms. Sometimes, after all, he didn’t have a choice in what lay ahead of him. It wasn’t as though he could leave a boon behind, not when he needed every edge he could get. 

Other times, though… other times Zagreus did have a choice, and he’d find himself choosing Ares over something else. He felt a twinge of guilt, knowing Achilles wouldn’t like it, but Ares’ gifts were just too difficult to pass over. And sometimes, Zagreus had to admit, he just missed the feeling of it, that rush, the thrill of violence the boons granted. 

Seductive was an apt word, Achilles, he thought, reaching his hand into the congregation of power and crimson light to see what Ares had brought for him this time. Perhaps ‘addictive’ might have been another.

That now familiar wave of sensation rushed over him, as Ares’ image manifested before him. “You must know I often hunger for destruction, almost uncontrollably at that,” Ares’ message spoke. “Though I am finding you are able to sate that appetite of mine.”

Despite the volcanic heat of Asphodel, Zagreus felt a distinct chill at that. A god like Ares, sated by Zagreus’ violence. The words seemed to echo in his ears for chambers upon chambers afterward, and not for the first time, he wondered just how much his Olympian family members were able to perceive of him through Nyx’s shroud.

Eventually, he finally managed to defeat his father on the frigid surface, and his trials through the underworld stopped being about escape and instead became a pilgrimage for those brief moments with his mother. They were precious, standing amongst the beauty of her gardens in what seemed to be the only warm place in the mortal world. But her words, her fear that there would be consequences for his visits, were haunting. 

Zagreus had never known war, after all, but his mother’s words gave him plenty of reasons to think on the concept. Both Hades and Persephone, in their own ways, seemed to fear that if her situation became known to Olympus, it would be war. And something told Zagreus that a true war with Olympus would involve deaths far beyond the kind that sent him back to the Styx. His thoughts turned over the old tales of his father and relatives tearing their Titan parents apart, scattering the shreds of them throughout all existence. The gods might not die as mortals did, but there was no doubt in his mind that they could be destroyed.

The Olympians were assisting him, but he had also felt how quickly they could turn to wrath if given reason, and the ferocity of their responses when spurned. Demeter especially—his grandmother, he reminded himself—could be particularly cruel, and even from the brief messages and frigid power he’d received from her, he was certain she would tear his home asunder if she learned anything to make her think she could bring her daughter back. 

War, true war, was still foreign to him. But he was more than certain he would do anything to keep it from coming for his family. 

Especially if Ares were going to be on the other side. 

✦✦✦

A screaming skull, wreathed in green-red flames, screeched from Hades’ hand as Zagreus dashed to the side. A bolt struck his father as he slid in the snow, rewarding his near miss as he struck once, twice, thrice in quick jabs before dashing away once more. 

The skull howled for his blood as it flew, but he hurled Varatha in a perfect throw after it, coursing with Ares’s strength. The doom would seal its fate before it could burn itself to the point of detonation. In the space of a heartbeat, the exalted spear was back in his hand once more, and he dashed away again, loosing a bloodstone shaped like one of Artemis’ arrows from just out of reach of one of his father’s swipes. 

Hades growled, rearing back for a vicious spin, but Zagres had learned his father’s tells by now. By the time the strike came, the prince was already gone, sliding to a stop well behind Hades’ back. The fight raged through him, and he threw Varatha again, marking his father with the doom as well as the spear pierced him, then returned. They were close to the end, Zagreus could feel it. 

Before Hades could turn around to ready another attack, Zagreus dashed back in, driving Varatha home. The spear plunged deep just as Ares’ ethereal sword crashed down from above, and the God of the Dead gasped raggedly and collapsed to his knees. Zagreus stepped back, grinning in triumph as the chaos of the fight gave way to a sudden calm.

“Well… done, boy…” Hades rasped, begrudging respect in his words as he clung to his last bits of awareness. 

“See you back at the House, Father.” Deep within, Zagreus thrilled at the words. After everything they’d been through, he still couldn’t believe he and his father had come to an understanding. That one might even say they were on, perhaps, good terms. Only a short time ago, it would have been unthinkable.

A part of him believed Hades might actually enjoy these now-regular trips up to the surface, a break from the parchmentwork and a chance to spend time with his son. Even if it was a fight to the death. Strange, how something like that could be a bonding experience. Though perhaps after all this time with Meg, he shouldn’t have been surprised. 

For a while after the Lord of the Dead faded back into the Styx, Zagreus stood and just relished being on the surface. He took a deep breath, the cold biting into his lungs, trying to memorize the feeling of the wind on his skin. He knew he wouldn’t last long, not now that Persephone’s influence wasn’t up here to lend him strength, but that just made him determined to appreciate it while he could. 

Things were better now, so much better than he could have hoped. His mother was home, his father was happy—or the Hades equivalent of it at least—for the first time in Zagreus’ memory. They were safer now than ever too, he told himself, as he didn’t need to worry his surface visits would lead the Olympians to discover Persephone at her cottage. He enjoyed his new role, refining the Underworld’s security. He even enjoyed the extra challenges his father’s Pact of Punishment presented. Everything seemed nearly perfect. 

Zagreus stood there long enough for his feet to melt a wide circle in the snow, and then he started to walk. He could feel the Styx pulling at him already, and it would only get worse the farther he went. He remembered a wide overlook on the way, perfect to stop and watch the sunrise, but try as he might, he hadn’t yet been able to make it back there again. His wounds ached, mortal-red blood dripping from a few good hits Hades had landed, but he barely paid attention to those anymore. 

The river would take him long before bloodloss did.

✦✦✦

“For one so newly a victor, you do not seem celebratory, my kin.”

Zagreus spun at the unexpected voice, Varatha appearing in his hand as he tensed and found himself face-to-face with his first Olympian in the divine flesh. Ares stood in the path of melted footprints behind Zagreus, eyeing the escaped prince with a deep curiosity. And something else in his eyes, unplaceable. He looked exactly as he had in the visions Zagreus had received from his power, and yet there was something far more menacing about Ares being so close now in truth. 

“Lord Ares,” Zagreus said, his pulse suddenly pounding in his throat. “I wasn’t expecting you—or anyone, really—to be here.”

Inwardly, Zagreus’ thoughts raced. If Ares was still here when he died, he would realize Zagreus was never going to make it to Olympus. Once that was known, the Olympians would start to question what he’d really been doing, and he was certain, if they put their power to discovering what was truly happening, it was only a matter of time before they uncovered the truth, Nyx’s protection or no.

“Of that, I have no doubt.” The crimson eyes flicked up, locking onto Zagreus with a dangerous expression. “Ah, even with you standing before me, your mother’s power clings to you. Yet it is refreshing to be able to see you clearly for the first time, my kin.”

Zagreus felt a small surge of panic at the mention of his mother before he realized with relief that Ares was speaking of Nyx. He decided to play it safe, for now, stay polite. “I am honored to meet you in truth, as well, Lord Ares. If I may ask though, what has brought you here?”

Ares’s expression grew distant, contemplative. “You know, I recall the first time I felt you kill something truly alive. Nothing more than vermin, of course, and then half-feral satyrs, but there is a vast difference between scattering a shade and killing something living and breathing.”

He took a small step forward, and Zagreus unconsciously stepped back. A little smile played at Ares’ lips to see it, and Zagreus wondered if this fear he felt was something supernatural, an aura around the War God perhaps. Or was it instead simply that Zagreus knew what was at stake here. 

How near War truly was to him and those he loved in this moment.

“I took that as a good sign, how near you were to finally breaking free,” Ares continued, his tone casual but his bearing anything but. “And then I would feel you die again, presumably to start over. But then something changed, didn’t it? You see, I felt you killing shades, and then satyrs, and then nothing. You didn’t die. But then it started again a short time later, shades again, then the vermin, and then… nothing once more. As it continued, I wondered, perhaps it wasn’t that you were not dying, but rather that you were simply no longer dying in battle. Something within the domain of your brooding Thanatos instead?”

Another step forward, and that cruel smile spread. “I doubt the others had any knowledge of this, but I am, as you know, uniquely attuned to such things. Though I’ve wondered if Hermes knows more than he’s telling. Regardless, my curiosity got the better of me, and I wondered what I might find, were I to visit the entrance to the Underworld myself. Imagine my surprise.”

Zagreus forced a winsome smile—the kind that usually got him in trouble—and forced down that choking, cloying terror that clawed within him. The safety of his home depended on him finding a way to talk himself out of this. “It’s a funny story, actually. The surface world is a more treacherous place than I expected, and I’m so unfamiliar with it all. After being weakened by the fight through my father’s realm, something or other always seems to finish me off up here.”

As though mentioning the weakness summoned it, a wave of Styx-sent enfeeblement and nausea washed over him, but he didn’t dare let it show. 

Ares narrowed his eyes, and stepped forward again. Striking distance. “‘See you back at the house,’” Ares quoted. “Odd words to a slain foe, Zagreus. And what was that your father said as he fell? ‘Well done,’ was it? How strangely cordial.”

Zagreus laughed, trying to hide his panic as he realized just how long Ares had been watching. “Well, you see, there’s a simpl– urghhh…” The groan slipped free with an involuntary shudder as the Styx’s claim wracked him again. He felt like a pierced wineskin, vitality leaking from wounds he had no way to staunch. 

Ares crossed that final bit of distance between them in his moment of weakness, pressing the edge of his sword to Zagreus’ throat. “And what might this be? I can feel this isn’t from your wounds. Have you been poisoned, somehow?” His eyes widened just a fraction as it clicked. “Or does the surface not agree with your nature? An answer for your unviolent deaths, it seems. How many times have you done this?”

The wind sharpened against the clammy sweat on Zagreus’ skin. He mustered what strength he had to glare fiercely over the blade. “You cannot tell the other gods, Lord Ares. You cannot–”

The blade pressed closer, forcing Zagreus to flinch back. “Oh, but don’t you think they deserve to know that dear Zagreus, of whom we’ve all grown so very fond, has been deceiving us all this time? How you’ve taken our favors without ever intending to join us?”

In a flash of movement, Ares’ blade withdrew, replaced by a hand wrapping around Zagreus’ neck and lifting him off the ground. Ares’ grip was as unyielding as granite. He tried to make a strike with Varatha, but the spear wasn’t designed for such close quarters, and Ares batted the feeble attempt away. He let the prince dangle from his grasp for a few moments, chuckling to himself, and then effortly tossed Zagreus across this clearing in the trees. 

Zagreus tumbled through the snow, feeling altogether like one of Cerberus’ much-abused chew toys between his lingering wounds and the blood weakness consuming him. As he rolled to a stop against a gnarled tangle of roots, he heard the snow-crunch of Ares walking towards him again. 

“You wish my silence on this matter?” Ares said, clearly delighted at the whole situation. “Best me then, and you shall have it. Let us see if you’ve learned anything from the gifts I’ve offered you all this time. Though I wager you’re not feeling particularly fit, are you?”

Zagreus called Varatha back to his hand from where it had fallen, and started to slowly push himself upright again. He was still on hands and knees when he suddenly had to throw himself sideways, rolling into a crouch a few feet away as Ares’ sword came down where he’d lain.

Ares grinned at him as Zagreus attained his feet, Varatha held wardingly before him. “So there is some fight yet in you, my kin. At the very least, you ought to be grateful for the battle death I shall grant. This wasting illness upon you is most unbecoming.”

“Lord Ares,” Zagreus said, backing away, already breathing heavily. “I do not wish to fight you. This is all a misunderstanding, I assure you.”

“Oh, we are rather beyond words now. But fret not, we will be finished quite swiftly. I suggest you relish this fight while you can.”

Zagreus dashed back as Ares came in for him again, instinctively swiping with Varatha’s blade, but missing widely. The familiar spear felt like a stranger in his hands, twice as heavy as it’d ever been. In the space of a heartbeat, Ares was behind him, throwing a rift of bloodied blades at Zagreus’ back. He dove ungracefully to avoid it, rolling and barely getting Varatha’s haft up in time to block the next sword strike from above. 

Ares was right, he was far from fit for this contest. Already wounded from his earlier battles, and now enervated by being above ground too long. Ares was perfectly hale and relentlessly eager to see him slain. Zagreus knew he was fast enough to stay away, avoid being it, but he was bleeding strength by the second. He might not stand much of a chance in this fight, but he wasn’t going to go down without at least bloodying Ares for it.

Out of habit, he threw Varatha, his safest option from afar, but the weapon swerved off-course, Ares catching it as it flew to his hand as faithfully as it had ever returned to Zagreus. 

“Did you forget who blessed these throws of yours this time?” Ares laughed. “You aren’t foolish enough to think I’d let you use my own power against me.”

Zagreus growled and called Varatha back, snapping it out of Ares’ hand. Up close and personal, then. He’d need to keep a very particular distance: out of reach of those swords, but close enough to jab his own attacks in. 

After only a few exchanges, it was clear Ares was toying with him. Zagreus fought sloppily, throwing himself into attacks to make up for his swiftly dwindling strength, and Ares parried each cleanly. Rather than taking full advantage of openings Zagreus left, Ares returned him little nicks and shallow slices, clearly enjoying showing off how perfectly in his power Zagreus was. 

Frustrated, Zagreus lunged forward, desperate to land a hit, and Ares cracked him across the head with the flat of his blade. The world spun in a sickening lurch, and from the ringing in his ears, he thought for a moment that Thanatos had come to aid him. He tried to find his feet again, but instead stumbled sideways, his balance reeling from the hard hit. 

Ares stood back and watched him struggle to stand, like an artist stepping back to admire his canvas from afar. “I must admit, you fight quite valiantly, my kin. It has been too long since I have allowed myself an indulgence such as this.”

Zagreus threw himself into it once again, and Ares met him, smiling all the while. Ares seemed to have a preternatural sense for how Zagreus moved, where he intended to strike. Even at a full dash, Ares never lost track of him, a perfect warrior in every sense. Zagreus zipped to the side but his leading leg’s strength gave way at just the wrong moment, sending him faltering forward, but even as he fell, he wrenched Varatha up into an underhand swipe and finally, finally, managed to land a hit. 

The strike traced a smooth line up the bare skin of Ares right arm, shimmering ichor starting to flow from the wound. A chaotic strike seemed to bypass Ares’ sense for how he fought. He remembered Achilles’ warning that often, an untrained opponent could be the most dangerous, as it was impossible to predict what they would do. A tumbling strike, it seemed, could be the same.

Ares stepped back, surprise on his face. He touched the slice, staring as if in disbelief when his fingers came away wet. “How unexpected. You are not one to be underestimated.” He dipped his head in a conciliatory bow. “A fair hit.”

It was nothing, Zagreus knew. The kind of minor injury that would barely slow a mortal, much less a god. But that brief moment of respect, that surprise on Ares face when the hit landed, something in Zagreus thrilled as though it were a grand victory. 

The reprieve was short lived, and from the moment Ares engaged him once more, Zagreus knew he didn’t have much longer. He managed to land one another attack, piercing Ares’ shoulder, but his strength was almost entirely spent, and a new look had entered Ares’ eyes. The anticipation of a kill. 

It happened so quickly, as Zagreus tried to feint left, but Ares, of course, didn’t fall for the maneuver. Before Zagreus could re-adjust, Ares’ hand clapped down on his shoulder to hold him in place, and with one smooth motion, the gleaming sword ran him through. Agony blossomed through Zagreus as Ares pulled him in closer, drawing him up to the hilt with the blade slipped between his ribs. 

This part of the process, at least, was familiar. At this point, he’d had more violent deaths than he could count, ever varied but never entirely unexpected. Dying never got easier, but it was, at the very least, something he now knew well. Varatha slipped from his fingers, disappearing before it hit the snow, and his pained gasp gave way to a jagged cough, a wet sound that told him Ares had pierced his lung. He could taste the blood in his mouth. 

Ares breathed out slowly, with the barest shiver of pleasure. He held Zagreus in that facsimile of an embrace, as blood flowed down the hilt and onto Ares’ hand. For a few heavy heartbeats, they were both still, intimately close. And then Ares closed his eyes and leaned in, his face mere inches from Zagreus’ skin and inhaled deeply. 

“So that is you, after all,” Ares said softly, marveling. “I had thought, at first, that you merely carried remnants of other fights, clinging to you still, but this is stronger. Innate. Incarnate. The scent of blood rests beautifully upon you, my kin.”

With a sickeningly wet lurch and another surge of hot pain, Ares yanked his sword free, tearing a new gouge through Zagreus. The War God shoved him backward, and Zagreus collapsed in the snow, trembling hands instinctively pressing into the warm mess of the wound. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. His senses were fading. 

Ares stood over him, as dignified as ever, and raised his sword to catch the scent of Zagreus’ blood once more, now wisping off the edge as the other blood had before. “It has been far too long since I had a partner quite so satisfying, I must admit. I shall keep your secret to myself, that I might continue to enjoy the violence you wreak. Whatever your reasons, your ever-faithful bloodshed may sate my curiosity for now. And of course, I know where to find you now, should I have need for another…  personal correspondence such as this. Savor your death here, my kin, for I know I shall. We shall see one another again soon.”

Shock and relief rushed through Zagreus, and with it, that familiar little thrill of a challenge. Ares would keep his secrets? And… wished to fight him again? He would find Zagreus far more prepared next time. A new chance to prove himself against a worthy opponent. It would take time and practice, as these things always did, but the idea was intoxicating: their positions reversed, Zagreus triumphant, striking down the God of War.