Perdition

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LOG://5208B-007: QUERY 1

Alkahest.
My name is Alkahest.

I thought, perhaps, I'd find something here. This frozen wasteland, calling out endlessly, willing the abyss into something more than a dream. Salvation.
I misinterpreted.
Not many ghosts come here looking for anything, these days. What I sought was not there, not in the empty ice-rotted husks of long dead piecemeal alloy-plate bodies. Some of them probably never had life in them to begin with.  

Instead I found knowledge, hidden in the ice. Exos. The alkahest. It gave them their rebirth. 

Am I not the same, then? Is that not what ghosts do? 

LOG://5251B-008: QUERY 2

It turns out what I was looking for wasn't planetside. At least, not at first.

An orbital satellite. The Morning Star. Everyone saw the explosion, of course; several million tons of golden-age plasteel and titanium igniting, breaking apart, painting the atmosphere with a haze that blurred the edge of Jupiter.
There should have been nothing there. Should have – but there should have been nothing on Europa, and yet.

I raised him, for the first time, buried under girders and shattered blackened glass, tubes that had once held fluid. He was an unmade, ugly thing, put together by the Fallen, just to see if it would work.
It didn't, for them.
But I was the alkahest. I could give him rebirth.

I could give him salvation. 

LOG://5303B-009: QUERY 3

It's rare, to find a guardian nowadays. There aren't many ghosts left. Rumors persist of some ghosts finding something darker, out there beyond reality, something that twists and grows, and whole groups of them go missing at a time. Maybe it's a mercy for them.

Baizhu'ul can't even walk.

The first thing he did was grab me. Punched right through space-alloy debris and shattered most of my shell. He's got claws, the cabal-forged blacksteel they fuse onto their hounds' paws. 

It's been two weeks since the Morning Star's planetfall. All he's said is a dialectic blend of Eliksni and Cabal, fashioned into a name he holds like a weapon in his teeth.

He crawls, hunched, awkward and ungainly, like his legs aren't his own. His first death was sliding off glacial ice several hundred metres, unable to step across a gap, and all his exploration is done with his teeth. Everyone would see him as an abomination, savage and unlearned. A beast.

He wants to try, though.
I can tell. 

LOG://5315B-010: QUERY 4

It's interesting, being responsible for a guardian who can't hold a gun.
Always, it comes back to the claws.

Every guardian uses and maintains firearms, I tell him over and over. I don't understand why he keeps getting angry; seems he's broken more guns than he's hit targets with them.
The arc spears, scavenged ad infinitum, he can use. Anything that can fit to the curve of his claws.  He gutted a servitor with one stab, smooth and flowing. The glacial ice in its ripples and curves and unyielding surface – that's what I thought, when I saw him do that. 

But then he turned to stare at me. 'This could be you,' I felt in his empty glare, those horrible sockets. I have no body to shudder with, still shattered and churning in the husk of a shell that stopped sparking last month. I would, if I could.

Can the traveler make mistakes?

LOG://5398B-011: QUERY 5

A breakthrough today, a month after rising.

He managed to ask 'why?' in his guttural, metal-churning voice. I hear so little of it I can't decide if I hate it, or like how unique it is. How unique he is, despite everything.

Even through our struggles, I'm still proud to have given him a rebirth. What does it matter that he can't stand upright still, or utilise fine motor skills, or communicate? I'm proud that he's here, proud that I found that spark in him, and that he's my guardian. 

I told him as much, and he tried to crush me in his teeth. I don't understand why. 

LOG://5436B-012: QUERY 6

He can't use the Light.

Baizhu'ul saw his first guardians today. Saw the way solar crescents trailing sparks lit up the snow, scorchmarks and blackened bodies; void etchings leaving deep currents of pulsing ultraviolet that still glowed eerily under new snowfall. 

He tried, too. I told him he was a guardian, that he can do all of that, if he reached for that spark I saw in him.
He pulled out the darkness instead. Ice that crawled like a living thing down his arms and claws, and as it did, the brighter the glow in his throat got, until he was breathing smoke and sparks, and wind howled around him.

I think he lost control. What was left of my shell is gone now. It was beautiful.
It was... terrifying.

I was wrong.
I was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong I--

LOG://5487B-013: QUERY 7

He wasn't anything, before he was something.

A dead body, with no defining marks, no memory. A thing, a shape, a broken doll used as a plaything by the Fallen.
I wonder, if he could remember, would there even be anything there? Or would it be an endless expanse, like the moon's cracked and bleak wasteland stretching out into that dull grey sky?

I wonder, if he still feels like nothing?

...

I may have been approaching this all wrong.
We'll start over. He and I. 

LOG://5599B-017: QUERY 8

Baizhu'ul has become something of an urban legend. 

It's been hard-going. He's learning Earth-words, but he can understand Eliksni a lot better. Must've been something they programmed into his body as a trial on the Morning Star, before it fell.

I thought I was proud of him before, but I think I was deluding myself. Misplaced pride in my own actions. I didn't take responsibility.

None of that compared to when he took his first,real steps, there in the ice-buried lab filled with vex remains. I'd always wondered how transplants and replacement limbs and augments worked with the Light; in theory, of course it was possible, but what was to stop the old limb from being regenerated?
But seeing him stand, shaky and so strong-willed, on chroma-bronze talons planted steadily on the floor, it was him. It was all him, and I couldn't imagine him being anything else.

My guardian. 

-

He's a hunter.

Funny, in a world where none of that matters; the Vanguard hasn't had a hunter representative for years now. Nobody to teach him how things work.
He doesn't go near anyone else. Probably for the best, the things I've heard over network channels, something about a red Minotaur, or a were-beast. Nobody believes the reports.
It's best that I... encourage them to stay that way. 

LOG://5613B-018: QUERY 9

He likes the Drifter.
I don't.
I think the man is rude and selfish. Baizhu'ul likes him for those same reasons. 

There's only so much I know about survival. My new shell is a labor of... not love, but perhaps forgiveness. Amends. It's made of pieces and scraps, bitter twisted metal arranged into something few could call pretty, but he put care into it, and it functions admirably where it matters.
I'm glad he's come this far. But he can't keep hidden forever. When they find him – and they will – I want him to know how to handle it. 

The Drifter was, therefore, the most logical step. He's survived since the very beginning, amongst the First Lights. I thought he'd be able to help my guardian. I thought he'd understand.
He refused.
I was angry, righteously so, but Baizhu'ul saw something in that refusal. It feels like all my righteous anger of the past has always been misplaced, now. In the past I might've retaliated, but... 

Interesting how my justification is just temper, when my guardian sees a side I would never have thought of.

He'll be found out. But I think, in the end, we'll be okay. 

LOG://5669**-019//020: QUERY [CORRUPTED]

The line between light and dark is so very thin. 

I've heard this phrase, passed about frequently on Europa. It's supposed to be something bigger than what we are. The Traveler. The Darkness. Tools, we thought, but perhaps we are playthings for forces we cannot hope to comprehend. I am of the Traveler, but to put blind faith in it is just as foolish as giving in to the whispers of the dark. I'm sure someone out there understands it all better than I. It doesn't matter, in the end, not really.

My guardian was raised by the light, but born of the dark. He walks that razor's edge, everything and nothing, heading into a future clouded over and hazy, drifting snow obscuring the view of what he might find; ice and smoke burning on his breath.
But his steps are sure and strong. He does not falter.
And neither will I.

Whichever side of that line we fall on, we will face it together. 

//:CONNECTION CLOSED//.