Lore:Heresy and Truth
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Heresy and Truth is a Lore book introduced in Episode: Heresy. Entries are unlocked by progressing through the Episode: Heresy narrative. The entries contain the Lightbearers' reactions to the events that take place aboard the Dreadnaught.
Anemone
"We need someone on the Dreadnaught," Crow was saying. "The Hunters are spread thin, but maybe…"
Ikora finished tucking her feelings away in the place where she put all such feelings: a little ball inside her chest, to deal with at some promised later time. "Not Hunters," she decided aloud.
The spot where Zavala should stand around their war table was conspicuously empty.
"Who are you thinking, then?" Crow dropped his datapad onto the table. He regarded her levelly, with none of the deference that would once have been there. "The Hidden?"
Ikora weighed possibilities, not answering immediately. Chalco would drop everything and go—Eris was a Hunter, as they all so frequently forgot, and Chalco had considered her one of theirs still—but it would mean recalling her from her current assignment. Others of the Hidden, perhaps… but this was the Dreadnaught, not Savathûn's throne world. Where Savathûn laid out cunning traps, Oryx would have laid out simple might.
Dead though the Taken King was, to approach his throne world confidently would require a specific sort of will. A Titan.
They hadn't told Zavala about Eris yet. Ikora told herself she was waiting for the right moment.
"Not the Hidden," she said at last. "And not the Drifter alone. He may have become more reputable in recent years, but regardless, I would not lay this on his shoulders. I would send Deputy Commander Sloane."
"Ah." Crow sounded surprised, but understanding flickered across his face in a moment. "Well, she has more than enough resolve to spare."
"And her connection to Ahsa ought to mitigate any risks caused by the lingering Taken effects." Ikora was speaking half to herself; as she laid it out, it began to seem the obvious course. "Sloane will punch a hole directly through the Dreadnaught, if she must, to get to the bottom of what's going on there."
"We can't let the Dread run amok," Crow agreed. He rubbed a hand across his face and sighed. "Is Zavala…"
He didn't finish the question. Ikora could and did fill it in well enough herself. Zavala was by no means inured to loss, and after the Pale Heart, he still ached. Some wounds, after all, would take a lifetime to heal.
"I'll let him know," Ikora said. "I have no doubt he'll agree with me."
More than willing to leave that conversation to Ikora, Crow nodded simple agreement. "Then we send Sloane."
Asphodel
Guardian funerals rarely had a body to inter, and though Eris no longer stood among the ranks of Lightbearers, she was not unique in that manner. So, they simply gathered, those few who had loved her well, packing themselves three deep into the cramped apartment even Eris had sometimes forgotten she owned.
There was Mara Sov, starlight in her eyes, Petra Venj at her elbow—no particular friend of Eris herself, but where the Queen went, she liked to follow. "Little" Eido, taller than the Queen of the Awoken, tucking her second arms around herself and taking care not to disturb any of Eris's bones and relics while peering at everything. Crow, serious as he moved toward Mara; Zavala, quiet, occupying a corner. Here to witness, not rip himself open. Some small assortment of Guardians who had corresponded with Eris over one matter or another, study of the Taken or Hive—Awoken, Human, and Exo faces alike, some distraught and some somberly set, determined to witness though they might not weep.
The Drifter did not show his face. Ikora had wondered how he would bear it, and she had her answer: he would not. He would simply go, careening into the dark of space with his pain alone to guide him.
Ikora sympathized, with an unavoidable bitter chaser of resentment. This was not the first time she'd been left to manage a funeral on her own.
Senseless. It was always senseless, death among the immortal. She had not grown any more used to it. She hoped she never would.
"We are here to celebrate Eris Morn," Ikora said to the surrounding group, drawing herself up and making steel her spine. "Mourn by carrying her with you, if you must. But in her own words, her life was a bright and victorious one, despite everything she endured. She ought to be remembered thus."
For Cayde's sake, she allowed herself two jokes in the eulogy; for Eris's, she did not cry.
Heliotrope
Eris's apartment was close and dark, and it smelled so strongly of incense that Drifter could barely breathe. But he sat alone, his elbows on his knees, staring at the harsh green glow of her Ahamkara bone.
"You know what I want," he whispered. "So go on."
There was nothing. He gripped it between his hands, his mouth curving into a harsh frown. He raised it, shook it roughly, then held it close to his face.
"You hear me?" he hissed.
Nothing.
His shoulders slumped. He held the orb loosely, his eyes closed, and thought of her.
"Be careful with that," Sloane said. He looked up, startled. The deputy commander stood in the threshold of the door. She let her eyes wander for a moment, her jaw set.
"She lived like this?"
Drifter didn't respond. He stood, placing the Ahamkara bone back on the table. Then he made his way to the door. Sloane blocked him with her body before he could leave. He met her eyes, expressionless.
"Where are you going? We need to talk," she said firmly.
"I got nothin' to say," he replied.
"Yes, you do."
He took a few steps back.
"You can't walk away from this. Too much is at stake here. The City relies on you— you have to be ready for when you're needed."
"Haven't you all taken enough from me?" he muttered.
"You're not walking away from this."
"Yeah, I am. You gonna stop me?"
Sloane grabbed him by the collar. He lifted his chin in challenge; she raised a fist.
"You wouldn't," he started, just before it came down on his face.
Sloane let go of his collar. Drifter staggered until his back was against the wall. He flinched as he touched his nose, his fingertips coming away bloody. Then he grinned with red-lined teeth.
"Been a while since I earned one of those," Drifter said, his voice trembling. His smile faltered quickly. He wiped his bloodied upper lip with the back of his hand as his Ghost appeared beside him, coming close and staring mutely with its red eye.
He batted it out of the way and left the room, bleeding.
"Don't go too far," Sloane called after him.
Drifter didn't stop walking.
Elaia
"Savathûn presumed that my throne would hold me. That I would either willingly relinquish myself to its safety or become trapped within it."
Ikora shook her head, smiling. Eris shared in her smile.
"She did not anticipate the Guardian's resourcefulness. And she misjudged me."
"As did those of us who assumed your death was final." In the admission, Ikora's smile faded.
"As I, too, assumed." Eris tilted her head, studying Ikora intently. "Do you presume that you should have come looking for me? No. You did the right thing, Ikora. That I survived, that I am triumphant, could not have been reasonably predicted."
They stood together in Eris's throne, in the world that was made of all of her, yet still Eris did not understand all that was contained within.
"You're comforting me," Ikora said, her voice a tense whisper. "You shouldn't. Eris, you're the one who died."
"Yes. But you're the one who grieved."
Ikora turned away, and Eris let her. To accept comfort was no small task, as she well knew. In silence, they studied the spines of books ancient and new, the runes writ along them in delicate gleaming soulfire.
"I missed you," Ikora said finally. "I… felt that somehow, I had let you down: that I should have kept you safe. Even knowing you would have hated it."
"That is your curse," Eris returned solemnly. "Responsibility."
For that, Ikora laughed, startled into it. "You and Ophiuchus see it very differently."
"Ghosts are bound to worry."
Ikora's half-smile faded into soberness again. She drew stillness about herself as a cloak. "Was I right to let you go?"
"It was all I would let you do," Eris told her. She gestured up and around, to the infinite helix-library that cradled her innermost self. "This sort of library suits me as one in the Tower never could. You did what you could, Ikora."
Absolution offered, held in the quiet space between them. Ikora was the one to break it, closing the gap to sweep Eris up into a tight embrace. They held each other for a long moment.
"Don't do that again," Ikora whispered.
"I won't," Eris replied.
Ion
"And when he escapes?"
"If," Eris corrected.
"When he escapes," Sloane continued, "he'll have torn a hole straight through your throne world and into the Dreadnaught. This entire place will be compromised, and the City with it. You're fine with that risk?"
"There is always risk," Eris said. "You must assume risk inherent with trust, and focus."
The words were pointed.
"That's not how trust works," Sloane said, unclenching her jaw with some effort.
"No?" Eris's sidelong glance was too green. It made something itch in Sloane that she didn't like. "Tell me of trust, Deputy Commander Sloane."
"It's earned." Sloane uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again, the other way this time. "Someone does the work, again and again. Proves they have the skills and the follow-through to get a job done. It adds up, over time. Long enough, and you know someone can and will do what they say they will. Then you don't have to question when they promise you the impossible, because you know they've got a way. That's certainty. That's trust."
"I see." Eris sounded like she was trying too hard to be neutral. She laid solid, unwavering lines into the floor of her throne-library, one after another. Unhesitating.
Sloane's arm burned. She ignored it.
"Trust," Eris said at length, "is always, still, a risk. It is whispering a secret to another and hoping they will not tell it. They do not—you are caught before you fall. This time. And ever after, you must ask yourself: Is this the step too far? Is this secret the one that turns them back? But you will never know, not completely, that they will not. To entirely understand someone is impossible. You can only guess, and hope, and trust."
"You sound like Savathûn," Sloane told her, and regretted it immediately. It wasn't true—she just hated the twistiness of Eris's mind, the way it spiraled around a question that should be so easy to answer.
Eris's chitin-plated shoulders hitched, but her back was to Sloane, and it was hard to tell if she felt anything serious about the accusation. "We must do something, Deputy Commander. I trust," she stressed the word lightly, "that you will be there to chide me if I fail."
Sloane's lip curled. "I'll be there," she said. "But to grind the Echo into dust. That's more important than anything else—making sure it's taken care of."
"There you have it." Eris turned, then, a lightness on her face that Sloane had rarely seen before. "You are a certainty. Above the risk, I know this: you will not allow this to go unfinished."
That was not quite the lesson Sloane had hoped Eris would take away from this conversation. "I'm only one Titan," Sloane said seriously. "If and when he escapes you, we're going to need more firepower than that."
Eris hesitated. Only briefly, but it was the closest to a win Sloane was going to get. "Then make what preparations you must," she said. "Warn whom you feel prudent. I will do this—I must do this. I am aware of the risk; I would not proceed if it was not well-founded."
The reward for a job well done was always more work, wasn't it? "Fine," Sloane said through gritted teeth.
At least Eris trusted her, by one definition or another. It wasn't nothing.
Iris
"Don't you have a home to go to?" Drifter wanted to know.
Deputy Commander Sloane, who had any number of other places she could be, glanced up from her assortment of reports and screens. She'd set up her battle station right in the middle of Drifter's ship and showed no signs of leaving. "I'm busy," she said. Her Ghost, hovering above her left shoulder, bobbed in agreement. "Either contribute, or leave."
"That's my line," Drifter groused, but he pulled up one of the more stable chairs anyway, dropping himself into it where he could scan over the things she had spread out. "Hive?"
"It's always Hive," Sloane said tiredly.
"Unless it's Taken."
"Unless it's Taken," she agreed, then remembered she was angry with him, scowling across the way. "Were you going to help?"
Drifter held his hands up, exaggerated his 'I wasn't doing nothing, ma'am' expression. "I might have a few pieces of intel."
"Right," Sloane said. "Well, you go ahead and volunteer those when they seem relevant. I'm thinking Xivu Arath has to be first. Savathûn likes the long game anyway, and Xivu Arath's eager for a fight. She'll hit us first, and we don't want to be trying to unwind some kind of trap while Xivu's throwing swords."
"She's real into swords."
"Helpful." Sloane tapped her fingers against the rickety card table. "If Xivu Arath gets going, it'll be hard to stop her without also powering her up by fighting. So we hit her first, ideally, if we can find the right place before she starts killing."
Drawn in despite himself, Drifter squinted at Sloane's notes. A blue-line map of the Dreadnaught in three dimensions, half-complete—a few little notes off to the side ranking Hive constructs and likely locations for Xivu Arath's plots. SWORDS was underlined heavily. "Surprise attack still feels like an attack to me," he said in a moment, warming up to being helpful.
"It sure is." Sloane blew out a frustrated breath. "She's not what she was. Not since Eris cut her off. But we still don't have time for an elegant, pacifist solution. Which is why my best thought is not to target her directly. We target her targets – find where she plans to hit, deprive her of kills and tithes by taking them down first. And if it does come to straight-on combat, make whatever we do quick and clean, none of the glory-in-battle nonsense she likes." She shrugged, not particularly happy. "It's got flaws, but it's something."
"Not the worst plan I've heard," Drifter said honestly. He rocked his chair onto one leg, swinging it over the pivot point carelessly. "You think all this is gonna work?"
Sloane looked up at him, fixing him with the sort of gaze that looked through him. He had the sense that he had her full attention. "I don't know," she said. "But I know we have to give it our best if we have any shot at it working. You trust Eris, don't you?"
"'Course I do."
Sloane deliberated visibly for a moment or two. "Then it will work," she said finally.
"Sure," Drifter said, ignoring the sheer volume of things she clearly hadn't said. "All right. Guess I'm already dealt in anyway. Got any use for a list of places the Lucent Brood's been sighted?"
"Always."
Hemlock
"You are not of my Taking."
Sloane squared her shoulders against the weight of the voice that spoke to her. It wasn't a surprise. Every time she visited Eris's throne world now, that lone and baleful eye seemed to follow her.
Didn't mean she had to like it. Or talk to him. It.
"But what are you, then?" he mused aloud, as if her response or lack thereof was wholly immaterial. "I am told the Taken changed hands many times. Who was it that Took you?"
"No one," Sloane said before she could think better of it. "I said no."
"Did you?"
There was an awful heaviness to the Echo's attention, a fizz of sterile neutrinos and the prickling awareness of danger down her spine. But Sloane was nothing if she was not herself, and so she stood tall, chin up, and did not falter. "I don't need that power."
"Whomever made that offer, it will not vanish," the Echo said softly. "You may not need it now. But are you so sure of the future?"
"Yes," said Sloane, willing it to be true as she said it. "What do you want?"
"To understand," said Oryx, and the simplicity of it was as sharp as a knife. Whatever needed to be twisted or prized loose or broken to understand it—he would. That was all there was.
"Then understand this: I am resolute." Arc light crackled in her hands as Sloane closed them into fists. "And I am complete in myself. I need no other power." She knew it for not-quite-truth even as she said it: she was in Síocháin and Ahsa, the Traveler's Light and the Vanguard, even as they were in her. But she certainly didn't need the Taken.
"Aiat," the Echo said thoughtfully, and nothing further.
Sloane did not retreat. She turned that word over and over again in her mind. Aiat. It had a meaning it hadn't quite before, sounding almost like her own voice saying, "I am complete in myself" back to her.
Hours and hours later, long after she'd left Eris's throne world, still it echoed. And still she wondered about its truth.
Hellebore
Close. It had been too close. The knowledge of the shape of the knife held out to her had burned itself into Sloane's mind; she could see it even now, though its weight did not bow the fabric of her thoughts as it had.
"I am pleased you returned to us safely," Eris said—close by. Very close. Sloane startled back, surprised that Eris had come so near without Sloane hearing her. "Your loss at this stage would be… catastrophic."
Sloane's exhalation was half a laugh. "You have a gift for understatement," she said, to cover how rattled she truly was by the experience of re-forging Willbreaker.
Eris's mouth flickered, the ghost of a smile there and gone again. This close, Sloane thought, she looked pale—paler. Strained. Containing the Echo was wearing on her. "Do you hear it still?" Eris asked.
"Yes," Sloane admitted. If she was compromised, it was her responsibility to be honest about it. A moment later, remembering, her gaze flicked over Eris's shoulder to where the Echo hung, roiling with its own power, suspended in the grasp of Eris's magics. "Not sure I want to talk about this here."
"He cannot hear us," Eris said simply. As if she had thought it and the matter was done. Honestly, that was probably the exact case. That was the nature of a throne world.
Cautiously, Sloane experimented with relaxing her shoulders. It made her feel as if she might collapse at any slight gust, so she tightened them again. "What it offered me," she said abruptly. "'Bulwark against despair.' To never fear that I would be so overcome as to fall. But that would be falling. In itself."
"Yes," Eris said, in simple echo of Sloane's earlier assent. Her trifold gaze was intense, searching. "We feel foolish when we come back to ourselves. For the choices we almost made. We laugh and say how stupid we were. Of course that was wrong. Of course we would never."
Sloane's mouth tasted like ash. "I think that offer's always going to be there," she said—quiet, so quiet, that nagging fear that created the way in. "Ahsa has my back, but if I wake up one day and choose—just choose—to jump into that abyss? She's my ally, my partner. But an anchor doesn't do any good if the ship cuts the line."
"Choose not to. Again, and again." Eris's smile was softer, even sympathetic. "Someday, you may find it valuable to let that knife rest where you may reach it, because you know you will not. Trust yourself, Deputy Commander—Sloane. As I trust you, even when you are infuriating."
"It's my job," Sloane cracked weakly. Her ribs were a cage with the door opened, suddenly letting breath back in.
She hadn't had that slow, methodical proof with Ahsa. She had had a moment, a prayer, and no alternative. Maybe Eris wasn't entirely wrong. That unspeakable risk, back then, had saved her.
"Those feelings." Eris still regarded her with that searching intent. "In that pit. Those feelings are not false simply because we may look back on them later and laugh. Remember that."
Sloane would.
Apple
Eris Morn looked up at the spiraled heights above her. It extended into an endless void, the library of her soul coiling beyond sight. All that she was, every moment of her past and her present, everything that could yet unfold inside her.
"My throne," she whispered. There was a frisson of excitement in her voice when she said this, a small tremble as her body tensed and relaxed. It thrilled her, still, to find herself here.
Drifter came to stand beside her. His hand moved to reach for hers, but he hesitated, uncertain.
"This place can be anything you want?" he asked.
"Anything," she answered in a sigh of comfort.
"So what do you want?"
An earnest question. She turned and met his eyes.
"Joy," she said. "Joy, at last."
For the first time in centuries, the thought of the future made Eris smile.
"We shall explore this place together. Map my interiority. See what wonders I possess."
She reached out and laid a palm on his chest, feeling the stutter of his heart. He put his hand over hers and twined their fingers together.
"You want that? Me, here?"
"Yes."
He saw the delight in the turn of her mouth, saw bright feeling in the rise and fall of her breath. Her throne was all she was and could be, and she had invited him to see it.
"Then I'll follow you," he said, warm and genuine. "For as long as you want."
"Then follow."
Eris turned and made a sweeping gesture with one hand. In that movement there rose up a set of stairs that coiled upwards beyond sight. Their stone steps were bowed with the impressions of centuries of use. She had imagined something worn, and something worn had sprung from her thoughts.
She began to climb the stairs. She did not know where they led. He took a few steps after her, then paused.
"Moonlight," Drifter called. Eris turned to look at him. His eyes were filled with wonder. "Can I kiss you?"
A starving man, she thought, who had found sustenance at last. And she, too, found something she had lost long ago. Something she thought irrecoverable.
She closed the space between them.
In these vast landscapes of her mind, in these endless halls of her design, they declared what was unspoken with the joyous press of her lips to his. And when they parted, she held out her hand. He took it, then let her guide him up the stairs and into a world neither of them knew.
