Final Shapes: A Destiny 2 Fanzine

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Morality, of course, is subjective, and you’d known as much long before you stopped believing in your own self-created cosmology. No one outcome of a game is more noble or more wicked than any other unless you are one of the players. The propelling force of the universe is the desire to keep on existing—so perhaps, from a certain point of view, it is the drive to live which is the only moral good. Everything wants to exist, and the cessation of one life allows another to exist and thrive; life and death and life and death and life and death, locked in a dance than never ends. But for you it had never been a matter of morality; not in any critical manner, anyway. It was simple and entirely neutral, majestic in its plainness, a sharp needle-point of a compass piercing a way through the mayhem and cruelty you witnessed around you. A universal explanation for a chaotic universe. If there had ever been a tenet you could say you truly admired, it would have been this.

It was supposed to be a garden world, and a garden is no less good or evil whether it is wilted or thriving. Growth without withering is cancerous, festering and crawling out like rats to infect the outside, until it stops being a garden, until it does not resemble anything more than a putrid mass of not-even-life trapped in perpetual limbo.

It was with this thought that you set out on your celestial crusade, back when you still believed the universe had been destined for goodness. You wouldn’t have admitted it—and you certainly wouldn’t admit it now, if you still cared to self-reflect on this—but the fearful anger that would go on to guide your hand had been there already, by then; deep down, eating at your core.

You harboured no ill will toward her. That was what you told yourself.

In truth, the anger was already burning within you, and the fear festered just underneath. Words bubbling on your lips which she offered no response to, accusations you’d hurl at her silent face staring down at you with infinite patience. Her gaze, full of nothing but unalloyed hope, jeering at your questions that would bump off of her surface with a mocking echo, only stoking the fire at your core.

You had grown resentful of her silence. For once, just once, you wanted to make her talk.

You only strived to make things better. You had your great ideals and your beliefs and tenets, your centuries of reasoning and volumes of scientific proof. You wanted to bring back the harmony: to preserve the natural goodness of the world, to tend to the garden. You were noble, and right, and the fate of the universe rested on your shoulders. And you thought you were prepared.

You found it at the edges of the cosmos—a sisterly shape, a vault of answers you had been crying out through the dark after, a perfectly-balanced weight. You brought it home (because you still had a home back then, that deplorable bolthole of spears and walls, do you remember?) and all that time it sang to you, in its strange, resonant voice so unlike the hum of Light you had known. You aligned it, and it snapped into place as if pulled by the magnetism of an opposite charge—and nothing stayed your hand, not a single whisper of doubt slipping past your carefully constructed rationale. You created the link.

The scream that she let out, it threatened to turn your brains into liquid.

In the years to come, you’d rarely concern yourself with that moment. It was what came after that mattered. But at that point of contact, in those few fickle seconds, you had her laid bare like an exposed nerve, screaming blinding-white, cutting through to your core. The closest she had ever been.

In that moment, you met her there.

She was all fear and pain, sharp with a bitter undercurrent of sorrow|betrayal. For once, there was genuine emotion, something you could relate to, something mirroring your own fear. She had not expected that. It felt like victory, then, like pushing a knife into the soft underbelly of a thick-shelled creature, and you told yourself it was necessary.

You saw her eyes, sad and scared. They seemed to be saying, I loved—

The link snapped like an old mooring rope, sending you reeling. Before you could gather your bearings, she ran, a white shape disappearing among nebulas.

The Veil was still there, singing softly just under the lid of your many consciousnesses. You stood, many faces upturned to the sky and many hands flexing in shocked horror, a roar that held no meaning pushing its way past many lips. The weight of absence slowly settled, and with it your rage, stoked by the change of pressure.

In the ages to come, you would go on to learn the inherent power of emotions, these strings of the soul, and the finesse art of playing them. You would go on to learn many things, and the foundations of your philosophy would suffer many a change as you slithered across the universe on your righteous crusade. You would commit acts beautiful and monstrous, and they would each fall at your feet like pruned weeds all the same, because a garden is no less good or evil whether it is wilted or thriving. For now, this was only your first metamorphosis—the first trimming of branches.

The Veil hummed. The sky yawned empty.