by Various
A great moment is coming, Splendid Dust had said here, when he was striding beside Bornstellar many years ago, proudly pointing out the art composed of spent slipspace flakes. Bornstellar looked at him now and thought he had never seen anyone so beaten down.
“The amphitheater is ahead,” Splendid Dust murmured. “I don’t know what it currently looks like, but once . . .” His voice trailed off.
Bornstellar met Glory’s eyes. He recalled a floating bowl connected to the main structure by little-used ferries and pretty bridges; platforms, a massive covering dome, and gently moving orbs displaying the twelve great systems of the early Forerunners.
Pomp trumps security, the Didact’s presence, then so freshly in his thoughts, had warned him. He took that warning to heart now and adjusted the grip on his rifle. Up ahead, according to the incomplete data fed to him by his armor, the way was—
He blinked. Nothing.
“My armor—” the voices began, but Bornstellar waved them to silence.
“Mine too,” he said, and the others all nodded. At least the life-support systems were holding steady. For now. “We are expected,” he said grimly. “We must focus on the task at hand.”
“Head for the area where the platforms were,” Splendid Dust said. “Below is the waiting chamber, where the councilors hid during the battle.”
“Where they locked out others seeking safety,” Trial said coldly.
“Yes,” Splendid Dust replied. “But beyond that is the entrance to the Mysterium.”
“And you have the key?” Chant asked.
“I have all the keys,” Splendid Dust replied with sadness.
“Let’s go,” Bornstellar said. He shined his light along the glittering walls until he spotted the faint outline of a hatch.
“That will take us to the prime seats,” Splendid Dust said. He paused, looking at each of them in turn. “This may be the finest action the Forerunners ever take. I regret that there will be no one to tell the story—whether or not we succeed.”
“I do not enjoy stories,” Glory said bluntly. “Let us go and restore the Domain.”
And removing a pulse grenade, Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn tossed it toward the hatch door.
Chant-to-Green was prepared for the theater of battle. Given the gradual reduction of her armor’s efficiency, she anticipated it locking up on her at any moment. But none of those things happened.
The second they ran through the opening into the amphitheater, illumination flooded her vision, so bright it made her wince. A roaring sound met her ears. But it was all wrong. It wasn’t the angry cries of the redesigned crawlers, or the bellow of the outraged Organon—
—Abaddon—
—it was voices, calling out in a language that, this time, she understood. And when her dazzled gaze cleared, she saw the speakers.
“Forerunners!” Stone Songs cried. But he was wrong. Not just Forerunners: humans, San’Shyuum, all the sentient races whose once-teeming numbers had been so terribly reduced filled the boxes, the corridors, all were crammed in beyond the sheer—
And all at once, Chant knew what was happening. They had come to honor a promise, to atone. But they would not be making the gesture solely of their own free will.
The Organon—Abaddon, she amended; Abaddon was its name—would exact its own price.
She dragged her horrified gaze from the rioting crowds, holograms all, upward to the cavernous ceiling. No longer lurking in the dark, the danger was boldly present.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of armed Sentinels peered down at their makers, each with a single glowing indigo eye. They were modified, as the crawlers had been. They were larger, but far less squat and mechanical. If the crawlers were insectoid, these were avian; their long arms looked like wings, and their curves were graceful.
It’s learning. It’s learning from our ancillas . . . from us . . .
“BORNSTELLAR-MAKES-ETERNAL-LASTING,” boomed the too-familiar voice, and Chant tore her gaze away from the beautiful hovering machines to the stage.
Abaddon.
Its shape was enormous, radiant, exquisitely terrifying, and heartbreakingly wondrous. It towered, its perfect face, neither male nor female, drawn in a frown, its indigo-luminescence darkness visible. Had its massive wings beaten, the wind would have knocked them flat.
Had it been real.
“SPLENDID-DUST-OF-ANCIENT-SUNS,” it continued. Its gaze fell on Chant, and as Abaddon intoned her name, Chant felt her gut clench, her will dissolve. A platform was floating toward them, and one by one, raptly, they climbed atop it and let it ferry them toward the feet of the godlike being.
It’s a hologram, Chant tried to say, the words bottling up in her throat. She tried again, and this time Bornstellar heard her. He turned toward her, eyes wide, and nodded. Splendid Dust had said that the Forerunners had “found” something once that had assisted them in comprehending the nigh-incomprehensible Domain. He now realized that it was a Precursor’s version of an ancilla—one as far beyond those of the Forerunners as a keyship was to a wooden raft.
“A trial was to be held here,” Abaddon continued. “It was interrupted by your creation, Didact.”
“I am not—”
“You will face trial,” it said, ignoring him. “You have failed the Mantle. Behold what you have wrought.”
The screaming crowd below them dissolved into dust, but not before they convulsed in agony. Beside Chant, Splendid Dust was sobbing.
“It’s right,” he said in a thick voice. “It’s right. We did this to it. We did this to everything. We should stand trial.”
Chant grabbed his arm. “No,” she said in a harsh whisper, “this is just a projection. The ancilla. What’s physically left of the Domain is down there. It’s broken, and we have to fix it!”
“Everyone,” Bornstellar interrupted, “listen and do exactly as I say. The Org—Abaddon—wants us alive to answer for what we’ve done. That means it won’t let us die. We still have a chance.”
The platform settled onto the greater one. The eyes of myriad Sentinels bore down on them. Again, Chant was almost overcome, so dazzled was she by the glory of the being in front of her. But she knew it wasn’t real, that the endorphins flooding her body were being artificially injected into her system, and when Splendid Dust, unable—or unwilling—in his grief to distinguish fantasy from reality, fell to his knees in front of the enormous image, Chant knew what she had to do. While there was still time, before the armor did its work and she could resist Abaddon no longer.
Charging Splendid Dust with all her speed, Chant snatched the hexagonal key from his collar and hurled herself down into the darkness.
Bornstellar was two steps behind Chant-to-Green. Ordinarily, the drop would have been too great for their armor to protect them. It would have tried, but they would have plunged to their deaths. But this time, instead of falling, they floated. The Abaddon entity did not attempt to stop either of them. They descended for what seemed like an eternity and landed ungently—but alive.
Chant grunted and rolled over. Smiling, she showed him the key. “You are brilliant!” he exclaimed as he got to his feet, extending a hand to help her rise.
“I know,” she said. They looked up, watching as Trial, Voices, and Finder landed as well.
Voices said, “Glory and Stone Songs chose to stay with Splendid Dust. He says he’ll buy us time.”
Whether that was truly the case, or whether Splendid Dust was already lost to them, was not for Bornstellar to decide. He simply nodded, grateful that Abaddon’s terrible attention was not on them, so that they stood at least a chance of completing their mission.
He moved his arm, directing the pool of light, and examined their surroundings. As the First Councilor had told him, to one side was a door that led into a waiting area. Here the councilors had waited until it was time for them to board the platform and rise before their audience. Here also some had hidden, refusing to allow others admittance during the battle for the capital. There were no
bodies present. Bornstellar had no way of knowing if those who had been refused had fled elsewhere, or if those who had rescued the councilors had also taken any bodies aboard their ships when they departed. Either way, he was grateful.
He saw no door, but he had been told it would not be immediately visible. Illustrated on the wall was a mural of the original twelve worlds of the ecumene, an echo of the display above. As Splendid Dust had instructed, Bornstellar touched each one of them in turn. Slowly, with a grinding sound, a rectangular chunk of the wall slid aside.
There had been nothing to indicate a door. Bornstellar was silently pleased that the method of hiding this passageway was not dependent on any source of power other than simple knowledge of the code. Steps cut into the stone wound down into the darkness, and the group began to descend. There was no sign of damage this far inside the equatorial section. This stair, and the Mysterium at its base—these were perhaps the oldest things of Forerunner history that yet remained as they had been. Bornstellar felt a flush of determination. He had started this quest to keep a promise. He would finish it. Because beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was the best thing he could do.
He suspected it would be his last act; and he was at peace with this knowledge.
Bornstellar kept his rifle pointed slightly down and ahead so they could see the turn of the stairs. He stopped abruptly, between one step and the next.
There was light up ahead, a faint indigo glow. Foolish, to think he could outwit the Domain.
He didn’t say anything to the others; they had eyes and brains. They saw. They knew.
Bornstellar had no idea what to expect from the Mysterium. But as he turned the corner and got his first glimpse, he knew that to have thought of it as a “vault” was a grave error.
Once, he had attended a farewell feast for one of the races they had reseeded, and had unwisely eaten far more than he should have. Now, he felt as if his eyes were being fed past their ability to digest what they beheld.
Row after row of beautiful, terrifying, or incomprehensible objects stretched away into the darkness; images of beings and creatures and symbols that were utterly unfamiliar to either him or any memories the Didact had possessed. What fantastical technology lay here, gathering dust? What solutions to problems simply sat, unimagined, for thousands upon thousands of years? In his youth, Bornstellar had been enthralled by the idea of treasure. Here, now surrounded by it, he could only gape at how limited his mind had been.
“Your First Councilor still pleads with me,” came Abaddon’s voice. “But he is guilty, as are those who stand here with him. You are all guilty.”
Bornstellar turned to see a smaller but no less overwhelming version of the great being they had encountered in the amphitheater. It stood in the doorway of the most majestic structure he had ever seen. The ancilla appeared to be made of points of light, and he wondered crazily for a moment if, somehow, on some unfathomable plane of existence, the original had been too. This was the Organon, the Domain, after all, or so he believed; the great gift of the Precursors, and the thought of its heart being an ordered collection of stars did not seem impossible to him. Not now.
“We have come to atone,” Bornstellar said. “To make right the wrong we did you.”
“No. You are attempting to finish what you began. You have proven yourselves betrayers. I am Abaddon. I am the Protector. I shall make you suffer. And you have taught me how best to do that.”
“Our armor,” Trial said. “That’s how it knew about the crawlers.”
And our presence at the trial, Bornstellar thought sickly. And the deadbolt key . . .
“I shall make you suffer,” it said again, “and I shall be remade.” It lifted its arms, spread its wide, violet, graceful wings. Beside Bornstellar, Voices lifted his rifle, and then crumbled to indigo dust. Finder cried out in horror, and then he too was gone.
The celestial figure turned its gaze upon Bornstellar. He braced himself, but Abaddon seemed to make a decision. Its eerily beautiful face twisted in pain.
“Behold,” it said in a shattered voice. Then there was nothing in front of Bornstellar but a slag heap. One stone was still a deep, beautiful amethyst hue. Light sparked, but feebly, limning its edges and outlining a hexagonal hole. The glamour had been dispelled, and he knew he beheld what was actually before him. His heart cracked. Aya, he thought, is this truly laid at our feet? Did we do this, or did time?
His ancilla, gone since the first manifestation of Abaddon as a disembodied voice, abruptly reappeared. She stared him down, her form no longer her typical, pleasant blue, but the same frightening pulsing indigo that he had grown to loathe. Abaddon would have them. In its role as a guardian and protector, it had once permitted the Forerunners to explore the Domain. Now, in an incarnation twisted by the Halo’s firing, it saw its role as a destroyer. Thinking to protect what remained, it would stop them. And it would do so disbelieving that they were trying to help.
Movement caught his eye, and then all at once, all of that—the fate of the Domain, his promise to the Librarian, his own life—abruptly became as nothing to him.
Chant-to-Green, the Lifeshaper, was racing forward, fighting her own ancilla, her hand outstretched, clutching Splendid Dust’s key. She would slot the key in place, and the Domain would recover, and somehow he knew it would take her with it.
That could not be borne.
Chant!
His mind went back to the last decades. To their awkward coupling and the decision that they both loved each other, each in their own way. To Chant’s devotion to carrying out the charge of the Librarian. To her kindness, and the casual way she would touch him, a gesture always welcomed. How it seemed they instinctively turned to one another. He looked to Chant for wisdom when his own failed, for comfort given and received, and his throat was suddenly raw, and he realized he had screamed her name in agony.
She turned her head, and he saw a universe of emotion on her face. Resolution, fear, peace, and—
He loved her.
He loved her. Chant-to-Green. Not for her position as Lifeshaper, but for how she lived what it meant. Not for her likeness to the Librarian, but her unique differences.
Bornstellar had thought he had lost the love of his life.
He was wrong.
The part of him that was the Didact certainly had. But he was more than that, more than Bornstellar, and this third amalgam loved with a ferocity and a passion that made him realize he would give all he was, all he had known, to save Chant-to-Green, who in this instant, this precious sliver of time, met his eyes with love returned.
But he did not save her.
Growth-Through-Trial-of-Change did.
Fewer steps away than the newly awakened Bornstellar, Trial surged forward. To Bornstellar’s shock and confusion, Trial didn’t pull Chant back to safety. Instead, Trial slammed her weapon into the Lifeshaper. Chant’s ancilla was obviously in rebellion, for Chant stumbled and went sprawling. Trial’s own armor was starting to attempt to lock her down as well, and she struggled to pry Chant’s hands open.
“STOP!” Abaddon’s disembodied voice shouted, even as Bornstellar pitted his will against his rogue ancilla and moved like a mechanical thing himself. He had to stop Trial. She was a Lifeworker; he was a Builder and a Warrior-Servant. His words had ordered the firing of the Array.
“Trial!” came Chant’s shriek. Trial only increased her speed toward the radiant stone. She struck hard, her hand sliding down until the key caught, slipped, slid into place.
For a moment, Trial, like the temple of Abaddon—whose name had been corrupted through time to Organon and reduced to simple, palpable, pathetic riches—glowed and sparkled, as if she too were made of starlight.
Growth-Through-Trial-of-Change looked at both Chant and Bornstellar. She nodded, gleaming white light where her eyes had once been, and a voice inside Bornstellar’s head whispered: All is well.
Then she was gone.
Falling Stars’ voice was in Bornstellar’s ears a
s the power returned. He blinked in the sudden brightness as the Engineer said in a shocked tone, “The Audacity is now fully operational. So are the other ships. I anticipate having two more ships ready in less than an hour. What happened?”
“It . . . is a long story,” Bornstellar said. He was gazing at Chant, whose own gaze was fixed on where Trial had last stood a mere few heartbeats before. “I will tell everyone upon our return. We should not be long.”
His ancilla appeared, looking apologetic, but otherwise her normal self, informing him that nearby shuttles were now active and that they would indeed make good time returning to Audacity. As she spoke, she was interrupted by a humming sound. Bornstellar and Chant looked up to see the platform descending.
Splendid Dust lay curled up, shivering, on the platform. Beside him were two piles of dark violet; all that remained of Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn and Keeper-of-Stone-Songs. Bornstellar placed his grief aside, reaching to help Splendid Dust to his feet. The former First Councilor was shaking as he spoke. “Abaddon had pronounced sentence,” was all he said.
Its defeat had come in time to save Splendid Dust, but not the others. He blinked, then started when he realized that Trial was not with them. He turned a haunted, questioning gaze to Bornstellar, mutely asking for answers.
“Let us go back,” Bornstellar said to Splendid Dust. “And we will all tell our stories.”
And so they did, each briefly analyzing what they had experienced. It was a somber retelling. The deaths of so many, especially Trial, were deeply felt by all of them. Only the assurance from Bornstellar and Chant that they believed the mission to be successful made the losses slightly bearable.
It was time to leave the dead capital, and let the Domain begin its work of healing—if it truly could—in peace. Falling Stars commanded one of the new ships, which Bornstellar named the Bravado, and Tread-with-Care took control of the newly dubbed Impudence.
Bornstellar had requested that Chant and Dust stay with him on Audacity. There were things that needed to be said.