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My feet knew the path
We walked in the dark
In the dark
I never gave a single thought to where it might lead
For the first time, Eris was alone.
It was dark, the tunnels so devoid of light she could not make out her hands in front of her face. It was dark, no Light to guide her, its absence a yawning hole in her sensory awareness. Her mind grasped for it like a drowning creature struggles for the surface, and deprived of it, panicked.
Twice-blinded she stumbled forward, feeling as though she guided her feet from outside herself, each step a conscious action. She registered the sensation of the cave wall beneath her calloused fingertips, but experienced it as though it was through a proxy, every sense fuzzy and dreamlike — rather, nightmarish.
Her mouth still tasted of blood, the hot, wet coppery scent suffused her sense of smell. Her ears still rang, dampening her surroundings and heightening awareness of her own thundering heartbeat. The wretched song of death echoed through her mind, though below Toland's screams. Omar, poor Omar, the blood ran to ice in her veins when she thought about his sounds of agony at the end, but Toland … no, his noises had been ecstatic, cries she would have known anywhere because she once urged them from his throat, he'd once gladly sung them for her. She felt as though her guts were wrung by an invisible hand, her body wracked with dry heaves as she fell to her knees —
How foolish she'd been. They'd all been. If only she could go back and prevent their folly, convince Eriana to give up her pursuit of vengeance — better, prevent Wei from ever joining in the assault on Mare Imbrium — she wanted to cry but found her eyes as spent as her stomach. Curled into herself and clutched at the ground and screamed as well as her raw throat would allow, the hoarseness unfamiliar to her own ears, until her voice cracked and withered to silence. Dust stirred and scratched at her windpipe as she gasped for breath.
Part of her wanted to stay here forever, to rot and become a part of the dirt in which the others lay. There was something right about a fireteam dying as they'd lived.
But Brya had died so Eris could live, so to die would make her sacrifice in vain.
Against her worst urges, she instructed the muscles in her arms to lift her up out of the dirt. She drew her ankles beneath her so that she was sitting, sitting turned to crouching, crouching turned to standing. She willed one foot in front of the other, and repeated, again and again. The darkness felt like floodwater against her legs, physical resistance that she had to force her way through. Her sword and rifle hung heavy as an anchor on her back. Still, she kept moving until she no longer had to remind herself to step.
Days turned into weeks into months, no measure for the passage of time beyond cycles of hunger and thirst, wakefulness and sleep. In preparation for the mission Eris had learned the human circadian rhythm tended to uncoil in darkness, lengthening gradually until it stopped. The passage of her days not only felt slower, but were slower than they'd be earthside.
It was a cold relief to know it wasn't just in her head, unlike the things heard and saw. She quickly became accustomed to the ghostly image of her limbs in total darkness and the dazzling lights that sometimes flashed into her vision, but the voices of her friends among the ambient sounds in the caverns never failed to wrench at her heart. Still, there was a terrible comfort to it.
Sometimes, she thought she heard it whisper. Taken during the Great Hunt, the ahamkara bone charm had never spoken before; she supposed the dragon had said all it needed when, as it lay dying, it showed her visions of her life as the mortal Erisa Pyatova-Hsien. She was tempted to talk back — ask it for rescue, or save her team, but suppressed the pangs that urged her to mollify her sorrow with dangerous wish-magic. The dragon had already landed a grievous blow by forcing her to mourn a life that wasn't truly hers.
Despite the bone-deep loneliness, the boredom of herself, her brain's trickery . . . she could not call existence in the pit monotonous. The alert periods were primarily spent moving and hunting. Eris' amputation from the Light didn't affect her ability to handle weaponry, nor her hunter instincts toward foraging, camouflage and stealth. As pieces of armor wore away, she learned to mend them using hive chitin, cured first so that its corruption did not parasitize the rest of her gear, or seep into her body. (She'd learned her lesson when a piece of horn adhered to her palm and had to be ripped away.) In time, she found herself in confrontation with the hive only when she needed sustenance or passage. When she was tired she rested, hiding on high ledges and in crevasses too narrow for even the reach of thrall, until she fell into shallow, watchful sleep.
As Eris adapted to survival in the tunnels, so too did she start to process what happened. The anguish hadn't lifted, but had begun to dull into a generalized ache instead of the searing, encompassing pain that had once paralyzed her in place, or made her want to flee from herself.
The hardest realization was this: Eriana and Toland had never planned to leave.
The vote to go further or return all those — she does not know what time interval anymore — ago replayed in her head. Eriana had spoken earnestly when she said they could do it. All signs pointed to weakness among the Lunar hive, and their team conversely being at the peak of power even with their losses. While the odds seemingly favored them, she knows that not even certain failure would have deterred Eriana from her duty. As their numbers had dwindled, her hunger for vengeance only increased.
In some ways, Eris admired how dauntless Eriana had been. If she'd been sure she could trade her life for Crota's death, maybe she would have made the same sacrifice.
In the end, she knew it wouldn't work. They underestimated the brood. She had seen it firsthand.
She hadn't wanted to witness Omar's death, but had been compelled by a grim impulse — toward closure? The need for him to not bear his suffering alone? to glance through the cracks in the ritual chamber walls. It was horrific even by the standards of the hive, flensing not only the Light, but his very essence, from his body.
Toland had looked, too. Even in the disorienting light of the tunnels she'd seen something in him change. Frayed threads of hope and sanity snapped as he stammered, in maniacal disbelief, about soul magic, that they shouldn't be able to — they can't —
He'd fled into the tunnels inconsolable and incoherent, and she'd mustered the strength to forge ahead on Eriana's trail, a last-ditch effort to gather her and leave. What followed were days of careful searching, connection to the Traveler and her ailing Ghost too tenuous to test. Still, her deadened Light had picked up on a spark of Solar, and she chased it to its source — slamming into Toland in the darkness.
Heart pounding and sweat welling, she'd made a dazed scrabble for his arms, a gesture he returned with his face pressed to the crown of her head. Heaving with breath, swaying uneasily on his feet, he held her tight and mumbled something she hadn't followed about moths … spirits of the dead … superstition … against her oily hair. Panic spiked that he'd slipped further into insanity, fear eased only a little when she noticed bugs swarming dim crystals at the ceiling of the cavern.
Through the lump in her throat she'd confessed she couldn't find Eriana, that they had to leave.
Dire lucidity tinted his voice when he broke their embrace to tear the bond from his arm. "You have to leave. Take her with you if you find her, but don't waste time finding her. Under no circumstance let her drag you further."
Eris wasn't able to form a response before he took her bicep into his hands, his touch gentle as he cinched the strap around her. When she asked what he was doing, he replied: "With this, the hive will believe you are one of theirs. That is the only way."
In an instant, heart-stopping drop, the weight of understanding collapsed upon Eris. He steadied her by her shoulder.
She couldn't save him, but she could spare his dignity. Unfastening one of the decorations from her tattered brace, she tied it around his gaunt arm at bond-height. They exchanged a look, a shared moment of humor as dark and bleak as their surroundings. The exchange of bonds, marriage rite of warlocks transformed into … whatever this was.
"I'm afraid," Eris admitted.
"I believe in you."
"You’re a madman," she choked past suppressed sobs. "You'll believe anything."
"But not anyone. You're the best of any of us, Eris. Never forget."
As her hand lingered on his bond, he rested his forehead to hers. She pressed back, close enough for their noses to brush, breath hot as the air beneath the lunar surface, suffocating as her welling tears. While he stroked her bond-arm he drew the other beneath her chin, tilting her mouth to his. With instant, silent agreement they crashed together, their lips and hands a wordless plea and retrograde act of mourning.
She wouldn't see him again, but would hear him and wish she hadn't.
She would see Eriana, marching toward the Stills, the deathsong her beacon, even as it began to molecularly decompose them both.
Looking back, Eris couldn't hold hard feelings against Eriana. She had done what she thought was right. She had been willing to wager her life on a bet that she could survive the unsurvivable, kill the unkillable, and had lost. Eris only wished that something, anything, could have diverted her from this path.
But Toland . . . death was too gentle a fate, too fast a release. He deserved to be trapped forever, and not a day passed without Eris wishing that he was here to suffer every pain, every horror, every tedium alongside her. There were more punishments still un-inflicted on him in her mind, the kind wrought with her own hands. Failing that, she should have been the one to kill him, and raged with envy that Ir Yût had robbed her of that opportunity forever.
He had left her that day with his bond and his journal, and his taste on her lips. There was no amount of suffering he could endure that would lessen her pain. Still, she nursed that agony with the same delicate touch with which she tended her wounds. Forever.