#kabr

Rating: G Ship: Praedyth(/Pahanin/Kabr) Note: Vault of Glass, Canonical Character Death(s). Written for Pride Kisses 2025 - Day 8 "Almost lost you" kiss.

Summary: In all timelines, Praedyth will not exist.

Read on Ao3

—and he [wakes] in a place that is a time that he/they/he has never seen before. An emerald meadow. Flowers like blood. Sky with no ceiling, white rivers, glass plains echoing with a—

[Define: wakes. Sudden transition into alertness from a period of dormancy.]

—song on the [wind] like the sighs of a giant. Still. Everything is still when you [are] Vex, charting moments like points on a map and skipping between them without any movement at all. He breathes in—tastes salt—sees white and green and red and feels something electric trickle down from his nostrils.

[Define: wind. Perceptible movement of air.]

[Define: are. ERROR://NULL]

A Tower, it is said, never collapses twice. [He] was hardly one for Warlock wisdoms, back in the day, but he liked to [squabble] about their empty meanings, those inflated [phrases] stealing all the air out of the room but adding in nothing of value. A Titan, it is said, is a wall, a shield, a cup—

[Define: he. ERROR://NULL]

[Define: squabble. To disagree on petty matters.]

[Define: phrases. Thoughts formed and given comprehensible shape.]

—pushed past the edge of the table and shattered. Some containers can never be emptied, no matter how hard [one] tries to scrub them clean.

[Define: one. ERROR://NULL]

He breathes in and the Collective breathes with him. He breathes in and the Collective breathes within him, a great sizzling volume with no mass at all, the contents all sloshing within him like a churning river: time and thought, song and sea, plurality and personhood tangled together into a knot with no beginning or end. He breathes and thinks, what a marvel, this place, red fields and green sky, grey stone like the walls of the Tower. And the Collective marvels within him and he [is] them and he [is] him he [is] a wall a shield a cup he he he is he is he is he—

A Titan is a Wall a Shield a Cup filling itself to overflowing. The container changes the shape of its contents but the contents change the nature of the container and the nature is eternity.

Did you know that Tevis Larsen had apparently had an instance of direct contact with Rasputin? Where Red told him he does not care about humanity?

Or that Drifter had at some point asked Felwinter to kill the Warlord Citan that had massacred Eaton when Felwinter had already joined the Iron Lords, and been under the Iron Decree no less? And that Felwinter did it anyway?

Or that Wei Ning's fists could move mountains? That Taeko-3 was a Praxic Warlock and Eriana was one as well?

How Andal Brask died from Tallulah Fairwind slapping his shoulder the moment he got to the City? After he barfed on the watercraft Micah-10, Den-Mother-Of-Ghosts, put him to cross over the Pacific to get to the City? And how she is being hunter by the Ghost killing Guardian Cyrell while she herds Ghosts towards their new charges?

That Shaxx kicked Teben Grey and Shin Malphur (as Zyre Orsa at the time) out of the Crucible with a great many threats and how, where Andal had been almost neutral towards them, Cayde was instead pointedly dismissing the not-yet Shadows, because he and Shaxx were close?

How Pahanin kept saying puns just to annoy Kabr because he thought it funny and the piece of crumpled gum-wrapper he tossed at Praedyth's head before they walked in the Vault is still something Praedyth has.