Fragment: Reforged

[rekindledtitan]

On Earth the summer has fled southward and darker days are coming to the City. On Mercury, it is noon.

The other Guardians of the City call this place the Burning Shrine. Blaze has no idea if that’s a translation of its function to the Vex, or a description of the eerie feel of the place. Half the sky is taken up by the sun: if not for the adaptive glass of her helm’s faceplate, the light here would be blinding. Around her looms Vex architecture, black and angular, roots sinking into the planet’s heart and spires rising unsettlingly high. Mercury was lost to the machines in the early days of the Collapse, a garden world turned to metal and glittering circuitry for eight hundred years. It’s a dangerous world: hostile, infectious, searing light twined with stark shadow.

Except perhaps for the place she’s come back to now, where a carved stone dais lies beneath the fury of the open sun, drifts of glass piled against its sides. The slick Vex metal has not touched it. At the center is a golden light Blaze remembers. It twists in the air, visible now, brighter than before, but still not ready…

“So. You have returned.” The woman’s voice echoes around her, rich and strong. It almost sounds as if her words are actually reverberating from the walls, as if it’s more than a synthetic translation though her helmet comms. “I do not know what led you to us, Guardian. It does not matter now that you stand before us. I am Ouros, Third Empyreal Magistrate of the Sunbreakers. You have sought us twice now. You are worthy of our time.”

She opens her mouth to answer, but the Sunbreaker keeps speaking. Her words have the cadence of an initiation now. “You have come to test your Light against the forge. But first you must wake it from its slumber. Prove you are one with the Light. Have your Ghost light the forge.”

//“Yes ma’am.”// Blaze lifts a hand in respectful salute. Ouros. She’s heard this name. Ouros dueled a Gate Lord with nothing but her fists and won; Ouros defeated Lord Shaxx in the Crucible; Ouros replied to a warlord’s taunts by tearing down his castle single-handed. Ouros fought with Zavala when the Sunbreakers broke from the City. Later there will be time for awe, and asking how many of the stories are true. First, the forge awaits.

It doesn’t seem like such a difficult task. The kindling mechanism isn’t obvious, but on her last visit she and Ghost saw some Vex equipment that might be aimed towards the forge. She heads into the ruins behind it.

The Vex have been watching. They appear in clouds of crackling black mist. Her fist is thunder and her sidearm lightning as she works her way through the enemy robots, every shot and impact less a sound than a vibration up her arms, through her shoulders.

//You see where we’re going, Ghost?//

//I’ve scanned the nearby power grid. I think I see how to get the lights on. They must have messed with the Vex infrastructure to be able to turn it to their advantage. That’s clever… I think.//

//Guess it’s worked for three hundred years.// And she can almost feel them now, on this world where the days go on forever and time warps to alien whims. She walks among the ghosts of supplicants past. How many Guardians have come to test themselves on this ground, long before Shaxx brought his Crucible? How many would-be Sunbreakers left the echoes of their Light burned into the alien metal beneath her boots? Does the Forge remember them all? The Vex surely must.

They find an access port where Ghost can venture out and switch the power on, while Blaze slings crackling grenades at nearby snipers. When he succeeds a beam of white energy appears along the ceiling, following a sequence of collimators and relays back to the outside. Blaze follows it, finding another control port for Ghost to get the whole array aligned. The Vex harry them, but she’s fought Vex often enough. They neither frighten nor hinder her for long.

Ghost focuses the energy down to a receptor at the base of the stone dais, and the shimmer at its center blossoms with incandescence. It’s unnerving. It’s entrancing.

Blaze leaps down to the glass-strewn stone and approaches it. Ghost is silent. For a second or two she does wonder if she’d made the right choice. What if she isn’t ready? What if she isn’t strong enough?

Ouros speaks again, commanding. ”In the shadows of the light that gave birth to the ancients, use the Forge.”

The doubts fall away as she steps up onto the dais, as if the solar wind has blasted her clean of them. Her optics are full of the searing light before her, more brilliant even than the vast sun behind it. There’s no place for doubt here, nor fear. There is only the way forward.

“Fire born of man. Fire of the Light.” The Sunbreaker’s voice seems to be everywhere, resonating through the thin air, through her, through the Light itself.

Blaze reaches for the fire. A double wave of red heat and icy chill ripples from fingertips to shoulder as her thermoreceptors overload. She knows no pain. Pain is irrelevant. Fear is irrelevant. But then she feels it catch hold of her Light and she doesn’t think. She plunges her hand into the molten forge-

“Ask yourself: what power do you seek from the forge, Guardian?”

-and the burning heat flows in, warping and reshaping her with itself. Memories burst to the surface and erupt across her mind, thoughts spinning and reversing to the pulse of an irresistible drumbeat.

pick bone fragments from the plates one by the sky’s on fire fingertips brush the petals and she’s surprised ships falling from it look inside this one the NLS drive’s still intact Steve holds it steady for her slipping into the crypt we’re on the clock here how fast can you tap these squares mouth aching with lodged sand grains no this is my real face

It is chaos, overwhelming, a vast and drowning fire; it’s inevitable as the gravity at a star’s heart, unrelenting as the ion gale around her. Every defensive wall blasted through, every gentle shadow laid bare. Fragments pouring into her mind, mingling and confused, everything she can never stand to face. She can’t tell which ones are true. Which ones are her. Turn back. Turn back or I lose myself…

something’s wrong write down everything you feel now tap the blue squares please I don’t know which one I am biting deep across her back crypt processing failed how about Nike disintegration is okay you don’t feel home smells of leaves and sulfur and the sky’s full of burning eyes bubble out of the walls you’ll only forget that color suits you Guardian

Blaze-37. I am Blaze-37 of the Last City on Earth. I have one purpose and one alone and I will not forget.

She feels it then. Something just beyond her fingertips, waiting for the answer to a single question.

“Can you bring Light to where only Darkness survives?”

falling as worm-eaten rock gives way beneath her they can see us they are waiting he dares to infect the Nexus teeth close on her hand

Her fingers close on its haft, and when she steps back she draws the hammer forth. The Light of the forge comes with it, surging into her and from her. She came for this. Came to make it a part of her. There is no stepping back, no matter the memories sleeting through her swift and plentiful as cosmic rays. Ghost says something she can’t hear. She’s brimming with flame, new and raw, exultant and uncertain. Her circuits pulse and surge with joy and sorrow and rage and painful doubt and yet.

The voice around her is eager and silken. “Prepare yourself.”

the spear pins her midsection the shock of it and the cannon barks in her face a crater of ash and broken bodies and she rejoices as she charges

And yet the air is alive with clouding particles and she can feel the Darkness coming. Marching goblins and hulking minotaurs step out of the air, eager to quench the signature of a newly reforged Guardian.

And she has a hammer.

She charges to meet them gladly. The hammer feels almost as joyful as she is, light in her hand and crushing in the swing. A minotaur’s shields are paper before it, the robot’s core crushed to ashen shards; one swing vaporizes goblins two at a time. She hurls it into a newly appeared pack and it explodes, turning the Vex into molten spray… and the hammer is in her hand once more.

We are one, and nothing stands before our purpose.

This, she does know. She charges and swings and bounds from platform to platform, and when the hammer is finally exhausted she feels the fire of the sun above pour into her and she begins again. The energy bolts on her armor are nothing. The Vex fall in heaps. And slowly, she feels herself in control.

She is a half-named soldier lost in a Nightmare without end. She doesn’t shove the thought away this time. There is no turning back.

She is Brynhild Marshall, the naïve child of a dead utopia.

She is Blaze-37, enthusiastic Guardian of the City and the Nexus

She is Bryn Marshall, rank unknown, shedding her humanity for a soon-forgotten cause.

Crunching through the ice fields of a besieged moon. Searching out her allies amid burning Nexus streets. Her own face laughing at her when she knocks back the whole whiskey. A bewildered corpse dragging herself from the mud. Holding tight as the dropship descends. Scrubbing furious tears away over the tiny bathroom sink. Pain grinding through her crushed hip every step of the retreat. An arm around her shoulders, a thrill of anticipation- Another perception test: match these colors, please; how many red dots do you see? Blaze-37, dying alone on an unmarked battlefield. Laughing wildly, reveling in the thunder of her new-found Light. Blaze-2 and 5 and 24 and 36, so jumbled they can’t be told apart.

It’s all her. She is all of them. For the first time that brings her no existential terror. She feels the whole of herself together and in it there is strength.

The Darkness ebbs and retreats. The Vex cease to come. Blaze feels the fire settle without dimming. For the first time she looks properly at the hammer in her hand, the head forged in the shape of an eagle’s head. The broad side is pointed into the shape of flames, the hooked beak forming the heavy claw side. The surface of it simmers with readied fire. The metal of the short haft looks plaited, ending in a sturdy spike.

She feels as if every plate and strut in her body is molten still. The flames lick over her armor and she does not fear them. The memories are not gone, but she knows who she is.

The Magistrate’s voice rings out once more. “A Sunbreaker does not answer to any but the will of the Light. Welcome, Guardian. Wield no power but the fury of fire.”

//That… was intense,// Ghost says quietly. He sounds tentative. //Um… you haven’t said a word to me so far. Are you… all right? How do you feel?//

And Blaze-37, Sunbreaker of the City, says simply, truthfully, //Better.//