#destinewt

guiding others down the same path that saved me. But... I might allow myself to want more than peace. What, I am not certain. Is joy the word? Might I find that again?

From Eris' last radio message in Season of the Haunted. Once resigned to misery, Eris now wants something more than the peace she has gained helping others process and survive trauma like hers. She even entertains the once-impossible idea of seeking joy in her life.

"Hey," Drifter said. "You find that joy yet?" "Soon," Eris answered. "Joy is built... but I have taken the first step."

From the IV. Tether in the Purpose lorebook from Season of the Deep. She's seeking the joy, folks! But still, what does she want?

I am lost in these lunar tunnels. Out of ammo. Short on Light. I am out of moves, save one. I clutch an Ahamkara bone in one hand, and my dead Ghost in the other. I hear a whisper. My vision is gone. My face itches from the viscous flow from my eyes. Though I can't see, I find that I suddenly know the way out.

From the Cloak of the Great Hunt lore all the way back in Forsaken. She wants what she's always wanted, what she originally wished upon an Ahamkara bone for. A way out. Of the Hellmouth, of her personal misery, of the Sword Logic and the greater horrific positive feedback loop of violence that the Hive have been enacting upon the universe for billenia.

Your star got its name from the oldest myths in that archive. and when your mother told your father that story...the star became your name. A prayer that all will go as it must... and the way it must go is struggle." "Aiat." Not a word in Ulurant or any other Cabal tongue. "But Caiatl means something else." "Yes. 'It may not always go as it needs to go.' A good name for a soldier." (emphases mine)

From Caiatl's journal in the Lightfall Collector's edition. A way out!!! It keeps coming up in the lore again and again. Ending vicious cycles and finding out what's beyond them, even the Hive's unstoppable AIAT.

Recovery is a spiral, not a circle. You may return to the same patterns, but you will break free." —Eris Morn

Seal the gates Before what's out is in Or offer a treaty A chance for reprieve // And now we're suddenly Fate's latest casualties —Vallis Alps, “Reprieve”

Ikora stared at the endless reports on her datapads. Her eyes moved, but the words they read did not translate to meaning, no matter how many times she retraced them. Why couldn't she regain her focus? Waves of frustration crested and crashed within her but brought no resolution. Even taking a few minutes' meditation to center herself only steadied her. It did not impel her forward through the avalanche of paperwork that trailed after the Witness' demise—much in the same fashion as its many-faced foggy head once had. The tedious aftermath was as banally omnipresent and mundane a drudgery as its evil. It was hard to imagine the distant day when they had sorted through a universe's worth of the ramifications.

Ophiuchus suddenly compiled before her.His outline was blurred. She scrubbed at her eyes, then squinted at his glimmering wine-red shell.

"Take a break." His tone was quiet, but brooked no argument.

She rolled her eyes. The oft-repeated words of their ritual were already on her tongue. "I'll never get through all of this if I don't—"

"You need a break. I'm serious this time."

They stared at each other. This was a departure from tradition. So instead of continuing her usual excuses, she asked: "Why now?"

Her Ghost hovered before her, rising and falling uncertainly in this new territory.

"We won," he said softly. "There's time now."

Ikora went so still in body and mind that Void light pooled within her as if she had called it forth.

She dismissed the gathering Light with a clarifying shake of her head. "There is still much to be done."

"There always will be. But are you going to remain calcified into the same person you have been, or are you going to adapt to the new world?"

Ikora looked her Ghost in his single blue eye, really looked at him with a rare intensity of regard.

"The work we do—I do—is still necessary. It will be for a long time."

The petals of Ophiuchus' shell spun, rotating the front hemisphere 180° clockwise and the back half 180° counter in perfect synchrony. "Yes," he said. "Nonetheless."

He stared her down in a long, adamantine silence.

At length, Ikora sighed. A few years of painfully cautious words between them had done little to heal the silence of decades. This was, in a way, the root of their cleaving. Ophiuchus had never approved of some of the necessary sacrifices she had made. Some of those sacrifices had required her to forgo the aid that was a Ghost's calling to provide, if she was to become what was needed. If she was to give herself utterly to the cause. If she was to do the most good of which she was capable in a dying world.

His quiet dissent was his right—and how could Ikora blame him, when she had shed her skin so many times that she was no longer the same Lightbearer he had raised? But neither had he remained the same Ghost.

What did that make them, now, the day after the end of the world, other than two not-quite-strangers who knew every painful detail of each other's lives?

She didn't want to fight with him anymore. Not again.

"Perhaps you do have a point," she admitted with chalk bitter on her tongue. "After I finish this round of reviews, then."

Grudging acceptance emanated faintly from her Ghost through their bond, intangible yet apparently unbreakable. "Two hours?"

Ikora nodded once. In a flicker of Light, he disappeared once more into the back of her mind.

With the awareness of an impending deadline, Ikora sped through a number of Guardian reports regarding the successful raid on the Witness' fortress. She had passed well beyond amazement at the sheer improbability of the topic in the past week. She had just begun skimming individual reports on its final, true defeat when the faintest breeze shifted one of the floor-length curtains that muffled sound in her personal library.

Heavy green drapes silently disgorged Chalco Yong. The grass-green of her armor blended into them, but burnished copper accents shone in warm complement.

"Brought you a snack." Paper crinkled into the silence as Chalco set a little brown bag at Ikora's elbow. It smelled sweet, sugary. Ikora looked at the clock. It had been exactly two hours and forty-five minutes.

Ikora sat up very straight to stretch the muscles that paralleled her spine, then turned to Chalco with a yawn.

"Hey," Chalco said in a quiet voice. The hardwood desk creaked as she leaned her hip against it. One hand splayed over wood and paper. She smiled subtly at Ikora with her eyes.

"Hey, friend," Ikora said warmly. Chalco's familiar face lit up.

"Did I catch you at a good time?"

"As good a time as there ever is." Ikora sniffed at the aroma of pastries that was taking over her desk. "Definitely, if that's what I think it is."

With another crackle of paper, Ikora unrolled the bag's neatly folded top. Half a dozen flat, round cookies were stacked on the bottom. They were a soft, rich violet color. Ikora smiled and pulled one out with care. She took a delicate bite off one side and closed her eyes, savoring the way it crumbled like powder and melted on her tongue.

"Good?"

"It's perfect. Thank you, Chalco." Ikora dusted crumbs off her fingertips into the wastebasket below her desk. Then she lifted both eyes and one hand to Chalco, who clasped her hand with ease and held her gaze with dark eyes, unafraid of the intensity of her regard. "What brings you here?"

Chalco quirked an eyebrow at her. She looked at the bag, then back at Ikora. "Trials. Obviously."

Ikora rolled her eyes. She pulled on Chalco's hand to help herself to standing, only to be tugged into a casual sideways hug with Chalco's arm looped about her waist.

"Just wanted to see you." Chalco picked a piece of dust or lint off Ikora's robe. "See if I could coax you out of your cave for a minute."

"It's not a cave. It's my library."

"Yeah, and that's not your dragon hoard of books either. You definitely don't curl up on piles of them with a smug grin when no one's here."

"I don't."

"Maybe not physically."

Ikora rolled her eyes again. "Was there somewhere else you wanted to be?"

"Maybe. We can't leave quite yet, though."

"Why's that?"

Another presence rippled through the room. Ikora's head whipped toward the source of the disturbance that unwove the continuity of the empty air, but it was just Eris arriving in her usual dramatic fashion. Ikora relaxed back into Chalco's embrace with only mild embarrassment.

"Hey Eris." Chalco flung a hand up in casual greeting. Eris nodded acknowledgement as she emerged from her Hive portal. Behind her, the seething lime-rimmed black disk contracted back into an aperture the size of the medallion hanging from Ikora's neck, then nothing.

"It's good to see you, Eris," Ikora said, deliberately ignoring the gray dust she tracked on the carpet. "Although I do wish you wouldn't gate directly in here. I don't want to risk Hive piling into my personal library from the Ascendant Plane following any traces you might leave behind."

"Yeah, Eris, you know she keeps her first editions in here," Chalco said cheerfully. Ikora squeezed her shoulders in exasperation.

"My apologies, Ikora. I did not have enough time to fly in from Luna while you were available. Although as I have told you before, this particular type of portal does not actually transit through the Ascendant Plane, but rather bypasses—"

"—but it uses the same basic spell elements as the ones that do, and I'm not convinced that one could not reverse-engineer it—"

"—Okay, okay, enough, enough," Chalco interjected.

"And what do you mean, 'while I was available?' How did both of you show up just as I...ah," she trailed off. Ophiuchus. making good on his unspoken threat. Her suspicions were confirmed by Chalco's grin and Eris' small smile, both equally wry but the former with greater pretense of innocence than the latter.

"We are escorting you home," Eris announced.

"What? I'm only taking a break, I'm not—”

"We're here to make sure you actually do," Chalco said. "Come on. We'll walk you there."

"I can't." Ikora hadn't intended to say the words. But so many similar reiterations over the centuries had carved the habit as deep into her as a river its bed. The flicker of disappointment that surfaced within her was submerged again so quickly that she scarcely felt it.

"Why not? Wasn't that your plan, anyhow?"

Ikora disentangled herself from Chalco. She expected the disappointment and hurt on Chalco's face; but she was so unprepared for the bitter lack of surprise that accompanied them that the same old true excuses slipped past her lips before she could think to stop them.

"I don't have that long. We're in uncharted territory now. We don't understand what's caused the Traveler to emit this aurora, nor what pressures the Witness' sudden absence will exert on the universe. What other threats might either have spawned? We're still so vulnerable after all our losses. We can't afford to be complacent after a single victory."

"See, you're doing the talking in circles thing again," Chalco said. Her voice, only moments ago full of joy and lightness, had sagged with sorrow like a kite with the wind withdrawn from its sail. The sound of it lodged between Ikora's ribs like a needle of Strand. "All of those things are true. But none of them are actually reasons why you can't step away for a little while."

"It is my responsibility!"

"That doesn't mean you have to do everything alone."

"But if I do not—"

"Ikora, is that what you actually want?" Ikora flinched from the words despite their even tone.

"Stop." Eris' voice was quiet, but its power stilled them both. She laid a hand on Chalco's shoulder. Chalco shrugged her off without malice, but paced to the far side of the room away from them both.

Eris crossed her arms and faced Ikora, as implacable as a stone in a stream. "If you truly must remain at your toils, then we shall leave you to them. But if not..." Eris hesitated, then spoke even more softly. "I never thought I would be the one to say such things. But can you not afford yourself a moment's grace from the fight, even now?"

The word grace immobilized Ikora's mind, stunned at this echo of her own secret philosophies from the unsuspecting lips of her longtime ally and inevitable lover.

"Is it always going to be like this?" Chalco whispered from across the room.

Gone rigid as Ikora already had, the hopelessness in Chalco's voice shattered her heart like a shockwave. It broke her, the way it pervaded the voice of her oldest friend, the very kin to her mind and soul.

"No," Ikora said—or tried to say, but her voice cracked into merely a soundless exhalation. She swallowed, then tried again. "No, I—I'm sorry. Both—all three of you," she said, conjuring Ophiuchus in her palm. Eris and Chalco stared as he hung there shyly, shell tucked tight into a perfect sphere.

She spoke to Ophiuchus, although his eye was the hardest to meet out of the six in the room.

"I know I haven't done well by any of you. Not for a long time." She met each of their gazes in turn: one, steady and square and glowing blue; two, clear and dark and too knowing; three, blazing green, defiant and tender all at once. "The Guardian's work that unites us has also long consumed me and kept me apart. But...perhaps you are right, that the world has changed. That it could, if we chose to let it. To create it."

Ikora laughed softly at no one but herself. All these years of championing the Traveler and its ever-changing, ever-growing Light, and she herself had failed to change and grow; had failed to allow the possibility of a world beyond the war of eons. Perhaps, paradoxically, she would best embody the philosophy to which she had dedicated her life by loosening her grip upon it like a free-flowing skein of Strand. By remembering her past like Darkness; by making a different choice in the grace of Light.

Ikora reached up to haltingly brush her fingers over the curve of Ophiuchus' shell with a familiarity she hadn't expressed for many decades. She nodded to him like a promise. He merely blinked his digital eye at her and vanished once more, but the bittersweet ache that seeped muted through their bond revealed how deeply he was affected.

She turned to the two women watching her with pride and cautious joy. She stepped toward them.

"I don't know how to find a balance with...any of this," she admitted in an undertone. She stopped a few paces away from Eris and clasped her own hands before her uncertainly.

Chalco silently returned from the fringes of the room and took her hand.

"If you want to try, I will too," she said simply. A tightness narrowed Ikora's throat.

"I will."

Eris took her other hand. "That is all I could ask of you, and all that I do."

Ikora pressed her eyes closed, clutched their hands tightly, and tried to breathe. Emotions moved strangely through her, since the day long ago that she had fed them to a dragon. But still, they moved.

"Come on," Chalco said with a light tug at Ikora's hand. She opened her eyes. "Let's get you out of here for a bit. We don't have to take you home, but let's get somewhere we can see the sky." Eris nodded agreement.

"Alright," Ikora said. Her voice rasped just a little. "I know somewhere. Shall I transmat us?" The others made sounds of assent, and Ikora mentally flicked a wordless intent toward Ophiuchus. With a frisson of surprise, he gathered them all up in the buzz of transmat and deposited them in open evening air.

They landed in a small tiled pavilion at the center of a rooftop garden. They were in the northeastern part of the twilit City; the deepening ink-blue of the sky was still shot through with gold at the horizon. The Wall was quite visible behind the lightly dancing branches of saplings lining the perimeter of the rectangular space. They were close to the Tower, which peeked from behind a tall trellis heavily laden with squash vines. Regularly spaced beds of autumn-blooming flowers and garden vegetables sprawled around the rest of the space and spanned the whole range from well-tended to neglected.

A soft gasp came from Eris. Meanwhile, Chalco spun to scan the skyline, squinting and crouching a little as if that would replicate the view from nine stories instead of twelve. "Wait, isn't this your apartment building?"

"It is."

Eris turned to her with wonder. "Is this your work?"

Ikora shook her head. "Not the majority of it. It's a communal garden. I come here to meditate sometimes, but I haven't been here very often. Just enough for something small."

She led the way from the central pavilion toward the southeast corner of the building facing the City. She took a seat on the bench there that overlooked the shelled cradle of the Botza District from between more of those saplings that would one day form a proper windbreak. They could just see the telltale purple gleam of a Servitor's eye drifting through the reconstructed Eliksni Quarter far below.

Ikora breathed deeply of the gentle evening wind. Her eyes were drawn toward the shining downtown lights. She was still adjusting to the Traveler's absence from its silhouette, but now, paper lanterns floated up through the space it once held. As they had every night for the past week, those tiny golden lights rose and rose as if the new hopes they carried might reach the heights of the eclectic fleet of myriad alien and allied ships that now guarded the skies. Once night fell, the light of the rising full moon would limn a thousand different hulls each in silver.

"Which ones are yours?" Chalco asked, prowling between the nearby garden beds. Eris prodded at an intimidating-looking bushy nightshade with interest.

A modest waterfall of vines with heart-shaped leaves spilled over one side of the nearest bed. Ikora gestured to it. "Sweet potatoes."

"Huh. Why sweet potatoes?"

Ikora shrugged. "They're hardy. Useful. Quite nice simply steamed, if any tubers set. Not that it seems likely." She leaned forward to pluck a dead leaf from one of several of the more wilted-looking vines.

Chalco's Ghost briefly manifested to shine a light on the vines in question in the dimming of evening. "Ikora. They're purple." To her credit, Chalco was trying not to laugh.

"They are," Ikora agreed.

"They're beautiful," Eris said reprovingly.

"They're really not," Ikora said through a smile.

Chalco laughed and clasped Ikora's shoulder for a moment. "Thanks for sharing them."

Ikora looked down into her lap. She didn't know what to say in the face of their sincerity. She supposed she simply had to trust them to understand, to witness this imperfect, unimpressive effort of hers.

"Here. You forgot these." Chalco pressed the paper bag of cookies into Ikora's hands. She opened it once more with a smile and passed it around to share.

"I wish I'd made tea before we left," Ikora said once they all had taken a bite.

"Fear not," Eris said as she came over to take a seat beside her on the bench. She transmatted a large metal flask into her hands and removed the lid. Then, she somehow contrived to immobilize it just above the green flames that always sprang from her Ahamkara bone, so that both hung in midair before her.

Ikora perked up. "What did you bring?"

"Merely water," Eris replied. She pulled a crumpled, unlabeled packet out of her tunic. Shaking some of the utterly unidentifiable contents out into her palm, she tipped it into the flask’s wide mouth as it began to simmer.

"Is that even a plant?" Chalco asked with idle interest.

"It is a calming herbal draught."

"...Did you bring anything with caffeine?" Ikora asked.

"No," Eris said flatly. Chalco snorted.

"Then it's a tisane."

"Hold on, it could be something decaf," Chalco said in an unspeakably reasonable tone.

Scandalized, Ikora refused to look at her. "Eris wouldn't do that to me. Would you?"

"No."

"Thank the Light."

The gleaming of Eris' eyes narrowed in a smile. She leaned in to kiss the sugar from Ikora's lips, then poured a measure of the brew and pressed a small porcelain cup into her hands. It was Ikora's favorite cup. She must have stolen it from her kitchen several days ago, at least. How long had they been planning this just for her?

She caught Eris' eyes, but only a mysterious smile answered her unspoken curiosity. Ikora squinted at the near-black liquid in the cup with suspicion, then shrugged. Her eyes widened as she took a cautious sip. It was far more delicate than it looked, and it formed a pleasant contrast to the cookies' sweetness with a soothing, earthy mushroom-like flavor chased by something like citrus.

They watched the night deepen and brighten across the City while sipping their 'tea' by the green foxfire of Eris' bonelight. Chalco lounged next to Ikora and draped an arm around her shoulders to hold her close. On the other side of the bench, Eris laced their fingers together. Between them, high above the surface of the world and below the sparkling gaze of the clear, breezy sky, Ikora slowly sank into a strange peace that was warmer and more comforting than even the profound stillness of the Void that had so long sustained her.

Somehow, Ikora must have let her guard down enough to nod off into a doze at some point. She distinctly recalled the receding of the fresh air and the dim confusion of being shuffled sleepily into her own unlit apartment by familiar hands.

She surfaced briefly again into consciousness and found herself in the nest of her bed. More golden lanterns floated past the undrawn curtains of her bedroom window, casting slow, diffuse shadows across the wall. Perhaps their shifting lights had wakened her. Although no blanket covered her, some tactile weight still anchored her in place.

The dark ponytail in her face and the arm flung across her neck and chest confirmed that Chalco was half sprawled over her, as was her wont. How those contortions could possibly be comfortable, Ikora never would know. The dim peridot glow in the corner of her eye and the hand draped around her waist located Eris on her other side.

A small, faint blue light flickered to life in the shadows across the room. On her dresser, just above the small velvet cushion that lay on top of it, her Ghost's shuttered eye opened.

Ikora tilted her head slightly to see him better. But that only made Chalco shift in her sleep and kick one leg so far over Ikora's that she brushed Eris' calf. Eris twitched with a hissed breath, then resettled herself against Ikora with a grumble.

Clasping Eris' hand to soothe her, Ikora softly blew Chalco's hair out of her mouth. As gently as she could, she eased the tie out of Chalco's slick hair so that she wouldn't have a headache in the morning. She slipped the elastic band onto her own wrist. Chalco hardly noticed, only nestling her head closer into Ikora's shoulder.

A faint wash of concern or apprehension trickled through her bond with Ophiuchus. She would wonder if something was wrong, but for the same uncertainty being directed toward her.

Oh. He was worried that Ikora had woken with the intent to withdraw from this brief reprieve. He was worried about her, and for once, he was permitting her the awareness of it.

Without moving at all, Ikora reached out toward her Ghost with all the slow comfort and gratitude that currently bathed her entire being. Reassured, he sent her ripples of his own quiet affection. His eye went dim once more.

Ikora watched the lanterns drifting past the window until she slept again, lulled by quiet breaths and the gentle press of limbs. When she woke draped in dawnlight and soft regard, she remembered that the war was over.

_

We must remember the value of unshakable, irrational hope. The choice to act as if we lived in a better world can create a place for that better world to exist. —Eris Morn, Book: Unveiling; “Trust and Hope”