TYPE: Statement
DESCRIPTION: Discarded pages, torn from a journal belonging to POI #0247
PARTIES: One [1] Guardian-type, Class Warlock, designate Wahei Ohr (POI #0247)
ASSOCIATIONS: Black Fleet; Bog, Dredgen [AKA Kashaf, Afa] (POI #0478); Bray, Clovis I; Bray, Elisabeth [AKA Elsie; Exo Stranger]; Darkness; Deep Stone Crypt; Device, The; Drifter, The (VIP #1315); Europa; Exo; Future War Cult; Glykon Volatus; Haruspex, The; Light; Morn, Eris (ERI-223); Ohr, Wahei (POI #0247); Pyramid; Ruin, Dredgen [AKA Ainu, Hadil; The Ruiner] (POI #0480); Salvation, Shadows of; Splinter; Toland; Traveler; Traitor's Die; Umbranomicon; Vergift, Dredgen [AKA Magda-9] (POI #0492); Ziggurat
// TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
[REGARDING THE MEDIUM-- The pages transcribed for this entry were recovered by AUN-326, whose report indicates they were found in a disused campsite located in a cave in the region of Rathmore Chaos on Europa. (see REP #326-EUR-0247-1105)
The papers are of standard journal stock, as commonly used by Warlocks of various guilds and factions. Analysis indicates trace amounts of radiolarian culture and alkane spores in the paper, while the ink shows similar trace amounts of phaseglass and relic iron. However, the analysis also indicates that the trace elements are from within the last three months, well after the worlds and moons from which the elements originated were consumed by the Darkness with the arrival of the Black Fleet.
Additionally, there were further stains, burn marks, and other damage on the pages. Dense writing scrawl, some of which overwrote characters on the media, also affected transcription. I have done the best I can to transcribe what I could.
REGARDING THE CONTENT-- As always, I am presenting the content of the media given to me without commentary. Analysis of the content's meaning is for someone else to determine.
Along with the writing in standard Common, there are passages which were in cipher, determined during transcription to be a combination of a caesarian shift cipher, further obscured with a set of conlang lettering. I presume the conlang lettering was created by the author for their own purposes, to obfuscate her journal from prying eyes, and was caesarian shifted to further hide its contents. To my eye, the conlang lettering was adapted from a form of Reefborn Awoken writing.
I have provided additional annotations throughout, where relevant.
REGARDING TRANSCRIPT CODE: Text included in "{ }" has been translated from cipher. -MIL-921]
// NOTES END /
// TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS... //
\\--ggurat would be a viable place for meditation, but there is too much foot traffic in the vicinity. Besides YW and sundry other L.bearers stopping by the thing, I've seen Drifter and Eris come through the area.
While Eris isn't an issue-- I visit her frequently on Luna and in the other places she likes to hide away from people-- my last convo with Drifter ended poorly. Might've been my fault for poking the bear and hinting at the secrets I know, but he deserved it. Drifter plays up his enigma to seem like he's hiding great wisdom, and delights in all the rampant speculation about his past, I'm sure. He shouldn't get so angry defensive when someone actually digs up some truth about him. {What name is real-- Germaine, Wu Ming, Eli, Todd, Majhul ???}
[ANNOTATION: This ciphered segment was written alongside what looks to be a charcoal rubbing of one of #1315's jade coins, depicting the two-headed snake icon like the pendant he wears.]
There's also that Exo which set up the camp in the first place. Elsie Bray, in the flesh, so to speak. As fascinating as the entire Exomind program was and still is, it's a little outside my usual purview. Still, with what has been hiding inside the Crypt, I've tried to talk to her about it, but she keeps saying she doesn't have the kind of access she needs to unpack the truth. And Mr Big Head has deliberately encrypted as many systems as he could, just to spite anyone trying to "plunder his secrets."
◊ 257.246.0548 ◊
Am preparing to do another attempt at communing with ▲. Viz is always ready to bring me out of it if it goes on too long, or if there's some kind of adverse reaction. As noted, my subjective experience with these "visions" or whatever they are has been they can last hours, but Viz says I'm out of it at most 5 minutes.
Meditation focus as per usual. Tol.'s book to hand, Splinter on the ground before me, Die loose nearby, rosary in hand. Barring any kind of adverse reaction, Viz will bring me out of it after 10 minutes.
[ANNOTATION: The next six pages are covered in automatic writing scrawl. The scrawl is dense and overlaps enough that, combined with the fact that #0247 defaulted to using their cipher, individual characters were almost impossible for me to parse out for translation. Some parts of the pages were stained as if from drippings of some dark substance, and others had smears of dripping blood.]
◊ 257.246.0834 ◊
OK, got my head on straight. Not hemorrhaging anymore. Once I'm done writing this out, I'll pull up camp and take my ship back out. Probably sit in Jup-Euro L5 while I think out the connotations of what I saw.
I sank into meditative trance while making a cradle with the rosary. Viz said I worked the cradle into at least three distinct figures before there seemed to be a reaction from the Die. Viz said when I made the last figure, the Die lit up and tumbled around in a circle around the Splinter before stopping, the sigil in its left eye socket lighting up. At that point, I lowered the cradle around the Splinter and Viz says at that point the Splinter seemed to react and shimmer with the D. non-color.
{Moth, Night, Spear, Diadem - correlation to the Crown? V. worrying!}
[ANNOTATION: This ciphered segment was scrawled in the margin of this page.]
I have a very good memory for things that I've seen, especially things that I see when meditating like this. I may not always understand, immediately, the meaning of what I see, but I always recall it perfectly. But not this time. It was as though my head, my mind, had been plunged into a choking fog of shadow. There's never been a reaction like this before, not when I attempted a trance when I revisited the Glykon. I've done trance meditations with the Die and Splinter before, with the book to hand as well. I'm not sure what was different.
{Zig. - no reac., Lun. Pyr. - beckoning, DSC - no reac., Glyk. - hostility, Jov. anom. - no reac., Eur. cave - THIS? What's different?}
[ANNOTATION: This ciphered segment was scrawled between paragraphs.]
That mind-fog means I could only recall fragments of what I witnessed. A lot of it was similar to things I've seen before. The endless garden. The flowers. The androgyne twins. The knife that became a Fleet. Hive spaces. So much Hive spaces. Omnigul's lair. The thrall swarm in the Hellmouth. The Hope-Eater pointing at me, "You're next, Lightborn." Crota's death-howl. Fleetbase Korus, the first time I saw the Taken. Seeing Oryx's true size on the Dreadnought. The Darkblade's cell. The Catacombs below Paris. And through it all, the shrieking of the Deathsingers. It probably contributed to the nosebleed.
And then it was like the fog had lifted. I was getting more distinct visions, and less of the fragmented stuff. I saw the ruins of the Last City. I saw a combined army of Imperial Cabal, House Light Eliksni, Awoken Corsairs, and some scattered few Guardians. They were deploying from the Leviathan, and they were clashing with the largest army I've ever seen, a mixture of House Salvation, Red Legion and Calus-sworn Cabal, Taken, and Hive. And among this army were Guardians as well. The Leviathan was towing behind it the Traveler, in something like the Cage that Ghaul had used in the Red War. I saw the battle commence. I saw the Lightbearers fight to the last, saw Zavala fly like a missile into the Scarlet Keep and demolish it. Saw the last Titan take a sword to the chest from a Knight and tackle it back into a yawning chasm.
I saw the Queen fall to a knife in the back. Saw two sisters clash. Saw Eris the Witch triumphant. Saw the Traveler erupt with Light as Darkness surrounded it.
Saw an explosion of paracausal spite.
And then my flight took me through the Ascendant Plane. I ended up passing through one of the waystations there, and then I was in a different part of the Ascendant Realms. This was more coherent, less rubble and segments of reality superimposed on it, and more properly-formed, with a structure erected upon it. It was like a cross between Awoken and Hive architecture. But a lot of the material looked as though it had been transmuted, so it resembled the dark-matter stone/metal that the Pyramids are made of.
I passed through rooms. Rooms filled with books and scrolls and slates and boards covered in scrawl. Rooms dedicated to meditation and to... study. For dissection and vivisection. A slab in the middle of the room had been well-used. Covered in blood and ichor. A blade like an elongated scalpel, shaped like a Hive blade, but made of dark-matter metal. And finally into a chamber that was unquestionably a throne room. The throne had been taken from the Dreaming City, but it was encrusted with Hive growth, and more of that dark-matter stone had encroached on it as well.
There was also a structure of some kind erected before the throne. I recognized some components were similar to machinery I had seen at the Ishtar Collective, and others looked like they'd been plundered from Braytech. Crystals were installed around the frame of the structure, Hive crystal, a Traveler shard, Reef amethyst, a Splinter, and several Ghost cores. As I drifted into the room, I saw several figures in it, one appeared to be manipulating the structure, another was seated on the steps before the throne, facing it, and another stood to one side, arms folded. I knew who they were, though the armor and clothing they wore was different. Dredgens Vergift, Bog, and Ruin-- the Shadows of Salvation.
But my attention was drawn to the figure perched on the edge of the throne. They were draped in a cloak or a robe or something, I couldn't make out their features. Their gloved hands were clasped before them, as if they were about to rest their chin on their laced fingers. Their attention seemed fixed on the structure, which I could now see was displaying fragments of the action from the battle I'd witnessed, looped as though on recording. I could see also, however, that the loop was changing. Sometimes the Guardian displayed in the loop was cut down immediately, trod into the lunar dust. Sometimes they managed to defeat the enemy who felled them. And who the Guardian in the loop was... kept changing. Sometimes they were a Titan, sometimes a Hunter, sometimes a Warlock. The armor they wore flickered and changed in the loop as well.
The Dredgen at the screen-structure spoke up, it was Vergift. "I can't focus too much on this one. There's too much variance on them."
Ruin was angry, from what I could tell. "I'm missing the battle for this?"
"Morn was clear, stay here and hold down the fort." That was Bog, but he wasn't any happier about this.
And then the figure on the throne lifted their head, raising a finger in the air, head cocked as though listening. After a moment, that finger crooked slightly, and Bog rose to his feet and approached them, leaning in as the cloaked figure spoke in whispers. When they were finished, Bog stood up. "Come on, we're to help mop up. And don't worry, Ruin, you'll get to hunt down whoever's left that either ran or chose not to fight."
Vergift sniffed. "I'd rather stay. I want to refine the--" But she stopped when the cloak twitched their fingers and closed them into a fist. Vergift straightened up and then gave a slight bow. "As you wish." She departed with the others, the doors to the chamber closing behind them.
Then the cloaked figure reclined back on their throne. They might have been smiling. I felt like I could make out their expression beneath the cloak, even though I couldn't see their face. But more to the point, I knew they were looking at me. I'd checked as I flew past the battle-- I was disincarnate, and invisible. I might have even been a wisp like Toland. Which raises all kinds of connotations in retrospect.
Then the cloak spoke. "I see you." And I recognized the voice. It was different than usual, maybe a little throatier, a hint of a rasp to it. But that might just have been from general disuse. But I knew that voice. Of course I did.
Everyone recognizes their own voice, even if they won't admit it.
"Yes, I see you. I know you're surprised. I always was. I always am. I suspect I always will be." They clapped their hands. "Silly me. What am I saying. I'm not surprised, but the other me's that come here always are." They gave a laugh which was almost a cackle. "Oh, they're so surprised! And oh, they run the gamut of emotions. So much anger and grief. There are some that are happy, at least," and they laughed again. "Those are ones I know will find themselves on the right path so they'll become me. Which type are you going to be, I wonder? Are you going to be accepting or are you going to be difficult?"
They laughed once more, and there was this about the laugh-- more than the fact it showed that the cloaked figure was not entirely sane, it was an affectation. They weren't amused by this in the way the laugh suggested, but they laughed anyway. They were doing it to put their audience ill at ease. It wasn't working. It wasn't.
"Yes, you're not the first me to come here," they said. "After all, that's what we are, aren't we? The Seeker of Insight. Going wherever we will in our quest for knowledge. Meditating in strange places, with strange artifacts, stealing forbidden tomes and reliquaries." They gave that false laugh again. "Have you had your showdown with the Praxic Order yet? Is the Vanguard hunting you? Or are you still managing to toe the line?" They might have been sneering. "Did you kill the Gunslinger, or did you ally with him?" This time the laugh was derisive. "Yes, I thought so. You're still trying to sit on the fence? Trying to stay in twilight? Wishy-washy, wishy-washy, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, you're worse than Drifter. He might play both sides, but at least he has an end goal. But you, you're just moving along with the vaguest of end-goals."
The cloak rose from the throne, their hand raising and twisting in the air. I could feel paracausal power shifting around me, and I recognized a Hive cantrip, like one I'd triggered innumerable times before, a trap spell. I pulled myself away from it, and I could feel myself willing the spell to dissipate. The cloak stopped, tilting their head, and then the laughter was actually more genuine, almost happy. "Oh! You're quicker on the draw than some of the others! That's good! You're either going to be more of a challenge, or you're already far enough along the path to become me. Wonderful! In that case, I'm going to explain something to you!"
They gestured at the structure. "Take a look, you'll try to make something like this, eventually. It will help you with your visions, far more than hoping and wishing on a spiteful skull and trying to ask an uncaring entity for favors. Just bear in mind that, if you get it to work right, it will show you everything." They cackled again. "I'd tell you how to dial it in, how to shield your mind from the totality of it, but, well..." They laughed, for far longer this time, until they were wheezing. "...We never tell secrets, do we?"
I got myself together enough that I was able to speak. "What are you? I know you're me, or you used to be."
They cocked their head, and I got an impression of a smile again. "I am you. Or I was. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that you will be me." They laughed once more, lacing their fingers together. "I am our Queen's court soothsayer. I slay the false potentials and cast the bones, foreseeing the way forward in the entrails of dead possibilities. I am She Who Sees, the One Who Found Insight."
They lowered their cloak's hood, and I saw my face, or what remained of it. A crown of dark-matter grew from their empty sockets, spreading out across their brow and encircling their head, digging into their flesh. Streams of dark ichor dripped from where their eyes had been, and their lips glistened with it. They smiled, far wider than was normal, their lips splitting their cheeks. "I am the Haruspex." They spread their hands, as if to encompass their throne, the realm around it, and even the ruins of the battlefield flickering past on the screen nearby. "Look upon this, O Seeker mine. You know that there are variables, and there are constants."
The Haruspex smiled, and their laughter split their face open. "Which am I, and which are you? I know the answer, and soon so shall you." The laughter rose higher and higher. "Be careful what you scry upon, Kingslayer! Knowledge is power, and power is dangerous!"
I found myself flying back, but I went through the screen, and felt the endless web of possibility and potential tangling around me. I saw the battlefield, over and over and over and over and over again. Saw the constants. Zavala's last charge. The Army of Light gathering under the Queen. The Army of Darkness gathering under the Witch. Saw the variables. Guardians battling Guardians. Sisters fighting, or allying. Saw Drifter die in the Crypt, saw him flee the system for his own survival, saw him stand and fight. Saw my friends fall, saw them slaughter through House Light and Imperial Cabal, saw them smash through House Salvation and Wrathborn Hive. Saw myself in the battle, saw myself dying in a cave, saw myself fall to Hive, or Fallen, or Guardians, saw the Haruspex watching, heard the Haruspex laughing.
And then I was sailing back through the mind-fog, and woke up on the floor of the cave. Viz says he was about to bring me out of it when I collapsed. I was bleeding from almost every orifice on my head. I needed an hour or so before it would stop and before my head stopped aching.
I have to think hard about what this all means. It's true that I've noticed there are similarities, repetitions, patterns that hold true. Constants and variables. Even what records I've read about what the FWC found in their Device seem to fall along similar lines. There are some things that don't change, no matter what timeline they explore. Figuring out the constants, the fixed points, helps build a map for potential futures. {I wish Mercury hadn't been lost. The Sundial would be useful.}
I need to think on this. I don't like the idea that I might be a fixed point in the way I saw--\\
// END TRANSCRIPT //
Afterword: Took me a while to come up with something new. I didn't want to write anything concerning this season until we know what the finale entails, and inspiration just wasn't coming yet on how I wanted to approach the next step of Wahei's pursuit of the Shadows of Salvation. In the back of my head, I'd been wondering how to approach how Wahei would end up in the Dark Future. Then it finally clicked for me, and so we got this. I hope it worked out. --J2K
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