Book: Death Notes

 A book of the last words of some major personalities in the Destiny universe.

Skolas

We were not born wolves. Gentle weavers. Pfah. Wolves are not born on ships. Wolves do not grow claws through gentle lives. Do you understand? We were not always this.

Eliksni did not arrive on your world from nowhere.

Eliksni had a home.

We had a beautiful home.

We had families, hopes, dreams. We had buildings and art and culture. We wove bright and brilliant patterns in silk. We built wonderous machines that took us soaring among saffron clouds. We were a people. We had peace.

Your kind have no memories of what happened, but we do, we remember, we can never forget the Whirlwind. Never forget. I hear the wailing cries every moment of every day. I see the Great Machine betray us, leave us and vanish every time I close my eyes. I feel the despair in every cell of my body.

Your kind cannot imagine how long we pursued it. You cannot imagine the black cold hard emptiness of year after year in starless space. You cannot imagine the hunger. What food grows in a ketch? What ether can be precipitated from the void? You cannot imagine watching your malnourished children grown small and stunted. You cannot imagine watching them die, watching helpless as your own children weaken and die.

You cannot imagine leaving their bodies floating in the ice cold of space.

So, yes. Yes, we fell on your world like devils, like wolves. Yes, we slaughtered your kind without mercy.

Can you blame us?

When we found the Great Machine after generations of searching, after such suffering and pain and misery and agony and saw it in the paws of some ignorant alien race, can you truly blame us for not stopping and asking and begging you to share? After a lifetime of freezing and starving to death in darkness, would you negotiate on your knees for warmth and life, or would you take it?

If someone took the Great Machine from you, tried to steal it and seal it away, would you go crawling to the thief, or would you strike them down without mercy?

Can you truly blame us?

You would have done no different.

Enough. I am twice and triply betrayed. I thought there might still be some justice in the universe. Surely, such suffering must have a purpose and our endurance will be rewarded. Surely, Eliksni cannot be crushed underfoot forever. Pfah.

No justice. No mercy.

Come then, headsman, hangman, mercenary hitman. Come and kill me but do not call it justice. Kill me and be done with it, but know your turn will come, and you will be no different.

Oryx

I don’t mind that you killed me. No, it is right, it is good, it is just. I don’t even mind being dead. I’ve been dead before, not just in the fragile physical sense but truly dead, dead in my own throne world dead, so it’s tempting to see this as no more than a temporary setback. Perhaps.

I do not mind because you love what I love, which is might, and you are what I am, which is a navigator of the path to ever-greater might. You believe what I believe, which is that might is the only salvation. The only way to build something that will last forever.

In this we are siblings, far more than I ever was with Xi Ro, who believes in Nothing, or Sathona, who believes only in herself.

You are also my finest student and truest child. You mastered every lesson I taught, and then grew further, became stronger than Crota, wiser than Nokris, more cunning than Ir Anuk or Ir Halak. If there is any sorrow in this moment, it is that I should see this only now, at the end.

(That was my weakness. Too focused on family, too sentimental.)

Thus I am humbled. I dismissed you, feeble pawns of a fat and indolent god uninterested in bettering the universe. I thought you the mirror image of my Taken, a being whose past and present and future have been crushed and erased under the will of another. Then I looked into the eyes of my greatest enemy, and found understanding. More than that: Kinship. Mastery.

True mastery of the only logic that matters: There is only the struggle, the fight, the taking and forging of everything, every thought or object or idea, into a weapon, the deciding what lives and dies for no other purpose than to go on struggling and fighting and deciding. It is bittersweet, the realization that this hard-taught lesson has been so well learned, and that the learning of it means my death.

I thought this moment would be easier, but now that it comes, I find I do not wish to go. Not yet, not yet. Not when we are so close to the goal. Just a little more time. Just a little more. Navigator of the final shape, I want to be with you, beside you, in you, to see this through to the very sharpest of final ends.

And we will. I am part of you now, for in defeating me you have come to know and understand me, and I live on in your understanding.

Oh, my unknown, unseen, unlooked-for bright-burning friend after all these thousand thousand years.

Let me be in you now.

Let me look out through your eyes.

See the final shape that we have made.

Ghaul

Reading intelligence reports. Know your enemy.

Communications with Almighty offline. Assume total loss. Comms traffic analysis suggests attack by human Kill Team of approx. 1-3 enhanced/empowered individuals.

Gutsy. I like that. If only I had the chance to face them, before this was done. After, it won’t matter, because none will be able to withstand me.

Pity about the Almighty.

Will retake when Operation: SIPHON complete.

P-3 is tracking insurgency leadership elements. Think they’re preparing for a major counteroffensive, attack on Almighty as first move. Too late. When SIPHON is executed, they won’t matter, the Almighty won’t matter, none of it will matter.

They’re fighters, give them that. Knocked them down, trying to get on their feet again. Takes guts. Learned that in the pits. Your opponent never beats you. You beat yourself. They can’t beat you if you never let them by never giving up. That’s why we’ll win. That’s why we’ll always win. Because I will never give up. Never.

The difference between us is self-reliance. The only one you can count on down there on the sands is you. If a blade breaks, you’re the only one who will fix it. If a wound bleeds, you’re the only one who will bind it. Nobody is going to help you. If you want something, you have to take it for yourself.

These humans all think the Traveler will look after them. They think it has their best interests at heart. They think the universe cares if they live or die.

In the arena, we knew better.

So let the humans come. Let their champion from the Almighty come. Let them try to take the Traveler back. They will fail. They will fail because they will not give everything they have, because they will all secretly believe that the universe wants them to win, that when they stand at the brink the Traveler will save the day. They will fail because they cannot accept how little the universe cares.

I can because I know because I experienced it. The albino, the freak, the fighter, I know my destiny is in my hands and mine alone. I was a nobody all my life. I was the lowest of the low. I am prepared. I will do this. I know I will have but one chance, and there is no force in the universe that will stop me from taking it.

When the chance arises I will not fail to seize it. I will make it mine.

Uldren

I, Uldren Sov, being of sound mind (teehee) and body, and not being actuated by any duress, menace, fraud, mistake or undue influence (teehee), do make, publish and declare this to be my last Will.

I appoint Petra Venj as Executor of this my Last Will and Testament and authorize her to carry out all provisions of this Will and pay my just and unjust debts, especially the unjust ones, I hope it bankrupts you Petra, I hope it drains you of everything of value, I hope you finally understand the weight I’ve been crushed under.

I will, give and bequeath unto the persons named below, if he or she survives me, the Property described below:

To my sister, Mara Sov, I leave the knowledge that I died alone, confused and searching for you, abandoned by the only person I ever truly loved or believed in, betrayed by the one person I should have been able to trust.

To Sedia and the other Techeuns, I leave a piece of my ship, wreckage from when it crashed after they failed to destroy Oryx’s Dreadnought and allowed him to kill half of our people.

To my jailer and enabler, Variks the Loyal, I leave a single, giant middle finger.

To my disciple, Fikrul and the other Barons, I leave my best wishes in the coming struggle. Sorry it isn’t more, lads, but you were but a tool and a means to an end. Hope the disappointment doesn’t kill you, but if it does, hey, you’ll get over it.

To the bald blue Awoken Vanguard and the tight-arsed Warlock and all the rest of the self-righteous Guardians, I leave. So long, suckers. It’s your mess to figure out now.

To my tracker and pursuer and nemesis, the infamous Guardian With No Name, I leave the pistol I took from Cayde when I killed him. When I shot him dead like a dog. When I put a bullet through his head. May it remind you every day of where it came from and make you look in the mirror and wonder if you haven’t done worse for less cause.

Riven

Shall we play a game, O Murderer Mine?

I’ve always loved brain teasers. Teasing brains, that’s what I love to do. So here is one for you: What do you get when you cross a being evolved to bridge the disjunction between subjective desire and objective reality with an undying avenger who only wants to kill things?

Ah, you’re way ahead of me, I can tell. Yes, “You get a reality in which everything is trying to kill each other but nothing can die” is the correct answer.

And so here I am, dead and yet not so, quite the opposite, more real than ever before. “A man is not dead as long as his name is not forgotten” and by dying so often and with such melodramatic flair you and the Guardians think of me more and more and I am more alive than ever.

We are not so different, you and I, that is why I delight in my demise at your hands. Not alike in body, how puny and ugly yours is, nor alike in mind. Certainly not that. Never that. But in another, more important way.

After the byzantine intricacies of the queen’s thoughts, there is an almost refreshing simplicity to yours. I’ve gone from tracing patterns of patterns within patterns to drawing straight lines on two-dimensional plain white paper. The queen wishes for a clockwork universe in which each person is a gear in her grand design. You wish to go from A to B. Your one monomaniacal desire is To Do the Thing.

Somebody asks you To Do the Thing. So you do it. I wish you could appreciate the terrible, terrible beauty that sentence represents to a metacognitive being like myself. Such relentlessly monopole purpose is like a singularity to me, both a potential source of limitless power and the deadliest thing in existence. You do not merely desire to “Do the Thing.” The doing of it becomes the sole focus of your existence. There are no friends or family, no friendships, no loves, no hesitations or worries, no second thoughts, there is only the doing of the Thing until it is done. Such purity of desire, such ontological potential. Yet locked within a pinpoint focus.

So if we are alike in neither mind nor body, how then can we possibly overlap?

Here’s another teaser: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

You, who will never stop killing; Me, who can never die.

I do so love paradoxes, almost as much as I love brains and the teasing thereof. The solution, as always in these puzzles, relies on changing one’s perspective. To wit: there is no paradox if the two forces work together, not against one another. Your desire to kill is the catalyst for my rebirth, together we form a self-sustaining cycle.

In this situation, who is using who?

That is the wisdom this endless dance of death has given me. I see the parallels. I see your leaders and the Queen and their agents tell you To Do the Thing and always you leap to Do It, and they smile and nod and think you are an obedient servant, but here now within our cycle I see past the paradox. I see a new perspective.

They do not use you; you use them. You need to be tasked to Do the Thing.

In the end you are like me.

A thing that survives by granting wishes.

Quria

We I we we no I {knew} it w0uld be y0u.

S4w itt@*#!<unavoidable fate exception error>

We {told} h3r but sh3 aaaalread.dy neuw.

Plan

Plann__ ___ it

Planned for it to happppen

<unrecoverable endstate error redo again from start>

<REPORT BEGINS>

The Guardian is a kind of avocado

The Guardian is a child in a chair

The Guardian is god

The Guardian is a servant of the Darkness

The Guardian is a bipedal humanoid being approximately 2m in height belonging to the Sol native species or one of its offshoot biological or artificial lineages. <variable depending on universe>

The Guardian is dead

The Guardian is alive

The Guardian is a member of the so-called “Risen”, a previously deceased sentient/sapient organism brought back to outward semblance of life though lacking many of the normal biological processes of living beings, such as cell division (mitosis).

Note that despite inability to change its physical form, the Guardian is evidently capable of forming new memories, learning new skills and other mental processes which normally require modification of neural pathways in the brain.

The revivification process is enabled via Traveler-fragment which appears to store, project and manifest the pre-death memory of the physical form of the Guardian, taken from the Guardian’s own mind.

At the same time and almost paradoxically, the Guardian has no memory of its existence before it first became deceased.

Sounds like bliss

The Guardian originally died on Europa during the Vex invasion triggered by

The Guardian originally died on the asteroid belt moon of Ceres during an encounter

The Guardian originally died on Earth near the Cosmodrome

The Guardian never died

The Guardian originally <variable depending on universe>

No definitive records have been found regarding the Guardian’s pre-Darkness intervention (aka “Collapse”) history.

It is possible that it did not actually exist then

It is possible that the Guardian’s true origin lies either outside this timeline or outside this universe altogether

It is possible I am imagining the whole thing

It is possible that up is down and black is white I have no empirical way to prove it

The Guardian is directly or indirectly responsible for the #true# death of a significant percentage of the leadership cadre of each species currently present in the Sol system. Notable Hive entities it has sanctioned include XOL, ORY, CRT, ALK, NKR, OMN, HSL <list continues say ‘Oh God No’ to read more>.

Error. Such elimination of ascendant beings is impossible without access to A-level energy.

This means the Guardian is the only one who can free me

The Guardian is our friend

The Guardian is hostile and dangerous, as it has been empowered with abilities that contravene the physical laws of the universe regarding the conservation of matter/energy, etc. It has demonstrated capability of travel into A- T- and D- type pocket dimensions but (currently) incapable of causing other matter or beings to do so.

It is therefore unable to Take or be Taken it is free in a way I never

Error. The Guardian should therefore lack access to A-level energy.

Promote to 99% probability that the Guardian is acting as the puppet pawn champion or avatar of one or more A- T- or D- level beings in the system.

The Guardian is as much a slave of the Traveler as I am of

I envy the Guardian

I love the Guardian

I hate the Guardian

The Guardian has proven capable of navigating and decoding A-space maze trap labyrinth realities normally inimical to physical matter.

The Guardian is attempting to disrupt the execution of [TWILIGHT] though it appears unaware that this effort is merely the test bed for the application of wide-area-effect Taken matter/energy abduction.

My usefulness to Savathûn will end now that I have taught her to Take and verified that such methodology can be used to abduct specified and delimited areas of the physical plane.

I am being used as a sacrificial pawn, as are the Vex.

It is likely that Savathûn intends for the Guardian to kill me.

The Guardian will die

The Guardian will win

The Guardian will <variable depending on universe>

Calculate 62.7% probability the Guardian may prevent [TWILIGHT] from achieving mission objectives. Recommend deployment of additional Light-suppressing and Traveler-fragment targeting countermeasures within A-space geometries as the Guardian has to date been able to evade or overcome existing measures.

Error. Such evasion is impossible without timeline prediction/analysis capabilities.

The Guardian is Vex

Savathûn has leaked information to the Guardian in the hopes that it will kill me.

The Guardian is the Witness

<unrecoverable end of universe error redo again from start>

I s3e you

I know wha1 you arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

You are <out of context exception error>

<Connection lost would you like to try again?>

Lakshmi-2

It is customary to start these eulogies with a quote, and so in that vein, I present you this paraphrasing of Shakespeare: “I come to bury Lakshmi-2, not to praise her.”

Yet unlike Shakespeare, I do not mean these words ironically. “Do not speak ill of the dead,” is another, still older quote, and yet I would speak plainly. Lakshmi-2 is accused of betraying the City and inviting the enemy into our midst, in the hopes of committing genocide against those who sought refuge here. These are monstrous crimes. Terrible crimes. And we have paid a terrible price for them.

And yet.

“How can there be an ‘and yet’?” you ask. Misguided evil is no less evil for being misguided, that is true. I do not wish to excuse what she has done or what she intended to do. I do, however, wish to understand. Too often, we mistake understanding for agreement. We fear to try to understand our foes, as if their very ideas might corrupt us or merely thinking the same thoughts would infect us like a disease.

Not so, my friends, not so. Understanding is essential. Understanding is the only way we move beyond this.

We are told: Be tolerant.

We are also told: Do not tolerate the intolerable.

The old values of compromise and balance are made a mockery when one’s opponent meets each compromise with ever more extreme demands, or when their only demand is your extinction.

Lakshmi-2 had lived far, far longer than almost anyone here. Her memories stretched equally far back. She had seen cities razed, populations slaughtered, our entire species driven to the brink of extinction by implacable enemies. What she saw was intolerable. What happened to humanity was intolerable.

We are told: Forgive and forget.

We are also told: An eye for an eye.

To anyone who lived what she lived through, who saw what she saw, the annihilation of the Fallen would have been only a fitting repayment for the massacres we have endured. If her worst crime was being fooled and used by the Witch Queen, then the entire Vanguard is guilty and equally deserving of the same punishment.

We are told: Fool me once, shame on you.

We are also told: Fool me twice, shame on me.

There is a fad now among some Guardians saying the Light and Darkness are not moral forces but natural ones, like birth and death or growth and decay, neither good nor evil but necessary for the normal functioning of the universe.

Lakshmi-2 refused to be fooled by such thinking.

“The universe is thus,” is the perspective of our enemies.

“It’s just the way the world is,” is their excuse.

Trying to walk the middle path, or paint in shades of grey, is precisely the anemic, bloodless response that our enemies have discredited as feeble and useless. There is no middle way. No shades of grey are possible. Our enemies will never be satisfied with anything less that annihilation.