Lore:Sintering
From Destinypedia, the Destiny wiki
 |
Sintering is a Lore book introduced in Renegades. The first five entries are aquired through the Renegades quest while the last four entries are unlocked from completing mission in the Lawless Frontier or the Fire & Ice Exotic Mission. The entries describe the rise of Dredgen Bael and the Barant Imperium.
Entry 7: Only from Pain
Division is the universe's force for creation. Reality is ripe with possibility when things spiral and fly and crash into each other. When the outcome becomes unpredictable, something happens: Possibility emerges. I can grab on to possibility. Widen the gyre that deafens the falcon and spins the center apart, as they say.
All coalitions not grown from the inside out, but made instead by bringing outsiders together, have cracks through them. Foundational kintsugi can be exploited. A union made from gold is just nice to look at. Nothing is stronger than the monocoque, the single piece. This is Lume's "Imperium." For all the great gifts of flat time that VI has given us, the Imperium has not resolved the tension that animates its core. Lume has enjoyed decades in a moment, using VI's grace to propagate and train vast legions of Barant soldiers and weapons, to capture and recondition generations of Psions. But for all that effort, the Imperium still lacks the summative soul of a nation. Torobatl is still beyond his efforts. All he has built is a self-contradictory revanchist movement stitched together by grievances, garbed to look like an army.
Shared hostility makes tight bonds, but the main partners—Barant, Psion—are still enemies. The would-be master and the defiant servant cinched together for millennia, bonds broken for centuries. They haven't shaken the pain. The soul remembers the imprint of the bindings. These tidy categories both hate Caiatl, but they hate her for different reasons; those reasons aren't germane here.
What I can use is this: Barant and Psion have come to despise each other. The Barant see themselves as superior to the Psions. The Psions have never been free enough to consider themselves supreme. Lume will lose control of his coalition despite the powers afforded to him by our patron, VI. Lume's nascent state is fraying not from the edges, but from the center: the point of the stitch, where the binding is meant to be strongest.
The Imperium will fail. I can see this in my dreams. I can read what trembles the fibers of reality. But until the Imperium collapses, I will use it to further my ultimate goals: Defeat the Vanguard; break their tyranny. I'll reach into the seams of his Imperium. Tug the right threads. Spiral them apart in a way that I can predict. Stoke the fires to burn in a controlled manner, prescribe the burn, and then search the violence for promising candidates necessary to complete my work.
The Psions will be my first attempt. The fruit plucked from division's harvest.
Cabal—Barant, especially—live long lives. Lume's project will fail, but he will endure. That is the Cabal nature, anyway, to endure. Even if he must use the last of his pliable muscles to drag his ossified corpse to Torobatl's shore, he will see it done, and I will be there with him. He has the last of my admiration; let this effort of mine be a test of his mettle, a lesson in pain that will prompt him to grow stronger. This is the lesson that VI confirmed for me: growth and knowledge can only come from pain. Ancient cultures practiced scarification. I do the same.
VI, are you listening to me? Witness this vessel. I await your response.
Entry 2: Crop Rending
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex tex tex texxxxxxxxxxx]
FEED DIES (reason_burn) 00:00:07:15
—-
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex mechanica mechanica fl350 fl350 apricot apricot]
#synch
'no'
FEED DIES (reason_reject, reason_burn) 00:00:15:59
—-
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex mechanica mechanica fl350 fl350 apricot apricot]
#synch synch synch synch
[mirror weapon tex mechanica fl350 apricot]
[render me true]
[open up janus conduit]
[catchment]
FEED DIES (reason_burn) 00:00:45:03
TEST CONCLUDED
—-
Rao,
Forty-five seconds is the longest any of your Psions have been able to sustain a connection to me before burning out. That's barely enough time for me to even begin to construct a shared understanding. Without additional minds to link to my own, I cannot form the agony catchment required to shoulder this burden. Enough. If you're not stalling, you're incompetent.
Where are you keeping your strongest Psions? No mission you undertake is more important than this; I am the conduit through which our shared patron distributes his power. Power that flows to you, through Lume, by me. Send me your best to share this burden, or I'll have Lume shut down your Totality Division, and I will use you as my primary catchment.
Entry 9: Direct Me
It's not working. None of it is working. I can't get them to listen. Lume's Psions are too stuck in their dreams and their delusionary concept of the individual, the self, THEMselves. Arrogant. Selfish. There is a greater movement at work, and they're too myopic to understand the beauty of being a part of it. They are improper tools for the work I intend to put them to; it seems that I will not be able to dismantle the Vanguard with them.
I need you to help me, VI. I need you to speak to me, to speak through me, so that they can see. I would cut off their eyelids to force them to see, but only if you guided my hand. Speak! I need you to speak! Let me be your conduit!
Is this what Guardians feel with the Traveler so still? Do they feel a similar agony when the Light animates them? I have never seen a Guardian in pain—could it be that the Light protects them from that pain, or does it withhold its greater power and deny them a fuller strength?
There is an old word for Guardians who turned from the path of Light. I have seen it in my texts on Darkness: "Dredgen." A word given to the exiled by the preening arrogants that expelled them. I think I should use this word. I should give it a new meaning.
I can't stop trembling, but only the parts of me that have not yet been changed. Only anticipation, an animal's apprehension at a transformational moment of pain. Those that have been made in the shape of his vision are all the better at channeling his power. The agony shaped me from meat to beauty. Gave me meaning beyond a decaying body.
This is the thing Lume's Psions are afraid of: the pain. Only pain. That's so small. A rat fears pain. A frog. Creatures, beasts—these Psions claimed to be the mightiest beings in Sol, but they wither when I share a moment of my agonies with them. Pathetic. They refuse to accept that pain is a pathway into meaning, not merely the spasmodic firing of anguished nerves. Of course transcendence would be excruciating! What did they expect? To meditate themselves into absolute power? To relax into freedom?
Please, VI, direct my hands. Direct my feet. Direct my search to those who would more willingly become my Dredgens. Find me those who can endure the agonies necessary to become open to your power. I am your vessel, but the more I channel your strength without you, the more my own wanes.
Entry 1: The Engine of History
There is a level of suffering that I am quite used to, and then there is working with Caiatl's bureaucracy.
Moving this battle rifle platform through Caiatl's latest round of trials has dampened my spirits. Competition against the other foundries typically lifts my spirits, but not this time. I find myself wishing something terrible would happen to me. Maybe I will be struck by a meteor, so I no longer must suffer the signatures they ask of me in duplicate, triplicate, etc., etc.
The Cabal marched into empire not just because of their legions, but also thanks to their armies of quartermasters, logisticians, factory-masters, armorers, and so on; their soldiers brought the stars to heel, yes, but only because of that greater force that kept them fed, fueled, and stocked with ordinance. One would think the soldiers of the Cabal to be arrogant, but in this twilight age of their state, I've found that the haughtiest and most entitled of the Cabal are the bureaucrats!
They stand in the way of progress, clutching their columns, tables, and limits like a border guard and his rifle. When I want to give soldiers what they ask for, some quartermaster lumbers over to tell me that I must not, for it would be too expensive. Small! Small minds who don't dream, but think in terms of cost, capital, and limits. Discard your limits, factory-masters and accountants. Follow your heart!
Father, when I can get him to emerge from his tinkerer's shed, only mutters about how we must cling to Tex Mechanica's "brand" of old-world class and style. Father's a sentimental dope, and I'm sick of having to wait for his nod of approval. In the old world, people killed each other with less. They threw rocks. They fought with sticks. It's time for us to make something new. Until I run Tex Mechanica, I will push the firm into the future, despite him. I will follow the voices of soldiers and those who dare. That is how one keeps reverence for what came before, by responding to the will of the masses, who compose the very institutions these moribund leaders claim to represent!
Father eventually will understand. He must. Until then, I find camaraderie in the field. Bracus Lume, my liaison and the commander of the test unit that fields my weapon, understands and agrees. We have spent long hours together discussing many things. He serves as a muse to me: a rogue in uniform. He respects Caiatl, as a soldier must submit to their commander, but through his words, I can pick out the shape of his true intentions. He paints inspiring images of the Cabal before Calus, when they—as Lume so poetically put it—"made an empire in tribute to the sun." Brave Bracus Lume has dreams, like me. Dreams of liberation, of rousing history and leading it forward. Torobatl, their empire—I am moved by his vision, how similar it is to my own.
What weapon would we need to build to realize the aspirations of dreamers like Lume? That is what I ask of my designers and engineers. Imagine a weapon to be carried into the breach and beyond. A tool as mighty as the ones who wield it. Make Lume a weapon that he is proud to carry and let me be the vessel through which it is delivered. Of course, there is marketing in this thought but I don't think of my ask as something that base. We make weapons, not sugary drinks. We give power a body, milling it from inert metal into an implement that shakes the columns of reality itself. The bark of our beasts makes kings and tyrants just as mortal as the lowest of us. I want "Tex Mechanica" stamped on the side of the liberator's gun. I want us to be the engine of history. So, we begin with Lume.
I will continue to tilt at those bureaucratic windmills, but I think now, at least, I do it with a steadfast squire as company. Together, we'll score a victory over that class of manicured, deskbound elites. They might think they can control the world with the stroke of a pen, a perfected spreadsheet, or the tweak of an allowance, but we'll show them that people with dreams should be the ones to make decisions. People united, individuals of supreme motivation, who wrest the tiller of history away from those who would prefer to crouch on their piles of Glimmer instead.
It is time for dreamers to lead in a direction of their choosing.
Entry 2: What Mother
I've known Mother to be dead for longer than I knew her alive. I remember small moments: Falling asleep on her shoulder as she carried me home at night after a holiday party. Teaching me to swim. Singing as she washed dishes. I remember feeling safe with her. Even when Father shouted, her voice would silence him. Protecting me. Memories that comforted me. Until I saw her.
The market at Bonnet Plaza, in the West District. I was getting lunch outside the Mechanica home office. Caiatl's logisticians, Father's lickspittles, hiccups at Factories Three and Four—a miserable day.
I had interred her. She was ash. But in this moment, I saw my mother moving through the crowd with her Ghost flitting around her head. She had been dead for three years at this point. Somehow, the Light had found her. It seems all it needed was ash.
Two others chosen by the Light marched at her side, bristling with weapons, leashed to their puppeteers. The Chosen, on some holy business to save humanity. She glowed, flush with heat, as if the fire that cremated her now animated her from within. I cried out in horror, unable to stop myself. It made sense: of course the Traveler would grant my beloved mother the gift every child in the Last City dreams of, every dying elder longs for, as they move away from the main of life. Eternal life without fear.
But when I embraced her, crying her name at the center of a cheering crowd, what did my mother do?
She shoved me away.
I felt the searing push of Solar energy in her strength. A sizzling reminder on my chest as I stumbled back and fell. Not a twinkle of recognition in her eyes, just discomfort, the look one gives a clamoring beggar that gets too close. Cold She was cold; she was hideous, a doppelganger, homunculus. Her chirping idiot of a Ghost commanded me to clear the way, and off they went. Bystanders helped me to my feet. Strangers, kinder than my own mother.
Is this the truth of the Light? Is this what it does? Animate the dead and possess them with Ghosts, puppeteers who keep them hooked to life like a fish on a lure? To prey on desperation and transfix the City in this poisoned dream? What miracle makes a mother spit on her child? My memories of her are now curses. Leaden dead weight. Every single one a searing ember.
