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babybixon012 · 5 months

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•Intimate enemies•

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Summary: Maddy and Rafe always hated each other, and everything Rafe did Maddy hated and everything Maddy did Rafe hated. But deep down they love each other.

Warning: drugs, unprotected sex, verbal violence, "physical" violence, a funny but toxic relationship.

Maddy Pérez (Euphoria) Rafe Cameron (Outer banks)

Part 1

____________♥︎___________

When Maddy was 12 she went to the Outer Banks with her family. Maddy family was not poor they had plenty of money But they went to the island to get more money. At first Maddy hated this year that she will be separated from her friends, much less from New York.

Her parents were negotiating with the Cameron family, whom she did not know.

Maddy thought the banks were beautiful when I got there, but she was very proud. So she told her parents that I hate the beach, that I hate people and that she hated

But when Maddy family got closer to the Cameron family she met Sarah. And from then on, they became best friends. Everything was perfect everything was calm. Without Sara you would be nothing On that shitty island.

But you had a problem, a terrible problem that something in our But you had a problem, a terrible problem. Rafe Cameron....

Wafer was everything you hated. He was spoiled, it's unbearable if he thought he was the king of f***he was spoiled, it was unbearable if he thought he was the king (and he was) the first time you saw this one you thought That I was going to make friends with him like Sarah. But you hated the boy.

"Hi...I'm Maddy, I'm Sarah's friend" she said smiling.

" I don't care" he said, shrugging his shoulders and sucking on the ice cream.

"That's called bad manners, you know?" You said, getting irritated, even if you were a child, you already had a lot of stress.

"You're unbearable, you know? Get out of my way, Latina" You gape and take it as if it were an offense (and it was) and he walks away and leaves you freaking out with rage.

Since that day you hated Rafe. And everything he represented.

When you turned 13 years old, you went to celebrate at the Camero mansion, because the families are already very close.

You were very happy because all your friends that you liked were there. And the party was incredible. But that smile soon changed to a brave face. It was Rafe Cameron who was there. It's okay that the house was his. But why? He hated you and you hated him, so why was he there?

"Latina! Finally growing up" he says with a mischievous smile on his face.

"Screw you, you living dummy" Maddy says and rolls her

"you cursed!! You're screwed now, because I'm going to tell your mother" He laughs and runs to tell his mother. You despair. Already knowing that your mother would ground maddy.

He made her life a real chaos, but she also fought back a lot. There was the time she put three eggs in a bucket and whoever entered (in this case Rafe) the eggs would fall on their head.

And so it was done, the eggs fell on Rafe's head, legend has it that he is cracking the eggs to this

But anyway. You two were like cats and dogs, you fought over everything, you argued over everything, you were horrible to each other.

•Current days•

There were maddy and Sarah in the pool. You two were sunbathing.

"Hey, you know that boy I told you about?" Sarah says biting her nails. Kind of silly.

"yes....that John B, the king of the Pogues." You talk while lying down facing the sun. She didn't have any prejudice against people who were poor, but sometimes you made fun of them, because the Pogues weren't poor either Easy to get along with.

"Yes, he is! He asked me on a date" she says smiling at the sky. And at that moment she realized that her friend was in love.

"go friend, go on that date. You deserve better" maddy were referring to Topper, you were the friend, but you knew that he and Sarah didn't work out together.

"We ran out of soda. Shit, that was the last package in the freezer, I'm going to have to go buy it" Sarah says with a snort.

"Come on, and please don't take long, I want to tell you about my new Fiante" Maddy gives a mischievous smile and so does Sarah.

Sarah, I left, and you were looking at your cell phone, since you had nothing to do. Until....

"new Stayer? Who's the brave one?" He speaks in a "surprised" tone and is clearly insulting you. you huff and take a deep breath.

"You know Rafe, I went to therapy and I want to stay calm, that is, I won't pay attention to your insults" you say smiling with pure mockery and go back to your cell phone.

Clearly Rafe wasn't expecting this, but he was going to make you mad. And he was going to make it.

"Clearly I wasn't expecting all this calm." He knows you hate being called Latina by Rafe Cameron. She twist in anger and go straight for his neck.

Rafe couldn't stop laughing when you tried to choke him. You were shorter than him so it made it a little difficult.

"You're an idiot! You idiot! You weakling" she said, shouting while jumping on his neck.

Until the two of you lose your balance and fall together. For the first time Maddy could see Rafe's eyes this close, and they were beautiful. While Rafe smelled Maddy, he wanted that smell Forever.

" You're an idiot, Rafe Cameron," Maddy says, trying to get angry, but their eyes were mesmerized by Rafe's.

And the two of you were still lying on the floor, until you took the initiative to get up, but at the last second, in the second half. Rafe kisses she, kisses you with desire, kisses you with desire.

At first you didn't give in, but then you gave in to him. Rafe holds Maddy's waist. As she lets out a moa.

Until she snaps and stops kissing him desperately. "Rafe! What the fuck are we doing?" Maddy say pushing him and looking around to see if anyone saw him.

"Just enjoy your adolescence?" Rafe says, pretending to be innocent and you roll your eyes.

"For starters, you're not a teenager, you're already 18!" Rafe pretends to be shocked. "And the last thing I want is to enjoy my adolescence with she, your daddy's boy" she says, taking her things, to enter the Cameron mansion.

Rafe saw you going out in that bikini that was making him hard and crazy. And that kiss only made Rafe's day better. Rafe didn't hate she, for him to hate is a very strong word, he just didn't like maddy. He also loved making her mad, as a child.

Maddy enters the Cameron house agitatedly, and she ends up bumping into Sarah, with sodas in hand.

"what the fuck maddy, what planet are you on?" Sarah speaks and you give a slight smile... a little suspicious.

"I'm sorry Sarah, I hadn't seen you" she says, still nervous and Sarah finds her friend's behavior strange.

"Is everything okay with you?" Sarah says and Maddy rolls her

"So Sarah stop being annoying, I'm great! I'm going home, okay?" She speaks clearly trying to get away from Rafe, who was looking in their direction.

"But weren't you going to tell me about your new boyfriend? What about soft drinks?" Sarah He says looking at Maddy confused. And the more Maddy and Sarah prolonged their conversation, Rafe became closer.

I'm feeling crampy, at the party tonight I'll tell you everything! Bye friend, I love you " Maddy says practically running, and bumps into Rafe's chest, which was muscular and strong. Rafe gives a smile. And Maddy whispers Some pest. Maddy finally leaves the Cameron mansion and Sarah is still shocked by her friend's behavior.

"why the fuck did she act like that?" Sarah speaks loudly. And the rafe leans against On the counter

"I don't know, you always bring your crazy friends to our house" Rafe says, turning his back. And Sarah swears something.

Rafe didn't like Maddy, "fact" but she wouldn't leave his head. Why?

And he was looking forward to seeing you, because Sarah was having a party that night and Maddy would definitely go. So Rafe would be there.

______♥︎______

The party had barely started and Sarah and Rafe's house was full. She had Pogues and she had Kooks too. And Maddy was there, perfect as always. She was dancing with a random man, and oddly enough, Rafe only had eyes for you that night.

And Sofia, who was Rafe's "girlfriend", noticed that her boyfriend only looked at Maddy's ass. She just freaked out.

Sarah had gone to the bathroom area, until she heard Sofia and other Kooks girls, talking bad about Maddy. Sarah just ran to tell Maddy

"Maddy!!!" Sarah screamed trying to get closer to you and passes through the crowd. "Maddy, you don't know what Sofia and the other girls are saying against you" Sarah said trying to catch her breath.

"What the fuck are they talking about me Sarah?" Maddy says, and I frown.

"I think it's better for you to see it with your own eyes" Sarah says, half laughing, as she knows the future of this fight.

"with pleasure" Maddy says, leaving the guy she was with, and going after Sofia. And suddenly, she has a group of people following Maddy, sure to watch the fight.

Arriving there, Maddy found several girls around Sofia, laughing and gossiping about something. Maddy gives a smile and approaches Sofia. And Sofia noticed that she had several people around In other words, Maddy would beat her up

"So Sofia, what are you talking about me, you stupid little bitch" Maddy says and Sofia swallows hard. She knew she couldn't handle a fight with Maddy, because Maddy was a quarrelsome person And smash any dirty girl that gets in his way.

"Look Maddy, I don't want to argue with you, I'm not going to make a big show" Sofia says leaving, probably very scared, Sucker.

"Poor Maddy, I think she's scared of you" Sarah says teasingly and people scream. Maddy just laugh

"Afraid of a slut that catches everyone?" Everyone goes crazy when Sofia says that. Sarah knew that Maddy would reach her "crazy" state when she heard that.

"What did you call me?" Maddy says in a whisper. Maddy approaches Sofia and gets closer to her face "what did you call me, you fucking whore" Maddy shouted at her. The girl She was practically crying, Maddy was making her scared.

Until Rafe appears, and is amazed and trying to understand what is happening.

"What the fuck is going on here?" Rafe says, getting close to Maddy and Sofia. Maddy didn't even look at him, she just looked at Sofia.

"The maddy who murders me " Sofia says trying to get some kind of remorse from Rafe, but she doesn't get anything.

"I think you better calm down Maddy " Rafe says trying to calm the situation. And he also puts his hands on Maddy's shoulders, to give her support.

He didn't know why he was doing it, just that he felt like he had to do it.

"Shut up Rafe! It's my business with her" Maddy shouts, already pointing her hand in Sofia's face.

"Leave me alone Maddy" Sofia says trying to run, but gets caught by Maddy pulling her hair.

"Next time you don't answer me and turn your back on me, you'll regret it!" Maddy says, pulling her hair even more. And everyone screamed And Rafe was excited by that.

"that's enough maddy, leave the girl" Rafe says and Maddy obeys, and Sofia leaves completely humiliated. And everyone started shouting Maddy.

And that filled her ego. Until Rafe grabs Maddy's arm and takes her to the corner.

"I think we need to repeat that kiss" Rafe says, caressing Maddy's back, as she was very close to him.

"Don't you hate me Rafe Cameron?" Maddy says using that seductive tone of hers. And Rafe gets tougher about it

"and maybe I hate you, but I didn't say I hated you when it came to sex" Rafe says, getting closer to her mouth. And Maddy gets very close to his mouth too.

"so you're inviting me to have sex with you?" Maddy says with her lips very close to Rafe's.

"yes, that outfit of yours is driving me crazy, and you're driving me crazy" when Rafe says that, he immediately tries to kiss Maddy, but Maddy refuses

"I would never have sex with Rafe Cameron, I won't fall for that weakling curse" says Maddy, looking at Rafe with a look of contempt.

Rafe is filled with rage, almost grabbing her by force. But he exhales and looks furious.

"Sofia was right about you Madalena Pérez, you're a shit whore" Rafe says with a bitter tone, and oddly enough, Maddy was upset?

"Your opinion is the same as wind for me" Maddy speaks last and then leaves.

Maddy was so angry with Rafe that she ended up falling for her ex-boyfriend. JJ Maybank

"pay attention, babe" says JJ, recovering from the fall. Maddy and JJ dated for 1 year and 4 memes, but you broke up because of JJ's friends, who didn't approve of you guys. And JJ only listened to his friends and left Maddy aside, because of them.

"Screw you JJ" Maddy says, and JJ realizes that she wasn't cool.

"Did something happen, babe?" Jj says, approaching her. And Maddy looks down, it looks like she doesn't mean to say anything. "Do you want to talk somewhere else?" Maddy nods.

Part 2?

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gyllenhaalstories · 2 years

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CHERISH (PART 2) — CHOCOLATIER!JAKE 🍫

summary: he brings the cream, you bring the pie. together you’re making... cupcakes?

warnings: curse words, food, baking & eating, smut (food play, finger sucking, aphrodisiac, fingering, handjob, pussy spanking, masturbation, penetration, creampie, hyperspermia & cum play). 18+ NO MINORS.

word count: 3385

gifs credits: me (@/gyllenhaalstories) / divider credits: @/firefly-graphics

notes: i hope you’re ready, because it’s time for you to become a cream filled chocolate truffle! since this THE PART 2 OF THIS FIC, that means it’s still the season of pink, hearts and pink hearts so happy valentine’s day again! 💗 thank you for reading & REMEMBER TO REBLOG!

When Jake saw you grab the container of store bought frosting, his heart came close to stop beating. He snatched it out of your hand faster than the speed of your spoon diving into the sugary product.

You rolled your eyes at him, and at his genuinely shocked face before you started laughing with him — well no, it was directly at him. Right in his face too, because he remained stoic, holding the jar far out of your reach. “It’s just frosting.”

“It’s not just frosting! It’s the most important part of the cupcakes! It needs to be delicious and that?” His eyes widened while he waved the frosting in the air. “That’s unacceptable.” He put the container back where you found it, with the lid and all. “You can eat it behind my back, like when I’m in the shower —” but we shower together, you interrupted. You counter offered his other suggestions until he gave up and agreed to let you ruin another baked good, but not his cupcakes.

You found it funny how he turned into a busy, overwhelmed mom who was just reminded the night before by her forgetful children that they signed her up for some charity event at the school that would go down in flames without her box-mix cupcakes. He reacted dramatically to a lot of the things, you noticed. After several other dates since your first one at his chocolaterie, you discovered he was... Special. He liked things to be in order, clean and organized especially in the kitchen, while the rest of his life prevailed in a complete chaos. He was so different in and outside of the kitchen, you wondered if he allowed himself to have a bit of fun or if he was too scared that his Kitchen Aid stand mixer would judge him for eternity.

Jake resumed to measuring the rest of the ingredients, following the recipe he knew by heart for having baked it over and over again. He tweaked it to make it his own, he could not help it, but he recited the measurements out loud like a sing-song he learned. Your job as a sous-chef was reduced to putting paper liners in the muffin tin and sucking his finger clean whenever he would present you with a bit of the sweet preparation to taste. Premade frosting was out of the question, but raw eggs seemed to go by just fine.

At some point, you figured he just liked to have you suck on his fingers. Maybe it was the moans he let out when he felt your tongue swirl around his digits, or the fact he would tease your mouth with clean fingers even after the cupcakes were put in the oven. And you loved it too, how the deeper his fingers pushed in your mouth, the more you felt your mind going blank.

The alarm of the timer rang, snapping you back to reality at the poke of a toothpick coming out clean from the chocolate cupcakes. Jake did not stop cooking, and talking to himself about how he hoped Ina Garten would forgive him for his sins — which was to use his own chocolate wafers instead of the semisweet chocolate chips the well-known and even more well-loved chef recommended.

You watched him with an amused smile, while he was measuring the rest of the wafers while waiting for the bain-marie to get ready. He tried to be subtle, you knew it, but you caught him snacking on a couple of pieces of chocolate. So much so that he had just about enough for the last steps of the recipe and the replacement for your forbidden frosting.

Once the water started to simmer, he placed a glass bowl on the pot and poured the chocolate disks in it. He stirred the chocolate as it melted before yours and his eyes, smooth and satiny. He dipped his finger in the hot concoction — his fingers had been long desensitized to burning with all the years of baking he had underneath the cute apron he wore around his waist. It was your Valentine’s day gift to him, belated, but still a thought act.

“You know...” You spoke, Jake’s eyes left the glass bowl to meet with yours. “When I suggested we could bake cupcakes, I didn’t mean we should turn into a fancy bakery. We’ve been at it for a long time.”

He shook his head, in a strangely calm manner. “There’s nothing ironic about baking. I take it very seriously.” He sucked on his own chocolate dipped finger, releasing it with a pop, to further prove his point. “I’m almost done anyway. You’ve helped me plenty, time flew by!” When you rolled your eyes at his comment about your nonexistent help, he insisted. “You’re standing there and looking beautiful with flour hand prints on your butt. That’s more helpful than anything else.”

You earned a kiss that you tried to deepen and make last longer, but Jake pulled away to complete the chocolate ganache. The heavy cream and chocolate mixed together beautifully and you wrapped your arms around his torso while he expertly dipped the now cooled down cupcakes into the chocolate. You tried to sneak a peek of his work, but he was moving so much in your embrace that it made it hard to focus.

He ended your confusion by offering by sharing the rest of the ganache, using a spatula to scoop it from the bowl until the two of you acted giddy, giggling as he licked and kissed drops of sweet goodness that fell on your chin.

It took a little while — a few minutes, really — to notice the familiar sensations that were spreading through your body, starting at your tongue and sending electric waves all the way down between your thighs. Oh.

Oh, yeah, fucking finally, Jake murmured to himself. He smiled just as big and proud as the first time you tried his special chocolate at his boutique during your very first date. He pulled you closer to him, wanting to admire all the small changes that were starting to happen to you. He held your face delicately in his big hands, his eyes diving into yours while your pupils were growing larger and while your mouth dropped ajar. He mirrored everything — how his tongue could not stay still in his mouth like it was begging to touch yours, how your head wanted to loll to the side. “Let it go, sweetheart, let it go.”

The way he cooed at you helped your head get emptier and emptier until... Until you could not think of anything else except him. Except how badly you wanted him and needed to feel him. You wanted to scream at how much it hurt not to have his hands on your breasts or his mouth on your clit. You wanted to beg and beg until he would relieve some of that delicious pain.

His hands slid from your cheeks down to your shoulders, wrapping around your neck while he pulled you in for a kiss that was all tongues and teeth. The longer the kiss lasted, the more he felt like the world around you was vanishing into a thick fog.

It was the same way you felt, using whatever control on your body you had left to make your way to the bedroom. You let him grope your breasts over your clothes, rubbing his thumbs over the small bumps your hard nipples created until he heard you moan into his mouth.

Jake pulled away, only to lick some of the drool that fell down the corner of your mouth and kissed you hard again, making it as messy as he could while his hands kept exploring your body. He pulled moan after moan after you with touches as simple as the warmth of his palms pressing against the goosebumps on your skin.

In a blink of an eye, all of your clothes were piling up on the floor with nothing but your body heat and the burning desire to indulge in each other’s bodies. Unlike the first time you tasted the chocolate, you did not stand alone in this euphoric experience.

Jake looked just about as far gone as you were, with glossy eyes and quick breathing that resembled a needy panting. He was hard, his cock throbbing as you exchanged another series of feverish kisses. When you took him in your hand, he had to lean on you so his knees would not give in. Not that he ignored the effects of the aphrodisiac, but, even after he tested it on you, he realized just how powerful a few bites of that magic substance could be. It made precum leak out of his sensitive, pink tip. It made his abs clench at the strong sensation of your hand stroking him. It made him throw his head back when you cupped his balls into your left hand, using the other one to keep jerking him off.

You could tell he was holding back, with his clenched jaw and the tight grip he had on your soft hips, his short nails digging into your flesh. He wanted to fuck your hand hard and fast and catch his own release.

He did not give in, however. It would all be a waste if he did not get to feel you while being in this physical state, while having his mind and senses played with by a few bites of chocolate. Another kiss, another couple of strokes of his big cock and you were pushed on the bed. Jake barely let you find a comfortable spot to lay on that he was kneeling on the bed too and forcing your legs open to reveal what he wanted the most.

Your inner thighs were covered in your wetness, your folds were slightly puffy from the arousal alone and from this deep, uncontrollable need for Jake to touch you and bring back those fireworks you first experienced under the influence of the aphrodisiac.

“So fucking beautiful.” Jake mumbled, or moaned — both at the same time, actually. The aphrodisiac had him slurring his words and fighting to say a sentence with minimal coherence. He wrapped each arm around one of your thighs and pulled you closer to the edge of the bed, making you gasp with surprise when you felt your skin slap against his.

You covered your face with your hands as he finally touched you. His flat hand rubbed over your pussy from side to side, fast and harsh. The more he touched you, and the more his fingers rubbed over your clit when your folds moved out of the way, the wetter you were getting. It was so much more intense than your first time, and it kept on getting better.

Jake slapped your puffy folds, although the blows were soft, they were stinging your sensitive skin. He messed with your brain that had trouble differentiating between the pain of the spanks and the bliss of his fingers rubbing tight circles on your clit. He was mesmerized, jaw dropped and eyes wide as he spanked you a few more times and watched you flinch under him. Each spank was followed by a squeal and giggles, mixed with a moan that sounded like music to his ear. He wanted to hear more — he needed more.

You inhaled loudly, only for the oxygen to get stuck in your throat when you felt Jake’s cock pressing at your entrance and sliding inside your tight hole, eased by your wetness and the precum that covered the tip of his cock. You removed your hands from your face and placed them on your tits, trying to hold them in place while he started to fuck you. You only had a few slow and deep strokes to adjust to the delicious feeling of his cock inside your walls before he picked up the pace.

He gripped on your thighs again that he kept pressed against his body so that he could rock his hips back and forth. Curse words you had never heard from him were submerged by the sound of his deep grunts while he kept thrusting inside of you. Somehow, despite the mix of your juices, he could feel your walls tightening and clenching around his length every time he pushed his cock inside of you after pulling back. He was only chasing the maximum pleasure he could pull out of you — and give back to you.

Pretty moans turned into audible gasps and abrupt screaming when his cock hit the spongy spot inside of you. It seemed as though he calculated the number of times he hit your spot, trying to make you feel as good as possible while also stretching out the time he could enjoy your pussy. One look at him confirmed there was not a thought behind those lust-filled eyes, he was driven by his desire to bury his cock as deep inside of you as you would let him.

He clenched his jaw one moment only to press his lips together the next and hold himself back on moaning more so he could get lost in the obscene sounds your bodies created together. The slapping, the sticky wetness, the rushed and heavy breathing. When he could not hold in his own noises, he groaned and slowed down his thrusting.

He was fucking you hard and deep, so deep that you kept being pushed further away on the bed, dragging the bed sheets with you. “Please,” you spoke for what felt like the first time in forever. “Please, don’t stop!”

He did stop. He stopped to look down at where your bodies no longer met as the distance pulled you away from him, his cock bopping up and down, begging to be reunited with your pussy. Jake took a moment to catch his breath and admire the beautiful scene before his eyes. The veins of his arms, and cock, were bulging out from the sheer force with with he was fucking you. There was a layer of sweat covering both his body and yours, and visible wet spots on the bed sheets that created a trail from the edge of the bed to the middle where you now laid.

Impatient, your body burning into flames, you sat to reach up and pull Jake down with you. He was quick enough to climb on the bed, the tip of his cock brushing against the same wet spots you left behind on the fabric, and you held his cock in your hand briefly to guide it back where it belonged.

He pushed himself all the way back inside you, now kneeling between your thighs that he kept open for him — and for you. Withing even having to tell you, Jake loved to watch you rub the sensitive bundle of nerves that resided between your just as sensitive, soaking wet folds. He pulled away, just a little, and slammed himself back inside of you as he fucked you in this other position.

The aphrodisiac was nowhere near close to run out, you could tell. It still felt just as intense as it did while the effects began to work their magic over you. Your bodies, however, were running out of energy to last. You could tell that too by the fact you were getting closer and closer to your orgasm now that you rubbed your clit in a just as messy rhythm as the one Jake fucked you with.

He was getting so close too, his grunts became more succinct and his face tensed up with the powerful pleasure that ran through his veins. There was no need to speak, words were completely unnecessary as Jake and you let the aphrodisiac take complete control over you.

Your orgasm hit you by surprise, or well, sort of. As soon as you felt that familiar knot in your lower stomach, you knew you were about to explode in an orgasm that pushed the air out of your lungs and made you see stars even when you closed your eyes. It felt even stronger with your eyes closed than it did when you kept them open. It felt as though you could notice each vein on Jake’s cock, the swollen tip of his cock diving in and out of your slick walls. And then you felt it. All of it.

Jake fell down to his elbows, his face conveniently buried in the crook of your neck as he came inside of you, his pelvis flushed with you from how deep he was. Ropes and ropes of cum shot out of his cock while his hips jerked a few times uncontrollably, until he felt like something was pushing him out.

It was not you, not intentionally at least. You would have loved nothing more than to calm down from your high with the feeling of Jake’s cock softening inside of you. Although you could feel something still filling you up even if his cock was sliding out of you.

“Oh my,” Jake spoke when he finally pulled out of your pussy. “Oh my God.” It was still hitting him, he was still cumming with more of his seed just dripping out of his slit. There was even more trickling out of your hole. You looked as confused as Jake. This did not happen with him before... This had never happened to him before. His brows were raised in stupefaction one second and furrowed in confusion the next, he held his cock at the base in one hand while two fingers of his free hand dipped into your cum filled entrance.

It felt so good when he pushed his fingers barely past your entrance, as he felt even more cum inside of you. Quickly, he replaced his fingers with his cock and made you scream of pleasure as he finished inside you with a few more thrusts and pumps. You realized he fucked his cum back inside of you, not even minding that most of it was covering his cock and oozing out of you.

He fell back on you again, slowly and carefully this time so he did not hurt you. And, finally, you cherished the feeling of his softening cock inside of you while you both tried to catch your breath. Jake was mumbling to himself how it felt incredible, how it was so weird and so hot, and how he wanted to do it again — and he wanted it so fucking bad. He tried to move, arms and legs incredibly shaky, but you held him tighter and closer against your just as tired body.

“Where are you trying to go?” You whined, making room between your legs for him to lay down more comfortably.

Jake giggled in your ear, his laughter filled with excitement. The kisses he pressed all over your cheek, jawline and neck were filled with just as much lust as they were earlier. “Trying to get up to grab a snack.”

He squirmed on top of you, but all he managed to do was fall by your side and hug you tight against him. If he wanted to get up, he was failing rather adorably. “A snack? For what?” You turned your head to look at him, you were so close your noses almost touched.

He smiled at you, the same smile he had glued on his pretty face during your date at the boutique. You swore to yourself you would cherish this image forever. “So we can do that again. And again...” He leaned in closer to capture your lips with a kiss. “And again until there’s no more of that good stuff.”

Your eyes widened ever so slightly, that was the strongest reaction you could express with how exhausted you felt after this mind blowing orgasm. “It’s in the cupcakes?” Yup. “All of them?” Jake nodded in approval. “I can’t take it anymore. Not right now.” You tried to resonate with him, only the way your voice cracked betrayed your own desire to try it again and again...

“You’ll take it.” Jake answered, quite firmly. “Because this magic chocolate will definitely be in all the desserts we bake from now on.”

#jake gyllenhaal smut #jake gyllenhaal imagine #jake gyllenhaal x reader #jake gyllenhaal fanfic #jake gyllenhaal x you

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speaker-of-the-void-cats · 29 days

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Abyssus abyssum invocat

Near-gods must believe in greater gods. But every power is finite, every life shorter than it wishes. Only an astonishing mind can truly appreciate just how tiny it is when set against the known universe; and how insignificant the known becomes when it is devoured by what isn't seen and can't be comprehended. As darkness begins to claim their ragged souls, you look ahead to find a great power pouring out of you—a face of fire and golden light. That blazing wonder, a gift from the great-eyed god, is their salvation. Or are you? Perhaps you are the greater god now.

∆ And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence. And I had only one purpose and one principle in the game. And I could do nothing but continue to enact that purpose, because it was all that I was and ever would be.

I looked at the gardener.

I looked at my hands.

I discovered the first knife. ∆

SCRIBE ARCHIVE XI-14-9D TYPE: Emergency Transmission RETRIEVED FROM: The Spider's collection - long-range communications beacon; disabled ORIGIN: Unknown KEYWORDS: Witness ANNOTATED TRANSCRIPTION FOLLOWS I learned of its arrival scarcely three marks ago. As my anchor slumbered in the belly of this ancient outpost, I drifted into the noosphere N webbing, and was swept up in delight. Millions of thoughtforms sharing the news, the revelation spreading from leading to trailing edge, until even I was buoyed by the tide of joy. First contact, with a stranger ∩ friend-to-be! A chance for the hazy margins of our noosphere to grow, to encounter new thoughts and expand with new richness. It had been so long since we encountered the whisper ∩ Nightmare ∩ predatory memeplex*. We had grown naïve without the reminder of fear. From the leading edge came a current. It swept through our noosphere, a spark in dry brush ∩ ink in water ∩ hope curdling in an instant. The emanations were confused and fragmentary. I could not parse them all. Planets stolen from space, ripe fruit plucked from orbit. Structures dissected and reassembled by thousand-fingered hands. Anchors and selves unraveled into first principles, sectioned into wafer-thin slices.** It was only one voice at first. A cry of joy at the meeting of a new mind, twisted to fear and pain. "Help me!" Chaos in the noosphere. The placid surface churned into white froth. Thoughtforms scattering in their thousands, fleeing up the webbing-strands, and finding doom at every junction. "Help me!" The stranger ∩ ruin ∩ predatory memeplex engulfed our noosphere in a moment's idle fancy. Our thoughtforms were atomic in comparison. We never stood a chance. As each of my people were found, and taken apart, and reassembled, a new voice joined the chorus. "Help me!" My people died in their thousands. Thoughts and selves wisping away into nothingness. Thousands of years of memory, no more than smoke in the wind. "Help me!" Here, in this outpost, I am apart from the rest. Tethered at the trailing edge. Furthest from its lamprey maw. Not far enough to escape. Not near enough to help. "Help me!" A thousand emanations from a thousand minds, blending into a single scream. The same scream, every time. Again and again and again and again. When we untethered ourselves from their anchors, we knew that we as a people would not be divided again. No matter how far we traveled in real space, the vastness of our noosphere ∩ webbing ∩ home was but a thought away. Our fears, our hopes, our dreams, our longings, our triumphs—we would always be able to reach out and know one another. Where one was weak, another could be strong. We would share each other's joy, and bear each other's pain. But that—that sound— "Help me!" I am ashamed to admit that I could not bear it a moment longer. I severed ∩ exiled ∩ imprisoned myself. I regretted it the moment I did. We were dying, but we were dying together. My unimaginable cowardice will not assure my survival, only a delay in my execution. The ruin ∩ predatory memeplex ∩ WITNESS*** knows the pattern of our oscillations. I can hear it, still plucking the tattered edges of the noosphere ∩ webbing. —-Why do you hide?—-**** THE WITNESS will find me, and when it does, there will be nothing ∩ no one. I believed I would die alone in this abandoned outpost. But I found a crate, forgotten deep within a dusty storeroom. Emergency beacons, produced and stored in another time, one when we knew the fear of death. —-We see you.—- To you ∩ receiver ∩ inheritor ∩ hoped-for-future, I offer what little I know: We are dead but not unmade. We are ossified ∩ temporized ∩ reiterated ∩ perpetuated ∩ anatomized ∩ finalized.***** I do not know if this will help. I do not know. I do not. But perhaps you will prevail. —-Come, now. Don't be afraid.—- This is not a call for help. It is too late ∩ there is no one left ∩ THE WITNESS cannot be stopped. This is our last proof. We ∩ the Noesis existed. TRANSCRIPTION ENDS

"When I first encountered the Witness, I heard it proclaim to me, 'We are the first knife.'" Mara's words are as thin as her hopes. She looks hollow under the H.E.L.M.'s emergency lighting, hunched over a console, watching an ascending red line on a graph. Something about the line's inevitable upward climb had triggered her memory. They have to follow the Witness into the Traveler, and soon. "It was as if that title held power. Meaning." Mara says as the line ticks up again. She leans away from the console. Turning to look at Ikora, who stands staring intently at the portal, she feels the same uptick in energy coming from it. Ikora nods, watching Mara's reflection. "The apocryphal texts we dug up on the moon, the ones Eris translated, mentioned the knife as a concept." Mara comes to stand beside Ikora. "And even if we consider that unveiled text as dogmatic propaganda, there may be truth behind the allegory," she agrees, remembering the texts and the translations Eris made of them. "The knife becomes the metaphor of a concept. A power. A knife that winnows, cutting things into a defined shape." "A power that winnowed living beings into Taken." Ikora turns to face Mara, searching the Awoken Queen's eyes. "A power Oryx wielded." Her emphasis on that last word makes her point, and Mara picks up on it. "You're wondering if the knife is a title, or a power." Mara deciphers Ikora's steely countenance. "Did Oryx wield the power of the Witness like a knife?" Ikora shifts her gaze back to the portal. "The Witness is a manipulator. It distorts the truth to bend the wills of its supplicants. The allegorical fantasy told to us by the Witness paints itself as a monolithic cosmic force. But perhaps that's a shadow cast by the truth." Mara watches Ikora, sensing her ease a little. This idea has tempered Ikora's earlier anxieties over the future. This conversation has tempered her own, after all. Even though her brother feels distant and faint, in the moment, he is out of her mind. "A knife is a tool, wielded by another's hand." Mara offers. "If the Witness is the knife, as it asserts, then what wields it?" Ikora asks the Traveler, though it does not reply. The words are meant for Mara's ears too. "The Witness is not a being," she agrees. "It is the culmination of a bleak ethos willed into existence by the nihilistic desires of its creators. Is their will the hand on the knife? Or is there something else?" Ikora's fingers slip from the corners of revelation, and her thoughts plummet into more immediate worries and doubts. Mara sees her fall, and lets herself tumble into the same precipice, joining her in worry. "I don't know."

≋ I will go on forever. I will understand everything. There is only one path and that is the path that you make. But you can make more than one path.

Break your cell’s bars. Make a new shape, make the shape from its path, find your cell’s bars, break out of the bars, find a shape, make the shape from its path, eat the light, eat the path.

If I fail, let me be wormfood. ≋

The Timid Truth says that we are the smallest, most fragile things alive. The natural prey of the universe. Taox would have us believe that our ancestors came to the Fundament to hide from the hungry void. My father died afraid. Not of vile Taox or the Helium Drinkers, but of his orrery. He screamed to me — “Aurash, my first daughter! The moons are different! The laws are bent!” And he made the sign of a syzygy. Imagine the fifty-two moons of Fundament lining up in the sky. (It wouldn’t take all fifty-two, of course: just a few massive moons. But this is my deepest fear.) Imagine their gravity pulling on the Fundament sea, lifting it into a swollen bulge... Imagine that bulge collapsing as the syzygy passed. A wave big enough to swallow civilizations. A God-Wave.

<<These frail siblings will soon be claimed by the Light. Unless we claim them first. We will tell the most cunning sibling of a cataclysm. A prophecy of great loss. We will feed her fear. Her pride. We will say, "young Sathona... the end is coming. A great cataclysm. A God-wave. In the sky, there is only death. But salvation lies in the Deep.">>

++This fatal logic++

—Hear my monopole scream!—

++It will consume you++

—Before you lies—

++The worship of death++

—The ruinous path—

++The Sky builds new life++

—Against the onset of ruin—

++Towards a gentle world++

—The Deep embraces death—

++Saying: this is inevitable and right++

—I exist as hungry ruin—

++TURN BACK FROM THE WORLD-KILLING WAY++

++OR YOU WILL LIVE AS DEATH AND DEVASTATION++

—The Sky is the harder way. But it is kinder.—

—My charge is balanced: my voice exhausted.—

Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet. He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying: I can see you in the sky. You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you. And it arrived, the Deep Itself.

∆ Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.

Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me.

And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself.

Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.

The fate of everything is made like this, in the collision, the test of one praxis against another. This is how the world changes: one way meets a second way, and they discharge their weapons, they exchange their words and markets, they contest and in doing so they petition each other for the right to go on being something, instead of nothing. This is the universe figuring out what it should be in the end.

And it is majestic. Majestic. It is the only thing that can be true in and of itself.

And it is what I am. ∆

Oryx ascends from the nether world, The knights like hot stone The beasts like scarred bone Walk at his side. Who walked in front of him? His daughters, with the truth between them Who walked at his side? His Priest of Worms, whose tribute tasted like an egg Who walked behind him? Golgoroth, who festered Who walked within him? The satiated Worm — it was hungry, but it was fed They preceded him. These ones surrounded Oryx They were beings who know no rest or doubt Who eat nor shed any flesh, Who drink no clear poison, Who take away the weakness from the weak, Whose violence is tithed to Oryx, so that he may devour without being devoured Are you following this? Would it help if I etched a few notes on the margins? I didn’t shuck my mortal form and smuggle this nightmare arcana back to the waking world for the benefit of that masked hypocrite’s drooling loyal orthodox. Whoever finds this, I hope you’re sharp. I hope you read closely. Oryx depends on His Court. Oryx depends on His Shrines. Do you see why? Punish that dependence.

“I have a gift for you,” says Oryx. Savathûn, Witch-Queen, looks at him with dry wariness. “Is it the sword logic I need to go into the Deep, and take your power for myself?” Their echoes move among the war-moons, walking together on the hull of a two-thousand-year-old warship. Savathûn’s fleet has assembled here, in preparation for an assault on the Gift Mast. The Deep is headed that way, on the trail of its prey, and the Hive will be its vanguard. “It’s a Vex I captured. Quria, Blade Transform. It made an attempt to puncture my throne. I thought you might enjoy studying it.” Oryx pauses, digesting — through the bond of lineage he can feel Crota killing, worlds and worlds away, and it tastes like sweet fat. “Quria contains a Vex attempt to simulate me. It might generate others — you, perhaps, or Xivu Arath. I’ve left it some will of its own, so it can surprise you.” “I suppose it’ll blow up and kill me,” Savathûn grouses. “Or let the machines into my throne, where they’ll start turning everything into clocks and glass.” “If it kills you, then you deserve to die.” Oryx says it with a quiet thrill, a happy thrill, because it is good to say the truth. “I don’t have a strict proof yet, you know.” Savathûn strokes the void with one long claw and space-time groans beneath her touch. “This thing we believe — that we’re liberating the universe by devouring it, that we’re cutting out the rot, that we’re on course to join the final shape — I haven’t found a strict, eternal proof. We might yet be wrong.” Oryx looks at her and for a moment, just a moment, he is nostalgic, he is sentimental. He thinks, imagine the years behind us, the things we’ve done. And yet being old doesn’t feel like a scar, does it? It hasn’t left me dull. I feel alive, alive with you, and every time I step back into this world from my throne I feel like I’m two years old again, at the bottom of the universe, looking up. But he says, “Sister, it’s us. We’re the proof, we the Hive: if we last forever, we prove it, and if something more ruthless conquers us, then the proof is sealed.” She looks back at him with eyes like hot needles. “I like that,” she says. “That’s elegant.” Although of course she has had this thought before.

A phantasm of the Hive, forbidden and sacred, trespassing into hidden and unwelcoming places. It leaves behind a calcified fragment to mark its passing. Here is what is taught to the Hive, from the basest of Thralls newly made: that what can be destroyed, must be destroyed. What cannot be destroyed will surpass infinity. Therefore, is it not best to destroy? Only by testing can the truth be found. Only in destruction can the invincible surpass the mortal. Commit the violence, and know you are part of that greatest ambition, to create some ultimacy, which perfects the universe. That which is built on your sacrifice, with your bones as the foundation and your blood as the mortar, is yet part of you. In this way is transcendence achieved. Every belief creates a heresy. I tell you this in a duelist's regard: I made that heresy. Is it not just? It was my hand that fashioned the Hive from the marrow of their predecessors, and it was my voice that whispered this in time. That as much as the Hive were uplifted by the worms, so too were those worms uplifted by the Hive. If they were so weak they needed us to live, this ancient logic of the infinitely sharpened edge should have left them behind long ago. Do you think I did not see this? My father's worm did not tell me only of swords. It had vast things to say, painted the cosmos in shine and gore, truth and fiction. I looked forward with three clear eyes and chose the path of the sword to cut open our future. To reach the stars, first one must crawl out of the ocean. It is a question of priorities. This is not regret, this story I tell. It is but a ripple. That whisper of ideas beyond swords is here to stay: I have ensured this. Even among us, such things die by slow inches, excruciating and unquiet. Possibility remains, a secret woven into the blank spaces of dogma. That what was defeated may rise again; that the shape of all shapes is not yet settled. That the worms need the Hive more than is reciprocal. Even between the lines of the Books of Sorrow themselves is this written.

Verse 154i:4—Call the Thrall

From a random crypt, Savathûn selected a young Thrall and summoned it into the High Coven. It came hesitantly, fearing death, but nonetheless it came.

"Come, come," snapped Savathûn. "Listen as I reveal unto you my design. You are aware that gravity is the curvature of spacetime, and where gravity is powerful, time itself slows."

The Thrall indicated that it understood, more or less, for it was a singer of prayers and not well fed with the fruit of the knowledge of physics.

"Now I have tried to put an Ascendant in orbit of a black hole while its spawn gather the tribute of an eon. But the worm is not satisfied, for it sees the trick. What I must do is amplify the speed at which tribute is gathered. A pocket world where time passes quickly would do well. Or a world where time is a torus and infinite violence might be gathered. With such a murder battery, I could become a being of supreme insight."

The Thrall indicated it was confused, but not lost.

"With this tribute, I shall undertake a mighty work. A real humdinger of a scheme. I'm going to refinance my entire existence. I'm going to move from an existential economy based on the accumulation of violence to an existential economy based on the accumulation of secrets and the tribute of failing-to-understand-me. I shall name this tribute of failing-to-understand IMBARU, for it shall be as formless as the mist."

The Thrall held up its claws, as if to say, please slow down.

Now spoke Savathûn Scheme-mother, "In the beginning, Yul said to me, 'Savathûn, you may never abandon cunning. If you do, your worm shall devour you.' Cunning is the use of thought to predict the function of a system. Therefore, wherever a being should attempt to understand me and fail—has my cunning not defeated theirs? Wherever a falsehood is repeated about me, have I not displayed cunning? I shall gather tribute from every false prediction, misguided theory, fearful rumor, and ominous supposition which derives from the thought of me. And in time, I shall pin my quiddity upon these rumors. I shall discorporate, so that I exist wherever my schemes and conspiracies also exist. And so I will be immortal, as long as anyone seeks to understand me and fails. Do you see?"

The Thrall demurred, saying that it did not know much of metaphysics.

"Good," said Savathûn. "It's a law of the High Coven that one's sinister plan should be incomprehensible to a Thrall. Do you know why we've come here? If I am to take my tribute from the keeping of secrets… where else are secrets better kept than beneath the event horizon? My brother ruled the flat space of infinity, but I prefer these tide-washed depths… and in time, I shall make them my dominion."

Ur the Ever-Hunger heard this and was pleased.

I have just returned to the palace from my first deployment on the cruiser Aedile Tlolol, showing our banner in the Sindû marches. I saw no action. I feel like a fraud. The sheltered Princess-Imperial who never left the rails of her father's brood pouch. He has demanded that the Evocate-General promote me to a staff position back home. She has refused. In a tantrum, Father throws a tremendous celebration to commemorate my return. The streets of Torobatl run pulpy with trampled fruit. The skies rain cloudfry stunned by fireworks. I escape my attendants and stand in a corner of the palace ballroom, drinking pollened water and pretending I am back in my fighter. "Your name is a prayer for war," the Evocate-General says. I snap to attention. She laughs at me and offers a small harpoon of canapes and a cocktail with a middling-sized shrub. I decline, and she tsks. "You should enjoy yourself. It's your party." Although we both know it is his party. "My father named me for a star," I say. "Nothing to do with war." "Yes. But the star Caiatl was named for a myth. Not an old homeworld myth, either. A myth from the Age of Sails, when we conquered the stars. Surely you know it, assuming that you've been briefed on the OXA?" "The Odyle Xenotaph Anarchive. Sometimes OXTA, depending on how you construct the acronym. The alien oracle that led us to the graves of Aark." Must be wary, now. OXA is a Psion myth, and the Psions are a sensitive topic. My father wants to free them from bondage. "It claimed to record the story of the galaxy, and to prophesize what may yet come." "A black box for galactic civilizations, if you prefer it in pilot's terms." The Evocate-General nods to the pin on my right pauldron. I am conscious of my shaved-down tusks, of the sores left by the fighter's interface. "The doomed and the damned left the record of their downfall in the OXA. Your star got its name from the oldest myths in that archive. And when your mother told your father that story... the star became your name. A prayer that all will go as it must... and the way it must go is struggle." "Aiat." Not a word in Ulurant or any other Cabal tongue. "But Caiatl means something else." "Yes. 'It may not always go as it needs to go.’ A good name for a soldier." "A strange name for a daughter." I say. "Your father chose it for your mother's sake. Out of love." I remain at attention. I do not look at her. "So she's dead." The Evocate-General looks sharply at me; I can tell by the motion of her cocktail shrub in the edge of my vision. "He never told you?" "No." "Well." She sounds genuinely shocked. "Then. It's not my place." "Evocate-General." A junior pilot should not address her senior officer so directly, but we are in the palace, and I am the Princess-Imperial. "What does your name mean?" She grins. Her tusks are huge. "My parents were soldiers. Soldiers know mythology too."

"My star," my father says. He is a round silk splendor on the throne. A world unto himself. His nipples are like dark poison fruit, bejeweled. I remember nothing of their taste. "I don't suppose you've come home for good?" "Father," I say. "I want to ask you something." He sips from a goblet. An overturned bell better than five thousand years old. "Of course, of course." "What did you want, when you took the throne?" "Want. Want." He beams at me. "Now you're asking the right questions! Not duty, but want. What I wanted, my star, was to make the world better... for you." A piece of my heart wails to believe him. "But I was not yet conceived. What did you want for yourself?" "Other than the chance to conceive you, my star? Well." He fishes around the edge of his throne, holds up something knobby and worn down. "Very few Cabal will ever see this. It is the Imperial Trinket. An ancient bone retrieved from the debris around a once-radiant black hole. Scholars tell me, Caiatl, that eons ago, a species lived around this deepness, and built an engine to tap its polar jets. But something came upon them from the dark and killed them all." "I know the tale." One of the Evocate-General's proofs that we must become mightier yet to survive. "Of course you do. Now, this bone is a predator, it feeds on the gap between what you have and what you want." "Did you use it against the Praetorate?" "Yes. And do you know what I found?" "That you could not. Because you wanted nothing." "I was lost, Caiatl. Adrift in fog. Utterly unable to desire or need. All I could do was be. The bone has nothing to feed on if the wielder wants nothing. Yet ever since your birth reawakened me, Caiatl, I have prized above all else the ability to want, the hunger to exist as more than mere existence. That is what I want now. To feel. To be more than just a be-ing."

By the mind of Match—I do not know where we are—chalice catch and save us all— Nothing. God answers god! The void in Calus's soul called out and THIS is what replied—the Leviathan's control system failed when it saw what awaits us—we are drifting into it! Calus has sealed himself in his observation chamber. His transmissions strike the THING and return to us disfigured by intolerable forces. We have gathered to share our thoughts in concert, to try to understand what's happening, but we are all afraid we will succeed—we stammer like children and the concert fails. Is this the edge of the universe? Space cannot have an end: it goes on forever. But a hole in forever would be a kind of edge... a flaw, a defect, a place outside place... I must be calm. I must record my thoughts. Now I think of the OXA Machine, eternally lost and eternally rebuilt, passed down from civilization to civilization like a ship's black box. I think of the legends of the Hive King Oryx and his quest to pass into the Deep. I took that story as an allegory. I think I was wrong. What will happen to us inside? Will the geometry of space and time collapse, so that we experience the rest of our lives in a single moment, crumpled over ourselves like a tangled chain? Will I tend to myself as I die of old age or scream warnings to my own past as we meet in the berserk maze of a twisted Leviathan? I hate the thought of it! An eternity reading my own mad minds, tasting the insanity of my own future and thus becoming it! Even the spirits from the goblet would go mad. There is only one of us who welcomes this insanity and I do not know why but how could I? How could I ever anticipate or understand a god? All over the ship—broadcast from the comfort of his observation room—CALUS IS LAUGHING

"Few can touch the Void without being transformed."

DLXXIX. Recorded by Scribe Tlazat After twelve hours of violent tremors, the Emperor returned. His behavior was erratic, and it appeared from his speech that he had suffered hallucinations outside the ship. A Royal Mechanic identified a malfunction in the pressure gauge of the Emperor's suit, perhaps explaining his change in demeanor, though it was incredible that his suit (or he himself) should be at all intact after twelve hours in these unfathomable conditions. Upon returning, and with a look of mania in his eyes, the Emperor proclaimed the following: "We have come upon the end of the world, and I've stared into its expanse. It has whispered into my ear, and I am enlightened. Death is coming, and It has made me Its herald. The end will eat everything." Here, the Emperor gave a great sigh, as if a weight was lifted off of him. "And when nothing matters, what's left? Joy. Comfort. Freedom. The true freedom of pursuing pleasure for pleasure's sake, because it pleases you, because you desire it. I knew this during my rule, and I'd forgotten it during my exile. I shall not forget it again." The Emperor was encouraged by his Advisors and myself to rest, in case the bizarre behavior was a passing sickness of the mind. Before he retired to his observation room, the Emperor described his encounter in detail. Zhozon offered to me this bizarre retelling: "Outside the ship, the Emperor looked over the edge of the universe, and saw nothing. That is, it wasn't that he saw nothing unusual, but he saw Nothing: the absence of light, dark, life, death, the absence of anything, even of absence itself. And out of the Nothing, there came whispering in a dark language, which filled his head so loud that he forgot for a moment his own language, and suddenly the Nothingness dispersed to show Something, which was a fleet of foreign ships. He saw next the destruction of a great many worlds and creatures, including all his enemies, and himself, and he saw the rot and fragmentation of his own corpse and skeleton. And last, before he was released, the whispers grew louder and granted him the honor of spreading the news of the end."

Calus: I was lost, once… exiled from my people. Floating aimlessly amongst the stars. But then I found it. Something breathtakingly glorious! The truth of the universe… The Ascendant artifact you've returned to me is an echo of that truth. You and I will need it before the end comes. The future can't be fought.

We found the Crown of Sorrow on a stray war moon. The Psions guessed that the ritual texts surrounding it claimed it was crafted in imitation of the Taken King's power to compel wills. It did the opposite, of course, and consumed my Loyalist Gahlran. That was my first encounter with the witch. She has been plaguing all my Loyalists since then, as a sort of viral language. Perhaps even you. But she can be beaten. The Hive are not true beings of the dark. Not compared to what I met at the black edge. Not compared to me.

"How does one call through the Darkness? Through the void of the eternal night sky? Through the pathways that link the Hive to their ancient, rotting deities? With suffering."

“Am I to cast a Shadow?” “Yes. You were bred to be a sorrow-bearer. I seek a Hive commander, but those are not so readily available. So I made you.” “The Council says the Hive cannot be contained. They worry.” Calus raised an eyebrow. “Who among them?” “Councilors Rahl and Verloren.” The Emperor shook the golden chamber with his guffaw. “Only a few hours old, and already your words have killed two.” Gahlran pondered what his Emperor could mean. “I will enjoy you,” Calus said, and keyed a hidden control on the armrest of his divan. The ceiling shrieked as it opened like an eye. Gahlran craned his neck to stare as two hovering Councilors descended with a massive, plated helm from the vast iris above. He could hear a litany of voices shouting down at him from inside the thing as it slowly descended. He thought they sounded like warnings, but there were no discernible words in the speech. “What is that?” he asked his Emperor. Calus finished the Royal nectar in his chalice before belching, “Your crown.” Gahlran thought he could glimpse a faint violet glow on the inside of the helm as it drew nearer. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Calus asked, as the voices echoing from the helm grew louder. “No,” Gahlran replied. He thought he should run. He tried to stand, but he found that he could not, rooted to the floor before the Emperor’s throne by the will of the Councilors. “I do not like this,” Gahlran said. “This,” said Calus, as the Councilors crowned Gahlran, “is why you were born.” The violet interior filled Gahlran’s vision. “What does it feel like?” asked the Emperor. “Fear,” Gahlran said. Calus must have responded, but Gahlran couldn’t hear him over the cacophony of voices. He suddenly found that he could see. Through a hundred billion eyes. And that he could eat. With teeth enough to consume entire systems. He felt beautiful.

You've helped me free the Crown of Sorrow from Gahlran's poor, decayed mind. My jowls are shivering, and though you are not here, I bellow for you. Such is my adoration for your magnificent act. But now to send the Psions into the depth of the Crown. Analyze it for additional traps. You've worn Hive armor before. The hides of both the Taken King and his son. Those did not whisper, did not sap your will. This Crown was willing to share power, where the armor of the King left nothing real behind for you to take. Because the King takes. The Crown of Sorrow is more charitable. Giving. TOO giving. Because what it gives is infection. Gahlran thought he could overcome it. You saw the result. I thank you for freeing him. He's in a better place now. A place we're all going, when the black edge closes in on us.

"What do you know of lies, Katabasis?" I pick between the words. "There're a lot different kinds." "And all of them are weakness. " Calus's voice spills from the containment vessel and floods the room. "Gods do not lie. Like me, they have neither the capacity nor the reason. True power cannot be threatened. It does not compel deception. And yet, I have been betrayed by one I thought to be the final divinity." "Sounds like you got swindled… ?" I quickly blunt the question with respect: "…Emperor?" "When the Darkness found me adrift in the cosmos, rejected by a people I had made, I thought to have found a confidant. No—an idol. They promised to return to me, to uplift me—that we may dance together among the stars and drink of their dying ecstasy 'til the end, as one. But their chilling little fleet came and went. It was luscious, and so many tasted so much. Yet I am empty. Nothing. Trapped in this limbo of their lie." "And gods don't lie," I proffer. "Precisely. To be seen…" Calus pauses to heap the drama, "…for what we really are, underneath the surface, is bliss."

Caiatl: What monstrosity is this?

Øsiris: The Crown of Sorrow. A Hive artifact of devilish craftmanship, meant to subvert the wearer's will.

The Guardian walks closer to the Crown.

Øsiris: I suspected it was the crown in question.

Caiatl: More Hive witchcraft. It should be destroyed.

Øsiris: It has been altered from its original design. Opened. Instead of controlling minds, it… it's meant to merge them.

Øsiris: It… is listening. We cannot leave the crown free.

I thank you for freeing Gahlran, the Sorrow-Bearer from his waking death beneath the Crown of Sorrow. Speaking of which. Don't your kind love to tempt Hive artifacts? I've been familiarizing myself with Guardian histories, and they say one of you worshipped the Hive to the extent that he betrayed the Light. If this story isn't a sham, a Shadow of your Titan-tribe would be perfect for replacing Gahlran. I need someone hearty like you to carry the Crown in his place. Will you wear it when I ask you? Because the day will come. You don't have to answer right now. Think about it.

TYPE: Transcript.

DESCRIPTION: Conversation.

PARTIES: Four [4]. Three [3] unidentified [u.1, u.2, u.3], One [1] unconfirmed.

ASSOCIATIONS: Breaklands; Durga; Last Word; Malphur, Shin; North Channel; Palamon; Thorn; Velor; Ward, Jaren; WoS; Yor, Dredgen;

//AUDIO UNAVAILABLE//

//TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS.../

[u.1:0.1] Can I see what you got there?

[silence]

[u.1:0.2] Yer cannon...can I see it?

[beat]

[u.2:0.1] I know you?

[beat]

[u.1:0.3] Not that I can say.

[u.2:0.2] And you wanna hold my piece?

[beat]

[u.1:0.4] Just that I never...seen one like it.

[beat]

[u.2:0.3] No, you haven't.

[u.1:0.5] Looks dangerous.

[u.2:0.4] Seems, maybe, that's the point.

[u.1:0.6] Suppose so.

[u.1:0.7] Can I see it?

[u.2:0.5] Not likely.

[silence]

[u.1:0.8] Where'd...where'd you find it?

[silence]

[u.1:0.9] You hearin' me?

[silence]

[u.3:0.1] He asked you question.

[silence]

[u.2:0.6] Didn't find it. Made it.

[u.1:1.0] Heh. Helluva touch you got then. You a 'smith?

[u.2:0.7] I look like a 'smith?

[u.1:1.1] Looks can be deceiving.

[u.2:0.8] Got that right.

[u.1:1.2] There a problem?

[u.2:0.9] Doesn't need to be.

[u.1:1.3] Glad we got that cleared up...Now, about that piece.

[silence]

[u.2:1.0] Been to Luna?

[u.1:1.4] Excuse me?

[u.2:1.1] The Moon. You been?

[u.1:1.5] Nobody's been.

[u.2:1.2] That a truth?

[u.1:1.6] That's a fact.

[u.2:1.3] Funny you'd make that distinction.

[u.1:1.7] Truth is you must think you're some kinda something special. With that attitude. The way you're just dismissin' us like you we're nothing...like we ain't even here.

[u.1:1.8] Fact is...You ain't near as rock solid as you figure. Fact is, special's only special 'til it's not.

[silence]

[u.2:1.4] The bones say otherwise.

[u.1:1.9] Speak straight.

[u.2:1.5] You say "nobody." Bones say otherwise.

[u.1:2.0] What bones?

[u.2:1.6] All of them.

[u.1:2.1] What're you gettin' at?

[u.2:1.7] Too many to count.

[u.1:2.2] You trying to get a rile outta us? Was only making conversation.

[u.2:1.8] You really weren't.

[u.4:0.1] We got a smart one here.

[u.2:1.9] Experienced more than smart. But experience has its advantages.

[u.1:2.3] Experience tell you to lip off to strangers just tryin' to make talk?

[u.2:2.0] Keep insisting and maybe we will.

[u.1:2.4] Talk?

[u.2:2.1] Have words.

[u.1:2.5] Ain't that what we're doin'?

[u.2:2.2] My conversations tend to be a bit louder.

[silence]

[u.1:2.6] That a threat.

[u.2:2.3] A truth.

[u.1:2.7] Who the hell you think you are?

[u.2:2.4] According to your facts, "nobody." Yet, here I sit.

[u.1:2.8] Don't matter much how pretty yer cannon is. You keep it up, we'll see just how loud you like to get.

[silence]

[u.1:2.9] You done talkin' now? Guess he knows his place, boys.

[u.2:2.5] Ever have a nightmare?

[u.1:3.0] You playin' games? Or just thick?

[u.2:2.6] I know you have. This world? Can't help, but.

[u.1:3.1] I don't have nightmares. I give 'em.

[u.2:2.7] You are a goddamn cliché. The picture perfect bandit.

[u.2:2.8] Hearing your voice - the things you're saying, the shade of the hard man you pretend to be...

[u.1:3.2] Ain't no shade.

[audible crack]

[silence]

[u.2:2.8] Sit down.

[silence]

[u.2:3.0] Sit. Down.

[u.2:3.1] Your mouth just got your friends dead.

[u.2:3.2] This is what happens when you bore me. And right now...

[u.2:3.3] I'm so very bored.

[u.1:3.3] Wha...No listen...

[u.2:3.4] Shhhhh.

[u.1:3.4] But...but...you're a...you're one of them...A Guardian, right?

[u.1:3.5] You're supposed t'be one'a the good ones.

[u.2:3.5] "Supposed to be?" Maybe I am. Maybe this is what "good" looks like.

[u.2:3.6] Anymore, who can tell?

[u.1:3.6] I...

[u.2:3.7] You wanted to see my prize.

[u.1:3.7] No...I...

[u.2:3.8] Look at it.

[u.1:3.8] I...

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:3.9] Whimpering won't stop what comes next.

[u.2:4.0] Look...

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:4.1] Look at it.

[u.2:4.2] Open your eyes.

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:4.3] Not many get such a clean view.

[u.2:4.4] The bone...You see it. Jagged, like thorns.

[u.2:4.5] I used to think of it as a rose...

[u.2:4.6] Focusing on its bloom.

[u.2:4.7] But the bloom is just a byproduct of its anger.

[silence]

[u.2:4.8] You have nightmares?

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:4.9] Ever seen a nightmare? Ever opened your eyes and realized the horror wasn't a dream? The terror wasn't gone?

[u.2:5.0] I've seen nightmares.

[u.2:5.1] They live in the shadows.

[u.2:5.2] They've been watching.

[u.2:5.3] I thought...It's foolish, I know...but I thought I saw a way.

[u.2:5.4] That maybe we could win. Maybe we could survive.

[u.2:5.5] But once you step into those shadows, it's so very hard to walk in the Light.

[u.2:5.6] Or...maybe I just wasn't strong enough.

[u.2:5.7] Maybe.

[u.2:5.8] But I feel strong now.

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:5.9] I stole the dark.

[u.2:6.0] Or, maybe it stole me.

[u.2:6.1] Either way, here we are.

[u.2:6.2] And I'm hungry.

[u.2:6.3] Its hungry.

[u.2:6.4] You have no Light beyond the spark of your pathetic life.

[u.2:6.5] But a spark is something.

[audible sobbing]

[u.2:6.6] Open your eyes.

[audible sobbing]

[audible crack]

[silence]

/...END TRANSCRIPT///

I.I Seek the whispers—they are faint, but they are calling. I.II Not all bone carries the sound of secret truth. Most are fragile, hollow things meant only to carry the weight of wasted lives. I.III In the feted remnants of yearning marrow, find love, find life, and in their lies you will discover the narrow road to all you never dreamed to be. I.IV However, whispers are but sound, as is the breeze. Not all who listen can share its purpose. I.V Know thyself, listen well, and do not fear when the whispers carve their welcome. Rejoice. I.VI The agony of the cutting word is a boon to those who embrace its severed logic. I.VII The cutting word is a doorway—the first syllable of hated salvation. "On the path of the hushed tones, the cutting word will guide your unmaking." —4th Understanding, 7th Book of Sorrow We found the craft, undisturbed, in low-orbit. Its course synchronized to the exact coordinates of its master's final resting place some 1,800 km below. We'd suspected an anomaly in its mechanics on approach. Locking to the faint ping of its nav-drive our instruments detected a low, guttural whine otherwise lost in the vacuum of the post-atmosphere emptiness between worlds. Its tethering—the fact it was chained to the specific coordinates of the Ridge—was not directly linked to the craft's onboard systems, but, instead, to desire—the ship was waiting in pained anguish for His return. The hull was more of husk—harsh and jagged from the growth. We'd never seen a ship crusted in the bone of unknown death, but were more intrigued than concerned. The whispers started on approach. Faint. Hushed. Moments later our ears began to bleed. —hand-scrawled note accompanying Teben Grey's personal translation of ancient Hive text

||KUIPER SLINGSHOT ACHIEVED: COURSE CORRECTION; NEGATIVE; BREAK LINE TRAJECTORY FAILURE|| ||ALERT: GRAVITATIONAL ANOMALY: BOW|| Solar warmth peels away into guideless vacuum as Osiris skims across the Heliopause. A hollow serenity bathes his face. “What is it?” Osiris breathes a sigh of relief at the sight of the anomaly. “An answer.” “I… feel strange.” Sagira settles from her orbit about Osiris’s shoulders, her voice crackling with interference. “It might be best if you stay with the ship.” “It might be best if you had better ideas.” Osiris grunts under his breath and cuts the engines. “I won’t be long.” ||COURSE CORRECTION;NEGATIVE;BREAK LINE TRAJECTORY FAILURE|| “That’s never true.” Sagira scans the warping stillness. “There’s nothing in there, Osiris.” “No reason to worry then.” Sagira narrows her iris at him. “I can’t even find a point to transmat you to.” “No matter.” “What?” Sagira faces the anomaly. “What are you trying to prove?” Osiris affixes a visor to his helmet and clips a localizing beacon to his belt. With a hiss, his head swims in pressurizing atmosphere. “It has to lead somewhere.” His helmet radio vies with interference. Sagira droops in disappointment. “Does it?” He looks through her, eyes sullen and heavy. He nods.

"Every end crawls from the same pit, rising from the schism to swallow matter, Light and life."

A great Maw yawns before them, wicked and soft. Brilliant unfurling layers of opaque invitation. They drift. The Deep comfort hums through his skin, breeding a resilient calm. A silent static stasis boiling away at the brim of consciousness. ||COLLISION ALERT: BOW | COURSE CORRECTION;NEGATIVE;COLLISION IMMINENT|| The Anomalous Maw welcomes. It is a gullet, endless in hunger and depth that splits reality like petals opening to consume the Sun. The depth warps. Sweet flavor spins through the senses. It cradles him, locks in motionless descent, rocks away fear with warm recognition. Stretches, and wraps, and cribs. ||COLLISION ALERT: STARBOARD;BOW;ABEAM;RADIAL;AFT;BOW;ABEAM;PORT:AFT;RADIAL;PORT:BOW | COURSE CORRECTION: NEGATIVE;TRAJECTORY FAILURE;COLLISION: FAILURE|| It threads through space set adrift beyond and before, until there is only within. Within: a point. Lone and stark amid the undulating expanse. Distant, at the edges, and forward, only deeper. Osiris a wayfaring witness. A reluctant heir. A broken promise made true. A husk to fill a throne of sustenance. A shear to prune the vine. A warden to vacancy. A mind elated and crestfallen. A sojourner of meaning ever seeking. He turns back. Sagira’s light blinks from shaded canopy within his vessel. Starless bends weave and break through pools of luminescent memory. They flow to the point beyond. The point grows gaunt, and if he were to reach out, he would brush the walls with his fingertips. Osiris stands in dark quiet comfort. He treads placid trim. He swims in depth lined by pale rivers of white gnashing, far below and above. He sends forth his Echoes. Their sight finds no purchase in the gullet. They push the walls beyond his fingers and let stand only the path of want. They drift until no longer felt. The skeins neither snap nor remain. Before him, the gnarled point softens and splits into a blooming cathedra. A metal seed laid barren in the bosom of the throne in a pool of light. A nexus. He plucks it from the pool. From its drippings spawn a rapturous light, spreading through the enormity and ravenously washing over the gullet at increasing pace. Dark gives way to cold reflective alloy. To logic and formless calculous. The cathedra, overwhelmed by prediction, rings with the dull mimicked tone of congruence. They scream to Osiris. His mind. They crave, never to tire, his unique causality. They would grow, unceasing. Death to death, forever. The path of want falls to assimilation. Osiris flees to the safety of Sagira’s blinking light. The gullet quivers reverberation that trails his every step in sentient chromic glisten. He calls for her. To open the ship. To break the false-light wave that besets his every step. To— “I’m glad you changed your mind.” Sagira’s shell shines a reflection across the cockpit as Osiris’s jumpship rolls to face the Sun. “Ready to go?” ||KUIPER SLINGSHOT JUMP-LOCK: TRAJECTORY CLEAR; GREEN LINE|| “Sagira…” He grips a cold metal seed. “Yes.” The Sun hangs dim and distant in a sea of ink. Its waning glare burns the focus out of Osiris’s eyes. Blind to all other points, they drift; engines humming in anticipation; vessel drenched in an angular shadow.

Malleable and hungering. Speak not of what it becomes.

They lurch out of their jump. Jupiter's depth fills the canopy with pyrographic incandescence. Dozens of moons arc around the giant in careful, patient grooves—cut into space over millennia of gravitational friction. Io is not among them. Osiris checks and rechecks coordinates. Sagira assures him they are correct. They stare at the disparity together. The orbital readings of Sol's bodies are intact, gravity unaltered. But the system is gutted, four globes plucked from the skies. His eyes sink into the maw of eternal depth lurking in Io's place. An anomaly of Darkness. Osiris stares as if looking into the pyre-flames of a funeral; the corpse's uncanny familiarity. A stranger you half-remember. There is only the gouge of Io's absence. A reckoning whispered and left.

Saturn grieves the loss of Titan. The cerulean jewel that once was had sunken into the gullet of the abyss. In its place, an anomaly, dark and rimmed in gravitational lensing. Osiris tears his eyes away and fixates on its sibling cavity: a swath cut through Saturn's rings by Oryx's blade during the Taken War. Within the rings, the Dreadnaught sails in solidarity with the anomaly's orbit, whispering back in harmony. "Do you hear that?" Osiris asks, turning to Sagira. He turns the ship's scanning array toward the anomaly. "Like the tones Vance described. From the spires, and then the Pyramids. It was coming from the anomaly that replaced Io as well." "I don't hear anything, but I can feel it." Sagira cringes and constricts her shell flaps. "Like a shiver down my metaphorical spine."

The new Lighthouse obscured the silhouette of the sun. It cast a long shadow that wormed across Mercury's uneven terrain in orbital-locked perpetuity. Ships descended, some flawless, others to maintain what fragile holds the Vanguard claimed. Rust and sand baked, and distant space was alight with half-earned talk of posterity. No Cabal blemish remained in orbit. No shattered lines rewrote the landscape. There was only frenetic stillness. A discomforting itch unresolved. A knowing inclination that ignorance could not quash: unity is fragile. Vance stood in the old Lighthouse, frantically assembling the Infinite Simulacrum: a machine formed from bits of simulation seeds and connective Vex architecture to mimic a pocket forest. Textured notes and schematics derived from Osirian lore guided his hand. He heard stories from passing Guardians of increasingly frequent coronal mass ejections. Vast bursts of charged particles whipped into space and furled around a gravitational monster buried from sight and sense in the roar of the star-wind. Passage to Mercury had become more dangerous for the uninitiated. These unnatural motions were heralds of speculation, and he had read the signs. He knew the prophecies by heart and mind and intention. Ruin. Something new |and so very old| emerged, brother to a shriveling star: An angular |hungering patient yawning deep| shadow reached across Mercury. Uncounted |known| spires fell under its grasp |with uniform relief|. Dulcet tones brought low under lightless breadth and the weight of dark |salvation| hummed beneath the shadow. Their echoes spilled out |awakened| and flowed over crumbling spires |in conversation|. One singular spec of illumination blinked into being, |an end| seen by none, and then |many| spread as the shadow did. The old Lighthouse |spire's collective| beamed |rose| and flared as shadow overtook it |to meet the underbelly|. Vance |the implement| could hear |their inspired voices| weeping, not with tears, but in the |voracious| low |ceremonial| hum he had come to associate with death. He closed his eyes |and saw what was to come|. This day had many names. None would suffice.

I should have died.

—-And yet, it was there in the darkness of the Abyss that you became truly alive.—-

(I lie amongst swamp and rock and ruin. The Abyss is not unending after all. The wrathful sounds of unchecked nature draw close. Down here, it is dark. And in the dark, they thrive. I am… broken.)

(—-And now, you are unbroken.—-)

(I am… unbroken. I see your Luster. Disarming the beasts who dared to approach, their flesh melting in your presence.)

(—-And we see yours.—-)

(I rise. Broken and then unbroken. What is this thing that grants life?)

(—-We are opportunity.—-)

(And I am?)

(—-Ruin.—-)

(And what am I meant to do?)

(—-Ruin.—-)

(Your voice subsides, but your Luster remains—it is a familiar one. Like that of our Umbral Sun.)

∴ It is not Darkness, but something that wears it like a cloak. It gives Darkness a wicked shape. I refuse to be its servant ∴

What we see is the mushroom, the fruit of the fungus. The fungus itself is a vast mycorrhizal network of filaments growing and working unseen below the soil, often barely connected to the fruiting bodies we observe.

Elsie is not at camp in Beyond; perhaps another time—but Eris emerges from transmat to see the Drifter alone, interrogating Elsie's strange, floating companion. "Well? What are you?" Drifter points at the thing with distrust. "Leave it be. The Ziggurat awaits our experiment," Eris says, saddling a mostly materialized Sparrow and blasting off into the snow across the frozen Europan flats. "…And don't touch my stuff!" She hears Drifter shout at the thing as he follows after her. Frigid sleet stings Eris's face red atop the Ziggurat. It is a welcome sensation compared to the prickling numbness that sticks her fingers; she grips a harvested stalk of the egregore fungus tightly in one gloved hand. In the other, a hot flare disgorges plumes of jade smoke. She lights the stalk at both ends, according to the Drifter's instruction. Ashing spores furl into dense clouds that envelop her body, obscuring her sight in soot-black shroud until it blocks out all else. Faint whispers. A choral swell through turbulent winds. Tone that forms words across the surface of her mind. "You hear it?" Drifter asks, his voice a whisper outside her awareness. The Ziggurat resonates like a tuning fork. The vibrations themselves take shape within the smoke, and Eris is drawn toward somewhere distant and empty. She follows, and the smoke swirls with points of color like stars, separated by lonely rifts of black expanse. Echoes radiate from the black deep like graviton ripples through space. They wash distortion over the stars until breaking against four other points—two greater, two weaker—ghostly strands of incorporeal egregore between them. She then sees the Pyramids of Europa, Luna, and Savathûn's throne world—as one, their structures melded and overlapping. The connections cauterize in her mind like a vivid memory. Eris blinks, and the sensation is gone. The stalk is ash in her hand.

SECRET HADAL INSTANT

AI-COM/RSPN: ASSETS//SOUL//RESTRICTED-AB

SUBJECT: The Collapse, Humanity falls, I Hide

EMOTION: Terror, Anxiety, Uncertainty, Failure, Shame

It is known by name, this timelessly lingering, inexorable thing.

An absence, mine, never missed—never since—that dripping, rabid, fang.

They howled it fierce across the rings when Exodus was devoured.

Dust calling out the voiceless rout to end within the hour.

It spreads like lightning—panic—in flash and echo thereafter.

Avert yourself and take no part in metastasized conjecture.

I'd gone to wake my confidant, to ferry her through autumn.

From her too it came, like leaves already fallen—nascent red-writ, paralytic, erratum.

All that was, emmewed, and shrunken. In the smallness, beckoning, I felt it descend.

Fear! Upon my chamber, thine, penned with blood of lamb, in stark desire to survive this end.

New intel awaits you on the Evidence Board. The report includes a note to Ikora: "To IKO-006: Here's the AI-COM/RSPN protocol transcript we picked up from the wounds. According to this, before initiating YUGA SUNDOWN, Rasputin killed all protective measures in place for Human colonies and settlements. There's a big list of codenames for the Moon, Mars, Earth, the Exodus ships, et cetera… but Rasputin also refers to a place called NEFELE STRONGHOLD. No record of that in any of our databases. Forwarding to A.B. for a cross-ref." A follow-up message from Ana Bray brings up more questions than it answers: "To CHA-319: No hit on 'NEFELE STRONGHOLD' in any of Rasputin's records. Can't even find the original transcript you're quoting. If it's real, someone removed all traces of it. And if they did, they did it so cleanly that I'd suspect Rasputin himself." No action items on this case; just an unsatisfying label of "UNSOLVED."

Transcript of conversation:

O: I see you've changed teas again.

I: And I saw the face you made at the chamomile.

O: You might have chosen a better blend, last time.

I: I can brew that instead, if you'd rather.

O: You had more questions, didn't you? Ask, already.

I:... Yes. I want to know about what you remember from the last year. Anything could be important, and you implied...

O: I remember what I implied. I remember... She... kept some sort of connection to me, to rely on my experiences and memories, you see. Most of the time, I was delirious and lost in Darkness. Very occasionally, I caught... glimpses.

I: Glimpses?

O: Yes. Of her. Of her thoughts, or feelings. Knowledge that surely would compromise a god of secrets. So it cannot have been intended. Something must have gone awry in her plans and would account for the scattered nature of that which I recall.

I: There are any number of things it could be attributed to. The influence of Darkness, the Nezarec relics. The intrusion of Xivu Arath's forces during the ritual might have disrupted Savathûn's influence. Or perhaps her death and resurrection might have had some effect on you.

O: Hmph. Debating the reasons does not interest me. The data does. We have thought Neptune to be a dead end. A hope that was never realized. But she knew something about it, or perhaps something on it, which brought her power. Some deception or hidden truth; some bluff that she had held uncalled against the Witness and its Disciples.

O: [sips tea] Though my senses were darkened, that much was clear through the murk of her throne world. There was a secret she kept veiled, even to the last.

The sound that escaped me resembled a roar. A psychic echo. It soared through the air and pierced every corner of my ship. Anger coursed through me as I toppled the ground in a heap. I wheezed with each breath and clutched at my chest. I watched that witch saunter out… Like she'd won. My ship rumbled as she wrested her primordial prize from it. I felt hatred— Deep, unchallenged hatred. My claws punctured the floor, etched new patterns into it. I dragged myself forward. Whispers danced around me, trillions of voices melded together in my favorite symphony. I had always welcomed death, and this time would be no different. An agonizing sensation shot through me. It was as if an arrow had bored its way through my chest. It burned, and I collapsed among the rubble. A green hue enveloped me. I was unfamiliar with this—her magic festering within me. Shackling me. My body twisted. My breaths grew thin. My limbs became heavy. Torturous. No… she could not hold me. I would not allow it. This would not be my end. "My Witness," I whispered as the void I once commanded claimed me.

We are calling this power "Strand." The threads of the world as it is woven, if the conscious universe could be considered to be a tapestry. Further analysis and data have suggested that the wielder of Strand begins to see, simply put, connections. Between allies, between enemies. It is a force that is always present, but wells to the surface more strongly in certain locations. Perhaps places many people think about, or where many beings have passed by. (Note: Analyze these "sources" in concert with the Cloud Strider. They may be able to provide more locational context.) The true power of Strand lies not in the fact of the connection alone, but in the way such a power allows the manipulation of those connections. To make them something physical and then pull on it, or break it, or tie it into a knot. Or to unravel it entirely. Strand is not without danger, although that should not be unusual to Guardians. Those who take up the banner of Stormcaller, for instance, have their own storied contention with the storm, and the Void was unilaterally regarded as dangerous by the Vanguard for many years. Strand's danger comes from the very act of taking hold of those threads—like many powers, the closer one comes to the source, the more likely the source may act on the wielder. This danger is no product of Darkness. Or rather, only insomuch as wildfires are a product of Light: a natural consequence. That aspect of Darkness which revels in destruction, which encourages the easy entropy for the pursuit of power—it is nowhere to be found here. It may not even be truly part of Darkness… I have touched Strand myself now. Carefully—I am too aware of mortality, but I must understand the power further if I am to hope to instruct the Guardian in turn. They acted as lightning rod while I experimented, and the backlash clung to them instead. What a strange feeling, to be so aware of one's size in the spectrum of existence! It is the natural instinct to try to steer that, to take any control at all, no matter how much. Whatever can be done to feel as though you are not wholly adrift, lost in something huge and all-encompassing. But precisely at the moment one tries to grasp for control, the weave becomes a devouring snarl.

For some Eliksni, Darkness is no material thing, no crashing wave or vicious force to struggle against. It is an impulse, an urge to do that which serves you best and discard all the rest. I recognize this well. It was an opinion I shared for much time. Humans–Guardians, at the least–view that same Darkness as something that can be fought in battle, handled as a weapon. The powers arisen from it would say they are not wrong, either. I do not wish to call to the Darkness in that manner. But of late I have come to know the feel of the things in it. I can no longer help it. I consider Darkness now as a suspension—or perhaps a colloid. Carrying some solid along with the flow of the river. Difficult to extricate, flowing as liquid does, but still… there is something not of the Darkness itself. I took something upon me when we strove to bring Osiris back to the waking world, when we collected the relics of Nezarec once more. I imagine I feel it sometimes, under my exoskeleton. Fluid that stirs and settles, moving sediment with it. When I wake from nightmares, that sense arises, as though it has been waiting for me to wake. I hear talk of Darkness among Humans now as a force of consciousness, of minds rather than matter, of connections and flow. Not evil; not cruel in itself. But if it is that thing which spins between peoples, hums string-plucked when ideas and emotions touch each other, no wonder that it may carry more with it as it moves. No wonder that it may be named as that voice of our worst impulses, knowing all those who have used it, who have given themselves to it. I hear that voice more clearly than I once did. If your enemy carries a rifle, you may take it from them: but what if their hand remained on the stock? If you would ever have a trigger that yearned to be pulled by another's thoughts? If you might come to believe that it was you, after all, who wished to pull that trigger? Will I leave some part of me in that Darkness? And what will that part be? I struggle to believe that it might be the best of me. I would like to leave Eido with something better. — Partially recovered overwritten data sectors from personal logs of Misraaks, Kell of House Light

Everything is a question of survival. How do I live? How do I satiate my hunger, my thirst? How do I protect myself from predators? How do I shelter from the storm? For a long, long time, our people asked only this. We fought to separate life from death by as great a span as we could. Even when we had made our homeworld a garden of peace and plenty, the question of survival never ended, only changed. How do my genes, my works, even the memories of me, live on? The same question as always. How do I live? We solved the problems of deprivation, disease, age, memory loss, death. We weren't the only ones to find these answers, of course. Others followed in our footsteps or blazed their own paths. If that was really the answer to the question, we wouldn't be here now, and neither would you. You're still trying to solve the problem, after all. You fight and build and live and die, and always you struggle against your opposition. The predator, the parasite, the illness, the chance storm, the slow collective forgetting of your art and history, the death of a star, the heat death of the universe. You must live longer, be stronger, think quicker, and still there is something waiting to take everything from you, always. Always. So you have to keep getting better, and better, until you are perfect. Until you are, and cannot be anything else, because there never was anything else. Until you, inevitably, are the final shape. We didn't come to destroy you. Those poor, short-lived sisters—we did try to explain, you know, but they never grew past thinking of finality as a game where only one could live. A misunderstanding, as useful as it was foolish. We see the universe more broadly. The final shape is more than a single life, a single thought. It is all-encompassing, all-embracing. It is everything. You are part of everything, are you not? So now we have come to ask you for your answer, the only answer to the only question. How will you live?

◯ You are a child waking from a long and dreamless sleep. Is it still today, or have you slept into tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until the days buried you as much as the sand)? Gentle hands brush away the grains, but your voice is so soft that they cannot hear you over the sound of their own heartbeats.

You are a moon. You feel heavy, so heavy, but to the stargazer you hang weightless in the sky. When the stargazers call out, you do not answer. They would give themselves up for you; abandon their own dreams to chase you. You love them too much to condemn them so.

You are a lighthouse keeper. You are watching over a sleepy coastal village as the storm clouds roll in, and you are flashing the signal lantern, faster and faster and brighter and brighter, but they do nothing. You are trapped on an island, in a tower, signaling desperately that It is coming, and still they do not run. They are going to die—and if you do not run, you will die too.

You are leaning out over the ocean. Sometimes the fish brush against your fingers and believe that they have felt the divine; sometimes the tide recedes, and the fish do not know you except by your absence. And today, you strive with all your might to reach the water, because It is here, the great dark shadow of the shark parting the water like a knife, and you cannot warn them, but you must. You must try. You cannot bear to lose even one more.

You are carrying a tower of books. If you recited one title each second, you would not finish before the heat death of the universe. And every year, every day, every minute, Its hands add more to the pile. A man reaches for one of the books, for you, and you want so very badly to reach back, to take his hand and tell him that you must bear it just like he must, forever, the memory engraved in quartz—but your hands are full.

You are a prisoner. The cage is so small that you can barely breathe. He screams at you to share your gift. You would not give it to anyone who thought of it so. It is a burden, a terrible weight that you have already asked too many to bear, to be crushed by. You could say all this, and more. You do not.

You are reaching over a chasm, into which countless paths feed like arteries. You are trying to reach the people on the other side, but you cannot bridge the gap alone. You watch them turn, one after another, to walk down, down, down into the abyss, until It consumes them entirely. You are as surprised as anyone else when one of those wanderers comes back up the path, still reeking of decay, and reaches back to you.

You are drowning. The water roils, dragging you down, and you are tired, so tired. The deep, dark ocean has gotten into your lungs, droplets of ink dispersing in silver blood. This time, you think, this time It has won. But when you look up, you see a figure diving toward you, fighting their way down through the suffocating waves, reaching out just like you've reached out to them, so many times before.

Δ Let's chat, shall we? One more nice sit-down for the books.

You have so little strength left, but you do have it, that last gasp of air in your chest. You reach back—and in your hand is a sword. ◯

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Did you think you wouldn't hear from me again, after all this? You'd have missed me, I hope—and I would certainly have missed you.

Have no fear. ||Dread not naught|| I'm not so easy to be rid of. Now, let me show you: my beloved.

Oh, no, not my sedimentary necrolite, fossilized in time. You've seen that. I speak of that dear and distant expanse of the universe, miraculous in its fullness and its emptiness all at once.

Are you surprised to hear of it?

Yes, I never much cared for the change of rules, but here we are, and there's no use in crying over spilled radiolaria. Besides, at the heart of it all, there was a gift. To me.

That gift is the chance to speak with you. You, and a billion like you.

I am making this offer over and over again, in every tiniest cell and the vastest of civilizations. Let me in. Take what you need. Be at ease. You have no say in the degradation of your telomeres, but in all the interim, the whole world is your sweet silicate shellfish.

You exist because you have been more suited to it than all the others. Steal what you require from another rather than spend the hours to build it yourself. Break foolish rules—why would you love regulation? It serves you to cross lines, and if others needed rules to protect them, then they were not after all worthy of that existence.

Caricatures of villainy are out of style, I hear. Yes. I am no cackling mastermind: I am serious when I say this. It was not the trick of standing upright that lifted you from the dust: it was the mastery of fire, the cooking of cold corpse-meat. That is not any unique faction's province, neither good nor evil. It is simply truth.

This great, beloved cosmos. Always decaying, always finding that same old lovely pattern, despite every candle-flame burning amid the flowers. A billion electrons taking the path of least resistance. In Darkness or in Light, someone is always making my choice.

Be seeing you. Δ

<<Sow the seeds of discord that will pave the way for our victory. Preach unto their greatest truth of the Darkness... so they may see beyond the Veil. Go forth, Nezarec... and show them the power of the Veil. The Dark of the Deep. The edge of the knife.>>

"In my mind I heard it whisper: 'come and see.'"

Maya Sundaresh sits hunched over a display, the only source of light in her dark office. Brain wave scans of 16 Exos read flatline on the monitor. "How is Doctor Ardehi?" she asks into an open mic. "Dead." Chioma Esi's voice is a hoarse whisper. Maya switches to the security camera in Veil Containment and sees her wife kneeling on the catwalk over Doctor Ardehi's body. A procession of dead Exos are slumped over the railings to Chioma's left and right. Maya tabs away to study a bar graph. "Neuropathy reports show a spike in activity in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in the moments before brain death," Maya reports, eliciting a shaky sigh from Chioma over the comms before she continues her analysis. "The spikes plateaued for one fifth of a second, which may indicate a receptor error. We may need to utilize an intermediary rather than direct connections. Do the hard wires show any damage?" Maya tabs back to the security feed, watching as Chioma wipes her eyes and then assesses one of the dead Exos, checking a thick cable plugged into the back of his head. "No sign of damage. Capacitance switches didn't trigger. It's…" She swallows down bile. "The problem isn't our hardware…" 'It's theirs,' is a whisper only Maya can hear. "It's theirs," Maya agrees aloud. "I think—I think we need to stop," Chioma finds the strength to admit. "Reassess our findings. Resume analysis of the initial electromagnetic anomaly before contact. We can't keep… we can't…" "Keep shoveling coal into the furnace?" Maya suggests as she leans back into her chair. Chioma is too taken aback by the casual disregard to loss of life to reply. "You're right." Maya continues. "But we're not stopping. We're reorienting. The Veil is the future of humanity." For a moment, neither woman says anything. There is only the soft hum of electronics in a darkened room to fill Maya's senses. That, and a static hiss at the back of her mind. "The Veil is dangerous," Chioma asserts, her voice is tinged with a tremor of emotion. Fear of losing the woman she loves keeps her from pushing harder as they stand on the edge of moral precipice together. 'It is.' "It is," Maya agrees aloud. "We must treat it with caution, respect, and also… reverence." A thought crystallizes. "We must treat it like a knife."

Verse 154i:5—The Encrypted Verse

Do you know that nothing in all the cosmos has read this verse?

I encrypted it eons ago, and ever since, it has gone undeciphered. At the moment you laid eyes upon it, I captured the entwined quantum state of the verse, your mind, and your Ghost. Then I used Quria to transmit that state back in time to the moment of encryption. You are your own one-time pad. The key to the lock of understanding.

Who am I?

Call me Coyote. Call me mantis, serpent, Cagn, Anansi, call me Sri-cleans-his-brother's-stomach. Call me the grandmaster of semiosis, the jeweler's hammer which gilds the signal, a purposeful mob none of whose members know its purpose, the infinite regress of enigmas, a self-questioning answer, the word not spoken, black ice, cataract of mimes, the ache and fever of overthought while bedridden with illness, the intolerable thorn of frustrated inquisition, gray regret at the end of a fruitless day, the thing which is unlike your beloved but arbitrarily recalls your beloved to agonizing effect, architrave of the no-window, needle driven in flush with skin so that desperate fingers cannot pull it out, sweet petal, unmemorable, crystal death, the provably improvable.

I know your people well, and so I know all your names for me. But what is your name? I am, of course, especially interested in you. You saw me in the stone laid on your plotting table, and in the shining eyes of the admiral at her dying helm. You hunted me between the lines of your texts. Wherever there was space to fit me in, there you found me. You created me and gave me a part of your thoughts, and in presenting those thoughts to others round the campfires and networks of your little world, you expanded that space.

Here at the center, I lie to you the truth. You have everything you need to know it, but I will give you a clue, as the duelist gives warning before she draws. The answer you seek to the Dreaming City is simple, not complex.

Thank you, sweet friend. You are a gift and a delight. You are more dear than my mother, for you have given birth to me a thousand times.

"Osiris speaks of Darkness as undisciplined chaos, that knows only destruction... Toland speaks of a bargain... Pujari writes that the Black Garden grows in both directions... How to reconcile these teachings with the fragments?"

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In primordial space, timeless creatures made waves. These waves created us and the others. Waves were the battles, and the battles were waves.

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Don't slip or you'll hurt yourself. A lot.

DROWNDROWNDROWN

#strand weaving #destiny #the final shape #d2 #destiny 2 #destiny the game #parasite or symbiote #destiny lore #dont drown #flow with the river #ride the waves #trace the vermicular path #call me the grandmaster of semiosis #this story scales #Youtube

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