#pahanin

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.

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.

I'm not sure if this is before the vault or after but he looses Wei Ning and eventually Erianna (he introduced the two of them so we can infer he was friends with at least one of them)

He goes into the vault with his fireteam Kabr and Praedyth. *If the lore tab Epistemic is to be believed, they were a team for five years. They end up getting trapped inside the vault having to either fight or avoid an insurmountable amount of Vex forces. There is quite littlerly no hope of escape whatsoever. At some point he sees Kabr drink radiolaria which slowly begins to covert him and Praedyth gets imprisoned by the vex and is brought to the cells in the gorgon maze.

* this is conflicted in the original D1 lore where Pahanin states that him and Kabr were not friends but rather he knew of and respected the Titan. Either Bungie retconned this or the Praedyth recalling this is not from our timeline

This leaves him and Kabr. Pahanin apparently was always talking to himself (I like to interpret this as him being stressed and just trying to sort things out. Give himself some companionship). Kabr doesn't remember him. Pahanin and Praedyth's existences are wiped from his mind, for that is the fate for those who fall in the vault. Not just fall but become apart of the vault. Still he watches this sturdy, respectable Titan fall to the vex alone. This terrifies him. Since he notes that Kabr fought the Vex alone we can infer that Pahanin watched from the shadows or used his invisibility to help him get out (he is a void weilding hunter after all).

He manages to escape after Kabr cracks the Vault in as his final act as Kabr. This allowed Pahanin to escape. Pahanin is afraid. His friends existences are wiped from people's minds of those outside the vault. He's afraid of being alone.

So what does he do? He creates a gun with an ai that talks to him so he is never alone again.

Pahanin is somewhat scholarly. He reads and writes, giving advice to other hunters (for example how to get Titans and Warlocks how to agree to do something). He seems to be at least somewhat well liked, and well known. Still he carries around the Super Good Advice.

Then there's one fateful crucible match. He is up agaisnt no other then Dredgen Yor. Yor takes his light and in the end he dies alone with nothing but a jagged thorn sticking out of his corpse and his drained ghost.

Now this part isn't 'canon' but I can speculate. I doubt Yor would kill him in front of any surveillance cameras. He could've sure, as a message and a show of prowess but that also runs the risk of creating too many complications for Yor himself. Anyone that could've seen probably was either distracted or taken care of in one way or another. Pahanin's gun may have been tossed or dropped in the exchange. So not only is he facing fear of permanent death he is also facing his overwhelming fear of being isolated. And in many ways I'm sure that's almost worse for him.

Vex Mythoclast

…a causal loop within the weapon's mechanism, suggesting that the firing process somehow binds space and time into…

Type: Fusion Rifle

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Timeless Mythoclast - This weapon fires full auto when in its default firing mode.

Trait: Temporal Unlimiter - Defeating targets builds stacks of Overcharge. Hold reload to swap firing modes when fully Overcharged. In Overcharge mode, hold the trigger to charge up and fire more powerful linear fusion shots.

Masterworked Trait: Calculated Balance - Higher stacks of Overcharge improve stability.

Ornaments: The Untold Tale, Clast of Its Own, Infinite Gift

Origin & Description: The Vault of Glass is another liminal space like the Black Garden, but unlike the Garden it was created by the Vex. Well, I say created; once it existed, it had always existed. Once we broke it, it had always been broken. But before we broke it (which never happened, until it always had), it served as a kind of transit nexus outside our normal spacetime through which the Vex moved in pursuit of their usual unknowable Vex business. At the center of this center: Atheon, Time's Conflux. It is impossible to say, and to some extent does not matter, if Atheon created the Vault or if the Vault created Atheon. It is impossible to say, and to some extent does not matter, whether Atheon was a vast lynchpin Mind of the Vex labyrinth or a spacetime crossing guard directing Vex traffic. The suffix "-clast" means "breaker," so a Mythoclast is someone who brings down a myth; and indeed Atheon might have been one of the closest things the Vex had to gods - or it might have been little more than an extraplanar stoplight. Either way the Vault stood outside of time (until it never did), linked to every Vex conflux, and at its core glass-clad Atheon wove threads of causality all across our universe.

Standing outside of reality, the Vault had to fabricate its own, and that means that within it Vex controlled the horizontal and the vertical. Like the Infinite Forest it became an endless Guardian bug-zapper as fireteams dared the Vault to explore, to loot, or just to see what was inside. Virtually none returned. Some who did told stories of stepping through alternate futures and pasts, of encountering terrible Vex enemies that didn't need to resort to anything so crude as bullets - they could simply observe you and decide, in this local reality under their control, whether you existed or not (they tended to pick "not"). Some Guardians described the Oracles, Vex computations that examined your past and fixed your future, asserted your doom. But the Guardians that matter here the most are the fireteam of the Titan Kabr, the Legionless.

Kabr led six Guardians into the Vault but now only three of them ever existed: Kabr, Pahanin, and Praedyth. The Oracles saw the others and decided they weren't so now there were only ever three. They were a true fireteam; not an impromptu group convened by necessity like the one that pursued Crota, but a full long-term Guardian fireteam, Titan Warlock Hunter, meant to endure - much like another three-person fireteam that dared a Vex dreamland and came to a bad end. For people who can expect to live forever, who can expect to literally die for each other multiple times per mission, the bonds of a true fireteam are a marriage and more. So, dangerous as it was, Kabr, Pahanin, and Praedyth went into the Vault together. Only Pahanin would ever leave.

Praedyth survives, somehow, perhaps. Praedyth was captured by the Vex and endured inside the Vault, assuming it makes any sense to speak of time passing inside it. We saw his bones and his Ghost but that doesn't mean much in there. He sees many timelines, past and future, this one and others. He sees Elsie Bray, the Exo Stranger, stepping between them. He sees other shapes we know whose presence in the Vex network is unsettling - Taeko-9. Asher Mir. Praedyth still has the wrapper from a candy Pahanin threw at his head half an hour before they entered the Vault. It's worn soft and folded into the shape of a crane. And when the Vex in the Garden wake again, ringing to the signal that heralds the Darkness, he sees the manifold realities within the Vault change as well. He makes contact with the many exploration copy-teams of the original Ishtar Collective scientists. They pool their knowledge, try to understand what's coming and what to do about it. Praedyth knows a Guardian is always sure to pay attention to their gear, so when he sees Elsie Bray, he copies her rifle - building the original No Time To Explain - and etches his own warning into it: "Soon." He may have escaped; he may still be escaping right now. Time is strange in the Vault.

(But I hope he escapes. I need another crazy Vex warlock to be crazy warlock friends with while Asher's off having fun in the Pyramidion.)

Pahanin, the Hunter, made it out; how, we don't know. Before the Vault Pahanin was well-known for his many quips and jokes, which were collected into the Pahanin Errata. He liked puns because they annoyed Kabr and squid because he thought they were cool. Don't sweat it if humanity does go extinct, he said. You're just giving the cephalopods a chance. After the Vault, bereft of his fireteam, he built the machine gun Super Good Advice with its onboard AI - not to make it better in combat, but to talk to him, because he'd become terrified of ever being alone. But poor Pahanin wasn't done being a bystander in Guardian history. During a Crucible match he became the first Guardian to fall to Dredgen Yor's Light-devouring Thorn.

And Kabr. Kabr was named well; "qabr" is Arabic for "tomb". As his fireteam fought the Templar and its Oracles, who doomed them to fall over and over, he gathered up the destroyed frames and armored himself in Vex carapaces. Captured and surrounded, deprived of his weapon and his Ghost, he made one last play: he pierced the Vex-made reality of the Vault just enough to let in a ray of Light. With that ray and with the ruins of the Vex he had destroyed he poured the last of his strength into a weapon, and because he was a Titan of course it was a shield. The Aegis of Kabr focuses Light for its original purpose: to defy predestination. Kabr completed the Aegis and declared, "Now it is done. If I speak again I am not Kabr." Then he drank the radiolaria and became something else. With the Aegis we can strip the Templar's shields and block the Oracles' blindness, letting us take them out and causing possibly the greatest feed message in Destiny: "Guardians make their own fate."

And after you kick Atheon into a mess of glass splinters, the Aegis has the most important boon for a Guardian: loot! If you're lucky it has a bright gold engram for you containing the bright bronze gun Vex Mythoclast. Looking like a mix of the Vex hobgoblin frame's Line Rifle and the goblin frame's standard Slap Rifle (who named these), Mythoclast is a Vex weapon from an alternate timeline in some distant corner of the Vault where Vex weapons are a) separate from frames and b) usable by humans. Don't think about it too hard. Mythoclast acts just as weirdly as its origin might suggest; it's typed as a fusion rifle but has zero charge time and fires full auto in its default mode, more like a full-auto scout or regular auto rifle. Build up stacks of Overcharge and you can swap it into essentially linear-fusion mode, firing long-range shots that require charge time but hit much harder. Once you complete the catalyst - which requires locating and standing on several Vex plates inside the Vault, then shooting the Oracles that appear, then stepping through a familiar gate - each stack of Overcharge will also steady the weapon's aim. It's a surprisingly useful oddball (especially in PvP), but, like other recent raid weapons, isn't a gamebreaker. At least it better not be, because Atheon still won't cough it up for me. Come on, glass-buddy! It's time, right? Eventually it will happen! So it might as well happen now.

UPDATE January 2022 of this timeline: Finally got it! And it rules. You guys should get this gun.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

For @sylenth-l, who was the first (to my knowledge) to come up with this heartbreak of a ship. And of course, I was right on board.

music

[TW: veins, very mild mentions of corpses]

The campfire painted Pahanin’s face bright orange as he talked, arms flailing in overly theatrical gestures to imitate dragons and wyverns tearing through the jungles of Venus. Shinobu and Andal seemed genuinely interested, watching him with chins propped up on their palms—there was something of that kinderguardian wonder still in Nobu’s eyes—and Eris only nodded politely from time to time, focused on sharpening her knives. Behind him, Nadiya mimicked his every move, causing Micah and Conar to squirm on the ground with hands pressed against their mouths to stifle laughter.

“I wonder what happened to that machine gun I used to know...”

“You mean Pahanin’s gun?”

“Yeah. Last time I saw it was hanging out in the old Tower lounge, a few days before the attack. Haven’t heard anything since.”

“You went looking?”

“Not exactly, but I always keep an eye out on VanNet for any mentions. Half-expect to see it propped in an armchair every time I pop into a Hunter den.”

“I hope it’s doing alright.”

“I hope it comes back. We could use some good advice about now.”