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“You are killing me, but you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.”
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Xi Ro says to Sathona, “Sister, I will protect you from a cloud-whale.”
A cloud-whale, Sathona thinks, is a wicked creature, swift and dangerous in its cunning. It comes out from nowhere and swings its ridged tail, and vanishes in the storm as twenty Krill are crushed under a collapsing building. You should not go out on the street when it’s stormy like that. There are ways to hide from its sweeping gaze, though; it’s a measure of cunning to outwit such a creature, and a clever prey doesn’t need claws or teeth to rely on. In Sathona’s language, Xi Ro’s words mean: “You are not smart enough to avoid a cloud-whale”.
But Xi Ro is plain and honest, straightforward like a stone to a windowpane, and she doesn’t see the allure of saying one thing and meaning another. Xi Ro sleeps with her head on Sathona’s shoulder, and tumble-plays with her on the bedroom floor until Taox comes to scold them. Xi Ro is pesky and rash, and insolent at times, but she always wedges in between her sisters and danger, and never shies away from risking a bruise. She is skilled with a sword—Sathona admires her for this—and her eyes are teal, almost blue like bait-stars. Sathona likes the way they narrow and flicker when she laughs.
In their exile, on the infinite ocean, it is Xi Ro’s bravery that saves them. It is Aurash’s resolve, and Sathona’s wit, and together they chase the wild winds and flee from sea-monsters snapping their jaws at them from beneath the waves. Nights they spend huddled below deck, safe from the acid waters, and comfort each other to sleep with lullabies and shanties they overheard from sailors docking their ships in the port of their childhood. Sometimes, when the sky is peaceful, Aurash climbs out to look at the moons. Sathona follows her always, and keeps her arms wrapped around her as her sister gazes up in terrified wonder, maps and sky-charts spread out in her lap; fifty-two familiar circles and one errant star, their positions and movements tracked across the months. The mast at their backs is stained black with the mark of their oath.
Sathona combs through Aurash’s spine-tendrils and thinks of all the things her sister is afraid of: the moons, the wave, the people of Fundament unaware of the death sentence upon them, the Osmium Court breaking under the rule of a tyrant. The futility of their father’s warning. The stories she will never hear, the stars she will never gaze up at, once the upper half of her hourglass runs empty. Aurash can’t keep a thought to herself when she’s frightened, and Sathona lets her talk, lets her ramble the fear out until her throat is hoarse and her hands are shaking a little less. Then, sometimes, she asks her about constellations and celestial navigation, and watches light return to Aurash’s eyes.
She rarely tells them about her own fears—those waking visions that keep her paralysed at night, the taste of seawater as the ocean takes them, milky-eyed senility, the silence of a meaningless death—but the worm knows. Oh, the worm knows when she shakes awake from a nightmare, when she is too scared to fall back asleep for the fear of never opening her eyes again. Do not be, o sharp-minded one, it whispers. Do not let your steps falter, do not dread that which you can evade. Keep your gaze long. Salvation lies in the Deep.
Xi Ro isn’t afraid. She is brave with Aurash’s strength, and Aurash is strong with her bravery. In storms or despair she looks to Sathona and is brave with her words, the certainty with which she speaks them, her mad ideas that end up saving their skin over and over. Xi Ro’s blade is sure and her vengeance burns brightly. She sleeps well at night.
The needle ship saves them too, in spite of Xi Ro’s concerns. They haul ancient corpses out of its many rooms. Aurash locks herself up on the bridge for three days straight, devouring the maps and diagrams of Fundament, learning the layers of its atmosphere and names of species lurking beneath and above the waves. Sathona walks the labyrinth of winding corridors and writes their secrets in code. Xi Ro is thrilled to work on the repairs, learning how to weld sheets of plating together and fill the cracks with heated whale-tar, setting up traps for the large chitinous beasts that prowl the shore waters with Sathona’s help to then strip off their carapace and use it to patch the hull. She blows up in rage when Aurash suggests implementing Taox’s tips to fix the engines; never, she shouts, she is evil and vile and I don’t want anything to do with her. Sathona has to calm her down with soothing embraces and clever words, talking about foresight and strategy and the wisdom in using the enemy’s strengths against them. Xi Ro sobs in helpless fury—but by now she is smarter than a two-year-old wounded child, and relents.
As they break the surface of the ocean and dive into the swirling maroon depths, they are holding each other’s hands.
Everything changes, then and there. History begins. The perpendicular axes of space and time meet in the origin point, and the curve of the Hive starts ticking on towards infinity. Everything changes, except this singular fact — that when they emerge, Auryx is still at the helm and Xivu Arath is leaning on her sword, and Savathûn is charting the paths of monsters. And they are still holding hands.
Savathûn is the first one to learn the rules. She is the cleverest, the Cunning. When Auryx announces his plans to parlay with the Ammonite, she thinks it is weakness, and her worm latches itself onto that notion.
“Punish it”, it sings in the back of her mind. “Will you allow yourself to be guided by a soft-shelled weakling-prince, one who extends a hand in lieu of a knife, one who falls for the tricks of the Sky? Who clouds his own vision with pathetic lies, when he was supposed to chart your path to eternity? Punish it.”
It is not swords or a hands-on combat; nothing so dramatic. Once Auryx leaves for the peace negotiations, Savathûn stalks his shuttle all the way to the dry moon and fires a volley of rockets just when he’s about to break the atmosphere. She is young. She is clever, but too absorbed to think through all of the consequences, to flay open all the layers of meaning wrapped around her worm’s words. She still worships. Auryx’s shuttle is pulverised into a handful of floating debris, tugged on slowly by the moon’s orbit.
(She thinks about that a lot following Oryx’s final death, millennia later. The explosion made no sound in the vacuum, but it does in her dreams. Her worm gnaws at her for this and laughs.)
Auryx thanks her, once he emerges. She did not expect him to. She is grateful he does, and feels proud for a time, and it is with this pride that she tells him to not forgive her betrayal. For twenty thousand years they wage wars on each other — to practise death, and pry their worships as gurgled cries from slit throats, and profess their love. The Hive grow in number. Auryx’s wings grow in size, now as wide as the sails of his frigate, and Xivu Arath’s laughter grows to shake the foundations of the lightning palaces of their minds. Savathûn grows more clever and cautious, and does not need to leave her throne to pulverise Auryx’s ships anymore.
She still worships.
Xivu Arath knows Savathûn never means what she says, so she proves her love for her by massacring two billion of her Thrall. Savathûn responds in kind, with fire and poison engulfing the better part of Xivu’s flotilla; the carnage is glorious, and the sky cracks under the sound of Xivu’s joyful cry as she rams a war moon into the flank of her sister’s ship and escapes into a Rupture.
Savathûn rolls her eyes at this insolence, but she breaks into a chase across the howling depths of the Sea of Screams and for Xivu this is as close to a confession as she’ll ever get. They pursue each other through the wide empty spaces between courts, among shattered donjons and bridges half-willed into being—and when Savathûn’s talons finally hook over her sister’s carapace, the brightness of Xivu’s laughter could put every star in the infinite cosmos to shame.
These are the blissful times; these are the the lean times, when the Dakaua Ministry of War plots and plans against them, when the Ecumene war angels drive their armies back star by star by star. This is the desperate convention beneath a green fire sky: three lords of the Hive seeking counsel, three siblings embracing in weakness.
Savathûn has fear in her eyes. Xivu Arath is restless with defeat, confused by her failures and harrowed by hunger, massive legs and broad shoulders trembling with the pain. Auryx puts his arms around them both, and for a moment they feel like children again, scared and huddling for comfort amidst a howling storm.
Clever Savathûn speaks of her puzzlement. Mighty Xivu Arath speaks of her weakness, of how her armies are tired out and decimated and her own limbs frail from starvation. Defeated, she suggests retreat. Terrified, Savathûn suggests prostrating themselves before their gods for aid.
But Auryx is brave. He is the bravest thing Xivu knows, even beaten and sunken-eyed as he is now, and he roars at them to be strong. This is a challenge, a gift, and they will find a way to claw through it, to prove their right to exist against it, lest they do not deserve to exist at all.
Savathûn comes up with a plan. But it won’t work without a great carnage, she says, billions upon billions of deaths, and their forces are barely holding up against the Ecumene’s might.
Xivu Arath comes up with a plan. They must infect their enemy’s weaknesses, if its strengths are no match for their armies. But the Ecumene are lords of matter and physical law.
Auryx comes up with a plan. But it will require power, immense power, more than any one of them can claim alone.
So Xivu Arath tells him to kill her.
This is simple, in her mind. Maybe none of them has yet grasped the Logic to its full extent—they would have objected, if they had, to this foolish idea that could never work, that mustn’t work—and thus to Xivu Arath it makes perfect sense, letting her brother prove his strength by killing something as mighty as her. She does not see the obvious fallacy. She dies trusting in her sister’s idea, in her brother’s word, that Savathûn’s cunning plan will work and Auryx won’t use her death to slaughter their broods and reign alone. She dies brimming with pride, looking at his face as her neck gives in under the caress of his blade.
She does not see Savathûn’s attempt at betrayal|worship, or Auryx’s glorious triumph over Akka. She floats in strange spaces. When she comes back, it is from blood and green fire; unexpected, majestic, straight into her brother’s embrace.
And so the tithing law is carved in ruin and the Hive become an efficient killing machine, devouring systems by the hundred, and Truth is spread — the only truth, which is the sword, which is Life, which is the ceaseless struggle of proving your right to exist into infinity. Oryx reigns with his wings spread wide, each touching one edge of the known universe. All is well. The Taishibethi—a race of brilliant, onyx-feathered scholars—cry out from within their libraries and observatories, archives and glass-carved palaces; why, they wail, why are you ruining something so gentle and good, why do you hate beauty, why do you bring fire and pain?
Life is pain, says Oryx and splits the Tai capital world in half with nothing but the truth in his words.
Pain is power, says Xivu Arath and dips her sword in the tribute from this carnage, and goes to enact truth on the Taishibethi’s outer colonies.
Power is life, thinks Savathûn, hidden inside a black hole. The Worm her god purrs in assent at this, but the worm her vanquisher—who knows her secrets, who feeds on her cunning and doubts and the truth she wrestles with to deny—shivers in dread and delight. Isn’t this but a different angle to go at the final shape from? She wants to stay alive. She’s wanted it so desperately that she was ready to kill her brother in his throne world, and wasn’t that worship, wasn’t that the perfect enactment of the Logic which commands to carve your existence out of every piece of flesh softer than your blade — mortal or cosmic, despised or beloved? Her strength has always lain in her fears, and she is so terrified to die.
She envies Oryx when the Deep invites him to speak to it, and so she traps him there once he goes. (There was not much to envy, she finds out later, but as with most bad decisions, foresight is long overdue.) Then she cleaves her own way to it through cunning and wit, and it welcomes her inside, and it quells her dread with tender words. She believes it, for a while.
(And it lies to her — defeating her cunning in a beautiful, perfect way, and when she realises that, it is once again far too late for anything but hindsight. She is left weakened and raging and shrivelled by fear. She goes out to prove it wrong, and her worm feasts on this.)
(But that is all still in the future. For now they are sailing the black waters of the cosmos, still together, bound in love and violence and their oath older than history. Battles are waves and they lap at the hulls of their armada, and the galaxies they have conquered shimmer on them like sea foam.)
Savathûn, Insidious, combs her fingers through the river of stars drifting across the ceiling of the freshly completed Dreadnaught. The chitin on the walls still smells of newness, and various servant Acolytes and minor courtiers scuttle around with hands full of relics and banners dragging behind them, hanging up lanterns, lifting statues onto pedestals. Oryx stands presiding over this whole commotion with his head held up proudly and hand resting on the Willbreaker’s hilt.
“Why have you called this place the Mausoleum?” she asks, chasing a constellation with her hand and watching it dissipate between her claws.
Oryx rolls his shoulders, all regal, and the stars look like a diadem around his temples now—small flickering things at the crown of his vastness.
“Because it is the tomb of all the worlds we have liberated from existence, enshrined here as a map of our celestial crusade.”
“Eight hundred thousand fifty-two planetary systems. I’m impressed you’re still keeping count.”
“If we don’t know where we came from, how will we know where to go?”
She snorts at his tone, scholarly and formal like he is reciting prayers during the Feast of Swords. There is pride on his face, watching her watch the stars glimmer above them like precious stones.
“Then I expect dear old Fundament is hanging as the centrepiece over your throne.”
Oryx looks at her with his eyes the colour of nebulas and gestures, almost carelessly, to a tiny bright dot in a cluster of identical bright dots suspended on a distant part of the ceiling, above the ravine. From her spot at the edge of the balcony Savathûn can barely make out the largest moons.
This is a conversation about what is a crown jewel and what is a pebble, and, from Oryx’s perspective, an older brother’s lesson for an obstinate sister. And maybe if she were younger, less hardened by power and hunger, she would have picked up this gauntlet thrown in her face and they would fight, splattering gore across the polished floors. But wisdom comes with age—or maybe she is just too weary or too unbothered, or doesn’t want to make a scene in front of the Court—and Savathûn only scoffs, and turns away to admire the carvings on a nearby column.
(She does not remember this conversation anyway, untold millennia and heresies later—only the outline of their silhouettes against the cosmic river, and the weight on her left shoulder where Oryx’s hand rested—and it is one of the first memories she tells Immaru about.)
Xivu Arath, on her part, sees little point in argument-duelling. She prefers surer blades, the universe splitting under the edge of her cleaver while her siblings mince words in the howling dimness of their courts. She tells Savathûn, a daring glint in her eye, that she will anchor her throne world within the Greater Haubake’s nitrogen volcano and turn it inside out, thus causing a chain reaction and blowing up the whole planet.
“That’s stupid,” Savathûn says, finger tracing the rim of her chalice. “You risk the explosion affecting your throne world before you can snap off the tethers. What are you going to do with all that sulphur you’ve got lying around catching on fire?”
Xivu throws her head back. “You don’t believe I can do this, ha? Watch me, sister,” she swings her axe, “claim this system for myself when I shatter the Haubake Sun and spread forth to its outermost planets in a wreath of ruin! This day is going to be named The Day of the Blaze, I define it thus.”
Savathûn looks at her through half-lidded eyes. “By all means I’m not going to deny you this triumph. Go out there and die like a fool.”
This angers Xivu Arath (a gentle anger, prickling like salt water on dry skin, delightfully motivating), and so she anchors her throne world to the sun’s core—a cluster of deep metal and flame, threatening to rend her essence down to scorching embers. Savathûn watches from afar. Her sister has won their battle of wits, she figures; there were other words she could have used to try and deter Xivu from this idea, words more elliptical and less sharp with her intent, the silk-speech she had learned from observing court ambassadors in her childhood. She whets herself against Xivu Arath’s madness, eyes locked on the Haubake Sun and mind flicking between glimpses of a future where her sister does not come out of this alive. She is wiser now, not nearly as headlong in her worship as she was at the dry moon. More careful, perhaps. Or maybe just more afraid.
Xivu does succeed, of course, emerging along with a brilliant flurry of fire and molten rock. She crashes in a graceless tumble at the feet of Savathûn’s throne, filling the air with a choking reek of charred flesh, just as the shockwave ripples across the outer planets.
“Witness me, sister,” she pants, a big dumb smile spreading over the burns on her face.
Savathûn slits her throat and takes the triumph for herself.
Sharpening herself against Oryx is simpler, Xivu thinks. Not easier, not in the slightest, but simpler: a duel as plain as a punch to the face, with no three-layers-deep shadow-rules and all other overcomplications Savathûn brings to the table. It’s not that Xivu Arath does not appreciate her sister—she does, she loves the challenge of a mind battle and the thrill of victory, she loves—but sometimes it is freeing to just lean into the bluntness of a hand-to-hand. She and Oryx throw weapons at each other, spears and hammers and hydrogen bombs, warships and war moons. Tithes are poisoned and temples ransacked. Blood spurts, black in the blackness of space; and when they do come home at last, they’re dirty and ruffled, with faces split in ear-to-ear grins.
“You’re wasting our assets,” Savathûn scolds them.
“We are sharpening ourselves through the loss of our assets,” Oryx says. Xivu swings her axe at him and he parries the blow midway. “You are what you survive, sister. This is the only law.”
“So grateful I am to be constantly sharpened by your antics.” She makes a face. “Come now. I have communed with the Worm our god. The Sky has left a trail for us to follow back to the skein of lies.”
Of course where she leads them instead is straight into the crimson inferno of a carbon star, and Oryx’s fleet barely manages to escape its gravitational well. Worms their gods sigh and scoff, but they feed all the same. Many assets are wasted and the Sky slips away through their claws, but it is not important; what is important is that the First Navigator of Phase Spaces almost fell into her trap, and Savathûn is thrilled by the sheer pettiness of this victory. Yul has some choice words for them both the next time they stand before him, and she revels in his irritation as well.
The truth is that in the inmost depths of her heart, in the core of the intricately spun web of her secrets, Savathûn knows Oryx is mightier than her. Yes—she rules from a throne of bone and glass, overgrown with toxic blossoms; yes, her Wizards shame Akka’s memory with how easily they lie truths into being and her brood feeds on the ashes of two hundred thousand worlds. Her songs redefine matter and rend the minds of lesser beings asunder. Yet this one truth Savathûn knows is carved in osmium, and it has become apparent to her ever since she and Xivu failed to trap him in the Deep: Oryx the King is mightier than her, in wisdom and strength and purpose and foresight, and she will forever live in his shadow as he stands at the helm and charts the Hive’s pathway through history. Her worm will always gnaw at her for this. He will always be greater, braver, more steadfast in his ambition, more certain in his worship.
Savathûn is at peace with that.
But their gods aren’t, and they make it known. Their gods have whims – even after Oryx’s assertion of might over Akka, they still dare hold their bloated heads up proudly and slither around the Sea of Screams like they own the place. Eir is the most blatant about it, his gaze cold and piercing as he curls around the hull of the Dreadnaught and strains to crush it between its coils. Perhaps that is why Oryx favours him the most—the ongoing power struggle, whetting of strength against godly strength which always has him on edge, ever-vigilant and ever-sharp.
Yul is far more subtle. Proper and smooth-voiced, he chisels the grand dilemmas of existence down to one-sentence truths which he then speaks softly and with conviction enough to push planets off their orbits. Xivu Arath appreciates his straightforwardness. Savathûn loathes how sly he is, how vast the spaces between his words are and how adamantly he won’t let her squeeze into them. The simplicity of his dogmas and his utter disdain for her attempts to disprove them. They circle each other like wrestlers in a ring, and his wary eye is always on her.
She finds herself gravitating towards Ur instead. He feeds on her hunger for truth and life, the fervour with which she digs into the world to find and outwit its firmest laws, and leaves her plenty of shade to slip into. Xol is the smallest and the weakest; he burrows into the deeper places and waits, and observes.
It is Oryx who counsels with them most often – he is the Navigator, the eldest, and however ardently his sisters try to wiggle free from under his dominance, the tip of his sword is still the guiding lantern the uncountable Hive gather around. He is beloved by all—and so all who can feasibly attempt it seek to destroy him, and all who cannot instead dream about it. In tears of joy and sorrow does he cast his son into the depths of the Sunless Cell, his son who has tasked himself with his ruin. But the Worms their gods do not move against him, ever; and maybe it’s no wonder, Savathûn thinks as she loses a fifth of her fleet to love, maybe that is why.
“We set sail for the Harmony worlds,” he informs his sisters through an echo after one such counsel. “They had been lied to by the Traveler, and from this lie a flock of wish-vermin crawled out. I want to find and eat them.”
“I will eat them first,” Xivu says, and they fight about it, until Savathûn tells them to quit.
“Oryx, my kingly brother,” she says to the mangled shadow-form that is currently pulling the sharp end of Xivu’s axe out of his right temple, “why this urgency? Your brood has only begun feasting on the corpse of this system. Don’t you want to dwell here for a while and rummage through its secrets, and feast on the knowledge it holds?”
The echo is bleeding power profusely and already fading, but he looks at her sharply.
“Our gods command me, and I find benefit in this command.”
“Are they so afraid of whatever vermin emerged in the Traveler’s wake that they’re sending you to clean it up?”
Xivu pouts, and in moments like these she is still the youngest, childishly furious everyone around her keeps talking in a language she doesn’t understand.
“Speak plainly or I will kill you,” she threatens.
“We’re talking about the dragons,” Savathûn says lightly, and knows she has piqued Xivu’s interest by the way her eyes flicker. Between them Oryx’s echo fades out with the final scream of spacetime warping on itself.
Xivu’s face is bright with curious excitement, like sunlight glinting off of a blade. There are things, Savathûn figures, which are too vast to be spoken: which can only be expressed by their negative space, distilled from the absence of them. Truth is lies unwoven. The Sky is that which is not of the Deep, which can only be known in contrast to it—and the knowing is the process of peeling one from the other, as living is the process of evading death. She wanted to lie to Xivu Arath. But there are more languages than just the one she is most fluent in, and so she moves instead.
She does it swiftly and silently, barely a shift in the air—and suddenly there’s a knife in the back of Xivu’s neck. It renders her rigid in surprise, broken by a gasp when Savathûn pulls the blade out. She whirls around and snarls as her entire body flares up with the truest proof of love.
Hands clasp around a throat. Savathûn is laughing. Xivu is laughing too, splattering blood all over her sister’s face, and traps her in a wrestler’s grip strong enough to crush bones. In this she is the youngest too, Savathûn thinks: happy to be led across unknown topologies, trusting enough that she doesn’t need to understand them, not worrying about betrayal, weak, fearless—
The crack of a spine, and then the long, slow plunge under the waves of the Sea of Screams. A declaration of love. Savathûn dies in her sister’s arms, then is quickly followed by her into the depths when the whole ship explodes and breaks their mortal forms into singular atoms. Even in her feeble state she is fed by this deception. Dancing in the liminal space of green and grey, nine parts of her hunger and the residual thrill of battle, one part the hand she extends to Xivu—it is a little bit like being back on the needle ship, a sharp thing piercing through the unknowable ocean where no sound or smell or light has ever touched. A moment suspended in time. Happiness.
She never stops loving that moment—the precipice of death, where ecstasy clashes into her deepest fear in a furious claim of existence, a debate won in the only way that matters. The fraction of a second when she is not afraid, only triumphant and drunk on her own survival, chiseled down to a single point that screams defiantly: I AM.
(Then Oryx dies and everything becomes more complicated, obviously; but for now she is still elated, still chased by her sister as they sink down the spiral of death and rebirth, tied together as closely as atoms in a molecule.)
There are only two times when Oryx’s cunning defeats Savathûn’s — once, of course, beneath the green fire sky of his throne world, when she holds a blade behind her back to maim him but her cuts her down first with all of Xivu Arath’s strength. The other time is at the tactical map on the lower deck of her flagship, where they wrestle for dominion over a small moon the Harmony have just retreated from. Oryx is even stronger now, and faster, and the deadly edge of his blade slices through spacetime as if it were a sheet of fine silk; but Savathûn is smarter, and she turns the ruptures inside out until he is trapped in a sphere of world-shattering pressure crushing him from all sides.
It is a delight to scuffle again—the blunt clarity of a punch to the gut, a bright and sobering sensation when steel kisses flesh. Too long has it been since they fought like this, so plainly and close, with a sincerity that only comes from pressing one’s knife to the other’s throbbing vein. Oryx frees himself from the pitfall and reaches for Savathûn, his large palm scooping her up and clenching around her throat, and she drags her talons across his face deep enough to almost pluck out two of his eyes. She laughs with whatever air is left in her lungs. Loosening up in his grip, she allows him to pull her closer, until her claws can scrape against his carapace, until she can pierce him with the spell she is weaving with the last wisps of her fading consciousness—
This is a stupid mistake, and she realises as much when Oryx lets go of her throat to grasp both her wrists instead. She ends up locked in the iron trap of his arms and wings and a circle of dark power around her, heaving through the crushed windpipe, her thrashes and wriggles pathetically weak as she struggles for breath. He has grown stronger since they last wrestled, and for what it’s worth, this lesson teaches Savathûn never to go close quarters with him again. She tries beating against the wreath of his Will but it only wraps her spells inward—and so both the victory and the moon are his, and she already braces for the long and painful resurrection once her vanquished essence slips out to the Ascendant plane. Oryx laughs triumphantly.
He does not strike her down, though. They stay like this for a while, his strong shoulders and soft wings encircling her, and with her face pressed to his chest she can feel it rise and fall with every breath. Something in this reminds her of their infancy, when they were less separate entities and more a heap of limbs and tendrils all sticking to each other—those warm, dark years shrouded by fog, when they slept curled around one another and hardly ever broke hand-hold because one child was easier to snatch away by sea-winds or stormjoys than a chain of three. The velvet of Oryx’s wing brushes against her cheek and she leans into it.
She almost dies for this defeat, her worm ravaging her until she is left barely a shadow trembling on cold stone. Only Xivu Arath saves her, by failing to capture a third of the Harmony’s fleet before they fall into Savathûn’s trap; the surge of tribute is enough to allow her to stabilise her form, and in no time she is on the battlefield again, her Wizards spreading poisons across the system’s outer planets. Her worm still snarls at her in annoyance, but she tithes to Ur and he is pleased.
Even after they part ways, Xivu still visits her brother once in a while; sometimes through a shrieker, sometimes an awfully obnoxious scouting party to keep tabs on him. Oryx always sends her back their heads, which delights her greatly. Savathûn is both smarter and bolder, and sends her children instead.
“I will pluck out their organs and hang them as garlands around my throne room,” Oryx says, his shadow-form lounging on one of the decorative benches lining up the arcade at the feet of Savathûn’s Watchtower, “and toss the bones to Thrall to suck the marrow dry.”
“You are welcome to try.” Savathûn inclines her head with a sugary smile. The last time Oryx tried to kill the envoys she’d sent him, a third of the Dreadnaught required repairs.
“Sharpening their teeth since Thrallhood, aren’t you?”
“Like any good mother would.” She gestures, and a servant Acolyte runs up to Oryx to refill his chalice with wine. “How is your house faring, these days? I heard Crota has taken a consort.”
He side-glances at her with one and one-half of an eye. “You had been invited to the celebrations.”
“Oh, I was busy. Do forgive me.”
“Never,” Oryx grins, and throws the chalice to the ground. The poison spills from it into a murky, sizzling puddle, instantly burning through the stone.
Then there is a whole lot of bloodshed, swords brandished and winged shadows chasing each other between green-black suns. Some negligent number of small creatures die trampled under taloned feet.
Things are still good after that, for a little while. Children grow and breed, courts bloat with killing-power, civilisations whose names only Oryx has the diligence to still record are rent down to an asterisk in the Worlds’ Grave, screams still rippling across the membrane of spacetime when the Hive depart the ransacked systems. Every handful of years they meet on the Dreadnaught for Eversion Day, their children bringing children and the children of children, and there is always laughter and blood in the ancient halls, joy like the birthing scream of a neutron star.
They don’t see it coming before it’s done. There is a death, a domino chain of cause and effect tipped into motion, and then everything happens as it must have happened. There are words said and warnings unheeded, pleas falling on deaf ears.
And then there are two.
They do not speak for months in the wake of it, but their grief simmers in parallel. Xivu thrashes in fury across the Sea of Screams, stirring whirlwinds and god-waves that wreck the shores of neighbouring courts. She curses the killers and the empty throne, rages at the blasphemy and marvels in terror at her own doubts. There must be a strongest one. Where is the Logic, cold and unforgiving, infallible and perfect as the laws of nature, where is it to right this wrong? The vacancy yawns, heavy like a black hole, tugging at her with its gravity. She yells at Eir to set things in order, but he only stares back at her hungrily with his single glowing maw-eye.
Savathûn haunts the Dreadnaught like a carrion bird, combing through rubble and picking out whatever the Guardians have yet left intact, and hides it away in her vaults. She takes statues and banners, bones and clumps of drying meat, tablets and scrolls and tomes encoded in calcium. She breaks them down at the molecular level; reforges them; embeds them in monuments and temple walls. All of Oryx’s knowledge, the troves filled with a billion years’ worth of records and lore — she takes that, too, and drinks it until her mind bleeds from the strain and eyes leak from grief. She plots and schemes. She looks out to the sky often, past the known topology and writhing constellations of hunger-bound power, to what stares back at her from beyond.
They meet at last in a deep place, inside a temple Savathûn built and tithed to Xivu. There is an air of obvious dismay between them, the negative space Oryx is not taking crushing them like the pressure at a planet’s core. Savathûn is wrapped in her wings and her gaze wanders across the walls, unfocused and opaque. Xivu Arath stands tall, taller than the statue at the centre altar, but she looks up at the ceiling and feels small again, fist clenched around the hilt of her sword so hard her fingers leave dents in the metal. The silence hangs deafeningly.
Xivu speaks up, finally, when she can no longer bear the doubts choking her lest she vomits:
“Is this the Fraying of the Cord?”
Savathûn peers at her with eyes like dimming embers. She has grown taller from the influx of power, her wings resplendent and wide as sails, but her face is pale and lacks the usual vigour.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Do not reflect my questions back at me,” Xivu growls, fangs showing. “Doesn’t your sword ache to punish this transgression? Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
Savathûn thinks of amethyst palaces and jagged shapes beyond the roiling waves of the deep—of her hand closed around a thousand pale throats—and says, “Oh, I already am.”
“I can see how well it’s working,” Xivu sneers. Savathûn rolls her eyes theatrically.
“Thank you for the gift of your doubt, sister.” It is but a candy-sized morsel of tribute, a single sweet drop on her tongue, but sweet nonetheless. “You are lost in your grief. It makes you reckless.”
Xivu brandishes her sword. This alone draws the point home, really, but Savathûn indulges her and they scuffle for a while, if only to pierce this awkward bubble of tension that’s arisen between them. It is an easier sort of linguistics, and it tells Xivu what she’s wanted to hear. Love, she thinks as Savathûn drags a blade along the breadth of her neck, her sister has only ever confessed through action.
When they are done, Savathûn looks at Xivu with eyes clouded by thought. “I am on the trail,” she says. “Lend me your children.”
“Reveal the trail to me,” Xivu demands.
“I thought you’d want them to be honoured in battle.”
“I want to go down there and eat the Sky, and devour its power all for myself.”
Oh, so it’s back to bantering again. “May you choke on its broken pieces as you swallow.”
“May the trail lead you northwards and into my waiting jaws,” Xivu grins.
“May it shatter you, as you wish to shatter it.”
“May you be defeated under its brilliance, and never reach the truth.”
Savathûn takes Xivu’s face in her hands and presses their foreheads together. Xivu misses the shadow of Oryx over them, wrapping them both in his wings, but this is still comforting and good — all of Savathûn’s eyes converging into one, alight with some burning emotion she doesn’t voice. Xivu rings her smaller form with her own arms and feels Savathûn sink into the embrace. It is a moment’s respite, before their worms start screaming murder and they part ways to lead their armies to different front lines of their joint war for vengeance, but for these few fickle seconds it is almost enough to balance out His absence. When they do part, Xivu’s vision is clearer, and the waypoint hanging on the horizon seems so sharp and bright and attainable, drawing her in like a bait-star. Her muscles swell with newfound purpose. There is an end in sight, and the path to it narrows and tapers under her feet.
What comes next is Torobatl—a brilliant gift, a crown jewel—and an exhilarating chase across star systems; then the heresy; then the severing. And then Savathûn is dead, before Xivu Arath even catches her breath, before she can wrap her head around the abrupt shift in dynamics that leaves her reeling.
Savathûn is dead and Xivu spits on her grave. Savathûn is dead and Xivu does not grieve for her, does not mourn her weakling sister who turned away from the one beautiful truth to prostrate and wail for mercy under the Sky’s cold glare. The Queen of Lies defeated by a lie. She had woven that cocoon herself; Xivu does not seek revenge. Xivu sits at the feet of a ruined temple and seethes in the emptiness of her now oh so quiet mind, shaking from emotion, completely alone.
Was Torobatl a gift, she finds herself wondering, or just another victory of her sister’s deceit over her own gullibility? One last rush of power down the tithe chains, the last few drops of tribute she needed to finally break free from the confines of truth? Why is Xivu even asking this question? Whispered gifts are promised blades that twist, eventually and infallibly. A betrayal has always been a gift of its own: a lesson, a test of strength, a confession of love tucked in between the silken layers of lies upon lies. But this time it stings, it hurts, it leaves her splitting mossanite rocks with bare hands, choking on the realisation that when Savathûn invited her to dance on the burning ruins of Torobatl, she was in fact making her drive the final nail into her coffin.
It doesn’t matter. Savathûn is dead. It is but one more down the list of crimes she will punish the Sky for, one more reason to set it afire like a sootpearl—and it is right there for the taking, pearlescent and perfect, so beautiful it makes her want to scream. The Deep sings, and her brood feeds, and she wades through the rubble of what has been left after her sister and grinds it all to dust, and it doesn’t matter. Not even when she comes back, resplendent in heresy, and her radiant warriors swarm Xivu’s domains with Light seeping out of them like poison. It doesn’t matter. There is only one end to this game.
The Deep has charted a path, and Xivu will follow. Xivu will eat the Sky—a vengeance for Fundament, at last—and she will disregard her sister’s reappearance, she will not act on her urge to seek her out and maim beyond recognition, she will sit silent and still until she is called to enact her will upon Sol and finish what Oryx had started. She will walk this road with her head held high and a song in her lungs. She will be joyous like a thunder and inevitable like the wind.
For now, she descends to the depths of Titan.
It is not a grave. The Hive do not dig graves. It is simply a clump of rock and gas with her brother’s corpse buried inside it, no different from all other moons she’s split with her bare hands, no less negligent than the husk of Fundament. Small creatures have begun to settle in the nooks and crannies of his carapace. She leaves them to wriggle and gnaw; she is none to delay the inevitable.
He is half-sunken in the sand already, his chest cavity overgrown with corals that look almost ornamental as they slowly climb up the faded chitin. They remind her of Sa— of her sister’s throne world, those purple and violet flowers hanging from ceilings and peeking out of the cracks in the walls. She wonders what it looks like, now; if it still exists. She forces herself to stop thinking about this.
Oryx is a pitiful shape, all things considered. Xivu kneels beside him and brushes stray weeds away from his face. At the bottom of the universe, looking up with empty, unseeing holes where his eyes used to be, cheeks hollow and teeth rotting, the only thing still regal about him being his monstrous size. He’s been expanding by each visit, and she does not think about it, she does not try to understand, she only picks out the dirt and rubbish that’s accumulated in the crevices in his chitin. She knows he is not here—of course she knows he is not here. But she had been cleaning the bones of her dead siblings back on Fundament, before all of this, all the same.
Her sister would say something smart about funerary rites and grief management, and this thought makes Xivu angry. She would always have some witty answers to every issue, a ready explanation of every senseless act, no matter how hard Xivu would pound into her to make her see how badly it hurt. Under that thick cocoon of half-truths and double-lies and mirages and scoffing glances, does she even feel anything anymore? How deep would Xivu have to dig to get to her, to make it truly sting, to put her through but a fraction of the agony she’s caused when she cut herself away and destroyed everything?
She despises her. She cannot even push her name past her own lips. She hates her. She will kill her.
She will kill her, and this will be the end she deserves, a traitor’s end, pitiable and Taox-worthy. It will not be out of love. She will tear her apart, limb by limb and eye by eye by eye, she will crack her Ghost like an eggshell and disembowel the lie within slowly enough to savour each single scream. She will kill her in tribute to Oryx, in worship of the Deep, and she alone will reach for the Shape with the claimed might of killing something as treacherous as her—she alone, and she will be... she will be...
Xivu puts her hand on Oryx’s calcified forehead and brushes her thumb across it. She can almost see it there, the line of her blood all dark and crusted, a token and a vow and a plea for remembrance. He does not need it now. He will never remember anything again. But she will; she will carry him with her always, in heart and in sword, and if it’s Savathûn’s blood she will have to smear on herself to keep his memory, then aiat, aiat. He will be infinite, for she will carry him wherever there is war, and when she becomes the one final shape he will live forever on the tip of the sharpest blade. She’ll make sure.
But she will never touch his face again.
“I love you,” she says to the nothing that is her brother, and departs.