#brya

“– But we are the dumbest! To victory!”

Sai raises her drink and Yuka echoes the toast with a great slap of her tail on the ground. They are all clustered on a wide balcony built at Ghost height, with the Ghosts themselves out in the courtyard below. The risks they have already taken and the many more still waiting ahead have them all keeping a little closer than usual – Jax has his head propped up on the balcony to murmur back and forth with Eriana, and Karsys and Razor jostle each other good-naturedly for space. Brya moves out of the way of their scuffle with a laugh, quiet but fond.

Guren lounges in a deliberate pile of limbs, far from the rest and with seemingly no care for his Guardian or the fireteam. But when Eris looks over, he lifts his head to stare back, gaze a little too keen.

“Neither of us are much suited for gatherings,” Toland says, leaning against the railing beside her. “Not that I’ve received many invitations in the last few decades.”

The mention of his exile makes for a tempting quarry. It is usually Eriana’s place to press for more knowledge, and she has been relentless these past months, her fire never flagging. Eris glances at her friend now, and she looks almost at ease. A grim sort of ease in a world without Wei Ning, but it still gladdens her to see it.

“This has been everything to her,” Brya sends. “But now that we’re so close....”

The only thing left in the way of her vengeance is the entirety of the Hive, and Crota himself.

Eris is no Warlock, and her interest in Toland’s knowledge is not so all-consuming. It is the way he he wanders, time and time again, into dark places that have swallowed so many whole, and just this once has traced a path for the rest of them to follow. If they all were to perish tomorrow he would still go on, prying secrets from the Hive’s jaws. There is an assurance in that. In his pride, his confidence, how eager he is to share those secrets – at the right time.

“Yet you still came,” Eris says.

He shrugs, and his carved bone charms clatter with the motion. “How could I pass up the chance to witness some reckless frivolity before our goal? We have bound ourselves together as a fireteam. Some mutual discomfort and embarrassment is a fair price to pay.”

Bound has such a sense of finality and permanence to it. Her skin warms and prickles, though Guren is still looking at them both, blinking with reptilian slowness.

“You sound much like the Hive. Is it always about prices to be paid?” Eris means it somewhere between teasing and a test, a knife thrown with an idle flick of the wrist.

His hand skims over hers, fleetingly. “Always. This is how you know the world for what it truly is. For everything worthy, there is always a price. Exile for knowledge.” He raises his eyebrows, snagging her gaze from his (disconcerting) Ghost. “An Ahamkara dream for forewarning.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Eris says.

“A Hunter with such a gift of hindsight! Perhaps you can tell me how many lives would have been lost without that warning?”

Eris frowns at him. “Do not be difficult.”

“Here is an easier truth, then: no matter the price, it is in our nature to never be satisfied.” He says it as a warning and a promise, and Eris hears both of them.

                                                       - - -

The dust of the moon sifts and crunches uneasily beneath foot and claw as the six of them land. They had only gone part of the way by ship. Eriana had not wanted to give away their true destination, especially when Ghosts could just as easily make the flight, if not quite with the same speed.

Already, something is wrong, even though they are far from where the Hive tunnels had been recorded during the Great Disaster. After a moment of prodding at the feeling, Eris seizes upon it.

“There’s nothing left here.” No corpses she might have expected, given what Toland has told them of the Hive’s nightmarish hunger, but no bones at all? No weapons or armour?

“They’ve scoured the surface.” He says it lightly, dismounting from Guren to lay his palm against the ground. “Everything can be devoured or used. Especially if it was once touched by the Light.”

Eriana makes a quiet noise, head bowed so Eris cannot make out her expression. Jax turns back towards her, his neck a protective curve overhead.

Even Toland is not so far gone, though he might like to pretend at it – he recalibrates, sitting back on his heels. “But even with their bodies gone, their Light, and that of their Ghosts, has left imprints. These desolate seas are only so pristine in appearance. You will be able to find the many lives lost, once you are afforded the chance to look.”

“Only if we win here and now,” Omar says. “Otherwise I don’t see the Hive being such accommodating hosts.”

“Then let’s not waste time,” Eriana says. She’s straightened up, and her eyes and jaws blaze with light, overfull with rage and grief. “Are we close to the tunnels?”

“No. They have dug further, but everything beneath us is still.”

“So we keep going. Tread lightly. We won’t have the advantage for long.”

It is a quiet, stilted journey. The Ghosts cannot scout as they usually would, for their size and purity of Light would have the Hive boiling out immediately. Eris and Sai and Omar range ahead instead by turns, reporting back on the moon’s empty, dead horizons.

“Isn’t it strange?” Brya sends, drawing Eris away from her study of a crack in the ground that a person could just squeeze through, if they could stand the fetid stench rising from it. “That we’re here, after all this time. When you were warned about the Hive in the first place...”

“It could have been anyone,” she replies, feeling at the edges. Not claw marks, or some kind of burrow, but more natural erosion. How deep are the structures beneath, that the surface is starting to give way? “You know as well as I do that it was just chance that I was the fool caught in the dream in the first place.”

She can sense that this doesn’t settle her Ghost, though the unease between them is a delicately held thing. “I’m worried, Eris. That something will happen. After the Disaster....”

“We’ll be careful. That is all any of us can promise.”

Though she knows as she says it that she cannot hold them all to it.

The silence and the creeping pace towards the Hellmouth take their own kind of toll, until Sai spots a patrol and pins two thralls in the throat with her knives. Yuka, as eager for action as her Guardian, surges after her and engulfs the following acolytes and wizard in flame. The brittle stillness returns for a few moments longer, and then the ground beneath them shudders and rolls. Is that Crota’s malevolence stirring below them, rising in thick coils like steam?

Toland laughs, a single, sharp bark. “Well, we have their attention. Now all we must do is survive it.”

Brya wings past and Eris leaps to meet her, clutching at her side and hauling herself up onto her back. The others are scattered beside and behind her – she can see Karsys veering to one side as Omar and Vell shoot at another thrall pack. Guren leads the way, weaving through boomer fire with almost uncaring ease – there is something almost impressive in how false that previous emptiness was, how close to the surface the Hive must have been this whole time, waiting for the trap to spring – and Jax follows close behind, unerring. What was painstaking progress past collapsed and buried rubble is now fleeting, crystallized impressions: the fervent green flash of dozens of eyes below, tracking them; the furious vibrations searing overhead as Brya ducks below a spell; the muted roar of Eriana’s handcannon always hitting its mark. They are hemmed in by noise on all sides, the visceral howls of thralls behind and the roars and shrieks of knights and wizards ahead. Still they fly on.

The Hellmouth awaits them, splitting the moon wide open. There is an incredible weight to it, a sense of finality in its sheer scale. The Hive have already inflicted so much harm upon the surface that it can be glimpsed on a clear night from Earth.

Even if – when, she tells herself, when – they kill Crota and eradicate the Hive, these are not wounds to be mended or scars that can fade. Yet the damage can be mapped. If it takes going into the dark with a banished Warlock as guide, bringing those secrets back out piece by jagged piece... there is meaning in that.

Eriana and Jax make a pass at the entrance, Jax swatting the guarding knights into the path of Eriana’s hungry flames. Then they’re in the air again, Eriana hissing a curse over comms.

“What’s your game, Toland? There’s not enough room! We can’t bring our Ghosts down there,” she snarls.

“I am as serious as I have always been,” he says, while the rest of the fireteam crowds the channel.

“We’re not leaving them –”

“Can we widen the entrance? How many rocket launchers do we have with all of us together?”

“There’s no time, we’ll get swarmed!”

“You said you would lead us to Crota. How do we go down?” Eris asks, speaking above Brya’s weighing of their options. The question of if she could truly stand a chance among those starving hordes alone is not one she wants answered.

“We follow their scriptures,” Guren answers, so unexpected as he circles above them that they all fall into uneasy silence. His voice is not viscerally unpleasant, but flat and disinterested, as if the matter of their survival is a rote pattern he has memorized.

“Hive scriptures,” Eriana says, some of her rage ebbing away to wariness. “Which say what?”

“We dive,” Toland says, satisfied in being right and being listened to once more. “As their forebears once did. The narrow entrances and tunnels are so their broods can overwhelm intruders, but the deeper rooms are made for tombships and larger, more dire vessels than those. They’ll suit all our Ghosts well enough.”

Below them, the Hellmouth’s pit churns out its ominous haze from what must be the moon’s core. If she squints, Eris can just barely see the outlines of further structures shrouded within it. Balconies and galleries and the suggestion of less familiar shapes suspended from the sides, descending further down.

They can’t turn back. They must take this chance at Crota. But even if they could, she wants to press onward and see what is down there, to pry it out and make it useful. Can something good be made after all this hurt, all the dead? Eris hopes so.

“Toland is right,” she says into that unsettled quiet. “It seems like the surest way down.” Not for the first time now, she sees her opinion being given more weight for how sparingly she offers it – Karsys tilts his head, considering it as Omar peers over his shoulder.

“With all that horde after us, there could be less Hive down in the depths,” Vell says. “We might even surprise Crota. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“I would not count on it,” Toland replies, but Eris can hear the amused curl of his lip in his voice nonetheless.

“I still liked the rocket launcher idea,” Sai puts in, drawing a grudging chuckle out of even Eriana. “Ghost-fire first, rockets after... it could work.”

“Sorry Sai, you’re being outvoted,” Eriana says. “So, we dive. Lead the way, Toland, Guren.”

“As long as the rest of our story does not play out so similarly to their texts. I do not think any of you would welcome such a journey.” Another sharp laugh, almost infectious except for how none of them could see a reason for humour. “Come, let us venture further into the dark.”

Guren stoops down into the pit and one by one they follow him, until even the gleam of Ghost scales is lost in its fog.