The Final Shape

Xivu Arath sits upon her throne of bone and steel and watches two of her last knights kill each other.

The world about them is quiet. The stars are quiet, the galaxy is quiet, the universe is quiet. The Hive have overcome all others and now, still driven by their endless hunger for killing, turned their slaughter inward, until only a handful are left. This is the shape of victory, the final shape of the universe:

A queen ruling over an empty universe and an overflowing graveyard.

The knights are her sons. They slash and stab and tear at one another until one falls. The victor stands for a moment on wavering feet, and the God of War dares hope for a moment that a challenger might rise to threaten her and give her existence meaning once more. The blade falls from his hands, he goes down on one knee, then crumples.

And she is alone again.

Her worm growls, and she thinks again about plunging a blade inside herself and cutting it free, as her sister once tried to do. One last battle, certain to kill both host and parasite, and wouldn’t that be delicious, for the greatest thing that lives to kill herself on the eve of total and eternal victory.

Victory? Victory is soot and ash. Victory is endless hunger. Victory is wishing for death, unable to give it to yourself.

So lost in thought is Xivu Arath that she does not notice her daughter, her last daughter approach.

“I found a survivor,” says the Wizard. “A single Guardian.”

Xivu Arath stirs on her mighty throne. She remembers the Guardians, remembers annihilating them and cracking open the Traveler and drinking the Light inside. It is an old, old memory. None survived, none could have survived. This is the first interesting news for ten thousand years. “Why come to me?” she asks. “You should have killed it.”

“I could not,” says her daughter.

“Then you are weak. Better you had died in the attempt.”

“You do not understand,” says the Wizard, and the God of War is stunned. None dare speak to Xivu Arath in this fashion, not even her own blood. She is the final queen, the master of the Final Shape, all creation bows to her. “There was—grief. Incredible grief.”

“What do you mean?” Xivu Arath demands of the Wizard.

But her daughter is beyond words. She wails and raises her hands, summons her fiery shield, then inverts it, turns it inward so that its flames consume her. Charred tatters of her cloak fall upon the bodies of the two dead Knights.

The God of War is intrigued, yes, even a little worried, and curious too. She cuts a wound in the world and steps through it, onto the ground of Sol, hallowed in slaughter.

There is a small figure perched atop a lonely snowcapped mountain. Its head is bowed, knees drawn up to its chest and held prisoner there by the cage of its arms. It does not raise its head as the colossus appears on its world, makes no move as her nightmare form fills the sky and darkens the sun.

Xivu Arath has barely stepped through when it hits her. Sorrow, utter, bottomless sorrow, shattering grief, hammering down on her relentlessly. She staggers. The God of War staggers, who has not so much as flinched in a million years.

She roars in rage. And. Yes. In fear. It shakes the mountainside.

The figure looks up and she looks into its eyes. Blindingly bright eyes. Her vision allows her to see into the Ascendant Plane, and she sees the figure there too, and gasps. In that Place, where the sword logic rules and death is the only measurement of power, the tiny little Guardian is a Titan as great as she is, anointed in slaughter as she is, and it looks back at her and the eyes are not eyes but holes bored through the fabric of the universe. There is something there, at the bottom of those two wells. Something horrific, something terrifying, even to her.

“She made me into a living weapon,” the Guardian says. Each word is a wound that will never heal. “A perfect little weapon. And I did all the things that she made me to do.”

She does not understand. The words the Guardian speaks are the ones that have shaped her own life. She, too, is dedicated to embodying a single, unbreakable purpose. So why does she feel those words are tied to the horror that lurks within those eyes, and the titanic sorrow she feels?

“Yes, I was like you. A Ghost on my shoulder instead of a worm in my belly, but whispering the same things, ‘It’s just you and me now’, pointing me and unleashing me upon everything that opposed it. I killed the Eliksni, I annihilated the Vex, I slaughtered the Cabal. The Hive. Uldren and his allies. Then the Guardians who tried to stop me.”

She can feel it. What the Guardian says is true. She can feel the blood of Oryx on its hands, but more, yes, other great Hive (oddly familiar), Worm Gods, and still more.

“I do not fear you,” she declares, for she has learned all her sister’s old tricks and knows the value of a lie. “Behold Guardian, look upon me, and know that I have slain the universe.”

And the Guardian speaks.

It answers.

It whispers.

It says to her:

“So have I.”

Each word is heavier than a star. The weight of them breaks her.

“So have I.”

The two wells open and she sees it clearly. She sees the end of all things. A champion of the Light, as merciless in its slaughter as any Hive god. Another universe, another timeline, but leading to the same end—nothing. A single intelligence, utterly alone in the cosmos forever.

“We must change it,” the Guardian tells her. “You. And I. A universe drowning in Light ends the same as one pitched in Dark. Together, both the Light and Dark. Together we can stop this.”

“How?”

The Guardian shows her. Time rewinds. A single figure falls through the loop, from here to there, of all living things the only intelligence aware of what has happened.

“A balance. We have to send her back.”