#alathar

Alathar slammed his shoulder against an invisible force barrier in the world and a towering convex shield erupted in front of them, soaking up Cabal fire as cracks splintered across its surface. He panted to himself and turned to glance at Viggo. “Where’s Moon?” He asked, voice rising as the noise of Cabal munitions threatened to drown them out once more. Viggo snapped his head up in a panic to search for the Hunter that had taken it upon herself to be his mentor, Moon-5, who had moments ago been on the roof.

The roof that had just gotten eaten by a massive line of molten solar fire.

His query was not long left unanswered, thankfully; Her body landed face- up in the muck about fifty feet behind them with a wet squelch, her cape fluttering down over her face and her Ghost spinning out in the open to assess the damage. Viggo held his breath for a moment before one of her arms popped up, thumb held high. “I am O-Kay!”

He sighed, exasperation and panic bludgeoning one another for prominence in his chest. “God! She’s nuts! She’s nuts, and I’m gonna die, and it’s because she’s a fucking loon!”

“Relax,” Alathar said evenly, lifting his rocket launcher onto his shoulder. “Deep breaths, young one. Cover me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to shoot them with a rocket.”

Viggo whipped up and leaned his gun on the windowsill of the shack, firing precision shots into the crowd of Cabal escorting their latest horrible military death machine. Each triple-burst of his Swift Ride popped pressure seals or burned holes in brain stems, giving Alathar time to rise with measured patience from his crouched spot, step around his Barricade, and fire a warhead across the street into the crowd.

There was another boom of munitions as his rocket struck a Centurion in the chest and turned his torso into a gooey jigsaw puzzle, and the explosion scattered the procession. Moon vaulted off of Alathar’s shoulders and a raucous rush of Light adorned the ignition of her Hand Cannon. Six shots cracked out in three seconds and one of the rear thrusters keeping the massive wartank aloft crumpled and died.

Moon whooped as she wheeled around to cover, her cape singed nearly a foot shorter. “How’s that for a bit of adrenaline?” She asked savagely, thumping Viggo’s chest.

“Why are you so excited?” He shrieked, fumbling a new clip into his Pulse Rifle. “We’re going to DIE!”

“Who isn’t?” She retorted. “Load up, rookie, we’ve still got about forty Cabal out there and they did not bring party favors!”

“Move,” Alathar cautioned, grabbing Viggo by the scruff of his shoulder-length cloak and heaving him up. Moon scrambled under the hulking Titan’s feet and bounded across the clearing as the noisy hum of the tank’s main gun charging filled the air.

Seconds later the shack they’d just been hiding in was nothing but a molten crater, and the three of them were hiding behind a stack of ancient cars with the Dark Forest directly at their back.

“Oh Light,” Viggo hissed through his teeth. “Oh, I hate this. I hate this! Why did it have to be here?”

“What’s so bad about here?” Moon said, her voice forced into a chipper mask as she reloaded her handgun and pretended not to have noticed the oozing hole in her side. “Besides the tank, I mean.”

“Maybe ten more seconds until we have to move,” Alathar cautioned. “It will keep pushing us in the opposite direction of its advance until we can make it to that warehouse.”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it was the fact that the last time we were here, that headcase corpse-monster in the woods turned you into a modern art sculpture, and made Al blind!” Viggo spat. “With his MIND!”

“Only for a few minutes!”

“That doesn’t make it better!!”

Alathar’s rocket launcher spat heat again and the rocket crashed against the fore shields on the tank. The explosion still managed to half-incinerate the pair of Psions stationed by the vehicle’s primary thrusters.

“That Guardian,” Moon murmured thoughtfully; she stroked her chin in a peculiar way that Viggo didn’t understand, especially considering she was wearing her helmet. “The Corpse. Yeah.” He’d once seen Cayde-6 make the same motions and asked if she’d gotten it from him; Al had said that Moon was a great deal older than she seemed, and that it was the other way around. He’d gotten the mannerism from her.

“Yeah? What do you mean, ‘yeah’?”

Moon stood and checked the clearing for a moment. “Can you hold down the fort here, boys?”

Viggo blanched, appalled. “No!”

Alathar simply checked the ammunition on his auto-rifle as if he was used to this. “Why?”

“I have an idea. A bad one, but an idea.”

“Ikora told us not to bother that thing in the Forest,” Alathar reminded her mildly, stuffing a cluster-munitions rocket into the tube of his launcher. He dragged two fingers across the inside of the wrist that held the launcher by the grip and made a circle with his forefinger and thumb against the scuffed plating. Out. “Yeah, but these are extenuating circumstances.” She stuffed her hand cannon in its holster and crouched down in a sprinter’s crouch.

“Moon, you can’t just kite a bigger, badder monster in to solve our problems,” Alathar said pointedly. “Five seconds. I can hear the gun charging.”

“Why not? Either he gets vaporized or he turns that tank into mulch. Either way that seems like a win-win from where I’m sitting. One way or another a threat gets taken out of the equation.”

“I don’t like you talking about a Guardian like that.”

“Whatever he was before, he – Oop! Move.”

They scattered like rats as the tank discharged again. White filled Viggo’s vision until it went black and his legless torso splashed into the mud. Alathar slid to a halt next to him, suppression-firing into the crowd with his auto-rifle, until their Ghosts could channel enough light together to knit Viggo’s body back together from the ether. He dry-heaved inside his helmet and scrabbled on hands and knees behind cover at the edge of the cliff face that separated this portion of the Sludge from the road that ran past the Farm.

Moon helped him to his feet. “Are you okay?” She asked, gentler than she ever was in any other circumstance as he tried to get his newly-remade stomach to stop flipping end over end. “Can you breathe? Deep breaths. Stretch your knees. Roll your ankles. You’re okay.”

“Maybe half a minute until the tank re-emerges from around the warehouse,” Alathar judged.

Viggo slapped his hands against his helmet and successfully suppressed the urge to vomit in his helmet. “Green,” he rasped hoarsely. “Green. I’m reading green.”

“Good.” She thumped the forehead of his helmet with the side of her fist. “I’m off. Keep the light on for me.”

“Moon, wait!” He pleaded. “What if it just kills you?”

“It won’t! I’m too fast for that.”

“Okay, what if he kills us?” Alathar snapped.

“He – it – did once before, almost! Why should this time be any different? We’re Guardians!”

“I just got my legs vaporized,” Viggo mumbled queasily. Moon sighed, and took a moment to huddle with her fireteam.

“Listen,” she said earnestly. “We don’t have the firepower to break this thing before it breaks us. Viggo, you said it yourself, Dead Orbit’s radio-tech is scraprust-garbage. That means we either put this thing away here, or we pray to the Traveler that there are enough Guardians lingering at the Farm to stop it.” She put her hands on the backs of either of her teammate’s helmets. “And before they do that, it’ll vaporize a lot of stuff we can’t just Glimmer back together. This is us, Guardians. We smash the hard place with the rock we get stuck under. So trust me, okay? I’m moderately certain this will work.”

Alathar sighed, shaking his head slightly, but his expression was inscrutable behind his helmet. “Very well, Moon,” he rumbled. “It’s your call.”

“Thanks, Meat Mountain. Don’t die until I get back, ‘kay?”

“I will do my level best.”

“That’s the spirit!” She patted Viggo’s cheek and then turned and sprinted off towards the treeline.

“Think we’ll ever see her again?” Viggo said glumly.

“For at least a couple of seconds. Tether,” Alathar responded, hefting his rocket launcher.

Viggo spun out from behind their cover and pulled a short leather-wrapped handle from his belt; a phantom bow curled off the material component of his Nightspell and he drew the drawstring as swirls of void-light pooled at either end. “Choice of dispersal?”

“Center mass.”

“Yes sir.”

The arrow careened through the air like a twirling angelic mortar, burst just above the crowd, and sent a spiderweb of branching void-tendrils snaking through the crowd, binding them to the pulsating globule of Void Light that dragged them all inward.

Alathar’s cluster missile turned thirty more Cabal into so much Solar dust. And so the dance continued; Viggo and Alathar darted from cover to cover and left a molten pile of slag behind everywhere they crouched, trying to keep up with the thankfully now much slower ultra-tank as it trundled along through the Sludge. The forward Cabal guard clashed with Taken and Fallen while the tank and what was left of the battered rear guard tried in vain to deal with a pair of wily Guardians. Lives were on Viggo and Alathar’s side. Firepower was on the Cabal’s. The battle was pitched, and Viggo eventually passed Alathar his shotgun so that the Titan could charge the tank and blast the other rear thruster pod to smithereens with it, but the result was Alathar’s exasperated Ghost muttering ‘Why do you enable him?’ To Viggo while Viggo fed it enough Light to unscramble Alathar’s molecular waste and return him to the world of the living with a saucy chuckle and a light dusting of ash.

After almost twenty long minutes of following the tank, which now drove at a snail’s pace with the back half grinding along as it dragged thrusterless behind the front end, Viggo heard something from the abyssal trees and looming Shard behind them.

“Oh, shit,” he whined; a ghastly wail had picked up, wavering and rising with the wind. Even Alathar had to shudder at the sound of it, swiftly growing closer. Viggo felt it like a shadow blotting out the sun, or a demon chasing him through a bad dream, just behind and growing ever-closer in his Nightstalker senses. This thing, this once-guardian, it trembled in the bloom, suffuse with Voidlight unlike any Voidwalker or Sentinel he’d ever encountered before. Ikora was a bottomless well of stillness. The Corpse was like a slavering black hole.

Moon came ripping out of the Forest, one of her arms missing from the shoulder down, metal curled into springy strips and her hand cannon conspicuously missing.

“Run!” She shouted gleefully as she tore past them, dirt and mud flying up in a mist under her heels.

Behind her the Forest lurched, gravity-distortion waves bending the world momentarily as the Corpse screamed out of the treeline, jittering forward as if Blinking soundlessly from point to point. Viggo turned and sprinted out into the open after his mentor, panic seizing his heart, and heard the surprised grunt and thundering footfalls of Alathar just behind him. Moon laughed like a lark into the open air as she ran, her remaining arm flying into the air over her head. She was running so fast that her hood had fallen back, and Viggo kept one hand clapped to the crown of his head to keep the same from happening to him.

“WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Alathar roared, uncharacteristically fussed, as the Corpse’s screaming behorned form chased them across the ruined city street.

“I SHOT HIM!” Moon called gaily back. The Cabal were so stunned by the sight of them that for a moment none of them fired; the tank’s main cannon warmed, gurgled with heat so intense that Viggo watched the foliage peel and blacken off the slagged cars on either side of it, and slowly came to bear on them. He took a split second to glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, a bright violet wisp was drifting up and away from the Corpse’s torso from both sides, the singe of golden fire undoubtedly from Moon’s Golden Gun already dimming as the Corpse was slowly filled in as if time had decided to reverse course around the wound.

Viggo dodged and weaved for his life through Cabal slug guns, rockets, and Bronto-shot. He did his best to stay calm. Hit the hard place with the rock you’re stuck under. Viggo sucked his breath in through his teeth. The Corpse overflowed with Void Light. It was like the thing’s anchor. He could feel it pulling at the gravity under his boots as it glided like a nightmare after them. Okay. He could work with that.

“DOWN!!” Viggo shouted as he leapt upwards, vaulted off nothing, then triple-jumped for maximum height. Moon and Alathar dove to either side as he drew his Bow once more, reached into the Möbius quiver at his hip, and fired as many tethers as he could across the tank and the crowd of Cabal. The second his feet hit pavement he dove and rolled for all he was worth, holding his breath, feeling the Corpse fall upon them –

“I AM! Legion! Crimson tide! Forgotten army! Self-deluded castoffs lost and cowering away from Calus’s love/hate!” The Corpse rocketed past them, tattered robes fluttering in the wind. “WALLBREAKERS! CITY IN CINDERS! Ghaul’s pathetic final whimpers drain away like scattered dust in the vastness of the Datasphere! Yarrow says GO HIDE IN A HOLE SOMEWHERE, YOU UGLY FROGS! I AM NOT!”

The cannon fired and Viggo gritted his teeth and forced himself not to look away as the massive beam of solar power streaked towards the new biggest threat; but before it could impact the Corpse and turn it into ash, the magnetic field shaping the superheated energy unspooled in the fathomless Void, and the cannon’s discharge looped and spun away into nothing. The yawning nothing within the Corpse stretched out, and the massive cannon crumpled, screeching metal upon screeching metal, peeled open like a flower.

The Cabal unloaded their full retinue of fire on the Corpse, but the munitions spun away into the Vortex crowned above the creature’s umbral horns. It held its arm out, palm forward, wailing into the sky, and Viggo’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets with how hard they bugged as he watched the tank begin to buckle from inside. It let out a sickening groan of metal straining against gravity, crunched, bent in half, and then began to crumple like a tin can, dragged inwards as a second Vortex spun up from a pinprick somewhere in the bowels of the great machine...

Viggo blinked and it was gone. The sudden still and quiet was deafening to his ears and when he brought himself to pay attention, he noticed that all of the Cabal were now dead, too; they lay here and there, some in heaps, some sprawled alone in the middle of the street. All grey, as if the very color had been leeched out of them, with staining rust and green moss crawling across their armor as if they had been dead for decades.

The Corpse shuffled quietly back the way it had came, hugging itself like a lost civilian, hunched and small as if it were just a ghost. Viggo got to his feet first. He felt a pang of... emptiness. Longing. It was incomplete, he thought, and he approached it warily but at a firm pace.

“Hey,” he mumbled, trying his best to ape Moon’s ‘comforting Rez-sick newbie Guardian’ voice. “Can you hear me? Is– is there anyone in there? Hey.” He reached out, but the moment before his fingers touched its shoulder it began to fade, its image vanishing right before his eyes as if it had walked behind an invisible shroud and out of sight.

The oppressive weight of its presence instantly guttered and went out.

The three victorious Guardians stood in a silent triangle, alone with an empty crater and fifty dead Cabal.

“We need to talk to Ikora,” Viggo said breathlessly.