#euclid-319

The Hero of the Red War flicked her half-gaze to the rather large frog in the surf. One Ghost darted in the air. 

Old made new made old made new, thought Euclid. The grassy overhang on what had been the Vanguards’ ready room looked now as ancient as the Ishtar Academy. The Tower inside the Pale Heart was different from the ruins of the real old Tower. It even smelled different, all green sap and petrichor. But, the Light considered this version somehow definitive. Odd. Euclid and Kass had seen what that meant for Cayde.

What did it mean for Euclid? 

Euclid and Kass walked with measured paces toward the frog, angling to keep their shadows off it. 

The silence between the two Warlocks was comfortable, but the location was not. Even the beautiful sandbars were uncanny. Euclid reached down and scooped up a handful of sand and salt. The tan grains stood out against his robes and his metal palm. Like many things in this world, the grains of sand were made of memory. They had been formed from pieces of objects, chopped up with the clean butchery so eerily reminiscent of the Witness’ Final Shape. The grains of sand were unusually large, more like pebbles. As he turned them over he could pick out the spines of a War Beast, then stone eyes, then the tines of a Ghost. 

In the final battle, he had watched Kass’ Ghost channel the Light. Ghost had lived and died and lived enough for both Kass and Euclid. What little left of Euclid there was: Yarrow had shrugged her strong arm up under his shoulders in order to keep some important panels from peeling off. Euclid mostly remembered the pain in his head, toward the end, because his Ghost Constant had not been there. 

“I miss the Traveler,” Euclid said, knowing the words were apropos of nothing, old nerves rattling which he’d thought were firmly screwed in. “The old Traveler. But it was never inclined to speak one-on-one, hah.”

Kass matched his tone smoothly, as if they weren’t stalking toward a frog like kittens. “No. But through visions and birds and …”

Ghost flitted into existence at Kass’ shoulder, his eye light dimmed in comparison to the forever-noon false sun. Kass reached out a hand and Ghost cuddled into it with attentive affection.

“And here we are, talking about the Traveler inside it. What — Oof.” Euclid stepped into the waves, splashing, and grabbed the frog. His fingers fit just under its wet limbs. Holding it felt like holding a turtle, except that the antennae buzzed. “What odd gossip. What I mean by missing it is, I hear about that feeling of connection to the Traveler that Cayde had, but it’s alien to me. Cayde said himself he interrupted the grieving process, but, meanwhile, he had proof that the Traveler had loved him.”

“I want that proof, too.” Kass looked down.

“I don’t.” Euclid gestured with the frog. 

Kass raised her chin again. The sunlight caught on a white strip of bark in her striated eye like noon might catch on the blade of her sword.  

“It’s more that I’d like to have experienced it,” Euclid said. “I’d like to have been able to, to tell Taeko about it, hear what irreverent thing she would say. Taeko, she said to me, Cayde might not have been that different from what her fireteammates became. Batteries for the Light. Except on our side.” 

The frog’s legs stoped wiggling. Its antenna drifted, as if it was curious about the differences in the air this high off the ground. 

Kass held both her hands out for the frog so Euclid could fish a band out of a pouch. 

“I know,” Kass said, and asked about Taeko, and they talked happily of her while they clipped the band on and entered its number in the database. The frog pedaled its legs and did not croak or chirp.

Euclid’s thoughts drifted while they worked. He was needed on Venus next; Failsafe had detected oddities among the Vex. Euclid suspected he knew exactly what awaited him there: the unknowable, times and identities repeating, quantum froth bubbling up alongside Warlock egos. But that was next. This, the beach made of jumbled memories and the water clear as stolen crystal — this was now. Kass handed Euclid the frog. 

He put the insect-amphibian down, feeling and hoping for and dismissing the familiarity of having something small by his side, something friendly moving out of the corner of his eye. The frog hopped across the sand toward the land past the sand bars. Euclid wondered, with a warm curiosity, where it would go. 

*

There are so many aspects of the mind, after all. Facets, slates, translucent panes. Why do you imagine your own mind as a crystal? Why do you see your own thoughts as lattices, as liquid suspended? You are not used to interrogating your own thoughts. Action is better. However, you are almost certain that you did not feel this way before all of the confusion, before the sense of interacting with the world through a radio that doesn’t transmit. Action, now, seems like it will require more planning than usual in order for it to be possible. You rarely relied on thought alone before, but now you will have to. Your philosophical identity is a set of tools in unpracticed hands, and your thoughts bounce away from the fact that you are bodiless. That can’t be right. That cannot be factored in. It must be factored in.

What was that? Did you hear that sound? Is this thing on? Maybe it was nothing. You hope it was something.

                                                   *

There must be a point at which bravery is no longer a choice. One must be brave or one must be underfoot. Would it be bravery to jump away the moment someone hits you?

Euclid-319 thought bravery was a choice. He thought that he had often chosen cowardice.

This was one of the reasons he sat alone. Ikora Rey gave Euclid a small space in the Tower, a temporary gantry-turned laboratory. It was a place where construction frames once lifted rebars up to make the stairway above. Because of the method and balance of its construction it had walls on all four sides. Like an empty crawlspace on the edge of the Tower, it hung there without any windows to remind the occupant of the vertical drop nearby.

What were the others doing during the Red War? Euclid imagined one of his friends, their face blank with the failure of his imagination, and tried to picture them living while he was split/dead/cancerously alive. Surely Jolly would have been doing something heroic in that time not long ago, but he couldn’t quite conjure her. And Yarrow, she would have been doing useful things, probably, not separating mind from body in a nuclear sacrifice. Euclid’s body had become an enemy of sorts, sent on its own desperate, twisted journey. He had not been used to thinking of himself as just a mind, but that experience had been forced upon him and he had … learned from it? He had certainly experienced it. There it was, logged in the memory banks.    

Someone knocked on the door. It was Ikora, if she had kept to her schedule. (Five minutes late — standard for a sentient being.) Euclid flexed his wrists over the books he was using as a headrest, lacing his fingers together and turning the joints until he heard the smooth and satisfying shush of metal rubbing together. He couldn’t bring himself to read the books that had been returned to him, not really, but collecting them and putting seed packets in the pages to mark his place was comfortingly familiar. He had been killed and cured and self-immolated and cured again, and still he felt … self-conscious, around his Vanguard. He created a careful remove between himself and his monstrosity, and so she might see him as like a child and … no, that wasn’t sound either. Euclid shook his head, popped his joints again, and watched as Constant (old, many-lived, loyal and tired as a hunting dog) opened the door.

Ikora Rey nodded to the Ghost as she entered the room. Euclid missed his gardens where she had once visited him, but the Vanguard made the crawlspace warmer.

“Good morning, Euclid,” Ikora said.

“Good morning, Ikora! Tower’s still standing, huh?”

She didn’t smile.

“I’ll put the seed packages back,” Euclid said. “I found them on the shelves …”

“They’re actually for you.”

“Ooh!”

“I thought it might be nice for you to have a bit of home. Claim a spot on the garden ledges if you want. You can use my name if anyone complains,” Ikora said.

He looked at her evenly. Both of them knew that he was effectively confined to the Tower, the Vanguard studying him even as he studied the new emanations of the machine-deity. What effects might the Traveler have on plants brought from Venus, life forms used to being closer to the Sun and farther from the Light? Which way will sunflowers turn?

“I talked to Kass the other day. She says you’ve been talking to Jolly, that you’re okay,” Ikora said.

“It’s good to have some friends,” Euclid replied.

Euclid came to terms with the fact that his body roamed, mad, while his mind seethed inside the magic-magnetic field of the shard of the Traveler. He came to terms with the fact that the blood of Guardians was on the hands. It still cast a layer of dark irony over all of his appreciation, though.

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Ikora said. “Eris and I have been researching the ways in which Savathûn’s Hive lock Guardians into these crystal shells. Taeko-3 and her fireteam were instrumental in determining what exactly the Hive are doing on Titan. If I remember right, you were part of her cohort when she was first raised.”

“What have you found? Is there a way to revive her?” He thought he was babbling, possibly even asking for impossibilities.

If Ikora’s patience thinned, though, she did not show it. “The blueprint of her body and her spirit still exist within the shell. You, with your understanding of Exo brains and Void Light, are the perfect person to try to bring her back.”

“Yes! I mean, I’ll do it. If you need the help.”

It would be so good to help with something again. For a long time he had felt like a machine from which no energy escaped, turning and turning on his own wheels, pushing the fire he generated into his own mind. This could be a project that could occupy him, could keep him from dwelling on the transformation from which he himself was still healing or re-forming. Taeko hadn’t been the easiest Exo to understand, not when she seemed to switch from aggravating him to praising him with a rapidity he could not match — but he had missed her. He had carefully stored her memory in a kernel of his and told himself, over and over, that she was now just a talisman he had imagined for himself.

“I will bring you what we recovered from Titan,” Ikora said. “I’ll expect regular reports.”A stern, promise-making look. She would not let him catalog plants alone any more. She was right to do that.

“Of course. Of course! Right away.”

“We have already brought the crystal to the Tower,” Ikora said. “With your brilliance and the resources we have left, we might be able to reverse-engineer the power crystals.”

“My brilliance. Hah.” Was the bitterness going to come out now? No need to inflict this on Ikora, but — fine. She was still his Vanguard, despite the way they had learned to stay away from one another as a show of support. He made a conscious effort to regulate his movements, despite the strong urge to pop another joint in his hand. “As if it could make up for, ah, what I did. After the occupation.”

“Yours was one long, strange story among many.”

Would it help to think of it as a story? All of this was real, wasn’t it? How did his story compare to Ghaul’s? Was it larger or smaller, less or more catastrophic? Or … no. Ikora meant to reassure him, to smooth over history.

“I hope it was one that did not make too much of an impact on your, uh, the rebuilding efforts. Of the Tower,” Euclid said.

“I hope it did.” Ikora smiled.

                                              *

You died on Titan, under the briny waves and the old hulks waiting for their crews to pilot them. You died with a sword in hand and a halo made of Light.

You woke up with your internal chronometer reading zero.

All around you is green and purple light, swirling. It’s oddly flat, though, like paint on the outside of a sculpture. The colors don’t move closer and farther away. They play out as if on a screen.

Maybe they are the paint and you are the sculpture, able to look only inward through to the other side of yourself.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

The voice comes from outside, beyond the screen. You imagine a Hive Knight, hunched over with a knife in hand, but then you recognize the tremulous voice.

Hello?

“There was the, I mean, you know there was the war. You saw some part of it, I think? In as much as the Hive knew about it? They were on Titan before Ghaul, but the buzz afterward … someone stirred the nest.”

Euclid? Oh Light, something went wrong and they sent him in after me. Light, he came into the tunnels after me.

Light. Euclid?

“Ikora said I could use the battery but this, how long has this been here? Whose emergency power am I using? The first Vanguard’s? The Golden Age’s?”

Flip the switch, Euclid.

“Okay, this crystal matrix interpreter is set — doing what I told it to do, huh! Things that work, a brave new method in engineering.” He gave a tremulous laugh.

For all you know, the power is already on. He’s just second-guessing whether he deserves to use it.

“Good. This is good.” He has to convince himself, but that doesn’t take long. Afterward his voice is stronger. Maybe you can hear a shuffle, a click, like metal against metal or clothes against metal. He is sitting down or leaning against a feature of the room. It’s a small room.

“Now I just have to wait,” Euclid said. “I don’t mind waiting. I can water the plants outside, although should I leave this room? Something might go wrong if I leave this room. Someone recognizes me out there, and … maybe … maybe not.”

I know you’re a hermit at heart, but why would things go badly if someone recognized you?

“You don’t … listen to me, talking to myself! Ikora wouldn’t want to hear this. Taeko doesn’t … I bet she doesn’t know.”

You know what, she doesn’t. Why don’t you tell her, Euclid?

Taeko-3 thought maybe she could feel her limbs now. At the very least there was an impression that the colors around her had gained dimensions. The world she inhabited now contained the width and depth of arms and legs, making herself her own compass. It contained time, linear and marching, in a way it had not before. If she had to stay here, trapped in a body instead of a crystal and unable to move, she might go more mad than when she had barely registered herself at all. Better to go to sleep (that horror-sleep of the Hive, but still, it had not hurt) than to lay paralyzed. Where was her Ghost? What if she had woken up without them?

“Yes hello Taeko, while you were away I was the sphinx guarding the entrance to my own brain and also my mindless body killed some Guardians, and also I might have saved or, uh, delayed a large portion of the City from being overrun by Cabal legions.”

You what? Of course you did. You made it worth it, you old obsolescent brilliant machine… Thanks, for letting me know.

“That will have to be it.” He sighed. “But how can I explain it to her if I don’t understand it myself? That’s the key. To find out what happened.”

More cloth rustled. You guessed that he stood up. Your sense of having a body was slowly returning, although the prickling feeling and the sense that power wasn’t sparking from your brain to your limbs quite right were more worrisome than reassuring.

Don’t spend the rest of the day, however long it is, trying to diagnose your malaise, you wished for him. Go tend your garden, Euclid, you old obsessive. Go see the Sun over the City. Go to the Crucible and prove to yourself that you aren’t going to break.

It sounds like you’re partially responsible for anyone surviving to see that view.

                                                     *

Ikora offered to bring Euclid whatever other resources he might need to recreate Taeko’s mind, so the room filled up with a power bank and a lab table. He studied Eris Morn’s research and Commander Sloan’s field reports, digested all the data on the new nests on Titan. After 48 hours, he knew that he could clip the Hive crystal into an Exo body and set Taeko like a jewel. She would not be exactly the same, but she would be able to walk and talk and live. She would probably not have a Ghost, and he had worried himself so much about that until he thought about Eris.

Unless he was wrong and he was just giving one of Savathûn’s batteries an Exo-suit, to cause chaos in the Tower or to stand swaying silently like an industrial machine…

He would have liked to say that it worked on a day he didn’t expect, using a technique he didn’t expect. Then he could have run to Ikora shouting “Eureka!” Then he could have thanked some force of heat or Light for the victory instead of carefully piecing together the fact that yes, he had done it all correctly. The plan was his whether it flourished or burned.

Taeko, of course, was ever her own. Her green-plated body lay on the table, covered in simple robes.

Her eyes flared. They had been tinted green when the new body was built, but for a moment the horror of the Hive-glow returned to Euclid and he considered, terribly, telling Constant to stitch him up a gun out of the air. When the initial power surge faded she began running diagnostics, though, the twitches and stretches he had been expecting her to do. He stepped back, eager for the moment she would be ready to speak.

She sat up on the table. Her feet almost touched the floor. “Hello?”

“Oh, it’s you!” Euclid said. “I mean, of course it’s you. I … you should probably know that I rebuilt your body. And you’re in the Tower. And you’re not optimal yet, but your self-repairs are yours, you know, so, I didn’t want to touch that —”

“I know, silly.” She hopped off the table and took a long look at everything — at the corner where Euclid sat for rare and fitful sleep cycles, at the potted plants (more every time Ikora visited with a basket under her arm), at Constant. “I’ve been listening to you since you …”

She looked directly at him for the first time.

“Since you told me you were outside your body for a while.”

That isn’t exactly what happened, but Euclid doesn’t correct her. “I’m, uh, I’m so glad you’re okay!”

“Real talk? Me too. About both of us.” She paused for a moment. “But … are they alive?” She said it flatly, maybe curious, not angry and certainly not full of relief.

Who? The Hive? Would he have to tell her that the broods still shrieked on Titan? Euclid hesitated, his hands hovering just above the table. He spoke softly, apologetically. “Who?”

“My Fireteam. Caliban.”

“No. I’m so sorry, Taeko, I —”

She didn’t avert her gaze. “No, it’s okay. I thought so. From what you said, I just …”

She looked at Constant again and then flung her arms around Euclid, a hug so unexpected and with all of her weight behind it that he staggered backward, almost fell against a shelf full of bean sprouts and pine sprigs. “We won!”

Light, how can she celebrate so soon after her own freedom from paralysis? Doesn’t the joy have to wait, doesn’t he have to make sure he has not irreparably broken his relationship with the Vanguard first? Doesn’t he have to watch for the next war, the next slip, the next Vex poison-neurotransmission?

Maybe not.

Taeko slipped away, back to the center of the room near the table. She raised her fists. “I know what I heard, and in among all of the stuff you said, I heard we won.”

Euclid put a hand on his own chest, where a flesh being would have a heart. Artificial muscle was sheathing him properly, nothing bare that should not have been. The bonds between his body/shell and his soul/Ghost were strong, kept humming by the energy of the unified mind/self he felt with as much certainty as the metal.

Still, he felt as if something in him was falling apart. He had missed her so badly, even as he had struggled to understand the things she said that he tried so hard to interpret. The teasing, the jokes, the way she would lean her shoulder against his as if they were both as strong as the City walls, not machines ready to fall apart.

Maybe the feeling of anxiety wasn’t anxiety at all.

“It’s the end of the world,” Euclid calmly, gently accepting that the end of the world is slightly off schedule asfeddsds

it’s not Future War Cult paranoia if it’s true

I know you posted it before but I, again, love “last gasps of a total stranger” very much 

Euclid being himself unfazed by the “small Guardian ritual” is so telling and So Much

“I’m 129.” so casual

Golden Rock is both very desperate and very cool

Euclid you blasted unlimited hero. This last bit is a rollercoaster, and I’m struggling against the last-stand gravity to say that “full-throated lights that lit the inside of her visor” is great stuff from the originator of the light language. And Yarrow! Poor, poor Yarrow. This is fine genre form and 

hang on that wasn't the last stand

HANG ON

JAZZY

JAZZY DONT DO IT

(Nooooo....)

“Are you doing well out here?” Ikora said. You had to deactivate several defenses, some as old as the Academy and some much newer, before you could let her in. She was the Sun accounted for; Ikora filled the room with her own warm gravity. The Void presence bounced around outside. Still, that far out, it wasn't likely to trip anything.

"Don't … don’t do that,” you said. Talking was distracting. You tried to concentrate on the map. It wasn’t difficult; subroutines slammed into place. The Hezen Corrective would probably move to take that Conflux by the deep jungle in the next few days. If anything, they would reach out to one of the smaller nodes in order to make more synaptic connections before they pushed toward the larger node.

"It's me."

“I uh, I don’t think that’s … quite the problem.” You leaned your head on one hand, knuckle against the base of the cranial horn.

“We don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to,” Ikora said. “The Protective is investigating something out here, and you’re doing good work to track it. If you need anything … you know where to find me.”

“The-there is a, uh, one of your, on patrol. A Warlock outside.”

"She wasn't on my frequency." You heard Ikora tap her temple with one gloved hand, the shush of shaven hair.

"You didn't know? I mean, it’s fine if you didn’t. Sh-she wasn't anywhere nearby for a long while. There were three Hunters out there a while toward the cliffs, but she, she never exchanged, ah, or talked to them."

"I had an inkling. Do you mind if she comes here?"

"Why would she?"

“Curiosity."

You laughed harshly, and felt in your metaneural anterioprocessors how jarring the sound was through Ikora’s mood. A slight impact pulled at the outside of her aura, a solar flare in reverse. You thought about a cliff of silver crystals like stacked spears. “Let…let her in if she finds us,” you said, and went back to your map.

The Voidwalker did find them, probably because of Ikora shining like a beacon. How to Vanguard-proof the Academy? Ikora let her in; Ikora’s fault that there were two more Guardians in the room now. You turned from your map reluctantly, but the newcomer made easy conversation from behind an orange mask, talking about people you knew in common, about how she perceived the Light and how differently it felt on a different planet from the dormant Traveler. You talked, the patterns of the Hezen Corrective faded, and then the Voidwalker bowed, giving you her name - Kass - and a calming wash of VoidLight.

“Maybe we can talk again some time,” Kass said.

You smiled with all of your lights, then wondered whether she would have been able to read it. What cues from her first life might you have missed? Light, there could have been hundreds.

The door hissed open, and the humidity of the room adjusted upward by two percent.

“Be careful,” you said, stuttering over the words and turning back to the map. “The Hezen Corrective is moving at an interval of 15 minutes.”

Kass paused at the doorway with one hand on the frame. “Thanks …?” she glanced at Ikora.

The Vanguard said, “Euclid.”

“Thanks, Euclid.” Kass disappeared, leaving the room humid and the Void a little shallower.

“You planned that,” you said immediately, looking straight at Ikora’s sun-bright radiance and keeping your camera trained on the spot on the map where you marked the latitude and longitude of your own office. One of your hands curled on top of the parchment, faintly creaking.

“Planned to get her to visit you?” Ikora said.

“Y-y-yes. Planned to get me to talk to another W-Warlock.”

“I knew someone was nearby and that she does not like to cause commotions,” Ikora said. “I did not know if you would invite her in.”

“I’m not against helping you.” Suddenly, you have to insist that. Just to be sure. “Let … let me send some of my findings about the Vex to the Tower. They could be, ah, someone could read them who isn’t me.”

Ikora assented. You turned on one camera just to see her nod. Then the words from a minute ago registered, really registered, clanging like a hammer on the power centers in your chest. Why now? Why this, part of you wondered? It was the same part that wasn’t reverberating. Maybe your involuntary processes decided to be truly involuntary for once, and took their time processing. You scanned the time stamp: it was unobtrusive, shoved to the back of the queue by your decision to commit anything, no matter how small, to Ikora and then by turning on camera three.

You- you- you- Euclid. No one had spoken that name in that room in a long time.

The knowledge didn’t floor him. Euclid-319 performed a systems check he thought was unsettlingly quick for how complete it was. Was something missing? Efficiency, safety; he made sure none of his fuses were blown and no one else’s blood was on the floor. Euclid's fist clenched on the parchment, folding the Vex territory into a crinkling ball. Ikora was at his side in a moment, not quite touching him, shouldering into the overlap between camera three and camera two. Her Light enveloped him, both soothing and containing him. The sun was both a nuclear firestorm and a touch of heat in the summer.

On that day, he heard his Ghost clicking as it fussed over him and over the map. He heard Constant call what he realized was his name.

“I think my Sparrow should have been the other way around,” Euclid said as Kass approached him, and he rubbed his hand on the back plate of his skull. “But I found her.”

It took Kass a moment to realize that he meant the same person she did, and that he had jumped from one topic to another.

“Sh-sh-she stays off the track,” Euclid said. “I mean, of course. I see you didn’t.”

Kass’ Sparrow dissolved behind her. “I’m helping her. But time allowed me to race also, and it was … instructive.”

“I see what you mean. You looked like you knew what you were doing, though. I mean, you did well.”

She bowed her head for a moment in thanks. “I am not sure I’ll race again.”

“No, I mean, you did really well.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t want to ask him why he hadn’t raced, but let the idea of it trickle into her mood anyway, little prickles of lightning questions touching his awareness. He could answer them if he wanted. If not, no harm in the Light -

No harm, but he let the signals slide over his own presence, a deep, calm pool of Void that reflected her lightnings back with gentle sparks. Then he turned and she followed him up a familiar hill, behind the banners, to where Eris stood behind an outcropping, bending over to hold a small algae-orange rock between her fingers. She had known they were there, Kass thought. It was difficult to tell what Eris was thinking, her pretense alternately a swirl of impressions or completely hidden. She didn’t startle, though, just leveled a too-calm stare at Euclid.

He laced his fingers together, but spoke more as if continuing a conversation than starting one.  “Not to … I mean not to presume, but what are you doing here?”

“The Taken incursion ignores the boundaries we set for ourselves,” Eris said.

“Even those emblazoned with colors and set on sharp curves. Here I can study them, with fewer bullets in the air.”

“Is that … safe?”

“There is no safety here. We are tracking their movements. Finding the best places.”

Kass saw Euclid’s lights flare, a complex pattern running from eyes to jaw and back too fast for her to read. From the gestural tone of it, he was flustered, but that had already been clear.  “Th-that’s very thorough. I know the Taken are still working on an incursion against the Vex, so here … ”

Eris tipped her head in that expression which might portent words but equally might not. This time she did speak, absently: “We have been given a little time. There are always … ” And her voice cracked while, behind Kass’ back, another race started up. “More wars.”

“I could help you too,” Euclid said, rushing the words.

Another stare while the black gore rolled down Eris’ cheeks, and then her lips curled. “I will find some traces for you to examine,” she said, and Kass felt Euclid’s presence tuck into a slightly less erratic swirl of Void energy.

“Thank you,” Euclid said. “Thank you!”

A choked-sounding horn blared from the bottom of the hill, and Kass looked for a moment before turning back and crossing her arms. “I think that’ll be the last race for me for now as well.”