TYPE: RECOVERED SENSOR LOGS 

PARTIES: Two [2] Human-type, designate Umiña, Osiris. One [1] Ascendant Hive, designate Savathûn. Eighty-one [81] Hive-type, designate unknown. 

ASSOCIATIONS: Light [Umiña]; Darkness, [Savathûn, Hive] 

ENGINES: Offline 

LIFE SUPPORT: Offline 

SENSORS: Nominal 

//AUDIO RECOVERED// 

//TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS// 

U: Is that… Osiris! Osiris, can you hear me?  

S: Reverence, please, child. He is the first to see this realm. 

U: What did you do to him? 

S: He merely sleeps to dream a better world… one that I awaken to make reality. 

//REBOOTING// 

U: —some kind of fountain? 

S: It is the trough at which gods gorge.  

U: And you're going to feed me to them there? 

S: Nothing so dramatic, Lightbearer. You will be a scent. A texture. An added detail no one would notice, but whose absence would be felt. After all, one cannot cast a shadow without Light. 

U: But… with Osiris's Light… Wait! Are you saying Sagira is gone?! Then he doesn't have— 

//REBOOTING// 

U: —what you're saying is true, then we're on the same side! 

S: No, child. We work to the same ends. Our roads are quite different. 

U: You don't have to do this. 

S: An end must be reached. A journey chosen. We are not all of us burdened by the comforting lie of false sacrifice.  

U: Please— 

S: All I require is to relieve you of that burden.  

//REBOOTING// 

S: The vessel's sensors appear to be recording. Dispose of it.

Star Jasmine

The scent emerges as the sun sets, a testimony carried through warm summer nights.

I find myself once more stalking the night, my Witness, unknown as their final gasps. But my sojourns are no longer otiose errands. I am no more a predator among the Ahslid than the weaver is a predator of flax. Death creates gaps into which my progeny rises and stokes paranoia to tighten their fists. Each carapace crushed winds the clockworks my hands assemble.

They no longer need my direct ministrations. My children have children—some bequeath my lessons. The favored spawn are those who learned my lessons well. They converge on my shape, and unprovoked, prepare banquets of wisdom on which their kin gorge. They craft weapons—little more than hurled rocks standing in the long shadow the Darkness casts—but enough to crack their world apart. Only Uun disappoints, frightened as he is now by his own potential for glory. I cut him free of my succor. Obscurity is the crueler fate.

You taught me the most precious lesson of irrelevance. Only purpose can be momentous. It is the moment of clarity that freed me from worldly soil. This final gift I withhold from my progeny. It is the most challenging lesson to teach, and I stand in awe of the elegance with which you revealed the truth to me. I cannot do the same without reflection. I have imitated myself all too well, but to imitate you, my Witness, it is the one challenge to which I find myself unworthy.

Destiny Definitions Archive

"Star Jasmine" diff