The Mad Ramblings Of a Young Philosopher

themothyards:

“Oh, I know it’s funny. Titans and punching, the grandest joke in the Tower. Do you know why we teach our recruits to use their fists? It’s not just because we love cracking skulls.

A Hunter’s blade can skin a dreg alive. A Warlock’s tempered strike can reduce an opponent to its constituent atoms. But only through the fist can a warrior discover the truth of combat.

We use our hands to kill so that we may understand what it means to take a life. So that our bones fracture and reset, and in doing so become stronger and stronger still. So that we realize that we cannot deliver pain without taking some of that pain upon ourselves. 

The truth is that it is easy to lose yourself in combat, my friend. It is easy to see your opponent as little more than an object to be destroyed. 

Others have tread this path. Others have been lost to the Dark. 

A weapon is a tool, but your fist is a part of you. In the end, hand-to-hand combat is but a small measure to prevent a Titan from becoming a monster themselves.”

- Wei Ning

themothyards:

1. She lifts her cannon. The first bullet finds a Hive thrall - a prize for the leader of the charge that emerges from the black passage in the wall ahead of them.
   
   The cylinder spins. She counts backwards from ten.
   
   
2. The second catches a Wizard in the throat, just beneath its chitinous mandible. The creature’s scream dies with it, half-born rage and fear replaced with the sickly gurgle of ichor spilling onto the stones that pave the narrow walkway through the open chamber. 
   
   Beside her, her pack-mate clutches a bloody shoulder. Thrall-torn, weeping crimson, she can barely lift her gun. 
   
   
3. Their Ghosts died when they stopped the ritual, and the third bullet is her revenge. She does not know if the little lights are sentient or if they are purely a manifestation of a Guardian’s internal clockwork, but the scream it made when it died convinced her that it could feel pain. And when its shell splintered in empty ghostlight she felt something inside of her break as well. 
   
   
4. The fourth is for an acolyte, greedy for glory, that was not smart enough to keep its ugly head hidden. She snarls as it drops, as some of the blood-lust pumps through her. But she is tired, and the fire dies as quickly as it is kindled.  
   
   
5. She kills another acolyte with the fifth bullet. She has killed five Hive. She will kill five more, and that will be five less for her pack to kill when they come for her cloak, when they cleanse this foul place with light and fury.
   
   
6. With the sixth, she feels her heart sink.
   
   Her pack-mate cries out as another wizard rises from the bottomless pits that buttress the bridge and a bolt of energy tears through her side. She drops to the floor and does not rise. 
   
   
7. She grits her teeth to hold back a sob but the trance keeps her aim steady and the wizard burns.
   
   
8. To either side, the abyss beckons. Behind them, glowing runes bar the door and they have no Ghosts left to pick the lock, no Ghosts left to synthesize bullets from the bodies of slaughtered enemies. Before them, hope stretches away and disappears into the black cleft that births the crawling Hive. 
   
   Her eighth bullet kills a thrall. A single, measly thrall.
   
   
9. The ninth blesses a knight with a fourth eye. It dies before it can scream.
   
   Her pack-mate gasps for air, her own magazines long since spent. She has dragged herself up against a totem etched with strange and terrible carvings, and in her good hand she holds a trembling knife. Shadow stains the rock beneath her. She lifts her head, looks at the cannon with half-closed eyes. Looks away. 
   
   Her pack-mate has kept the count as well. 
   
   
10. Knights and thrall surge through the gash and wizards follow, singing funereal dirges born in distant systems, born of the joy of slaughter, born of the anticipation of feasting upon light and pain. 
    
    She thinks of the stained altars that guide their death-worship. She thinks of the twisting warrens above them, miles and miles of gnawed cavern, and she thinks of the stars beyond the tombs. 
    
    She thinks of the day that she pulled herself through the Wall into a battered jump-ship, thinks of the burble that her Ghost made when at last, at last, they made it to the Tower, to the Last City that will one day be known as the First City. 
    
    She thinks of her pack-mate, dying on the ground beside her, pictures curling tendrils of darkness binding her, imagines her screams as the Hive peel her essence from its shell and revel in an eternity of torment.
    
    She lifts her cannon.

ask-eris-morn:

In the darkness you hear things…

Long ago guardian, before even the time of the traveller, humans have known the horrors of death. In the time before the golden age humanity enshrined its fear of the ending of self upon altars and monuments, to stand watch and tribute to a force they could not bend or comprehend. In their worship they moved beyond the fear and honored the accomplishments of those past, left their grief and grievances in memories. If they had known what sought them at the end they would not have echoed its essence.

They say a falling stone creates ripples in a pool…

“What do you mean it’s another planet?”

They walked in its shadow, and it taught them secrets.

In the darkness it calls out….

Help us… return us whole….This must be the darkness, seeking to take back the light from within me, it has already taken Toland and Erianna, they are taken from all but memory now.

Do not let your legend become a tragedy like mine.