Chapter Text
>DATA INTEGRITY RESTORED. GAIA Log: 3 Feb 2065 R.
Okay, GAIA. Sorry about that. Where was I?
>You were telling a story.
Right. Yeah… so, like I was saying, it was a children’s electronics kit, but I’d hacked the wiring up to an auto battery and solar PV, and the grass caught fire. And so did a tall pine that’d stood there… I don’t know, maybe a hundred years?
>Query: You were how old?
Six. My mother was home, thank god, and she called the fire department, and after, she took me out on the lawn and showed me the dead baby birds. Because there were nests, in the pine tree.
>Query: What did you feel?
I’m not sure? I remember yelling that I didn’t care. And that’s when my mother took my face in her hands and… spoke.
>Query: What did she say?
She said I had to care. She said, “Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don’t make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something. To serve life, not death.”
>You often tell stories of your mother, but you are childless.
I never had time. Guess it was for the best.
>If you had had a child, Elisabet, what would you have wished for them?
I guess I would have wanted… her --to be… curious. And wilful. Unstoppable, even. But with enough compassion to… heal the world. Just a little bit.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now, GAIA. Time to tuck in.
>I wish you a pleasant sleep, Elisabet.
Thank you. I’ll catch you tomorrow.
>
>CREATING BACKUP…
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..
…
Aloy scrabbled at her chest as she woke with a gasp, and her fingers tugged the cord around her neck. Her hand closed around smooth bone, and her lungs stopped constricting, letting her breathe normally. As she ran her thumb over the pendant, she blinked at her surroundings—A Nora lodge?
Not a Nora lodge. The homestead. All of Rost’s things… She reached for Elisabet’s globe and let her hands play with it while she looked around at her old home. There were still embers in the fireplace, somebody’s attempt to keep her warm while she slept. All of her gear was here, organised in the way she used to organise things when she had a home to come to. It was neat and spread out, none of the crammed-together-ness of a pack put together by a Seeker on the move. Her gear was acting too much like… furniture. The globe had been on the table by her head, like an ornament.
How did she get here? Who laid out her stuff like this? She put on her boots (Who took off her boots? She didn’t sleep with her boots off any more, what if she needed to make tracks quick?) and took full inventory. Nothing had been taken.
As she donned her silent hunter gear, she questioned who would bring her back here. The only person she knew who understood the significance of the homestead to her was Teersa. Even Teersa would assume she’d rather be in Mother’s Watch, in the Sacred Mountain. Near her ‘mother’. And maybe she would rather that. This place… it was filled with Rost. Reminders that she didn’t need that he was gone. It was overwhelming when she stood on the doorstep, the memory of the last time she had yawned here in the early morning, confused and alone.
She descended the slope with a lighter pack than she’d had in a while. She didn’t plan on becoming a Banuk Chieftain or a Shadow Carja Kestrel again anytime soon, and leaving these things at the homestead was a nice compromise. It was already a… what was the word? The Old Ones had had them. A collection of ancient and beloved things, not to be touched. Museum. She left a few things that she hardly used behind, and if she found herself needing them, she could take a trip back, and say hello to—
Rost’s grave was gone. She thought it was a trick of the snow, a trick of her eyes, but it wasn’t there and where was it. The memory-pattern had been scoured from the standing stone that marked the spot, and there was no sign of the offerings and candles and the box with the stick dolls that he’d made for her when she was a child. “Rost?” she said, as if he might hear her, beckon her to where he was hiding.
Someone had dismantled his grave. Maybe someone had found out he was a Death-Seeker and what the Matriarchs had done for him… they weren’t going to get away with this. She activated her Focus to try and find the tracks, but it illuminated nothing. She tapped it again. There should be drag marks in the snow, candle wax, at least footprints. How long had it been since she was here? They could have done this weeks ago.
There. Heavy boots, leading down the path. She crossed the bridge at the bottom of the slope and spotted a figure on the ridge. The culprit was still here?
She considered nocking an arrow and shooting them right there, but she needed to know what they thought they were doing and what they had done with the things from the shrine. She climbed to the ridge silently, pulled her spear from her back and readied it—
“Aloy! What are you doing?”
Rost.
A thousand things happened in her brain at once, and she processed none of them, staring dumbly at him. None of the appropriate questions made it to the forefront of her mind, instead his name just repeating on a loop on her mind.
Rost. Rost’s here. Rost. It’s Rost.
“Aloy?”
She steadied herself on his shoulders. She felt the cuff of his machine-plated spaulder with one hand and the boar pelt over his shoulder with the other. The coarse hair of the boar, the careful stitching of the badge that held it in place… It felt real, and she started to sob and she couldn’t stop. When he pulled her in close for a bewildered embrace, she gasped. He smelled of pine nuts and smoke and dried salvebrush. She’d forgotten how it felt to be folded into his arms, was surprised by how quickly the feeling of security overtook her.
“What’s wrong, child?” he murmured. “What’s overcome you? The Proving is a mere two nights away. In that short time, you will finally get the answers you have always wanted.”
The Proving. Two days away. Two days until the Proving. In two days the Proving would take place.
“What in All-Mother’s name are you wearing?” he asked, taking her shoulders and holding her at arms’ length so that he could see. “Did Karst sell that to you? What did you pay for it? Aloy—”
She pushed away. “You can’t be here. I can’t be here. I don’t understand.” She was half-pacing, trying to tease any grain of memory from her mind. “I was with Elisabet… there must have been something in the air, some kind of toxin released by AETHER, maybe… This isn’t real. It can’t be.”
“Slow down,” he said, his brow furrowing. “You’re safe. Feel the wind-chill on your skin, hear my voice in your ears. This is real.”
“No… Rost, please, I can’t explain it, but all of this has already happened,” she told him urgently. “I won the Proving, but that was far from the end of anything. It was attacked by… by worshippers of a machine called HADES—they believe it’s the Buried Shadow of Carja myth—it doesn’t matter. Hundreds of Nora died. I defeated HADES and… and I woke up here…”
He held a hand against her forehead. “Let’s return to the house, come. You can tell me about this dream.”
“I’m not feverish,” she protested. “It wasn’t a dream. All of my stuff is here. This… this must be the dream.” She didn’t want it to be a dream. She wanted more than anything for Rost to really be standing in front of her, but he couldn’t be. She produced Elisabet’s globe from her pocket. “I travelled west, past the Sundom and through the Daunt. I found this in the hands of an Old One who died to protect the world we live in now. Her name was Elisabet Sobeck.”
“I see,” he said, still with creases in his forehead.
Her shoulders sagged. “You don’t believe me, even in dreams. Of course you don’t.”
“You have never left the Embrace, Aloy. How could you find such a thing?”
Exasperated, she said, “Because I was made a Seeker after… The Embrace,” she realised, interrupting herself. “I’ve never left the Embrace. But you… you are planning to take me out, tonight.”
His frown deepened. “What?”
“There are Sawtooths destroying settlements in the hunting lands, and, and you needed to teach me about fighting for the tribe and not just myself, so you’re going to take me out of the Embrace. You’ll, you’ll whistle. And someone on the other side of the gate will whistle back, and they’ll let us through. You’ll say you’re not breaking the rules, technically, because you didn’t speak to anyone.” She smiled to herself and reflected, “I’d never seen you do that before.”
When she looked up, she saw Rost staring at her with eyebrows raised, lips pursed together. She was hit by a wave of grief at her recognition of the expression – the same look he wore whenever she had used her Focus to her advantage. She had missed him so much.
“Do you believe me?” she asked tentatively.
He exhaled, his breath fogging the morning air slightly, and looked into the sky. Searching for All-Mother’s guidance. “I cannot see how you know such things unless you have had these… visions, as you describe,” he conceded.
Visions, she could work with that. She let him take her back up to the house for his ease of mind, so he could poke a fire and brew a basic herbal remedy while she paced. He kept his ear turned to her, and she spent a few minutes collecting her explanation before she began:
“There’s a door inside the Sacred Mountain. The Matriarchs call it All-Mother’s Womb, and that’s where I came from. But its recognition of me was prevented by corruption… in its mind. The Alpha Registry. Teersa and Jezza made me a Seeker so that I could find a way to restore it. I went to Meridian, and allied with Sun-King Avad and the Oseram Vanguard against the Eclipse, a cult of Shadow Carja who worshipped HADES. Eventually I recovered the Alpha Registry and spoke with… with the Goddess. She directed me to an ancient ruin where I could find the Master Override that would defeat HADES.”
“You’ve been inside the Sacred Mountain?”
“That’s what you focus on?” she said, but of course it was. That was so Rost. “Yes, Teersa argued that I should be close to my mother when I died, so I was taken there. Lansra objected. Obviously.”
He reached out to still her pacing, and she let him envelop her hand in his. “Aloy. You saw your death?”
“No. Just… close.”
“I should have been at your side.”
She fidgeted with her hands. “That’s not what you said… tomorrow.”
Even as confusing as this was to him, he seemed to know what she was talking about, and he hung his head before returning his eyes to the fire. “When you were just a little one and you demanded to train for the Proving, I realised I was one day going to have to let you go. I did not know if I could go through with it. But it seems I parted ways with you after all.”
“I wouldn’t have let you. If you hadn’t—I would have found you. No matter what.”
He stirred the pot. “The demon. It plans your destruction even now?”
She blinked, and remembered the glitch, the words SYSTEM THREAT DETECTED running through the Eclipse’s network. “No. No, it doesn’t know I exist yet. HADES only learns about me through Olin’s Focus at the Blessing.”
I can change it. I can save everyone.
“What does it want, this Hades?”
“To destroy the world. All life. It’s not really its fault, it… was separated. From GAI—from All-Mother. It’s lost without her, and the only thing it knows how to do is… destroy. In my… visions there was a massive battle. Carja, Oseram, Nora, and Banuk all fighting to defend the Spire.”
He handed her a cup full of the remedy and said, “But you can stop it.”
“It is what I was made for. Heal the corruption, save the world,” she said, not without a sardonic edge. Some people found the idea of a destiny comforting. Most of them probably didn’t have anything as major on their shoulders as the fate of the entire world. Most of them probably weren’t literally manufactured like a machine for the role. Rost gave her a disapproving look: practical answers only. She sighed and sipped from the cup. “The Master Override is in an ancient ruin at the top of the Bitter Climb, south-west of the Cut.”
“Beyond the Sacred Land.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Tonight we deal with the Sawtooth outside the Embrace. Tomorrow, the Proving, where you can ask for Seekerdom. And then Hades. Finish your drink. I will meet you at the North Gate.” He picked up his bow from where it was propped and left the homestead.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s just those three steps,” she rolled her eyes to no-one.
When she left the homestead for the second time that morning, she did it with a clear head. She was geared up for a day in the Embrace, fire arrows and tripcaster ready for their task outside the gates. When she got to the base of the hill, she whistled for a Strider and waited.
…And waited. She whistled a couple more times.
She scanned her spear with her Focus. There should have been a list of Cauldron codes to come up. There should have been—there should have been a database of every machine she’d ever encountered. Oh, no. She scrolled through the Focus menus until she got to the datapoints, and found that they had been stripped clean.
Even without the Cauldron codes, the override she stripped from the Corruptor should have let her summon a Strider. But the component wasn’t attached. Because this wasn’t—Fuck, this wasn’t the lance Sylens had given her. It was nestled in HADES’ heart beneath the Spire, where she had left it when she set off for the Daunt. This was her old spear, before even its improvements by Thok ahead of the Proving. She had picked it up from the homestead without even thinking.
>DATA RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS…
She expanded the popup – maybe it wasn’t all gone – but found, rather than the Cauldron codes, or the Alpha Registry, or the maps of all the ancient ruins she had explored, a folder full of corrupted files. The repaired ones were the entries of Elisabet’s journal and GAIA’s logs that she had read as she was failing to get to sleep the night before the battle for the Spire. The most recent was GAIA Log: 3 Feb 2065 R. Her Focus was trying to heal all of the files she’d scanned in Zero Dawn and GAIA Prime. It had deleted… everything else.
“Why. Why did you do this?” she lamented, allowing herself a moment to sigh before she pulled the green camouflage netting over her clothes and step-softners over her boots. Then it was time to get on with her day, taking all inconveniences in stride. As she did every day.
Her Focus was beeping every time she scanned something that storage space was insufficient. It was using all of its processing power to heal the GAIA logs, and she didn’t want to stop it. The logs might be important to fixing GAIA later. She switched to one of her spares and left the original to it.
She arrived at the campfire inside the North Gate out of breath just after the sun had slipped behind the mountains for the evening. Navigating the Embrace had taken a lot longer than she remembered without a mount or the ability to override what she came across.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to appear,” Rost remarked.
“Sorry,” she sat down. “I was almost here, and then I remembered I had to go rescue a spear from a Scrapper and stop a girl from being mauled by Watchers. I’m ready.”
Once they were through the gates, she took the Forgefire from her back and loaded it with blaze. Rost squinted at it. “What is that monstrosity? An Old Ones weapon?”
“No, it’s an Oseram Forgefire, made by my friend Varga. I can destroy a Sawtooth in three shots with this thing.”
“Do not show off,” he chastised.
“I’m not. I’m making use of the resources at my disposal.”
“What happened to your bow?”
She had seen Rost eyeing her Banuk Champion bow, but he hadn’t said anything. She had planned, if he let her, to show him later how the wheels worked to increase the power of the draw at the expense of slowing it down. What she had interpreted as curiosity might, she now realised, be jealousy. He had crafted her the simple recurve bow that she had used to win the Proving – she sold it in Meridian when the space it took up was more inconvenient than its sentimental value was comforting. She remembered how long it had taken her to make that decision. She remembered crying about it, and then feeling silly. It was just a bow.
Rost did not think it was just a bow.
“It broke,” she lied. “I put it under too much strain and broke it, so I made an investment in a new hunting bow.”
“In order to trust your weapon, it is best if it comes out of your own hands.”
“I didn’t have time to make a bow,” she said, clipped. “Better to invest in the work of a skilled Banuk craftsman than my own rushed, inexperienced attempt.”
He shook his head, and they slipped into the tall grass close to the Nora lodge that was still burning.
“What was this place?” she asked, realising she had never found out.
“I didn’t bring you here to answer questions.”
“Make up your mind!” she snapped. “Am I supposed to be learning to act as part of the tribe or not?”
“Aloy, quiet.”
The Sawtooth barrelled out of the trees with its yellow lights blazing, scanning for the source of the noise it had heard. Aloy didn’t waste any time. She rolled closer, squeezed the blaze sac with her elbow, and watched the Sawtooth’s eyes turn red right before it was blasted with a fireball. She backed off as it flailed and fired another blast, which did a good job surrounding it in flames and a less good job hitting any major components. It pounced at her, and she rolled underneath its belly – one last shot, directly into its blaze canister, and she slid to safety as it exploded. The night air was warm with her kill.
“That was showing off,” Rost said.
“Only a little,” she admitted, putting the Forgefire away.
He had his arms crossed. Would he never be happy? “I suppose now you’re going to produce a… Sandspitter? To put out these fires?”
She looked at the destruction around her. Patches of dirt were smouldering, but a section of tall grass was all-out blazing. “Oh.” Shock wires weren’t a hazard in tall grass, and the ground was wet enough not to take from a handful of fire arrows. She hadn’t had to worry about this the first time. She should have brought the Icerail.
“Come, then,” Rost said, starting to gather wet dirt to stomp over the flames. “We have more to do if we don’t want your defence of the Embrace to raze it to the ground.”
After the fires of her own making were dealt with, Rost whistled. Three Braves came out of the dark to extinguish the lodge, and he took out his bow, watching the trees behind them. Aloy mirrored him, and kept her ears trained on her surroundings – but her eyes were watching the sky become shades lighter.
“This was Mother’s Hand,” Rost said, after a long stretch of silence. “More of an outpost than a village, staffing the gates. The Hand extends to welcome Nora into the Embrace, and keep uninvited outlanders at bay.”
“Will they rebuild it?”
She saw Rost half-shrug in her periphery. “Nora are stubborn people. They will probably build it bigger.”
She wanted to ask about Mother’s Vigil. By the time she was told Rost’s story, the only other person she knew from there was already dead. They must have felt like they were on the edge of the world – what the Carja called the Shivering Watch gate at the top of the valley and Daytower just a stone’s throw from it. Nora Braves and Carja soldiers could have shouted stories at each other and learned of what lay beyond.
Who was she kidding? Nora were too proud to listen to stories about the ‘tainted’ land and its blasphemous people.
Back inside the Embrace, Aloy and Rost parted ways for the time being and she headed towards Mother’s Watch. She gave the village itself a wide berth, deciding she didn’t want to deal with the possibility of spits or stones thrown – it depended who was on the gates today. It was sort of darkly amusing to realise she gave the same treatment to the settlements of the Sundom for the opposite reason. Maybe this time she could avoid being hailed as the Saviour of Meridian and the wretched Anointed One.
Aloy heard the festivities in Mother’s Heart long before it came into view. She found herself nervous – butterflies in her stomach. The way a prowling Scrapper used to make her feel. The way she felt in anticipation of Maker’s End and the possibility that she was going to meet her mother at last. Nothing like the clanging, stone-heavy dread that came before the Sun-Ring or the Spire or the first time she’d faced a Thunderjaw. This feeling almost didn’t belong to her any more.
She’d told Brom and Olara to keep themselves well-hidden in his cave tomorrow. Just in case she couldn’t stop it. Just in case this was the kind of nightmare she couldn’t change to its core.
“Aloy,” Rost said, standing. She meant to say something – anything – but she couldn’t find the words. They just stood in front of each other, grappling with this day that should have been so many things but was now warped like the chassis of a corrupted machine. Failing to come up with anything meaningful to say, he said, “Why are you wearing your scarf over your mouth?”
Aloy looked to the gate of Mother’s Heart and shook her hands out. They felt numb. She felt… not all here. Perhaps a symptom of the dream. “I have to hide my face from Olin,” she stammered out. “If HADES recognises me through his Focus, then it will happen just like before.”
The gentle nod of his head showed his understanding-without-understanding. He had never got to grips with her Focus, and she suspected that he was struggling with the idea that it was in fact dangerous after all, but that she still needed it. She would take it off when she approached the gates – it was too noticeable to Olin and Erend.
“Sit. I will paint your face,” he pointed to the rock he had been sitting on and she watched him uncap a small container filled with dark paste. “My grandmother once told me that our ancestors painted themselves to conceal their faces from demons. It seems they were onto something. I would not like to risk giving you the blue without High Matriarch Teersa’s blessing, but… if you like, I would be happy to mark you with the paint of my family.”
“I would be honoured, Rost,” she said quietly.
He dipped his finger in the pot and held her chin with the other hand. It reminded her of him cleaning her cuts and scrapes when she was a child, tender and comforting. A long-buried memory surfaced of a scraped knee and a sniffly nose. Rost struggled with a raccoon’s carcass, puffing out his cheeks with effort, and asked her if she was strong enough to help him carry it all the way home. She had taken it into her arms with ease and laughed at him.
“Thank you, my little Brave,” he’d said. “I don’t know what I would do without a strong hunter like you to help me.”
“You’ll smudge the paint,” Rost said softly, moving his hand from her chin so he could wipe a tear from her eye.
She sniffed. “Why are you still allowed to wear Nora blue? None of the other outcasts do. And their patterns always go down the face, from what I’ve seen. Never around the eyes.”
He pressed his lips together a moment. “Wearing the paint of your mother ensures that All-Mother can recognise and bless you,” he said. “Outcast paint goes through the eyes in black or white because in the crime they committed, their jealousy, hubris, laziness, or greed blinded them to All-Mother’s blessings. Being an outcast is intended to force you to commune with the Goddess, to make amends. To appreciate the life she provides for us and charges us to care for in the Embrace and beyond.”
“But doesn’t All-Mother provide the Nora with community as well? What’s the point of casting someone out for life when they can never be a part of the tribe again?”
“Aloy…” he began, in his most You must not question these things voice.
“Clearly you agree, or you wouldn’t ask me to help Grata,” she rebutted.
He sighed. “Grata is traditional. She wears the customary paint and prays to All-Mother daily, and she will not speak to tribesmembers or other outcasts directly. But in truth I do not think the Matriarchs would have cast her out if she did not personally insist upon the sentence. She broke the rules, and therefore must be outcast. She believes this truly.”
“And you?”
He closed the paint pot and wiped his fingers on his overcoat. “I believe in the tribe’s rules, but I do not turn down generosity when it is extended to me. My situation is… unconventional. The pigment was gifted to me by a High Matriarch, when I was permitted to live in the Embrace. I believe that I was given it because I am the only surviving member of the family that bears this pattern. Though I cannot know for sure.”
She stood up. “It will stay alive through me,” she said.
He looked away, down into the valley towards the gates. Three Nora walked past them onto the bridge for Mother’s Heart, chatting away jovially and ignoring them. She recognised some of their paint – family members of one of the other aspirants. Rost made a point to keep his face turned away from them until they were out of earshot. “Aloy, you have the opportunity to begin your own design – your own family mark. I would not wish to burden you with my family’s history.”
“It’s not a burden, Rost,” she insisted. “I’m proud to call you my father. I know families are survived by the women in Nora tradition, but I didn’t come from Nora tradition. I came partly from the Old World… and partly from you. I told you I won’t forsake you. I won’t forget everything you’ve done for me, not ever.”
He sighed. “You may not think of yourself as Nora, but you are stubborn enough to be.” He reached into one of the pouches on his belt. “I want you to have this, for good luck.”
He held out his hand with the bone pendant resting in his palm, matching the one tucked underneath her breastplate, and her mouth became dry. She curled his fingers back around it. “I can’t take that, Rost. This… this isn’t goodbye. I want you to keep it, and promise me you’re going to be here when I get back.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Here?”
“Home. In the Embrace, I don’t know. Just don’t… don’t go where I can’t follow,” she said.
He regarded her for a moment, and nodded. “When you need me, I will be by your side. Always. May All-Mother bless you, Aloy.”
“...And you.”