Grimoire:Enemies/Books of Sorrow: Difference between revisions

The Leviathan’s Warning

Aurash’s Protest

The Leviathan’s Hope

Xi Ro’s Protest

You are huge and old! Our lives are short and desperate. If that’s the way the world’s supposed to be, I won’t have it! If people like Taox are supposed to win, I won’t let them! I’ll beat the world until it changes! I’ll kill anything in the way!

The Leviathan’s Dirge

Sathona’s Protest

Sisters, I have my father’s familiar. Look! It answers me in plain words. It helped me find this ship. It gives me strength when hope is lost.

If you do, your worm will consume you. And as your power grows, oh Princes, so will your worm’s appetite.

We’ve had enough of this dismal place. Haven’t you?

If anyone rejects symbiosis with our children, make an example of them. A mighty wave is coming for them all. They’d die anyway; save only what can be saved.

The worm grants you power over your own flesh, Aurash. When you’ve taken the king morph, what will your adult name be?

We are pleased with your use of our larvae to create mighty knights and plentiful warriors. Taox’s retreat to the Hydrogen Fountain proves your superior strength. But you must know that reclaiming your home is not enough.

Xivu Arath, knight morph of Xi Ro. You love to conquer, don’t you? We love to see you work. Nearly two percent of Fundament’s surface is now our dominion. Your species embraces the worm.

Our organs informs us that Taox and her surviving Refusalists flee towards Kaharn Atoll. She hopes to rally the species of Fundament against you. The Leviathan’s agents work tirelessly to destroy ships and engines, trapping us on Fundament.

You’ve done well, Auryx. Can you feel the growth of your worm? Can you feel your will beginning to warp mere law?

We are free from Fundament’s core, and Savathûn’s cutters are ready to fly. With Xivu Arath victorious, we have opened a wound at Kaharn — a wound leading to geostationary orbit. Behold: we are faithful to our covenant.

Good news. The fifty-two moons of Fundament host a starfaring civilization far more sophisticated than anything you’ve encountered so far. Taox’s ship fled towards the large ice moon, where a species of bony six-armed cephalopods keeps their icy capital. Savathûn’s named them the [[Ammonite]]. They seem eager to grant Taox asylum. Idiots.

We tried appealing to their hopes and dreams. This was largely unsuccessful, basically because they’re already happy and indoctrinated. This angered us, so we’ve devised a plan.

You’ll have to kill them all and take their stuff. Once the Ammonite are out of the way, we can deal with the Traveler.

Do not hesitate. You’re fighting the hypocritical puppets of a cosmic parasite. Avenge your ancestors.

Auryx’s failure of resolve led us to catastrophe. The Ammonite fleets under [[Chroma-Admiral Rafriit]] have pressed us back to the sixth moon. Once more we find ourselves burrowing into a world’s core to survive.

War is the natural rectification of inequality. The universe’s way of pursuing equilibrium.

What are these? How do they work? Wouldn’t you like to know. Suffice to say that some powers in this universe are superordinate to mere material physics.

The source of these weapons is the Traveler, the Sky’s bait star. Their effect is subtle, but devastating.

But you are armed to respond in kind. Savathûn’s mothers have listened carefully to our teachings. We will not give you the Deep, King Auryx — that power is for us, your gods. But we will teach you to call upon that force with signs and rituals.

Remember what you said to the Ammonite Satellite Congress? 'We will parley on neutral ground?’ Savathûn’s witches have rendered it utterly neutral. No living thing will ever claim it again. The space around the dry moon stinks of rot.

This is good. This is right. You will learn from this. Don’t you understand, great King? Don’t you want to build something real, something that lasts forever?

If a civilization cannot defend itself, it must be annihilated. If a King cannot hold his power, he must be betrayed. The worth of a thing can be determined only by one beautiful arbiter — that thing’s ability to exist, to go on existing, to remake existence to suit its survival.

Your ancestors endured the most hostile conditions. And now you must go on creating those conditions. Even unto your sisters. Even unto your offspring. Savathûn’s betrayal is the greatest gift she could offer you.

From this day forward, Auryx, you and your sisters will each survive death — so long as you aren’t killed in your own throne.

Taox wasn’t on the dry moon. She must be laughing at you.

The old priest is in open space, moving towards the Ammonite home moon. Chroma-Admiral Rafriit and his elite guard move with it. Rafriit is the hero of his generation, an Ammonite of peerless battlecraft. He’s danced circles around Xivu Arath... but now he has to protect his holy Leviathan.

We’ll give the old lunk a word:

++Our Traveler’s work undone.—

Once the way is open, we’ll show you how to eat the Traveler.

It’s done. Eir and Yul feed on the Leviathan’s carcass. Xivu Arath has made a temple of the Chroma-Admiral’s impaled corpse. Below us, Savathûn’s poisons stain the Ammonite home sea black. Their screams flavor the void.

The Ammonite occupied a piece of reality. They rented their existence on fraudulent terms, making themselves happy and fat, fencing themselves in soft lies and sweet apocrypha. Saying: 'we are peaceful and good, we harm nothing.’

And you are oathbound to kill Taox. Wherever she’s hidden herself.

Savathûn and her broods have liberated the Qugu from jaw-beasts, and indeed from existence. But as they chased the Qugu ark-ships, I stopped in to vaporize my sister’s warship and a few of her underlings. I want to dwell on the ruins a while, and punish Savathûn for failing to guard her flank.

But as we wield this might, our worm’s hunger expands.

My worm’s hunger grows faster than the might I draw from it.

In Radial Year 989 groove 3 our clients in the Dakaua Nest salvaged an interstellar spacecraft. Hull isotopes date the craft’s construction 24,000 years ago, around the same time the Fundament system dropped out of contact with our Amiable Ecumene.

“I know,” says cunning Savathûn. “I know a way. But it won’t work unless we are killing the Ecumene by the billions. How can we beat them?”

On the third pace, Oryx’s Warpriest meets them in battle, and he is victorious, he paints the void with fire, he salts the earth with ash.

On the fourth pace, Mengoor and Cra’adug, dyad knights, go to the Raven Bridge, and they stand on it and kill the Tai for ten years.

On the seventh pace, the Perfect Raven comes out of Oryx’s wound, and she spreads her wings across Taishibeth. Never again is a Taishibethi child born. She is perfect, she enacts the will of Oryx.

Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me.

And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means 'socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself.

Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call 'civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.

I’m walking down the road, I’m going to the orrery to talk to my dad, and I hear, well, I hear this noise, so I look back. And my sisters are behind me, and they’re ripping up the road. They’ve got these huge swords, execution swords, and they’re levering the stones out of the road. The stones are covered in writing. They’re like tablets. And there’s dirt underneath full of worms.

I need to get to the orrery before they catch up to me so I start running but right away someone trips me, it’s my dad, he’s got his foot out and he grabs me by the horns and just slams me down on my face. I’m in so much pain I nearly throw up a worm.

“Why weren’t you ready for this,” dad says. He’s wearing glare goggles, those shiny goggles that he’d use to save his vision during lightning storms or sea fire. All three of his eyes reflect me. “Didn’t you know they’d be jealous, because they couldn’t come to the orrery and talk to me? Didn’t you know they’d move against you??”

I start wailing like I’m two days old again and I say, Dad, I thought you were my friend, I’m supposed to be safe here. But he just puts out his fist and I realize he’s laughing at me for believing him, why did I think I’d be safe? In his fist he’s got a black sun and he holds me by the throat and goes to tip the black sun inside me.

But my sisters are still tearing up the road so I don’t know how to get back.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m a nihilist.

I don’t do much except break things. That’s what they say about me: we could’ve had a great civilization, if it weren’t for that damn Oryx, that damn Hive. They don’t believe in anything but death.

The only way to make something good is to make something that can’t be broken. And the only way to do that is to try to break everything.

I’m glad I learned that the universe runs on death. It’s more beautiful to know.

But I’m lost somewhere strange.

I love mighty Xivu more than a moon loves the tide. I’ll kill her for this. Over and over, forever and ever.

When I get home from my wanderings in the Deep, and I take back my throne, I’m going to have children. That’s what I need.

The crest of Oryx’s skull is as long as an arm. In the course of its life, a thought moves from one end to the other. Upon his crest I have painted a line in my blood, so that he will remember me.

Each of Oryx’s fangs has the precision of a finger and the acuity of an eye.

Oryx’s body is corded with strength. His sinews and his muscles are as strong as his children, and his children are the strength of him.

Let’s go meet your aunts and uncles.

“That’s adorably precocious.” Oryx shook out his new wings. “But why?”

Oryx brandished his sword. “Speak the Royal Tongue, or I’ll pin you up for Eir to eat.”

Out of this wound came machines called Vex. They invaded Oryx’s throne world.

The Vex clattered around, constructing large problems. At first their constructions were deranged, because they didn’t understand the sword logic, which defined all rules in Oryx’s throne world. The geometry perplexed them.

“I’ll cut them apart,” Crota said. But just then, the Vex ritual-of-better-thoughts manifested a Mind called Quria, Blade Transform. Quria deduced the sword logic.

Crota’s gate began to emit warrior Vex, huge and brassy. He leapt forward to fight them, but they blinked away. After they fled from Crota, they killed two thousand of Oryx’s Acolytes and ten thousand of his Thrall. Soon they had established themselves as powers in this world, by right of slaughter.

But Quria had instanced itself to the other side of the gate, and built a holdfast to keep the way open. Quria’s objective was to exploit the paracausal physics of Oryx’s throne to become divine. It organized a series of test invasions.

“Father’s going to eat our souls,” Halak sighed.

Meanwhile, Oryx brooded on the Vex. “I’ve met a worthy rival,” he said. “They want to exist forever, just as I do. But I don’t understand them.”

Out of love for her brother, which was the same as the desire to kill him, Savathûn leaked a secret to Xivu Arath — 'listen, Xivu, Oryx’s throne world has been compromised. You can cut your way in from here.’ Xivu Arath used this to plan an ambush.

'Where?’ asked Kagoor, World-Render.

This required a verse from the Tablets of Ruin. The whole Court worked together to push Oryx’s throne inside out. This was a day of joyous violence, and all of Oryx’s broods mark this holiday as Eversion Day, which is celebrated by turning things inside out.

Now Oryx’s throne was safe from incursion, because it moved so nimbly.

By now, Quria knows it can’t win.

There’s something pathological about the world inside Oryx’s ship. It resists analysis with hot, dead spite. And Oryx himself, he’s irreducible — he refuses to obey Quria’s simulations, he crashes around sowing chaos, he grabs subminds and compromises them with some kind of ontological weapon. Paracausal systems. Very problematic.

Quria’s trying the religious tactics it evolved in the Hive manifold. But even on those terms, Oryx is strong, so strong. Quria won’t be able to protect its gates much longer.

The closest Quria’s got to a simulation of Oryx is a best-guess bootstrap. It’s wrong — Quria’s sure of that, it’s Oryx minus the symbiote organism, minus the wings and morphs, minus the weapon, minus the power. No good for anything.

The Taken King marches on Quria’s Hydra-hull, armed with blade and magic, cloaked in ancient cloth, and the universe wails in horror around him. Quria’s physics models and toy worlds choke and crash.

Quria observes, alert and attentive, as a single quark splits on the tip of Oryx’s sword.

From within the Hydra-hull, Quria’s tiny not-Oryx speaks. “What are you?” it says. It’s manifesting terror and awe.

Oryx’s eyes blaze with a curiosity that is entirely isomorphic with hate, with voracious hunger. “Aurash,” he says, in his Hive language. “You’ve made me as I was. You’ve made a tiny Aurash. Ha!”

Quria updates the simulation’s name. Aurash is curious: “You’re me? You’re me as I become?”

Oryx kneels. His blade is on his left shoulder. Quria is firing every available weapon at him, but his wards don’t break. He looks into Quria’s sensors through the hammering fire and he says, “Child, I have everything you wanted. I am immortal. I know the great secrets of the universe. I have scouted the edges of the Darkness and I have chased the lying god down galactic arms in a howling pack of moons. In my fist I carry the secret power that will rule eternity. In my worm I bear the tribute of my Court and of my children, the Hope-Eater, the Weaver, and the Unraveler; and with this tribute I smash my foes. I am Oryx, the Taken King. I am almighty.”

The Taken King’s fangs glint. That sound might be a laugh, or a hiss.

But Oryx’s fist is full of black fire, and the next thing Quria sees is a light like stars.

Their echoes move among the war-moons, walking together on the hull of a two-thousand-year-old warship. Savathûn’s fleet has assembled here, in preparation for an assault on the Gift Mast. The Deep is headed that way, on the trail of its prey, and the Hive will be its vanguard.

“It’s a Vex I captured. Quria, Blade Transform. It made an attempt to puncture my throne. I thought you might enjoy studying it.” Oryx pauses, digesting — through the bond of lineage he can feel Crota killing, worlds and worlds away, and it tastes like sweet fat. “Quria contains a Vex attempt to simulate me. It might generate others — you, perhaps, or Xivu Arath. I’ve left it some will of its own, so it can surprise you.”

“I suppose it’ll blow up and kill me,” Savathûn grouses. “Or let the machines into my throne, where they’ll start turning everything into clocks and glass.”

“I don’t have a strict proof yet, you know.” Savathûn strokes the void with one long claw and space-time groans beneath her touch. “This thing we believe — that we’re liberating the universe by devouring it, that we’re cutting out the rot, that we’re on course to join the final shape — I haven’t found a strict, eternal proof. We might yet be wrong.”

Oryx looks at her and for a moment, just a moment, he is nostalgic, he is sentimental. He thinks, imagine the years behind us, the things we’ve done. And yet being old doesn’t feel like a scar, does it? It hasn’t left me dull. I feel alive, alive with you, and every time I step back into this world from my throne I feel like I’m two years old again, at the bottom of the universe, looking up.

But he says, “Sister, it’s us. We’re the proof, we the Hive: if we last forever, we prove it, and if something more ruthless conquers us, then the proof is sealed.”

She looks back at him with eyes like hot needles. “I like that,” she says. “That’s elegant.” Although of course she has had this thought before.

THE GIFT MAST. When the Traveler left Harmony, it made a monument out of the black hole’s polar jet. In the jet there is a hollow mast which sings in radiance. This is the Gift Mast and we will devour it, we will eat the Sky out of it, we will snap it like a bone.

THE DRAGONS. Our gods should be ours alone. Their smug freedom is an insult to me. I’d shut them all in cells. Bring them to me!

Xivu Arath kills the wishful bishops, and Savathûn achieves some secret purpose, and Oryx’s Court tears down the Gift Mast. The Harmony people wail in terror, and they throw themselves into the silver lakes of Ana-Harmony to drown.

Savathûn asks if I am as much a slave of the Deep as my Taken. She asks what price I pay for my power. I am not Taken. The Hive is not the Deep. The Deep doesn’t want everything to be the same: it wants life, strong life, life that lives free without the need for a habitat of games to insulate it from reality. When I make my Taken I make them closer to perfect, I heal their wounds and enhance their strengths. This is inherently good. Aiat: the only right is existence, the only wrong is nonexistence.

I considered returning to Fundament. Learning what became of the God-Wave, and the Tungsten Monoliths, and the continents which were all that remained of my people’s primal home.

I don’t know where the Darkness-which-is-the-Deep came from, nor the Traveler that I hunt. But I will learn. I will learn.

Break your cell’s bars. Make a new shape, make the shape from its path, find your cell’s bars, break out of the bars, find a shape, make the shape from its path, eat the light, eat the path.