Chapter Text
The presence of Warrior-Servants — so close to her, nearly a third again of her height and flanking her on either side as though she were being escorted through a burn — was a surefire way of making Tender-of-Growing-Roots disconcerted.
The Warrior-Servant to her left was only a head taller than her, in contrast to his companion, who stood at a third again her height. She guessed he was a first-form, like her, although with their rate, from the perspective of a Lifeworker, it was difficult to tell.
Warrior-Servants were permitted few personal adornments, but this one did have a backwards-arcing helix emblazoned on his right shoulder. It was an odd, somehow cheerful design. Tender liked this one better than the other, who stood tall in plain armor and stared forward like a great hunting cat.
Not that she mistrusted either of them. These Warriors were handpicked by her mentor, who had little love for their rate to begin with. She trusted his decisions.
Still. It would be a relief to be away from them soon enough.
Around her, she could feel the ship begin to thrum and come alive. It was going to make its fourth jump in as many standard hours. Tender wasn’t surprised nor annoyed. All she could think about was how many corrections and calculations were being made on the bridge, in its attempt to fight whatever was holding them back.
Tender was only surprised that it wasn’t causing more problems.
They reached the door with little ceremony. Upon it was engraved the Eld. A fitting motif for the bridge, a reminder of all who would command this vessel of their sacred duty.
"The captain awaits you," one of the Warrior-Servants said. "You should be quick. She'll surely be quick to get back to her own duties."
It didn't escape Tender that the Warrior-Servants were of a higher rate than hers. Apparently being the chosen student of Wind-Stirs-a-Distant-Ocean, the Lifeworker who had proposed and put together the expedition, meant little on a ship commanded by a Warrior-Servant.
The doors opened. The two Warriors took up position on either side of it, guarding against some unseen threat. Neither spared a glance as she passed through, nor did they so much as twitch as the door closed behind her.
She realized she had been following them with her gaze. Them, and the secret she had kept for so long before this moment.
Forcing her gaze from the door as gracefully as she could manage, she looked back up towards the two Forerunners who waited for her, hands clasped in front of them.
Wind-Stirs-a-Distant-Ocean inclined his head towards her, and his stance loosened closer to informality. As warm a welcome as she was likely to get, considering the situation.
It was the captain, however, who spoke first. "Tender-of-Growing-Roots," she said. "It is a pleasure to have to have you on my ship."
"The pleasure is mine," Tender said. She hoped her voice was strong and confident. She knew Warrior-Servants were impressed by that sort of thing in other rates.
"I'm told you were instrumental in stabilizing the ecosystem of Great-Sky after it became the site of a seed world constructor," she said.
The preservation of the specimens on the planet, one of which exhibited signs it may become a contemporary sentient species in fewer than five million years, had been a point of great contention between the Lifeworkers and the Builders. In truth, the actual genetic and terraforming work had been far less taxing or time-consuming than dealing with the Builders who wished the seed project to continue as quickly as possible.
Tender doubted this old Warrior-Servant cared about her work in ecosystem management, or even her limited but high-profile Lifeworker credentials. It was the latter achievement she was interested in.
“I admit I’m not the one to ask about that sort of thing,” the captain continued. “But, still, it sounds like quite the achievement.”
Was she trying to make a joke? Tender found herself appreciating the effort.
“She is the quickest to rise amongst my students,” Ocean said. “There is a reason I chose her to accompany us.”
Tender felt a warmth in her chest.
“I had imagined there would be,” the captain said. She beckoned Tender. “Come and talk with us. Ocean tells us you have something to share, that the Lifeshaper has deemed fit for us to know.” Her voice was mild and dangerous. “And we’d appreciate your perspective on what to do when we reach Erde-Tyrene.”
Tender stepped further up to the view-screen. She felt inadequate, or perhaps merely anxious, among this company — on closer inspection, she wondered if the captain was not a full Promethean — but knew she had no reason to. “I would be honored to offer my perspective,” she said, walking the line between proudly advertising her usefulness and sounding arrogant.
“I believe now would be a good time to go through the Lifeshaper’s plan,” Ocean said. “The Lifeworker contingent, will, of course, be allowed to embark on the planet first of all.”
The captain nodded. “With a Warrior-Servant escort,” she added.
“I fail to see the threat the humans will pose to us,” Ocean replied. “Especially with the Lifeshaper’s geas working on them.”
“I have my orders.”
Ocean was stock still, but she recognized exasperation in her mentor when she saw it. “Of course,” he replied.
“We thank you,” Tender jumped in. “And appreciate your help with this mission.” She hoped to both satisfy the Warrior’s wounded pride, as well as remind her that she was an auxiliary on a Lifeworker mission, not the other way around.
For now, she thought to herself.
Ocean seemed to understand. “Of course,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say we would not welcome the help. I only meant that if your attention were required elsewhere…”
It was a clumsy save, but the captain was gracious enough to allow it. She nodded at Ocean, quick and curt.
“First,” Ocean said, “if you are to accompany us, I feel it is only fair we tell you what it is we think we’ll find on the surface.”
“That would be lovely,” the captain said.
Tender could sense Ocean’s eyes on her. The captain’s eyes followed them. Her mind went terrifyingly blank for a second before she regained her composure.
Now was her time.
The enormity of what she was about to present was both humbling and exhilarating. The fact that this discovery was still so new contributed to her ownership of the role, although she was sure that at this very moment — before they left, more likely — the most powerful Builders were being briefed at Maethrillian.
But due to fate and some trick of the Lifeshaper’s, it was Lifeworkers who got the honor of hearing first, and it was her peculiar expertise that gave her the position, here and now, on this mission.
She swallowed. Life is deadly to all its parts, she reminded herself. Something, something, at least make it funny.
“Our oldest myths speak of our uplifting,” she said. “We were made by the Precursors to take on the duty of the Mantle. That is a position every Forerunner can hold onto with pride.”
Both the captain and Ocean watched her. Were it not for the helmet, Tender could imagine one of Ocean’s eyebrows quirking upwards. Tender sensed that this spiel worked better on self-important Builders than it did on either of them. She changed her tack.
“We have taken charge of Erde-Tyrene, and our former enemies, with that sacred role in mind,” she said. “But of late…”
She paused, and gazed around the room.
“Erde-Tyrene has been completely fucking us,” she said.
If her audience was scandalized, they didn’t show it. But she noticed that some of the bridge crew had looked up, beginning to pay attention to her.
“I don’t need to tell any Lifeworker about this,” she said. “We’ve set coordinates for this planet, only to find our instruments are faulty. We’ve tried to get in contact with our outpost ancillas or remotely affect our equipment, but we’re completely cut off.”
“Is this why we’ve dropped out of slipspace four times now on this voyage?” the captain asked. With materials and logistics, Tender had her interest.
“We think so,” she said. “We don’t think it’s the normal slipspace difficulties we’ve been having since the Flood arrived.”
“You know about that,” the captain said. She didn’t sound surprised.
“We were briefed by the Librarian herself,” Tender rejoined. It felt good to assert her knowledge to a higher rate. “But, no. This time, we’ve been dropping out entirely without notice or intent. Not only that, but we incur absolutely no reconciliation debt as a result of our trip.”
One of the bridge crew scoffed. Only one, and half-heartedly at that. They had all seen the numbers.
“Our theories have been varied,” she said. “But there is something clear. Whatever is stopping us, it doesn’t bear us any ill-will. In fact, we think it might be… trying to help us, in its way. Like a parent, benevolently steering their child out of harm’s way. Whatever this is, it wants to stop us, but it doesn’t want to hurt us.”
“So you think this something is capable of thought?” the captain said. “Of reason? Of kindness?”
She appreciated this old Warrior’s willingness to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. Even if it wasn’t clear that this wasn’t another Warrior-Servant joke.
She couldn’t help but look at Ocean as the crucial moment approached. He gave her the tiniest of nods in response.
“Lifeworker stations have been corroborating data. What we can salvage, that is,” she said. “Which is, as you might imagine, very little. That being said, we do have a working theory.”
She brought out her gauntlet, and whispered a set of instructions to her ancilla. She felt a brief pulse in reply, and then, the hologram began to expand.
It was large enough to command the attention and even awe of everyone in the room. Not strictly necessary, but the response, she felt, would be helpful. It was one segment of her presentation that even Ocean knew nothing about.
The side of the alabaster sphere nearly brushed up against the captain and Ocean’s faces. They took an instinctive step back, even though she had elected not to build the image out of hardlight.
“By the Mantle,” the captain whispered.
The sight nearly took Tender’s breath away. The power within even this poor copy uncoiled and reached out to her, as if image and object were somehow connected with each other.
The things it tried to tell her! Perhaps it was merely her own imagination, but she struggled to shut them out and get back on track anyway.
“This is the oldest of our myths,” Tender said. “Our uplifter from ancient times, the Mantle made flesh. Only the highest Builders, and some of the Warrior-Servants, still remember it. Am I correct in assuming you are one such, captain?”
It was a bold move to make against her technical superior, but it paid off. She could practically feel the captain suck in a breath. “Yes,” she said.
Tender had been hoping there wouldn’t be much of a fight on that point. Not for the first time, she wondered how old the captain was.
“We’ve had so many names for it we have no idea what the truth is,” Tender said. “Demiurge. Cocoon. Helper. The Builders call it the Great Machine, but the Lifeworkers call it the Traveler.”
The white, perfect, alabaster sphere hung over the bridge for a few moments. Just long enough to support the theater of the moment. Finally, Tender withdrew the image.
“But it can’t possibly be real,” the captain said. “The things we heard it could do… madness. Magic.” She said the last word with scorn — and a little bit of awe.
“We know,” Tender. “Believe me, we know. We have no idea how many, if any, of the legends are true. I myself have only scratched the surface of some of them, and they make me wonder sometimes if my brain pan hasn’t been jammed up with fixerjel.”
She looked around the room. Already, she could tell that a good number of these Forerunners had no idea what she was talking about, and the ones who did wouldn’t believe her. That was fine. She had guessed that. None of them really needed to, but if one in particular did, it would make things a bit easier.
She turned back to the captain, sensing her time here was at an end. “In any case,” Tender said, “something is stopping our progress that is currently unknown. I only wished to communicate that fact to you, and to prepare you for what we might find at Erde-Tyrene.”
“And if there is no Traveler?” the captain asked, soft, dangerous.
“Be it so.”
She bowed to the captain and to Ocean. There was no further need for her to stick around. The captain would make her choice whether to believe her or not, but either way, she would keep going to Erde-Tyrene.
Her answer didn’t please the captain, she could tell. A twinge of nerves ran through her. She cast her gaze back at Ocean, and hoped he’d be able to smooth things over.
Tender left the bridge with the captain’s eyes boring into her back. She couldn’t help but feel a moment of relief when the doors closed behind her, and she was left with the Warrior-Servant guards once again.
The taller one looked down at her. She had, at some point, caused her helmet to become transparent, giving Tender a full look at her face. “How did it go?” she asked softly.
All of a sudden, Tender felt bad for judging this Warrior-Servant. There was a plaintive kindness in her eyes, along with the steel that her rate usually possessed. “Well enough,” she said. “I think I’d like to go back to my quarters now.”
The Warrior nodded. “Well, you don’t need us to escort you,” she said, and nodded down the hallway. “That way.”
Right. Tender felt embarrassment. She had expected the Warrior-Servants to escort her back, like they had on her way there. She wondered if someone had ordered them to guard the bridge instead in the interim.
As she left, she could hear the Warrior-Servants start to talk behind her. Somehow, she thought sardonically, she could guess that it was about her.
…
The ship transitioned out of and into slipspace only twice more on the voyage, but they were both some of the worst acts of reconciliation Tender had ever experienced.
The cabin seemed to rock physically around her as the poor ship struggled to maintain its course against a metaphysical blockade of… something. Her Lifeworker’s sensibilities about the inner life of things thought to be inanimate made her stretch out a hand towards the bulkheads, as though trying to comfort the vessel.
It was, after all, trying to fight something it had no understanding of or reason to believe existed. Tended felt a moment of wry kinship with the ship. Warrior-Servant and Builder politics felt like something quite the same at times.
For whatever reason, the Traveler had dropped its pretenses. It was no longer trying to help them and push them away at the same time. Something in that ancient, incalculable consciousness had decided that this ship was an acceptable casualty. She could only hope it wouldn’t go all the way and destroy them.
She occupied her time by raising her model of the Traveler, the most updated version any Lifeworker or Builder who had dedicated themselves to the study of the paracausal had. It was smooth and alabaster, scuffed with marks of unknown origin but otherwise perfect in itself.
Forerunners and humans both had tendencies to see the sphere as “perfect,” limitless in its lack of edges — or its infinite edges, as the case may be. Tender couldn’t help but wonder whether that tendency came from the Traveler itself.
That also raised a number of uncomfortable questions about the shared origins of humans and Forerunners, questions she was not yet of a rate to answer. Ocean, perhaps, would have an opinion, but asking him something like that felt faintly heretical.
She sat down on her bed and extended an arm. Wordlessly, her ancilla gathered her armor up, and let it flow off of her body. It knew the drill.
At best speed, which they were all but certain not to make, they had ten hours left in transit. That left enough time for Tender to sleep, something she had only (relatively) recently begun to do. Time to sleep, and to dream.
She laid down on her bed. It would be easy enough this time. Without her armor, she was exhausted. She had instructed her ancilla not to heal any of the micro damages to her body that made her naturally need sleep, and it had been a long day.
Tender felt like a young child again, curling up like this. It had always been so, since she had begun to dream in earnest. She used to hate that feeling, and still did. But she had stopped denying, every time she was about to embark on this voyage, that it didn’t really make her miss her mother.
…
You stand here now and now and now and I am awonder, all awonder how you manage it
There is a bird flying, high above, the curvature of the Earth — of Erda — of Erde-Tyrene. Tender rises up, and reaches out her hand like a child to follow it. She is walking faster than anything. Mountains pass by her like molehills. She wonders if she is big, or if the whole planet had become small.
The bird takes her where it always takes her. This time, it lights on her shoulder and gently caws to her. It’s speaking, but its voice is a babbling, unintelligible torrent.
She forces her attention to the tree.
She almost gasps. The roots, once pure and silver, are blackened and curled at the edges. Its branches bear the same affliction. She wades through quicksilver streams to reach it.
Her hand brushes up along the roots. She wants to cry. This should not be happening. She doesn’t understand what’s wrong with the tree. It has never looked like this before.
Could it have something to do with the Flood? Could it have reached into this sacred place? She forced herself to calm down. This was her dream. None of this was real… yet. It was all a message, intended for her.
Swarming life of some kind raced up her arm. She relaxed. They meant no harm, or at least, they never had before.
She sat among the roots and listened. And when she had listened, she spoke.
She did not remember what she said. But the tree’s branches above her shivered. The bird, from her shoulder, chirped again, and this time it was a clear and piercing note, singular and sweet.
Tender still did not understand it. But she heard.
…
There was a knock on the door of her quarters.
Tender-of-Growing-Roots was startled out of her dreams a moment before the ship’s ancilla internalized the knock as a request for entrance and slid open the door, revealing Ocean standing, looking somewhat embarrassed.
“Apologies,” he said. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you.” He cocked his head. “Were you dreaming?”
“Yes,” Tender said. “And before you ask… no. I don’t know. Not yet.”
If Ocean were still capable of laughing, he probably would have. “That’s alright. Nobody expects you to be a perfect conduit for the Traveler’s every thought.”
“The Builders will,” Tender countered. “Once they’re briefed on what’s happening.”
“The Lifeshaper will deal with them,” Ocean promised. Once again, Tender had to doubt him.
She let the ancilla put her armor back. It was a quick process, but she was impatient to feel that shell around her once again, to feel protected. Then, she was obscurely ashamed of that impulse.
As she stepped out of the room, her eyes fell on the taller Warrior-Servant. She was standing a tad too close to Ocean, trying to look at Tender.
“Is it true?”
“There are a lot of things that are about to become true,” Tender said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
The Warrior was quiet for a moment, until Tender worried she had offended her. Then, “I mean… about you. Once being a Warrior-Servant.”
Tender exchanged a glance with Ocean, who met her levelly. That was not the question she expected to be asked. She inhaled and exhaled shakily. “Yes. I was born to a Warrior-Servant family. I never received my full mutation. Instead, a number of smaller ones from Lifeworkers, who took me in after I started to dream.
They were worried a regular mutation would stop me from dreaming. I don’t fully understand why they thought that, but I agreed to do what the Lifeshaper said.”
“Do you ever regret it?” the Warrior-Servant asked.
Tender had no answer for her. Not one that was satisfying, anyway. “I was put on the path of the Lifeworker because the Lifeshaper was the only one who could make sense of my dream,” she said. “She guided me in finding the Traveler. Her, and Ocean. That, I do not regret.”
The Warrior-Servant nodded. She understood duty.
Ocean cleared his throat, an archaic gesture. “Shall we go?” he asked.
They made their way once again for the bridge. “Good news and bad news,” Ocean said. “I would give the bad news first, but as it turns out, they might be the same thing. We are experiencing no further difficulties with our slipspace transit. No reconciliation, either. We are sailing more smoothly, perhaps, than the first Forerunners to leave Ghibalb.”
“How is that bad?” the Warrior-Servant asked.
“Because we’ve been invited,” Tender said. “The Traveler has accepted that it cannot stop us without destroying us, and not happily. We cannot know what it will do when we arrive.”
That cast silence over the group, until they reached the entrance to the bridge.
Before they entered, Tender turned to the Warrior-Servant. “What is your name?” she asked, trying to sound kind.
The Warrior-Servant shrugged. “I am called Star-of-Strongest-Light.”
“Do you prefer Star or Light?”
“Either will do.” Star shrugged again, almost compulsively.
“Before we see whatever we will see beyond the bridge,” Tender said. “Shall we be friends?”
Star looked almost startled. Ocean watched, his shoulders back, again with the curious implication that he would be laughing if he could.
“Alright,” she said.
Tender smiled, something she showed very few people. She still had the ability, due to her strange mutation track. Star was not disgusted, but merely surprised. She betrayed little of it, and if Tender had not been raised among Warrior-Servants, she wouldn’t be able to notice a reaction at all.
The door opened. Star stayed outside, while Ocean and Tender went to meet the captain.
Tender nearly stopped in her tracks. The walls had become transparent all around them, showing the blackness of space above, and below…
Below, the majesty of Erde-Tyrene waited. Green and blue and speckled in white, where clouds and ice rested on crowns of bright colored continents. Tender had seen planets like this before, but never one that carried with it the fates of so many, human and Forerunner — and perhaps of every living thing in the galaxy. It took her breath away.
The captain met her gaze, and then nodded towards one of her crew. “Show her,” she said.
For the second time, the wide white sphere appeared in the center of the bridge.
This image, however, was different. Accompanying the Traveler was ground, a great valley, and below it a human city had grown. There was a nasty wound on the Traveler’s groundward side. That was the best way Tender could describe it. A wound, sustained in battle, perhaps, a wound that would try to heal if only given the opportunity.
“We found it,” the captain said, something like resignation in her voice. “It’s surrounded by human buildings and shrines. We think they must worship it, like one of their gods. Then again, you people are the anthropologists.” She nodded towards Tender and Ocean.
“It’s amazing,” Ocean said. There was reverence and quiet and the barest hint of a tremble in his voice.
“What do we do?” the captain asked. Tender dully realized that A Warrior-Servant captain was now openly asking her, a Lifeworker, for orders.
Not just her. Ocean was looking at her, too, fully devoting himself to her judgment.
She closed her eyes. Breathed in, and out. Life is deadly to all its parts.
“Right,” she said. “Well, first things first. Let’s meet the locals.”