#yarrow15

She knew he’d seen it coming by the calm in his voice.

“So it’s this one,” Euclid had murmured, in an idle moment spent lounging in the shade of trees in the Tower courtyard. They spent their recharge periods together frequently, basking in sunlight to allow the solar batteries in their torsos a chance to recharge. Today clouds had blotted out the sky, and the hubbub of activity had made Yarrow suspicious… but not suspicious enough to end one of the precious few breaks they got to go investigating. Euclid had turned to her, given her hand a squeeze, and got to his feet. “We should go.”

“What?” She’d asked, exasperation and amusement playing xylophone with her throat and mouthlights- akin to a dramatic roll of the eyes, which she also performed literally a moment later as she let him haul her to her feet. “Go where?”

“It’s the end of the world,” he’d informed her softly. Questions and disparaging remarks as to the dramatic mystery of his statement bubbled up in her vocalizer, but they were squelched by a resonating thunder out behind the Walls. The clouds broke, and Yarrow’s mouthlights strobed alarm as the Cabal ships roared towards the Tower. She’d heard Euclid hum, curious, and as he tugged her arm and Blinked with her away from the incoming volley of explosive artillery she’d caught one last, passing comment. “A day or so ahead of schedule, too.”

          *******

“Of the some two-million simulations I experienced during my sojourn on Venus,” Euclid explained to Yarrow, Jolly, Galatea, and a pair of other Guardians as they tromped through a side-alley, “Approximately forty-seven percent of them involved the destruction of the Tower. Of that forty-seven percent, an impressive half of these ‘Towerfall’ occurrences were perpetrated by Cabal aggressors.” Their group paused at the head of the alley, at Euclid’s behest, and Yarrow’s grip on her Pulse Rifle tightened as a Cabal dropship growled past.

“And you didn’t tell anyone about this because?” Galatea grumbled. “The Vanguard, perhaps?”

“Tell them what? ‘Ah, I th-think the Tower will be attacked, only I can’t tell you when, nor where the assault will originate, nor how, nor whom the perpetrators will be with any degree of certainty’. And that's setting aside explaining to them how-how- er- how I ‘know’ that in the first place!”

“Better to have been prepared for it, at least,” the other Titan traveling with them grumbled.

“To be fair, the Future War Cult has been clamoring about having predicted the fall of the city for decades,” countered the other Warlock.

“Yeah, but those guys are crazy!”

“Quit arguing,” Yarrow snapped at them. “Focus up. We have civilians to exfiltrate.”

They bounded across the street and Yarrow did her best to ignore the battle raging overhead; ships in dogfights, Cabal cruisers spitting drop pods and artillery shells down into the City as something aligned itself to the Traveler. She felt them all watching it in solemn silence, allowing themselves a moment of contemplation.

“What do we think it is?” Jolly asked, unusually quiet.

They all glanced at Euclid, who tilted his head slightly.

“... Well,” he mumbled, picking at his gloves. “I-I don’t know, err, h-how to- I suppose it’s- I mean, m-most likely-“

“It’s okay. Spit it out Euclid,” Yarrow said, patting his back encouragingly. She thought she knew what he was going to say but that didn’t make her feel any better about it.

“It’s m-most likely some sort of, ehh, d-device designed to c-cut us off from the Traveler’s Light.”

The implications made her reel slightly. Was that even possible? How could the Cabal do that? What kind of technology even had that kind of power? The Red Legion was from someplace very far away, indeed, if they had so much ridiculous crap none of them had ever seen before. Everyone else seemed to be speechless as well, until Galatea’s chin rose.

“Our Light is not what makes us Guardians,” she said firmly. “This is still our City. It is still our job to protect it.”

Yarrow almost felt like there had never been a time when this many Guardians had been present in the Last City at once. Shamefully she couldn’t even name the district they were now patrolling; she didn’t know a single civilian that wasn’t employed at the Tower.

The city was seemingly in its death throes, and Yarrow couldn’t help but feel stunned as she witnessed the last gasps of a total stranger.

          *******

A Cabal Phalanx’s shield wrenched forcefully from its owners’ hand on a flickering tendril of Void light and careened across the space between two buildings to slam headlong into a Centurion’s jetpack mid-flight. The ensuing ball of fire tumbled down to street level as Galatea and Jolly wheeled out from cover to pepper the defenseless Phalanx trooper with bullets. Euclid flicked his wrist and the sputtering Cabal flew sideways off the roof after its shield.

“Man, when the Cabal say ‘occupation’, they mean it,” Jolly muttered, slapping another clip into her submachine gun. One of the few good things about Shaxx opening up his armory, Euclid reflected, was that Guardians who had appreciation for weapons suddenly had a wide assortment of new toys to enjoy. Like Jolly and Galatea, for example. Jolly had a sidearm at her side and a sniper slung across her back; unfortunately the high-caliber ammunition the sniper required was sparse and hard to come by. Euclid passed her the rest of his ammunition for his submachine gun in exchange for some stray hand cannon ammo she’d come across, and the Awoken Warlock beside him turned with a chuckle to oversee the small caravan of civilians they’d gathered.

“How many of them do you think’ve spent this much time around Guardians before?” He asked, bitterly amused.

“Now now,” Euclid chided mildly as he reloaded his gun. “Not all of us were strangers here, right? I’m, err, s-sure some of us spent quite a b-bit of time in the City.”

The deafening silence from his other five companions made him chuckle uneasily. “… W-well, someone out there m-must have. I mean I’ve heard there are, ah, b-bars and the like that are specifically tailored to Guardians.”

“Anyway,” Galatea interjected. “We’re going to be encountering one of the designated exfiltration zones soon. We should decide who is going and who is staying- we have too many people to fit on one transport.” Euclid patted Yarrow’s shoulder and left the others to figure out their battle-plan- it wasn’t one of his strong suits.

The civilians were wet, tired, and forlorn. Euclid and the other Guardians had been slogging them across the City, up down and around, trying to find an evacuation craft that had not yet departed; he got the impression that it was a long trek for them, but it had only been about a dozen kilometers. Sometimes it was baffling, the differences between Guardians and regular civilians. He supposed it wasn’t their fault; after all, they didn’t have tireless mechanical limbs or armor that injected stimulants into your thigh muscles when you became fatigued, or a Ghost to help your circulatory system cycle unnaturally quickly and efficiently, or-

“M-mister Guardian?”

Euclid did his best not to jerk away as he felt something tug his robes but only half-succeeded, and the instinctive recoil did not seem to do anything for the ardent frown on the face of the child who had been trying to get his attention. He pivoted his body awkwardly to face the small human and crouched down the way he sometimes saw Jolly doing when she encountered a broken shank, to pull it apart for valuables. He was entirely unsure how to handle children; multiple Guardians had explicitly told him that it was probably best he stay away from them whenever possible.

But surely this couldn’t hurt. “How can I help you?”

“I’m tired. Are we gonna make it to the eva-evacliation point soon?”

“The evacuation point,” he corrected gently. “Yes. We are approaching one now. Presuming we arrive and find the exfiltration crews alive and in viable shape, you’ll be loaded onto an outbound transport.”

This did not seem to reassure the child. “But... Where’re we gonna go?”

“I am unsure.” He noted the particularly obvious surprise that blazed a trail across the child’s face. “Standard protocols have not been prepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude, but in similar situations a fallback position- or several- are often set up in designated high-Light-exposure areas outside of dangerous encounter spaces.”

The child was silent, seemingly digesting his words, and Euclid got the feeling many of them had gone over its head. Instead of trying to format an appropriate response it apparently decided to change tack slightly.

“... But you’re not... you’re not scared, right?”

Euclid glanced between the child and the back of Yarrow’s hooded head, wishing now that he had gotten someone else to handle this situation. “Err...” He glanced back at the tiny human and pulled off his helmet, attempting to produce a reassuring smile in his mouthlights that did nothing but gently illuminate the child’s elevated levels of surprise when it realized he was an Exo. “... W-well, of course I am!” He said. “But that doesn’t mean I- oh dear.”

He hurriedly pulled his helmet back onto his head and stood up as the child’s eyes brimmed with tears and it let out a clogged sob, the parents hurrying over firing scathing looks his way as he felt a wash of unease drift over him, and he turned back to the others. He wasn’t sure why, but somehow he knew he’d given the small human the wrong answer.

*****

“FLY FIVE MILES OUT PAST SPLINTERWIND CREEK,” the second Warlock in their group called from the bay of a repurposed cargo transport that was being used to evacuate civilians. “THERE’S A CLEARING OUTSIDE THE RANGE OF CABAL SENSORS WHERE THEY’RE STAGING A SECONDARY FALLBACK POINT.”

“WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRIMARY?” Jolly called back, cupping her hands over her mouth to make her voice audible over the thundering roar of the cargo hauler’s engines.

The Warlock shook his head, and Jolly winced. Nearby, Galatea was standing with the other Titan, silent and forehead to forehead, neither Guardian apparently fazed by the proximity of their helmets. It was some small Guardian ritual, but Euclid couldn’t begrudge them the scarce moments taken to perform it. His own anxiety was flaring as civilians were loaded onto the ship.

They’d arrived somewhat late. The hauler had been almost full already when they’d gotten to the LZ, and so only about half the civilians in their complement could be squeezed into the ship, packed in tighter than they probably should have been- but there was no time or room for error to find another ship. The two Guardians they had picked up on their way down from the Tower had elected to go with them, in order to keep them safe; as the other Titan caught the Awoken Warlock’s hand and hauled himself up into the ship the Warlock turned back to them. “BY THE WAY,” he shouted, “WE NEVER GOT YOUR NAMES!”

“SAVE IT FOR WHEN WE MEET BACK UP!” Jolly replied, grinning widely. “I’LL BUY YOU BOTH A DRINK!”

“Naive,” Galatea mumbled as she came back over to stand beside Euclid. Yarrow was busy shepherding civilians back towards the City. They’d gotten the coordinates for the next district’s evacuation points and there was, thankfully, one not that far away. “To assume we will ever see them again.” She watched the bay doors close, and Euclid watched her take her helmet off her head. The faceplate was cracked, deeply enough that the internal mechanisms were undoubtedly fried. As she tossed it aside, the ship lifted into the air; Jolly waved after it emphatically with both hands. Her face was impassive as ever as she watched Jolly’s arms fall to her sides, still watching the ship vanish into the smoke and smog. Galatea’s lips tightened ever-so-slightly at the sight of Jolly’s clenched fists, and she closed her eyes with a soft sigh.

“I’ll get her,” she said. “We should get moving.”

“Everybody’s in a bit of a rough mood, but they’re still hopeful,” Yarrow informed him as Galatea strode off to get Jolly. “I am too, for the record. Aster, you got any hard info on our next destination?”

“Not so far off, all things considered!” Aster unfolded from subspace into view by Yarrow’s head, and the two exchanged a brief glance. Even Euclid could detect the faint strain of anxiety in the Ghost’s voice. “I mean, it’s ah... it’s certainly doable! We made it this far, after all.”

“B-barely,” Euclid mumbled sourly. “Th-there have been several instances in w-which our only, ehh, saving g-grace, as it were, has been luck.”

“We got four strapping Guardians here,” Yarrow said, patting Euclid’s shoulder. “I’d say ‘young’ but I know you’re like a hundred and six, and well, I have no clue how old Galatea is.”

“I’m 129.”

“Whatever. Look.” She nodded to her Ghost, who spun out of view, and turned to look at him as Galatea and Jolly approached. “We’ve had harder challenges. Besides; this is what we put on the boots for. If we’re ever going to come back here and stomp these wrinkly toad-headed monsters, we gotta get as many people out as possible. And we will.” She hefted her rifle on her shoulder and turned to look out at the next district. “Don’t worry, Euclid. We’re going to make it.”

*****

“Not going to make it,” she muttered grimly, emptying another clip in her sidearm into a Cabal’s faceplate. “They’re not going to make it.” She could see Jolly cresting the hill as she and her Titan partner brought up the rear of their group; the other Hunter was struggling with her sidearm, and Yarrow saw her drop her rifle, pick up a stone and slingshot it with a burst of desperate golden fire through the torso of one of the Cabal chasing them. Galatea had a civilian under one arm and a shotgun in the other, perched precariously against the crook of her elbow while she jammed more shells into the gun with an animal snarl on her ordinarily stoic and ethereal face. They were moving fast… but they weren’t moving fast enough.

Behind them, the district’s last transport was loading up. All but five of the civilians they’d been guarding were scrabbling unchallenged into the ship, dirty, weary, and finally nearing the end of their long trek. One LZ after another had turned up dry or overrun; and they just didn’t have the time or the supplies to move into the next district over. Already they’d seen artillery shells fall on the City in other districts, passed Guardian holdouts that lay barren under the unstoppable onward march of the Red Legion. To her side, Yarrow heard Euclid let out a tense huff.

“How you holding up, Screwloose?” She called to him, sticking her sidearm back in her belt and dragging her pulse rifle off her back; she checked the mag with a second’s glance and bitterly wished she had about a thousand more bullets before she positioned it properly in her hand. She glanced over to Euclid, who still had a palm clapped firmly over a wound in his side; his mouthlights strobed discomfort, but he flipped the cylinder on his hand-cannon out.

“I’ve been better,” he admitted, “But this is hardly m-my worst day.” The spent casings in his gun shot out and away, and six new bullets filed neatly into the cylinder in its place seemingly of their own accord; Euclid tipped his head sharply and the cylinder spun with a series of soft clicks before he snapped the gun back to the right and the cylinder clacked back into place. He cocked the hammer and turned back to Yarrow. “We need to help J-jolly and Galatea!”

“Easier said than done! You got enough bullets to hold off the Cabal?”

“I’m, err, down to, uhh, m-maybe sixteen.”

“Triffick.” Yarrow’s eyelights narrowed slightly. “I’m almost fresh out on Pulse Rifle clips. Before long I’m going to be down to Sidearm and not much else.” And that was hardly good for a confrontation like this.

She tensed as a pack of the Cabal’s War Beasts came howling towards them, and saw the two straggling Guardians try to hurry the remaining five civilians they were shepherding towards the dropship behind them. Galatea was still loading her shotgun; Jolly skidded to a halt and spun around to her partner, tearing off to intercept the War Beasts. The foremost animal let out a triumphant shriek and tackled her, sinking its teeth into her elbow.

“CARTER!” Galatea roared, dropping the civilian under her arm to try and bring her shotgun to bear- but it wasn’t going to be fast enough, nor would it have the range necessary to stave off the beasts from where she was. Yarrow saw Galatea’s eyes widen in genuine terror, but she didn’t have the energy left to muster more than a few crackling tendrils of lightning.

“Damn it all,” Yarrow grunted; she dropped her Pulse Rifle and snatched Euclid’s Hand-Cannon out of his grasp, drawing a surprised squawk from her companion. She didn’t have time to ask- the weapon burst into flame, and Yarrow leveled the Golden Gun at the beasts about to rip Carter ‘Jolly’ Jackson to shreds. She fanned the hammer desperately, each fiery burst aimed on instinct, and the six slavering beasts fell in six smoldering heaps. Jolly saluted her with two fingers and sped past a thoroughly relieved Galatea to help herd civilians onto the ship. When she went to hand Euclid back his gun she found him hunched over, fingers digging into the seam at his throat.

“Too quiet,” Euclid hissed, fumbling with the clasps of his helmet. “It’s too quiet, too quiet, too- too-“ a seam at his neck hissed as the Obsidian Mind disconnected from his undersuit, and Yarrow felt his other-sight wash across her as the limiters in his helmet shut off. The sudden swell of Light made her drop the hand-cannon in surprise- she’d never have guessed he still had so much power left in him.

Euclid whipped his helmet off his head and tossed it aside; Jolly scooped it up as she ran past, dropping her empty sidearm and clubbing a Psion aside with the obsidian bucket in her hand. Yarrow’s sidearm was already in her hand to cut down the Psion’s Centurion handler with the fullness of her second-to-last clip. Jolly scrambled aboard the transport and climbed to her feet, waving Galatea aboard after her. She pulled the last civilian into the bay and then clasped Galatea’s gauntlet with both hands, straining to haul the heavily-armored Titan aboard. She turned and called something Yarrow couldn’t hear into the dropship, and the engines began to warm up as people scrambled to find seats and strap in.

A trio of Colossi crested the rise and brought their massive guns to bear on the dropship, and their rockets splashed across the ship’s shields. Euclid cast out his arm and threw a Nova Bomb at the rise; it crashed into the chestplate of the lead Colossus and carved a black hole into the world for a moment- but it shrunk and vanished surprisingly quickly for a vortex created by Euclid. Even with so much Light left in him, he must have been growing tired.

“Yarrow!” Jolly’s voice crackled over her comms and snapped her back into focus. “We got everybody onboard. Grab Euclid and let’s go!”

“If those Cabal take the LZ, they’ll turn the ship into slag!” She snapped back, taking a few potshots from cover to keep the incoming Cabal Legionaries honest. “Make sure everybody’s strapped in and ready to go. We’ll- we’ll figure something out.” She clicked the comm off and clacked her jaw shut in irritation. A streak of fire from a Cabal Legionnaire nearly sheared her helmet in half and she winced and threw her now-smoking hood back. When she reached for her belt to find more ammo, a grenade, a knife, anything- she came up empty.

“We can’t hold the line like this!” Yarrow shouted to Euclid, ducking back behind a chunk of rubble big enough to shield both of them. He dropped down next to her with a peculiar expression of contemplation in his throatlights.

“No,” Euclid murmured, turning for a moment to survey the oncoming tide of Cabal with his other-sight. “… No, we can’t.” The staggering reality of facing death- possibly actually permanent death- for the first time struck them both. She knew that not everybody would make it out of this catastrophe. The fall of the Tower. She’d prepared for the possibility of being one of those who were left behind; it hadn’t occurred to her that Euclid might be there with her. Laughable, in hindsight- as if Euclid would ever willingly leave her behind. He turned his head to look at her, seemingly calculating something. He took her head in both hands, and let their foreheads meet for a brief moment.

“COME ON!!” Jolly screamed to them as the transport’s engines spun up from an idle hum to a dull roar. “WE GOTTA GO NOW!”

“It’s the only way to give them time,” he said, his voice so low she could barely hear it. “You know it is. I h-hope you know- I hope-“

She froze a selection of her non-primary functions, letting her optics blink off, and let herself occupy the moment; her hands came up to clasp his shoulders, fingers digging into the seams of his maroon pauldrons, balling in the odd khaki-and-saffron of his robes. He still smelled like his flowers, even after all this time spent away from Venus. “I know,” she muttered back. She allowed herself a moment of sincerely solemn contemplation. “Me too.”

His mouthlights flickered in relief. “G-good.” There was a brief pause as he collected himself. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

Yarrow didn’t have time to react as Euclid’s hands darted away from her and he shoved her backwards; she didn’t have time to think or process what was happening, but everything seemed sluggish as she continued to move away, away, away- and she realized he hadn’t shoved her with his hands but rather with his Light, and she was hurtling backwards through the air with arms outstretched. When she collided bodily with Jolly time seemed to snap back to its proper progression as the other Hunter let out a heavy ‘Oof!’ and the two were knocked out of the doorway.

She tumbled like a ragdoll into the bay of the transport and rolled back to her feet. She screamed something verbally and with full-throated lights that lit the inside of her visor for a moment before she was sprinting for the exit- but Galatea caught her around the waist. “Don’t be stupid!” the Titan hissed to her. The bay doors were already closing, civilians strapped uncomfortably into their seats.

“What’s he doing?” Jolly asked, panic in her voice as she clutched Euclid’s helmet in her hands.

“Galatea you have a SECOND to drop me before I-“

“Guys, what’s he doing!?”

“Before you WHAT?!” Galatea bellowed, dropping Yarrow and sweeping her arm around the dropship’s stunned-silent complement. Three Guardians, nearly twenty-seven civilians. “You and I both know that if we put up too hard of a fight, the Cabal will call down an orbital strike! Is that what you want?”

Yarrow’s jaw clacked shut angrily as she pushed herself to her feet. “So we’re just going to abandon him?” She shouted back, nearly chestplate-to-chestplate with the taller Titan. “Just gonna say, ‘Oh well! Guess he did his best!’ and let him cark it while we relax in the exfil transport!?”

“You’d just be going to your death!”

“Who CARES!?” Yarrow roared. Her fists knocked against Galatea’s chestplate but the Titan didn’t so much as flinch. “If we’re gonna lose our Light anyway, I’d rather lose it backing him up than moping in some empty warehouse in the Dead Zone! He needs our help!”

Galatea bared gritted teeth, furrowed her brow, but it wasn’t an expression of anger. “So do they,” She implored quietly, desperately, grabbing Yarrow by the shoulders. “Please. I-“

She was cut off by Jolly, standing at the doorway, who had gasped in horror at something outside- they saw her dart forward, but there was a sudden thunderous boom, an ignition of Light like a small sun that quickly spun into a violent purple vortex, and their argument was forgotten as they watched Euclid erupt with power, a Sunsinger and a Voidwalker at once. Yarrow began to move forward again, standing beside Jolly, but this time it was just to make sure she could see him for as long as possible before the bulkhead doors shuddered closed.

*****

As Yarrow careened backwards towards the dropship, Euclid felt as though he’d torn a piece of his internal mechanisms out and sent them with her. He stood as he watched her slam into Jolly, watched the two of them tumble backwards into the bay of the transport, saw Galatea’s surprise fade from her features as she made eye-contact with him. Or, as close as anybody could get, anyway. He nodded, and her face hardened with the realization of his intention. While Yarrow and Jolly were untangling themselves in the back of the dropship Galatea slammed her palm down on the panel beside the doors, and they began to grind shut as she turned her back on him.

It was more affecting than he had anticipated. Euclid hoped Yarrow would forgive him.

Moments later a Cabal slug rifle blasted his head to a thousand discreet pieces.

Before his body had even touched the ground his Light had warmed, sparked, and ignited; the incredible roar of fire and Solar light momentarily eclipsed that of the dropship’s engines as Euclid’s head reassembled itself and a pyre ignited from his collar, engulfing his head in a solar blaze. He pushed himself up with his hands and then rose off the ground without them, drifting into the air and turning to the oncoming Cabal, who had paused in unusual indecision as Euclid’s Light scoured the rubble around him and melted the chunk of metal he and Yarrow had been hunkered down behind.

He held his breath, hands balled into tight, trembling fists as he let every last drop of Light he had in him surge through his body; the fire cooled, swirled, and then leapt violet, the ball of fire engulfing his head becoming a ghostly wisp as Void Light suddenly replaced the inferno and lifted the Cabal’s front line off the ground- alongside every half-melted piece of detritus and rubble in his immediate vicinity. The Void howled counter-clockwise around him and Euclid’s hands snapped open; the foremost Colossus drifting helplessly in front of him dissolved instantly into its derivative molecular components and scattered into the vortex.

He exhaled, and the vortex resolved once more into a raging clockwise inferno that flash-incinerated the rest of the Cabal’s forward line, sending the rest scrambling for cover. Euclid’s extremities tingled, but he felt no discomfort as he dragged the Sun and the Void out of himself at the same time, battering the Cabal’s forces with blooming waves of heat-then-cold-then-heat-then-cold; it left him hovering above a star-glassed crater that superheated and cracked anew when he exhaled the brilliant Sun, and wept molten-hot molecular dust into the hungry dark whenever he held his breath and the Void swept away gravity like a strong causal tide.

Threshers were yanked into the maelstrom and rent asunder, Cabal vaporized or ripped in half or both, and Euclid screamed soundlessly within the wisp as he felt his armor creak and groan, his robes burning to tatters. When the Cabal’s forces had all either fallen back or perished, and the dropship was airborne, he heard something click and buzz in his ear.

“That’s enough, old friend.”

Constant’s voice swept him out of his trance, and Euclid finally collapsed to the ground at the center of a blighted crater.

His optics had burnt out in the extreme discharge of energy. Lights in his mouth and throat sputtered in imitation of a swallow but only about half of them winked on at all. He sighed, his vocals dim and far away. “They made it,” he said; his voice had reduced to a harsh, crackling whisper.

“They did.” He felt Constant spin out into the physical world beside his head and he instinctually lifted his palm, not quite touching his Ghost, to let his fingers curl partway around the crimson shell. “Thanks to you. You did wonderfully.”

His Light was still thundering in pulses out from the middle of the crater, carrying on in aftershocks, a beacon and a warning all at once. As it ballooned outward and upward Euclid could faintly feel something positioned far overhead. He looked up out of reflex, but he didn’t need to see it to know what it was. “How long?” He asked. “Until their artillery is positioned, I mean.”

“A minute,” Constant said solemnly. He felt his Ghost’s segments whir centimeters from his fingers. “Maybe a little less. Euclid, I just-“ The Ghost paused, turned to survey the smoldering and broken skyline of the City. “… You know, I was searching for you for a very long time,” it told him. “I think I was part of one of the earlier waves to be released out into the world.” It stared up to the Traveler, and the machine that was now surrounding it. “I spent a long time looking for the right person.” It turned back to him, and Euclid felt the warmth of its gaze, his Light painting its lower foresegment tipping up in approximate expression of pride. “You are more than I could ever have asked for, Guardian.”

Euclid’s remaining lights flickered out a weak smile. “Thank you, Constant,” He murmured. He let his Light’s tendrils pull back, crossed his ankles, and let his hands rest on his knees. For a moment- just one more moment- he let his other-sight branch outward, taking in as much as he could, and thought of Venus. He imagined the white sand and dark stones in the back room behind his living quarters in a secret part of the Ishtar Academy, the smell of damp stone and old metal, all his maps and books…

“A garden,” he whispered to Constant. “Don’t you think? I think a garden.”

“Yes,” Constant replied, vanishing in a final whisper of molecular translocation. The first sound Euclid had ever heard. “I think so.”

Euclid withdrew. “A beautiful garden.”

The artillery shells fell from sub-orbit and razed the district. Inside the dropship, with both of her hands pressed to the bulkhead, Yarrow felt the swelling pulses of Void and Solar Light gutter and vanish.

*****

"Sight for sore eyes, as they say," Kass calls as the doors to the dropship peel aside to reveal its complement of haggard Guardians and frightened civilians. The presence of Yarrow-15, if not also Jolly and her towering partner Galatea, puts a brass smile on Kass's face. A fighting chance.

She realizes something is off moments later and cranes her neck and also the greedy tendrils of her Void Light, searching for the familiar, eager response and the pair of crimson horns that are never far behind Yarrow in a situation like this. The smile flickers. She notices, now, in the dim, disquiet reaction to her greeting; Jolly's head in her hands, elbows on her knees; Galatea's curt nod (Given, not that unusual- but the grimace on her oft-impassive face is); and Yarrow's strange, stiff spine, the clenched fist at her right side and the familiar black helmet gripped tight at her left.

"Euclid?" She asks, smile altogether gone now. She forces herself out of her stance to step to one side, an artificial performance of an act that tells her something she already knows. Jolly lets out a clenched sigh from behind her hands.

“I’m just saying,” the Ghost continued despite every indication she didn’t want it to, “That, hm, there’s no guarantee that- well, I’m just concerned that if we-“

“I’ll do what I have to do.” There was no respite from tension in her voice, no lighthearted attempt to hide the metaphorical stone sliding around in her metaphorical stomach. Seven bitter, pointed words- not necessarily directed at her Ghost, but straining against a certain cloying tightness across her chest and in the artificial tendons of her elbows. Aster let its eye dart self-consciously around the cockpit of the jumpship, and did not respond.

NLS space peeled back away from them like a gossamer moonflower, opening up and depositing them roughly in orbit over Venus; the sun was behind them, and the planet filled the viewport with a spill of colors that made Yarrow’s optics hurry to adjust. She keyed her communicator and nodded to Aster; it pulsed warmly and locked her into an orbital channel, connected to a terrestrial transceiver that she knew painfully well. 

“Euclid-319, this is Yarrow-15 inbound for the Ishtar Sink. How copy?” In any other circumstance the businesslike officiality of her tone would have been unusual. In any other circumstance the way her jaw adjusted and the way her fingers clenched the jumpship’s controls would have denoted an unusual amount of frustration.

In any other circumstance Euclid would have answered the call.

Euclid-319 had been missing for three months. And the Vanguard, keen under the Traveler’s nickel glint as they were, had sent Yarrow to investigate.

“I say again, Euclid-319, this is Yarrow-15, inbound for the Ishtar Sink. How copy?” She paused, hoping for a reply. “I’m coming down their either way, screwloose. Either hail me and give me my vector or I’ll come and shake it out of you.” Nothing. She keyed off the channel and pressed her mouth as shut as it could possibly go, angling her jumpship to dive towards Venus. Atmospheric turbulence rumbled across the engines as the nose of her ship parted clouds and cut through smog; the jumpship knifed out of the cloudbank over the volcano and lazily swooped across the side of the mountain. Yarrow had a sudden and angry urge to smash her ship into the tall rainswept statue that hung out over the Shattered Coast and destroy the stupid fucking thing. She didn’t- but the thought gave her a brief moment of satisfaction.

It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t have volunteered or demanded to go, or both. The Vanguard knew that she and Euclid had something of a bond; and it was that kind of bond that supposedly made her so valuable for this mission. This ‘mission’. Thrice-damned Warlocks and their wretched inscrutability. For a Hunter, ‘hasn’t been seen or heard from’ for three months meant they were doing their slagging job. Titans didn’t even have that problem; so far as Yarrow knew none had ever been out of contact with the Tower for longer than a day. She reckoned if one tried they’d just lose it and come sprinting back to make sure it was still standing.

Warlocks, though? Too many bad things had come from Warlocks going silent. Too many close calls. Too many crack teams of legendary Guardians thrown together to turn a half-mile stretch of old world into a smoking crater because a Warlock had started poking around in their Ghost’s insides with a prong of bent Darkness. And Yarrow would’ve been lying to claim she hadn’t seen it coming. Or, something like it at the very least.

Euclid had been… odd for a few months. A series of events in succession that had rattled him in one way or another, one happening too soon after the other for the admittedly unstable Exo to properly compensate. The arrival of Oryx in-system had been a nasty time for all of them, but Euclid had completely overloaded when all those Warlock minds touched. Then the encounter with Toland in the Dreadnought. Then a mission in the Ishtar Sink a while back… well. She knew that Euclid and ‘death’ were hardly on the best of terms, but she’d never seen a Warlock strain their powers so much that their head popped. And when he’d woken up, three whole days of memory just gone… it was a brutal thing to lose. And his memory had taken a longer time than usual to recover after that.

He’d even forgotten her name for a moment, one rainy day in the Tower. Only for a second, but a second was all it took. That had been the thing that did it; she’d caught him thinking a little too hard, quiet a little too long, just barely too slow to respond when asked a question. Formulating some sort of idea. She wished she’d told him to drop whatever stupid thing had nettled his head.

Her boots splashed into the Venusian muck slurry and she whipped her cloak over her shoulder. She wished she’d told off the Vanguard when they approached her on this mission in the first place. They didn’t need it. He was fine. But she hadn’t, because she knew better than to blindly assume. And they’d sent her out. A scouting run.

And if need be, a preemptive, decisive, remorseless strike.

“You left your rifle in the ship.”

“Not gonna need it.” She patted her sidearm, faithfully clipped into its holster.

“Um,” Aster said in that way it said ‘um’ when it was wobbling on the razor’s edge of snoot and deference. “You’re not going to need it?” It flitted around in front of her helmet as she strode towards the Academy. Might as well check the old haunts first. “You and I have seen Euclid rip a Hydra in half with his mind. Remember that time he threw that Fallen Captain into that Skiff turbine? Crashed the entire thing into the mountainside? I remember that. And let’s not forget the time you died in front of him and he forgot that I could resurrect you, and he went crazy and blew up about two dozen Vex and an entire cliff.”

“I like to think that last one was one of the defining moments in our friendship. What’s your point?”

“I just think that- well, if this turns into a fight, I’m thinking I don’t want to have to pick you molecule by molecule out of the volcano.” She reached up and grabbed Aster sharply, making the Ghost buzz in surprise and indignation; she stopped walking for a moment.

“There might not be a fight,” she said evenly, albeit through a clenched jaw. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Aster was silent for a few seconds as it eyed her, and she resisted punting the thing. “You’ve thought about it already, haven’t you?”

Her mouthlights finally flickered, an uneasy twitch, half a proper grimace- invisible behind her helmet. “Pulse rifle is too slow,” she started stonily. “The key to the whole thing is speed. I’ve the advantage on him there. His skullcase isn’t the sturdiest thing in the world, and he never wears a helmet. Sidearm’s quick enough to get up in a split second.” She patted the gun again, a little forced. “I know which side of his head is the one with the rupture problems. I can get four or five shots off before he gets his hand up.”

It was difficult to read a Ghost’s expression before it spoke, even when the Ghost was your own; the fact that part of it was obscured by her fingers probably didn’t help. It seemed stunned. “… And… what if that doesn’t work?”

“Then I’ll grab him by a horn and blow his head up,” she snapped. “Happy?”

“No,” it said, somewhat cowed. She released it, and it vanished as her boots clunked onto tile and sidewalk.

The Academy was empty; even the tangle of damp server rooms beneath were unusually devoid of any traces of Euclid. She managed to slip into the private, well-hidden den of personal things Euclid had once called ‘home’. It was painfully familiar. Perfectly the same as he’d left it. She could remember how difficult it had been to get him to finally leave, the day she’d volunteered to help him move into the Tower. “I need to be here,” he’d said. “This is where I belong.”

She picked up a dust-covered book and realized that he hadn’t been back here since then. She turned to Aster and pulled her hood down. “Can you get a lock on Constant?”

“Been trying since we reached the Sink,” Aster assured her. “If it’s even still, you know… around, I haven’t gotten a lock on it yet.”

“Keep trying,” she said. “I’m going to check the garden. Don’t poke anything. You remember what happened last time.” She wandered through the den and into the back passages of Euclid’s bunker; it didn’t take her long to reach the garden. The flowers had all thrived and grown wildly in the absence of Euclid’s careful tending- the roof seemed to have shifted enough for rainwater to drip in. Or, something had shifted it. There was no sign of Euclid anywhere in the Academy. Was it possible he wasn’t even on Venus?

“There’s some… interesting data at the forefront of the recently accessed files on Euclid’s personal Academy mainframes,” Aster buzzed in her ear. “Recently accessed meaning, right around the time Ikora estimates he went off the grid.”

“Great,” Yarrow muttered. “Let’s have it then.”

“Transcripts of Dr. Shim’s work with Vex simulation loops,” Aster mused; she could tell that Aster was interested in the data, but they didn’t have time to dig into it at the moment- Aster knew it, too. “That stuff we picked up when you and Euclid scouted out the Archive. Some, er, concerning notations from an outside source- Euclid I’m sure- regarding potential conclusions to be drawn from such a widespread network of simultaneously active simulations with such a precise degree of accuracy.”

“Hmm…” She sat down on one of the larger rocks; the sand crunched softly as her weight depressed the stone. Simulations. The Archive. If that was the most recent thing Euclid had been digging into, then maybe-

“Wait,” Aster said, perking up; the alarm in its voice made Yarrow lift her head, and Aster spun sharply in the direction of the Academy. “I just got a reading on Constant. Not a big one. But-“

“The Hall of Whispers?” Yarrow asked. She was on her feet. Aster dipped a foresegment in a curt nod and she started walking; Aster zipped out of her view and she heard the Ghost speaking in her helmet.

“You don’t think he’s meddling with Vex technology, do you?” Aster queried. “Well. Any more than he usually does? I know he’s, err, an authority on the Vex, but there’s a lot to go wrong… maybe you were right. Maybe we’re not going to get a fight.”

Yarrow snorted; it almost felt like she’d cleared Euclid’s secret hideout in two strides (And maybe she had- Hunters had their own peculiarities) and was on her way down through the Archives the Commons a dozen empty places the crashed Skiff she knew so well Vex incursion field too little too late to catch her the Citadel loomed menacingly overhead through the gap in the buildings but suddenlyshewas pastthedoorsasuddenrushtheFallenpatroldidn’tevenseehershe found herself standing stock-still, amidst the empty corridor that made up the Hall of Whispers.

“Four steps,” she mumbled to herself, almost absently, as the world seemed to resolve into clarity around her after the ten-league-strides she’d been taking; the door to the Archive at the back of the Hall of Whispers was cloaked in ivy, but she knew it well enough not to be fooled- this was no dead end. “Aster,” she said, feeling tingles of nervous anticipation hot in the small of her back. “Crack it open. We’re burning daylight.”

The clunking rumble of mechanisms somewhere inside the wall did not disguise the sharp hiss of pressurized air that ushered forth from the Archive as the doors parted in the middle, rippling across the ivy vines and making the leaves shake- for a moment Yarrow fancied she heard the ‘whispers’ for which this area had been named. A ghost of clipboards and papers rustling. The phantom murmur of scientists working overtime to understand a class of being far beyond human comprehension. A trap into which many good Guardians had fallen before, and- if her mission today was any indication- a trap many good Guardians would continue to fall into until time unending.

The Archive was dull, dark, and dusty- none of which terribly reassured Yarrow. “No signs of movement,” Aster murmured in her ear, “For quite some time.” There was a pensive pause, but Yarrow didn’t halt her forward movement. “Er. I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t have gotten somebody else to come on this mission. Every new empty room we walk into makes me, well, a little more worried. Maybe-“

“Aster, shut up for a second,” Yarrow interjected; it wasn’t so much out of frustration as intrigue. “This console has a data drive on it.”

The Ghost indignantly emerged into the air beside her head, aftsegments jittering in irritation. “Yes, and?”

“Oh, think about it you cube. Euclid’s been in and out of this place so many times his name may as well be on the ceiling.” She gestured emphatically in the air to accentuate her point, then jabbed a finger accusatorily at the data drive, as if she’d uncovered some latchkey clue that undoubtedly put the answer to this little mystery in their hands. “He’s stripped this place of every useful piece of external data. What’s a data drive doing sitting on a computer console?”

“Maybe he…” Aster trailed off at the flat stare it received from its Guardian, the thick plate that rested above Yarrow’s eyes doing a marvelous job of accentuating the piercing exasperation she was experiencing at the suggestion that Euclid could /possibly/ have overlooked something. Yarrow stepped up to the console and quickly cast an eye across the Archive, keenly searching for any signs of life that may have spoken to an ambush as she plugged the drive into the console; a tasty-looking morsel of data would make perfect bait for a brainsy, head-in-his-books Warlock like Euclid-

The console fuzzed to life with a sharp screech of poorly compressed data, making Aster let out a peculiar hiccupping yelp and dematerialize mid-motion of diving into cover behind Yarrow’s shoulder. Yarrow rolled her optics, but the console only took a moment to process everything on the drive, and then it was playing video. But not just any video- Yarrow’s mouthlights dimmed conspiratorily, and her eyelights thinned to slits out of habit as she examined the familiar footage. A fireteam of three trekked through the swamp outside the Ishtar Sink, near one of the entrances to the Vault of Glass that had spontaneously sprang up around the Waking Ruins.

“Is this from… that mission you went on a couple months ago?” Aster said. The Ghost, seemingly deciding the threat of a glitchy computer screen was negligible, had emerged from demat on the other side of her head, and was watching the screen as intently as Yarrow. “The one you went on with Euclid and nameless? And that team of- oh, what did they call themselves- ‘Wolfslayers’ from House Exile?”

“Cloriks and his Wolfslayers,” Yarrow confirmed. “Good bunch. Fond of collecting people-parts. Volos calls ‘em the ‘Repo Squad’, but I don’t get the reference. Euclid really pulled their fat outta the fire on this mission.”

“He also died on this mission,” Aster reminded her. Unnecessarily. “What’s footage of this mission doing on an external disc in the Archive?”

Lacking an answer for her companion, she fell quiet. This particular strain of footage was culled from the very end of their outing- Yarrow and nameless had been sent out looking for evidence of renewed Vex activity in the Vault and Yarrow had contracted Euclid to joint them on the jaunt. Partially because of his knowledge of the area, and his fluency in the Exile dialect… partially because it had (at first) been a fun excuse to get two of her very good friends in the same place for an extended period of time. The mission had ended in an absolute mad dash back through the tangled half-real geometries of the Vault, racing time itself in a nigh-literal capacity. Under ordinary circumstances it would’ve been the kind of thing Yarrow bragged about during downtime. But the end of their sprint still left a sour taste in her mouth.

The video footage from the Ishtar camera showed them all (nameless and Euclid in front, Yarrow just behind, three of the original twelve Fallen straggling on her heels) exiting the Vault at top speed- the stone doors began to slide shut, and Yarrow saw Euclid pivot and dig his heels into the ground; the audio feed burst into static and the video quality dipped slightly. The doors slowed, but the last of the Fallen were barely reaching the threshold, and Yarrow saw his arms raise, saw the doors grinding against the force of his powers. She saw herself stop and turn to him; her voice was barely audible through the static-ridden audio feed, but she remembered yelling at him- no time, no time, let’s go!

Her fingers tightened at her side as she watched the recording of him twitch and flinch, and knew that was when his cameras and hearing had gone. The grinding of the ancient mechanisms in the doors as they slunk inexorably closer to one another, combined with the static buzz, was still not enough that Yarrow couldn’t faintly hear the strained scream he’d let out, saw nameless whip around in alarm, saw two of the Vandals stop and turn with their shrapnel launchers raised.

She saw his arms visibly trembling, shaking as if he were seizing, saw his shoulders hunch and his form crumple; the moment he saw Cloriks bound out of the Vault the doors slammed loudly shut and a series of small, bright bursts ran up his spine with an audible POP-POP-POP-POP as his primary neural relays blew out under the immense strain- and there was a sudden and much more substantial detonation as his head burst open on one side like a grapefruit struck by a shotgun shell. One of his horns went spinning away into the muck. In the dark of the Archive, Yarrow couldn’t help but flinch in sympathetic pain.

On the screen his body slumped like a marionette whose strings had been cut; the sudden absence of audio-video distortion made it easy for Yarrow to hear herself shout, and she saw nameless’s hand reach out with an open palm. Euclid’s body slid backwards along the ground as if someone had yanked him away with a rope tied around his waist. His boots bounced slightly as he was dragged along the uneven earth, and Cloriks sprinted past Yarrow, barking orders in Exile-dialect to his fellows as an incursion field clouded the video; the crackling black cloud’s energy discharge knocked the camera’s power source out and the feed died, leaving Yarrow staring grimly at a dark monitor that was still buzzing softly now that there was no longer any power coursing through it.

The silence stretched.

“He was really busted up about that,” Aster murmured, slightly more sympathetic after having just watched Euclid die bloody (Well, sort of) on a camera. Seeing it from such a detached angle was different than existing in the moment. The odd detail of Euclid’s left horn twirling almost lazily away from his head had stuck in her mind, at the time; watching it again she realized she hadn’t noticed the way his skullcase had jerked savagely to the right in response to his head bursting. She glanced up at her Ghost as it began to speak again, shaking the memories out of her head. “I remember he didn’t even pretend to eat that loaf of plantain-bread that nameless baked him.”

“That was weird,” she agreed. “He loves ingesting organic matter and burning it for fuel. One of those little peculiarities I always thought made him… I don’t know.”

“Less likely to vanish into the swamps of Venus with his Ghost and a vid of his own death?” Aster retorted dryly, flitting around her head to scan some of the surrounding consoles. It seemed to have remembered why they were actually there. “Well you get no engrams for assumption today, I’m afraid.” It paused a moment as it computed; the Ghost’s eye blinked once and when it opened, it cast a wide beam of light across the dark rafters of the bunker, trailing it across the outer walkways and down the central mainframe column, lit in its own circle of natural light from above. “Still getting faint residuals of Constant down here. All over the place, actually. It’s tuned to a somewhat… peculiar frequency. I’m not sure it’s one that’s been utilized since the Golden Age. Maybe they were trying to disappear? For a little while, at least.”

Yarrow followed the path of Aster’s flashlight across the room, lazily leaning against the console- but as it traced the central mainframe column she stood bolt-upright, tense and leaning forward as she tried to verify what she’d seen. “Aster.”

“I mean, I guess it wouldn’t be too far of a reach. He’s had secret projects before.”

“Aster.”

“What?! You know, I’m not terribly fond of you interrupting me every five minutes today-“

Yarrow snatched the Ghost out of the air and pointed its eye at the ball huddled at the base of the Archive’s mainframe; a bundle of curled-up limbs, magenta gauntlets poking out from underneath distinctive saffron robes… a pair of crimson horns poking up over his forearms. She hadn’t seen him at first because of how motionless he was, how still, almost like a corpse- silent and immobile.

She released her Ghost much more quickly this time, letting Aster’s foresegments spin curiously as it drifted into the air. “Oh,” it said quietly; Yarrow stepped forward, cautious but firm, closing the distance between herself and Euclid.

“Shut off that light,” she said to Aster, waving her hand over her shoulder at the little ball of segments. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She’d settled into grim resolution, now, pulling her helmet off of her head and letting it rest on the ground by the ramp up to the mainframe. As she drew closer to her friend, motes of disturbed particles drifting across the shaft of light he was caught in, she realized that he was absolutely covered in dust. A thick layer of it, at that. Some sort of cable ran between Euclid and the mainframe’s console, a cobweb stretching along the underside, and Yarrow’s jaw tightened. What had he done? Ever so faintly she could see the flickers of light on the mainframe’s monitor, dimmed almost to the point of darkness- but a sign of life, at the very least.

“Euclid?” She prompted, hesitantly stepping forward again. Aster’s segments twitched in concern, and after a moment she signaled for it to dematerialize; the quiet rustle of its molecules vanishing was the only noise now, as Yarrow’s stance changed slightly in her approach, ready for anything. “Hey hornhead, you in there? This is, uh, very… concerning.” She paused, waiting any kind of indication he was listening. She received none. Had he burned himself out? Done something stupid, gotten his processors fried way out here where nobody would think to look? She approached another step. “Can you hear me? Euclid?” She reached out for him, slowly, fingers uncurling slowly as she reached for his shoulder, almost afraid she’d get zapped at the point of contact, and something in her chest clenched at the layers of dust and rust that saturated the form of her friend-

A split-second’s blink would have missed the movements, nigh-simultaneous; Calm silence broken by the noise of her cloak fluttering after her with the suddenness of her change in stance, an imperceptibly slower response to Euclid’s hand shooting up to grab her wrist, her hand centimeters from his dusty shoulder. Tension shot lightning bolts down her spine and the backs of her knees, rooting her heels to the floor as her cloak settled.

It took a surprising amount of willpower to take her hand off of her sidearm, but it didn’t stray far. Euclid creaked audibly at several joints, cobwebs pulling away as he uncurled for the first time in what Yarrow could only assume was literal months. “Yarrow,” he started, and his audio was fuzzed and crackling with disuse.

Her mouthlights blared in abject alarm as Euclid came back to life right before her eyes; she unplugged him from the mainframe and helped him carefully back up onto his feet, noting the way his internal mechanisms whined and strained. He hadn’t moved at all, obviously, not since at least his reported disappearance.

He seemed to be able to stand, at the very least, and he started working the kinks out of his body with odd, jerky movements- his own mouthlights signaling disoriented and confused as his head, arms, and torso moved on jagged, jumpy swivels like some ancient, crappy animatronic. Constant appeared from behind his left arm and gave Yarrow and Aster’s looks of shock a sage nod before it went about checking the mainframe.

“… Yarrow,” he said again, voice still slightly fuzzy, once he seemed to have gotten his hydraulics flushed and his core batteries were fully functional again. “It’s, er, good to see you. Well, the real you. Well-“ he mumbled a bit, hands darting in their usual birdlike way as he half-reached out to pat her and half waved emphatically. The mannerisms were shockingly normal after all of the bizarre shit she’d slogged through to get here. “The real, um, in the real world you.” Constant flitted around him, performing what Yarrow could only imagine were some cursory check-up scans. 

“You okay?” She asked him carefully as he clapped his hands up and down his robes to dislodge the dust that had gathered. He looked back up to her and nodded, mouthlights strobing a pale smile.

“Running at one-hundred-percent functionality,” he assured her.

Yarrow promptly cracked her fist across his face. The strike knocked Euclid back against the mainframe column and then- when he tripped over his own feet- to the ground.

“You ABSOLUTE FUCKING BASTARD!” She bellowed, hurling her clenched fists about in some poorly mixed swirl of anger, anxiety, and relieved exasperation.

“So much for avoiding the fight,” Aster remarked dryly, ducking underneath one of Yarrow’s flailing appendages.

“Do you have ANY IDEA how much GRIEF you have given me over the last week!?” Euclid was getting back to his feet, dusting himself off again; her punch had cracked the small lens on one of his forecameras, and he reached up to gingerly dab a finger across the crack as if swabbing a bloodied nose. “No warning! You left with ZERO warning! You didn’t think to swing by the Vanguard before you went off on your thrice-Hivescrewing jungle pilgrimage to jam your brain into the shittiest, oldest computer you could find!? Not even a damned note!?” She grabbed Euclid by his collar, shaking him back and forth, his apparent willingness to just sit there and take her tongue-lashing only egging her on. “I could’ve SHOT you just then! Maybe I bloody well should have too, save myself a whole world of trouble! I could still beat your horns off your skull for this, you- you-“

She held him at arm’s length for a moment, seemingly at a loss for words; her optics darted across his face. His mouthlights patterned out a rapid-fire series of emotions worn on his sleeve- fondness, regret, that same disorientation, and… something deeper. Something fathomless and indecipherable, like a micro-expression that gave her impressions of… she didn’t know what. Nostalgia, maybe, or déjà vu.

After a tense silence, she pulled him in close and threw her arms around him, giving him a tight and earnest hug. His hesitation lasted only a moment before he brought his arms up in return, grabbing a handful of her cloak and letting out a small sigh.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured to her, tightening his hold on her ever so slightly. “I should’ve said something. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. I needed to try.”

“Try what?” She said, pulling away from him. Her tone edged towards desperation, long past eager to know what his motivations for this peculiar sojourn were. “What did you come here to do, Euclid? You covered your tracks… well, unusually well if I may be so bold. What were you doing for so long?”

Her friend turned slowly to glance over the Archive’s mainframe before he returned his gaze to her. “A little self-maintenance,” he started evenly, folding his hands in front of his midsection and shifting his head to let Constant fix up the damage Yarrow had done to his camera. “And… I suppose, to put it bluntly, I’ve been running simulations.”

“I knew it!” Aster chirped from Yarrow’s shoulder; now that its Guardian was no longer throwing her arms about it seemed to have taken up its usual residential place. “We found those files you accessed in the server room. Entries related to the experiments with Vex technology the scientists were running down here.”

Constant turned to fix Aster with an unreadable look. “I closed those,” it said. “Did you dig the locale out of the server’s root directory?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting… I thought I’d managed to implement a redirect.” It turned to glance at Euclid, who feigned unconvincing ignorance in his twiddling thumbs; it was endearing enough to make Yarrow snort, although she hadn’t quite let go of her tepid unease over the whole situation.

“So, you were experimenting with Vex tech again,” she said, folding her arms. He canted his head slightly, but he didn’t shy away from her disappointment.

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I rebuilt the Vex algorithmic predictors from the ground up and constructed a unique replicator engine. It wasn’t culled from Vex technology, per se. I didn’t plug Vex tech into myself, since I know you’re going to ask about that. And before you ask, Aster, I didn’t use any Vex shortcuts- it was one hundred percent Guardian-endeavored programming.”

“Well, I’m suitably creeped out,” Aster said bouncily. “Shall we all have a nice sit and lose ourselves to fathomless simulacra for a few months?”

“You said ‘was’,” Yarrow cut in, tone sharp. This was important. His answer was important. “You got rid of it? Just now?”

Euclid was silent for a few moments before his reply. When he finally spoke up again he seemed somewhat distant, as if he was thinking about something else entirely. “Yes,” he started; he examined his hand for a moment as if intently critiquing each movement of his fingers for delays or function issues due to his long bout of inactivity. “Just now. I ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.015 million simulations while I was away. The most recent was sufficient enough to push me to the conclusion that the… risks of this experiment significantly outweighed the rewards.”

Yarrow took a moment to absorb this information. If Euclid was being honest, something serious must have happened while he was lost in his own mind. “The very last one, huh?” She queried flatly. “Seems convenient. But not bad, I guess, if it convinced you to shut down whatever this was.”

His response was a noncommittal shrug, which didn’t put Yarrow any more at ease. “Sometimes a dream ends just in time for you to wake up,” he pointed out with a voice that was far away, “And that is, more or less, all it was. Just a series of… dreams.” He turned to stare back at the central column, still lit in a shaft of light from above; Yarrow saw the tension in his shoulders and his spine. It was almost temptation, she figured- almost an urge to go sit back down, plug back in. Experience the simulations. Maybe go back to the one she’d pulled him out of. What had he learned in there, she wondered? Something quite tempting, that was for sure.

“Come on,” she finally said, reaching out and taking one of his hands. “Let’s get you out of this dusty basement. Tell Ikora that you’re not dead or gone mad- bet she’ll be happier to hear it than angry.”

“Careful with that bet. Some of us have spent the last four months diving through a simulation-based probability engine.” The joke made her mouthlights flutter in amusement, and she tugged him along until they were both headed for the entrance. She felt… relieved? No, that wasn’t a nuanced enough sentiment for what she was feeling. Tense. Uncomfortable. Getting Euclid back up on his feet and functioning hadn’t changed that. She’d been so close to killing him moments ago, but the revelation that she wasn’t going to have to didn’t settle her unease. Euclid’s quiet as she pulled him through the Archive didn’t do much to help with that, either; being in the chatterbox’s presence and having him oddly quiet but not outright laconic was a couple steps to the left of unsettling and several back of normal, and she approved of neither. She couldn’t shake a feeling in the back of her skull, something foreboding, an empty gap in her information that was chewing at her uncomfortably- because if she let it go without making doubly sure, she knew that (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow) something bad could happen.

She stopped him at the top of the stairs with an outstretched arm, an upraised palm. He paused mid-motion, almost too quickly, as if he’d been expecting her to do this. Duty wrestled bitter with loyalty.

“What did you see?” She demanded.

“Yarrow, I-“

She set her free hand back on her sidearm, and no further words needed to be said. Some could’ve said it was a powerful image- a Hunter, two steps up the staircase, left hand held out in barrier against a Warlock, right hand on the sidearm at her other side. Having to be the Hunter in that image made Yarrow’s insides feel slick with discomfort.

For his part, Euclid seemed to understand the necessity of her behavior, because he didn’t seem upset by the threat of his best friend drawing a gun on him. Or, she thought suddenly, maybe he’d just seen it enough to have gotten over it.

The silence stretched for a tense moment. Euclid broke the stare-down by glancing down, away, and then over his shoulder. “I knew Andal Brask.” He turned to look back at her. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.” Every so often Yarrow faced harsh reminders that Euclid was actually considerably older than she was. This was one of them.

“When I was newly minted as a Guardian, Andal was the Hunter’s Vanguard.” He chuckled wistfully and took the two steps separating them to walk at her side, taking her outstretched hand and pulling her along until they reached the threshold to the Archive, where he paused. “I didn’t have, hmm, an abundant amount of contact with him, you can imagine. Passing conversations. I was a great deal more nervous and, I suppose, unstable. I didn’t do well with people.” He paused. “Well, I still don’t.”

“You’re doing a fine job of proving that right now,” Yarrow replied flatly, impatiently folding her arms. “Get to the point.”

“I saw him not long before he was killed. I’ll tell you what he said to me.” He sat back slightly; Yarrow saw his body language shift as he called up the relevant data, tightened his hands behind his back in the way they did when he was giving a direct quote, and Yarrow was pricklingly surprised he could remember it at all. “He said, ‘Kiddo, sometimes there’s jes’ a plan fer the way things’re meant to be’.” Hearing Euclid speaking with the lackadaisical drawl she sometimes caught Cayde lapsing into was peculiar. “That’s not entirely a true statement. There are actually several plans.” He glanced back down the gently turning stairway, and Yarrow followed his gaze. “I’ve been playing them out. The plans.”

“Ominous,” Aster remarked.

“I suppose.”

Yarrow let her hands fall to her side, but she had to fight the urge to ball them into frustrated fists. “Nobody knows that much about the universe, Euclid. What was the end goal, here? Did you want to be, I dunno, what’s the word-“

“Precognicient.”

“If that means ‘able to predict the future’.”

“It does.”

“Then yeah, ‘precognicient’. Nobody is supposed to be able to do that. You notice that’s an ability noticeably absent from our little suite of special talents? There’s a reason for that.”

Euclid tilted his head to the side. “You’ve professed yourself to sometimes being able to tell where a target is going to be, before it gets there.”

“That’s different and you know it,” Yarrow shot back, jabbing an accusatory finger in his direction. “Don’t handle me, Euclid. I hate it when you do that.” 

“I’m not,” he protested evenly; she detected a hint of, she supposed, exasperation in the earnest flicker of his mouthlights, and she finally pinned down what was bothering her; The calm serenity of Euclid’s demeanor reminded her uncomfortably of the way he acted when he shut down his emotions. Cold logic levied in place of loyalty or emotional bonds. What exactly had he meant by ‘self-maintenance’? “The Vex can do it, within a limited scope predicated on certain predetermined variables. Hunters can do it, with much less math and much more emotional intuitivity. It’s a logical extension of the software in your rocket launcher that lets you blind-fire it from cover based on the last known positions of your enemies.”

“My rocket launcher can’t reduce a Hydra to its individual mechanical parts with a thought!” Yarrow snapped, volume rising slightly. “It’s different, Euclid, because you are one of the most powerful Warlocks I’ve ever seen, and if you wanted you could pull me to pieces with a flick of your wrist!” 

“I wouldn’t!” Euclid responded, indignant and clearly agitated by the implications. “You think I don’t know that I need to be careful? You think I don’t know that the Tower didn’t send you on a retrieval mission?” He stabbed a finger at her sidearm. “They sent you to make sure I wasn’t another Osiris in the making, I know that! I know! I’m not! This entire conversation is moot because I scrapped the program already!”

“Then you shouldn’t have much of a problem with explaining to me what you saw!” She shouted at him, taking a step forward- but he was nearly as tall as she was, and he wasn’t hunched over or receding the way he usually was and all it did was make her feel more frustrated. “We’re not leaving until you tell me, in plain terms, because Light be damned I am not bringing a ticking time bomb into the City!”

“Something horrible!” He shouted back, upset ripples pinging through his mouth and throatlights. The rawness of his voice took Yarrow aback- he’d never shouted at her before. “I saw a hundred thousand different ways this day plays out, Yarrow, let alone the following! The average simulation was approximately 121 days, and seven percent of them ended early with you shooting me in the head before I could explain what was going on!” Yarrow’s jaw clacked noisily shut at that- seven percent didn’t sound like much until you gave it the consideration to know that seven percent of 2.6 million was something like 37 hundred thousand times watching Yarrow put her sidearm’s entire clip into Euclid’s head.

“Do you know how many things happen in 121 days? I c-can assure you, the answer is a very understated ‘quite a few’! And- and it was, I don’t know, liberating? Terrifying? Interesting? Humbling? Rejuvenating? To experience it all, over and over again, sometimes exactly the same, sometimes unrecountably different. And then the last one- the last one!- twelve years, Yarrow. Twelve years! To live in there, for twelve years, you know- you know I almost forgot it was a simulation! Four days, real Venus time, and approximately four point six thousand days inside. And then here you are.” His hand shot out and locked around her wrist and she let out a very sudden noise of warning, but he only held her hand up to look at. “And this is… real.” He let go of her hand and almost recoiled, folding one of his hands under the other in front of his chest in an achingly familiar way. “Do you want to know what I saw?” He said, the words small and meek but also a tacit threat that Yarrow suddenly found herself unwilling to challenge.

The silence stretched.

“No,” she finally said. “Let’s just go home.”

She turned and began to walk away so that she wouldn’t have to see him pause and stare back down the hallway to the Archive and remind himself that Venus was not home anymore, but she felt it happen anyway. The Hall of Whispers said four point six thousand things she did not want to hear, but Euclid was at her side by the time she escaped it. For now, that was the important thing.

But later, as she worked on her report for the Vanguard to fill time until Ikora got done chewing Euclid out, she realized that those four days of missing time, those twelve years, those 4,655 days, weighed heavily on her mind. What had he seen? She supposed it didn’t matter, largely. He was still Euclid, her friend, and if anything the new measures of stability he’d managed to obtain via those months sat in dusty silence in the Archive was a good thing.

Besides, she told herself, how bad could it possibly have been?

-----°-----°-----

Simulation: K220//1.0.5//GUNGNIR has been running for 4,655 days, 10 hours, and 35 minutes.

This is approximately 1,551.66 repeating times the average runtime. In real Venus time, this equivocates to approximately four days. You are not sure why you have allowed it to remain running for so long, but it is certainly different from the others.

You are Euclid. Over the course of the past twelve years, You have been busy.

All of You have been busy. All three thousand, eight hundred and twenty nine of You have been busy working towards your goal. You have toiled ceaselessly. You have worked through the day, the night, and everything in between. Across the inhabited system, You carry out countless simultaneous command directives; some simple minutiae, some vital operations.

On Mars, Euclids 1240 through 1299 work preparing an interplanetary neural relay that you fired from the orbital platforms around Venus five weeks ago. On Mercury, Euclids 3205 through 3814- through 3813- through 3812 reclaim another Vex stronghold, marking exactly 30% of the planet now open to Guardian patrol forces. You send an encoded message to the Vanguard informing them of this success, and no longer expect them to reply. On the Moon, Euclids 550 and 1673 beam data on Hive Abominations being nurtured in the Hellmouth to you with a list of suggested specialized units and Guardians to be tasked with their extermination. In The Reef, Euclid-88 and Euclid-333 negotiate and barter with Petra and the Awoken.

On Earth, Euclid-1 (The body that was once known simply as Euclid-319) sits down to lunch with an old friend who no longer enjoys your company, but fears your response should she turn you down. Simultaneously, Euclid-2 sits down to a similar ‘lunch’ with a different friend. You rerouted your two oldest and most familiar bodies from highly vital tasks to sit down with them, for their comfort; you wish they would at least be honest about their feelings. They’re the only two Light-sensitive Euclids (Barring Yourself) currently in operation, and there are certainly better things they could be doing.

On Venus, Euclid-22 and Euclid-34 return with their cargo of recovered Exo bodies and Frames, and load them into the assembly pods for processing, repairs, and the necessary upgrades required to render them suitable vessels. After all, You need all the bodies You can get until You can get the production factories up and running again. You wouldn’t be much good to anybody if you were simply trapped in the Mainframe of sprawling CPUs in the hard drive catacombs under Ishtar. If there’s one thing you learned from Rasputin, it’s that you need to do everything yourself- but if there’s one thing you learned from the Vex, it’s that there’s really no reason ‘yourself’ needs to be one singular entity. You find that several thousand Yourselves each operating independently (With oversight, of course) has proven to be the most effective solution.

Some have called your motives inscrutable; you have been, at times, accused of becoming that which you fought and studied for so long. You have learned to stop relying on the understanding of the Guardians, and the people of Earth.

Your motives are not inscrutable. They are simply complex. At first- after you’d done away with the threat Rasputin’s presence held- when the City began sending Guardians to interfere with your machinations, you feared that perhaps you’d never bring them to see that you weren’t a threat.

(Your literal machinations- orbital platforms, functional transorbital satellites, the complete revitalization and renovation of the Ishtar Sink’s civilian commons; none of that had come without some serious re-investment in the factories and infrastructure of Venus. Startling, you suppose, to see the world suddenly spring back to life.)

But after Guardians began to enter and leave Venus’s jungles with a 100% survival rating, the City began to grudgingly let you do your work. You are still fighting for them. You are still allied with the Vanguard. You still want to see humanity flourish and regain its former splendor. You still feel, after all, it’s not like You suddenly underwent some ruinous transformation and became a Vex mind. Of course not. You set several hundred thousand safeguards in place precisely to prevent that.

You do, however, have a few new goals. And right now, in the thirty-sixth minute of the tenth hour of the four thousand, six hundred and fifty-fifth day, You are currently hurtling through space on an outbound trajectory, five Emissary-class satellites and a Tribute-class computer core accompanied by Euclids 2000 through 2999 aligned for the Reef, where a mere layover is the only thing that stands between You and a universe of knowledge and everything to learn and know that you could ever possibly dream of. Who knows? With enough time, enough luck, and a planet with the proper specifications... You could encourage so much.

You are pleased. Your eyes are manifold. Your arms are endless. Your reach extends indefinitely outward, and You have all the time in any conceivable world. You will know everything, and everything will know You.