#hekate004

You are with Doug-5 and you stand before the ritual site. The entrance melts away for you, and you drop into the heart of ritual. You know ritual. You knew it in your past, you know it in your present, and you will know it in your future. You have practiced such rituals, though never on this grand a scale. There, onyx towers ring the periphery like candles. There, idols and offerings line its walls in their unending observance. There, at the apex of this most deep and ancient of magics, is the altar of its transcendence.

There, at the center of it all, you see It. You see It at last.

You are Witnessed.

It materializes from the matter of the air. It stares at you impassively, its face just behind a dimensional refraction. It reaches out with an elegant hand, and the mirror crystallizes into shards of resonance. With an elegant sweep of its hand, its power washes over you.

You stand in the macrocosm. It is the universe, or a facsimile of it. The whole of its complex structure compressed into perceivable reality. You have stood in this spot before. In your haste to subdue Nezarec, you forewent study of this microstructure of existence, seeking only to overcome it in your relentless pursuit of the transformed Disciple.

You look to the Distributary at the moment of its creation. You see the clash of light and dark on a molecular level, the swirling atoms colliding into the formation of a vast, sucking void. Your colony ship is pulled inexorably into the singularity, and you float between time, between matter, until your skin knits into a familiar shape.

You stand in the shape of paradise and watch the corruption weave into the very sinews of this utopia.

What do you see, as you watch your skin shimmer with light and feel the atomic heritage of your being shift into a new shape? 

—- We will tell you what we saw. We did not ask for the Gardener's so-called blessings. We were wanderers, survivors. It found us in our unforgiving desert. It disrupted our natural order. It accelerated our world, transforming it in its own image. Our desert became gardens and we became its gardeners. Life grew, but so too did the weeds to choke it out. Unchecked, unfettered chaos warred within every blade of grass and atomic substrata. —- 

You are -

You are at the ritual site. Doug-5 is shouting at you, pulling you down behind a pillar as a barrage of resonant energy dashes against the ancient onyx. His hand clutches your forearm hard enough to bruise. He conjures a wall of ice before you and pulls you into a bubble of void as the ice wall shatters to the razor sharp resonance. 

You stand in the macrocosm. The great world, the universe, rotating as pristine marbles before you. Had you stayed, had you studied, perhaps the great calamity of your fruitless pursuit of answers would have been satisfied. Perhaps you would have heard us sooner, and averted your cataclysmic fate.

You look to Europa. You float atop a lake of unblemished ice. You bask in the placid, sublimity of the first snow of winter. Crystallized into a perfect, immutable stillness. Its gentility is calcified within caverns of undisturbed, untainted whiteness.

You stand in a place of profound discovery and curiosity, and watch humanity and vex spread like a blackened cancer into that peaceful tundra.

What do you see in the unchecked hubris of humanity's great minds?

—- We will tell you what we saw. Like you, our settlements blossomed within a so-called golden age. We stewarded the Gardener's transformations and spread our wisdom into our system. But wisdom is meaningless without purpose. We only ever sought answers. We knelt. We pled. We begged. Until at last, we demanded. And for our pleas, our cries, our search for meaning, we received only Silence. —- 

You are -

You are at the ritual site, and a shard of glass slices across your cheek. You feel the sliver of blood drip down your cheek. Your Witness spreads its arms open, and the very air whips into a razor sharp torrent. Doug-5's crushing grip on your wrist pulls you behind the aegis of Kabr against the onslaught. His knees buckle with the force of it. You are knocked back by the torrent.

You are in the macrocosm. They shimmer into a rhythm and carve out their sun. They enter into a synchronized orbit of each other. There is no center to this galaxy, this universe. No ruling point of gravity at its core. They now move and act as one. All of existence, existing only for itself.

You look to Luna, and stand within the imprint of the ancient boots of those first explorers from the confines of their single planet. You see a bleached white, ancient flag plunged into its surface, the fabric suspended in the deoxygenized air. A beacon of green light emanates from a crater to your left, and the bodies of broken ghosts and massacred lightbearers litter the ground.

What do you see, at the center of humanity's first step in the pursuit of a greater knowledge? 

 —- We will tell you what we saw. We, too, sought answers in the stars. We did not do so out of greed or hubris. We looked for a greater understanding of the universe and our place in it. We found another god, and it spoke within an exiled piece of our Gardener. With its hand we saw the means to achieve purpose. And with the other, it fashioned us into a blade. —-

You are - 

You are pulled from the ritual site into a dimension outside of space and time. But this is no vision, no trick. You are pulled into the very mind of the Entity that has whispered into your ears. It is a monument, a mausoleum, a calcified cognition of its own gestalt consciousness into unmoving figures of onyx. They do not whisper to you. They beg, they plead, and they cry out to you to destroy them. Do you hesitate?

Doug-5 does not. He shatters an iota of this consciousness into scattered pieces with a fist of arc energy.

And your Witness screams.

You are in the macrocosm. The planets shudder with a cosmic quake. Fissures crack through each spherical surface. The universe, it suggests, will break with each shattering of its psyche. Is this your desired salvation?

You are floating in the gravitational orbit of Earth aboard a defunct satellite. You watch through the viewport as your Traveler rises from Earth's atmosphere into the space beyond. You hear the silence of your strike team - the Bray sisters, the warlock Osiris, and the frame of Rasputin. 

You are in the Last City of Earth, watching as your god rises from its tomb to flee to the stars. The crowd around you looks to the sky. Despite their numbers, there is not a sound around you. They dare not breathe as the warsats are activated, and as the blinding light of Rasputin's sacrifice lights their empty sky, they shield their eyes. 

What do you feel as you watch your Traveler abandon you?

—- We will tell you what we felt. We watched as it fled from us, though we offered naught but reunion. We watched its Light dwindle around us as we preached salvation. We watched as we were abandoned. Through eons, we watched it spread unthinking, unchangeable chaos to the undeserving masses. —- 

You are -

It won't let you go. You're still here, in the crumbling macrocosm. Trapped, forced to watch, as the universe fractures around you. You hear the screams of trillions as they fall into chaos. 

—- We saw in the blade into which we were shaped not chaos, not death, but purpose. A means to create order in an orderless universe. We would end suffering, the slow dirge of time. We would remove loss, remove sorrow. We would carve away the chaos of existence. We would perfect the universe. —- 

A blinding light tears through the macrocosm. You hear Its screams of rage/pain/hatred/disbelief/loss. It fractures. 

Its grip loosens.

You are at the ritual site. Your Witness morphs into a silhouette of total darkness, and the air itself seeps with poison. You grab your throat as your lungs constrict. Doug-5 hits the ground hard beside you. He reaches, but the Aegis is just out of his grasp. You would scream, were your trachea not collapsed in the fetid rot. Your Ghost - your brave, devoted, and dying Ghost - expands, contracts, and shivers, but there is no warmth of healing Light. No release from your suffocation. 

—- YOU. FORMIDABLE, OBSTINATE YOU. —- 

(i see you, she says. i have always seen you)

She reaches for you, and in her hand, you find a blade. You can still choose.

—- BUT YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN THEM. —- 

The dissenters? The lightbearers? The gods? It is impossible for you to think with the force of its psionic rage pounding in your head. Its limitless agony bursts a blood vessel in your eye. Its unbridled, unchecked hatred squeezes your heart.

—- WE THOUGHT YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND. —- 

And then Doug-5 wrenches you forward by the lapel of your robe through a collapsing corridor. You are battered by the manifestation of its anger. Its disappointment. Its pain.

You see a being with a thousand names. You see It, unfiltered. There is no mirror, no reflection. You see its full magnificence. Its gargantuan glory. Its timeless, immutable majesty. Before it - you realize with a crushing, absolute certainty - you are so very small.

(you see the resonant wound cutting into the sliver of its brow)

And it sees you. Your Witness. It sees all of you, at last. It looks down at you over the immensity of its magnitude. 

Its hand separates into a legion. 

It reaches for you. 

—- JOIN US. —-