Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Destiny (Video Games)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ghost & Guardian (Destiny)
Characters: Original Ghost (Destiny), Agender Guardian (Destiny) - Character
Additional Tags: The Dark Age, The early city age, Pre-Canon
Series: Part 4 of these dark tidings
Summary:
Meditations on the Traveler, the Light, and choices.
Or: how Omen-5 came to gather bones and corpses for the Last City.
The world, Omen learns, is full of the dead and dying. For every flash of a rabbit darting into the undergrowth or the budding of leaves from a tree split in half, there are bodies corroded by the elements, left to rot. Bones dragged away and left unburied or gnawed upon. The rusting frames of bodies so much like xyr own, whatever force that had powered them long since snuffed out.
Often Omen must add to this count, and sometimes xe is killed in turn, only rescued by Boon plucking xem back from a final death.
“You could only bring me back,” Omen says after one such revival. “No one else. Because you were meant to.”
“That’s how it feels. I was needed, and so were you, and together we fit into something greater. Something important.”
This is not the first time Boon has said so, and Omen feels it must be the truth of it – otherwise why this power? This grace, to rise again? But something troubles xem still. To be chosen, to be needed, means that somehow the countless other dead are not. “So this Light between us is only ours. It will never go to another.”
Boon’s eye flickers, and they drop a little lower in the air. “It won’t. But another one of my kind might find some of them, as I found you.”
And xe has seen other little drones swooping low to the ground, searching amongst corpses, scattering if xe comes close. But never many. As Boon had said – might, some. If this Light is meant to be granted, it will never be to all.
It is an unfairness neither of them had any choice in, but it lodges in Omen’s thoughts for long years all the same.
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(For @xivu-arath and featuring their Omen-5. These two are a fascinating match and I wouldn't mind writing a longer story with them one day.)
They had met another time, Kass and Omen, but that was before the Throne World, before the excess of life that colonized Kass’ eye and cheek. Kass hadn’t expected to see Omen’s familiar face again in the courtyard of the Siblings of the Holy Orb, during the time of Rasputin’s slow revival.
Curtains thin enough to see through hung from the columns around the temple. A shallow pool glittered blue in the sunny, open courtyard.
Kass was returning a book. The Siblings had been a partner group to the temple where she had taken her sabbatical. The librarians knew each other. They had known, therefore, when the Siblings unearthed from an older, lost sect a book about Light corruption.
Light corruption had been a theory when this book was written. Light-as-cancer, Traveler-as-tumor. It wasn’t how Kass wanted to think about the golden eye sunken into her socket, the pinpricks of seed-stuff she felt around it sometimes like the spokes of a wheel or the legs of a spider. Eris had magicked those back under her skin, but Kass could feel them.
Omen looked like xe needed help.
Xe had paused at the bottom of the wide, low steps to scratch at xyr own arm. Claws shaved off the top layer of Tree bark sculpted like a shoulder. It met Exo metal somewhere under xyr short-sleeved tunic.
As she moved to greet Omen, Kass put on the posture of the Young Wolf like a cape. She’d done enough parades that she could turn it on, now; the set of shoulders just so, the set of graceful hands. Only the fact that she was wearing flowing robes instead of armor and the eye itself couldn’t be changed. Ready this way, she swept down the stairs.
“Omen?” She said softly.
Xe stopped trimming bark immediately. “Ikora told me I might find you here. She told me …” Xyr hesitation seemed intentional, not for dramatic effect but as if xe were listening to a signal from far away. “You’d have a book.”
“It might not help.” Kass’ eye ached. Sympathetic phantom. How inconvenient. “I didn’t find anything. The theory, though …”
“What about the theory?”
Kass fumbled. Xe was very direct. But many Warlocks were. “I found it interesting.” She handed the book out, but xe didn’t take it.
Omen met her eyes. “Thank you. Ikora knows it is hard for me to stay in the City for long, but she thought this meeting was important. I think it is.”
Kass looked up. Diaphanous curtains swept across the horizon of the Traveler. “Can you not stay because of the Light?”
Omen nodded, so xyr answer surprised Kass. “No. The City itself … isn’t right for me. Does the Traveler change how your Tree feels?”
This question, too, struck Kass as direct. It was pleasant, though. Some people did not want to speak to her as if anything had changed. She had started to want a happy medium between their silence and Eris’ intimate tending. Your tree, xe had said. She didn’t always think of it as hers, yet the words felt right.
“I am glad you asked.” Kass gave a parade smile. It felt uncomfortable.
Her Ghost drifted along to a polite distance to talk to Omen’s, and Kass used the moment xyr eyes flicked to the Ghosts to relax her expression.
“The Light makes my eye … brittle,” Kass said. “Or erupting. I don’t know what to call it. It broke open not long ago. Bled sap.”
Omen nodded as if this was both normal and interesting. “One of the hyacinthoides — it’s a whole family of plants, very loose classification of plants — on Nessus softened the bark a little. Made it more comfortable. But I haven’t studied it long.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“If I can find more, I’ll let you know,” xe said.
“Trade?” Kass asked.
Xe reached out for the book, and Kass gave it. Leather binding whispered against metal fingers. We should be better friends, she found herself thinking, except for the physical distance between them. Kass’ position made her unusually sedentary for a Hidden when not throwing herself against the solar system’s worst enemies. Omen, as far as she knew, wandered more. There were as many similarities as differences, though; she suspected but did not know for certain that they viewed romance and attraction with similar baffled indifference.
The conversation had been so easy. A simple trade. No complicated pity. That was worth a lot.
They talked some more and the feeling of ease stayed. The smile she left Omen with wasn’t the one people saw at the parades. It was softer, crinkled the skin around her good eye more. She felt the spokes under her skin move with it.
Slowly xe sits down and leans forward, digging both hands into the frozen ground until the surface cracks and splinters beneath xyr grip. As with many things, the sensations are mismatched; the cold sharply palpable, the brittle edges of the ice scraping against the wood on one side and muted by layers of metal and armourweave on the other. Again Omen feels the tangled Light and life of the Seed flinch away, and beneath it a subtle... waning, as if the very end of xyr fingertips have wavered and grown diffuse.
It is exactly as Eris said. Exposure to Darkness is enough to weaken the Seed. It can be curtailed, controlled....
“Omen?” Boon says, appearing to hover low by xyr shoulder. “It is helping, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Xe curls xyr hand and flexes it, thinking of peeling back the bark and stripping away the wood layer by layer. By now xe is sure not a trace of the metal and circuitry and cables of xyr original arm remain. It has all been devoured and transmuted. There is only the Light within, and without the organic shell containing it, it would spill out endlessly. At least here Europa’s ambient Darkness gnaws at its edges, its antithesis eating away at it in turn.
“We have proof then. It could be... worth trying.”
Omen thinks of all the dead xe has seen – the deaths xe has caused by xyr own hands – and those alone would become a pile that could almost reach the Traveler. And they are just a fraction of all the dead in all the world, and more dying in every moment. The scope of the search stuns xem, thrumming harsh and tight in xyr chest.
“There is not much chance at all,” xe says, holding up a hand so Boon can rest against xyr open palm. “And yet.”
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The world, Omen learns, is full of the dead and dying. For every flash of a rabbit darting into the undergrowth or the budding of leaves from a tree split in half, there are bodies corroded by the elements, left to rot. Bones dragged away and left unburied or gnawed upon. The rusting frames of bodies so much like xyr own, whatever force that had powered them long since snuffed out.
Often Omen must add to this count, and sometimes xe is killed in turn, only rescued by Boon plucking xem back from a final death.
“You could only bring me back,” Omen says after one such revival. “No one else. Because you were meant to.”
“That’s how it feels. I was needed, and so were you, and together we fit into something greater. Something important.”
This is not the first time Boon has said so, and Omen feels it must be the truth of it – otherwise why this power? This grace, to rise again? But something troubles xem still. To be chosen, to be needed, means that somehow the countless other dead are not. “So this Light between us is only ours. It will never go to another.”
Boon’s eye flickers, and they drop a little lower in the air. “It won’t. But another one of my kind might find some of them, as I found you.”
And xe has seen other little drones swooping low to the ground, searching amongst corpses, scattering if xe comes close. But never many. As Boon had said – might, some. If this Light is meant to be granted, it will never be to all.
It is an unfairness neither of them had any choice in, but it lodges in Omen’s thoughts for long years all the same.
I was reminded of this Average Omen Experience of xem sitting in the dark with lamp-like eyes staring unblinkingly at you due to server talk yesterday and I feel it's important to bring it back
the most ooc thing about this is that xe is in the tower and not staring at you in the dark from some random cave
this is from @thetruenightzedge, anon by accident!
oni-42
⛓️ what does guilt feel like to them?
a constant companion. ugly, simmering heat and weight even when nothing has happened and there's little on her mind, but when she's anxious or brushing up against not quite forgotten memories it swarms hot and electric under her plating
🪶 how do they laugh?
usually loud and raucous, a bit brittle in tone if you know her well enough to spot it and she's faking some of her good mood. naturally inclined to cackle
omen-5
✋🏾 what do their hands feel like?
one cool metal, one smooth layers of whorled wood. both unyielding and capable of exerting incredible amounts of force, but normally deft and very, very light when touching anything. until violence happens, of course
tashram
🌊 when was the last time they cried?
she's a dour sort who learned to shut down most vulnerable emotions many years ago, but she did shed a few tears when she finally grew some actually decent crops after her accidental retirement/faked death
