A Sword In The Dark

[Darayas]

A short story exploring genesis and origin. More an experiment to play with style and established background than anything, but if you guys like it I might write more!

 

-

Once, he believed in honour. He, and so many like-minded others.

 

They lived, breathed, and fought in accordance with the creeds they followed – doctrines of martial discipline to shape and guide the blade wherever it fell. Theirs was the aspect of balance; theirs the disposition of nobility. To have seen them arrayed for war was to bear witness to a host of descending angels in battle formation – swords glittering like glass in the morning sun, pale armour like the skin of marble gods.

 

But creeds survive only where men do, and they died slowly as the Long Sleep began. The honour of the duel, the way of the blade – one by one, diluted, decayed, sloughed off like dead skin in a cryo-pod, until only a hollow shell remained. A sword was reduced to nothing more than a leaf of metal, shaped for murder. A Warframe nothing more than a means to make killing easier.

 

When, at last, he awoke, his joints creaked with the ache of eons unimaginable spent dormant.

 

And when, at last, he awoke – weak shadow of the pride he once bore – he was empty.

 

When he awoke, he remembered nothing at all.

 

*

 

Dry air, cool, with a faint hint of salt. The shoulder of Sagittarius glittering like multi-coloured flotsam, far out in the galaxy, against the velvet black of space. The metal skin of the ship was sterile to the touch and colder, still, as he kicked in the vent facing and jumped down onto the deck.

 

The one behind him – the straggler with the horned helm and thin frame – sniffed the air. “Corpus,” horn-helm concluded. “It’s a Corpus ship.”

 

“I don’t know who you are,” he grunted, “but I think you should shut up.”

 

There were no more words offered.

 

The three of them made their way through the corridors of the ship in silence. He didn’t know their names, no more than he knew why they were together. But the same drop pod that’d inserted him into the bowels of this ship had brought them along too, and there was a strange sense that they were all charged with the same duties. A faint calling, a whispered suggestion of déjà vu; whatever it was, they walked like men on a mission, and so they walked together.

 

The big one took point. His Warframe oozed physicality – charcoal-black and traced with pearl, bunched muscle-fibre rippled lethally beneath his armour plates with the promise of violence. He led them down a series of elevators and antechambers, until horn-helm stalked forward and held up a hand.

 

“Wait,” he said softly. “Next room. I can sense them.”  

 

Slowly, gracefully, horn-helm eased a long rifle from the mag-lock at his back. “Let’s go in quiet,” he whispered. “There are too many.”

 

The big Warframe chuckled. It was a deep snort that sounded like the panting of a consumptive bull. It was also the first sound he’d heard the Tenno make ever since they’d stepped aboard the ship.
“’Too many’ sounds good,” he laughed, and shoved horn-helm out of the way.

 

The doors retreated with a hiss of depressurization. Vapour coiled, wafted, and split in the bulky ‘frame’s wake as he charged into the chamber beyond, sending thunderous footfalls echoing into the ceiling spaces. He saw the ‘frame crash into a bunched mass of Corpus, bowling them over with the weight of sheer muscle mass and Orokin-forged metal.

 

The ‘frame lay into them in a hurricane of whirling fists. He grabbed one Corpus by the neck and hurled it bodily into the reinforced glass windows. Another’s head he took in both hands and burst it like a ripe melon; his mailed knuckles brutalized the windpipe of the next Corpus until the crewman fell choking and scrabbling at the ruin of his throat.

His own limbs bunched in response. Something in him was stirring at the carnage that had just been reintroduced to his senses, some half-remembered muscle memory or motion.

 

Now, though – now the weight of numbers began to tell. He saw the big ‘frame’s shields sputter and fizzle as the Corpus and their avian war-engines started to retaliate. Lasers punched divots out of the walls and the whining slap of rifles opening fire filled the vast spaces of the hallway.

 

By the time the bolts came even close to touching the other Tenno, he was already-

 

-moving, racing across the walls, running with legs that haven’t been stretched like this in centuries. His legs kick off; the Warframe does the rest of the work and propels him straight into the Corpus crewman heading right for him.

 

He pulls the sword from his back. It’s been too long since he’s caressed the blade like this in his hands, or heard its death-dirge sing cruelly to a helpless foe. Down it plunges into the throat of the knocked-over crewman; the murderously thin edge, sheeted in first blood, pins the Corpus to the deck as dying spasms wrack its nervous system.

 

Only by luck does he parry the other’s blow. He’s in motion, sliding his blade out of flesh and bone and bringing it back to ready position, when it contacts with the shock prod of another Corpus. The electricity coils up his wrist and makes him snarl. He staggers backwards for a moment, surprised and angered. Then he dismembers the crewman. He is merciless in the steadfast evisceration of the foe. The orange Corpus jumpsuit offers pitiful protection against Orokin metal that chews its way through flesh with the lusty hunger of a predator.

 

One arm is separated violently from the torso; then the other, until he brings the sword down in a vicious two-handed slash, and decapitates the crewman in an apocalyptic release of blood. His own Warframe is sheeted in the viscera and organic tissue of others. It is not entirely human.

 

Murder is becoming familiar again. There is a musicality to the shocking violence of his craft that he is only just beginning to recall. His blade is singing in earnest now, his kill-strokes gaining momentum.

 

He sprints. He bends. The slide takes him full-force into the path of the next Corpus crewman; he cuts vertically with such vigour that the crewman is bisected completely. There isn’t even blood. The force of the blow particulates the spray of gore into a fine red mist. The two halves of the crewman flop to the ground in steaming chunks.

 

He is only just getting started. Hungry now, he turns; completes the follow-through with his blade to find-

 

-his wrist clutched in horn-helm’s firm grip.

 

“Put the Cronus away, you idiot,” he hissed. “It’s me!”

 

He was still panting. The adrenaline began to bleed out slowly of his limbs. He felt the haze in his eyes give way to the radiant light of the hallway. Carefully, as if handling a ravenous beast, he slid the Cronus back into its mag-lock sheathe.

 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. Horn-helm stalked away wordlessly to finish off any survivors. The long shadows of the chamber invested him with the likeness of some trickster god of old. Somewhere further down the length of the hallway, the other Warframe was still turning Corpus fodder into wreckages of flesh.

 

As he watched the hulking ‘frame shatter bones and break skulls, he felt something faintly unsettling about the way his counterpart set about the destruction of their enemies. His eyes blazed through the helmet’s lenses. The big Tenno came up like an animal, accelerating violently, almost pounding on hands and legs. It was the sprint of a wild beast; the kind that reminded you that they weren’t built anything close to human in anatomy – that the curl of their muscles, the agency of their movement, was capable of things a man was not, like a silverback gorilla rising to full majesty.

 

Or like a rhino, crashing into threats with lethal intent and the promise of pain.

 

He was about to jog off and join horn-helm when it happened. It crept in like twilight shadows upon the sun, and it felt like cold oil seeping into the back of his head. More worryingly, it started speaking to him in the silent spaces of his mind.

 

+Hello, Tenno.+

 

Get out, he thought as his lips curled back into a snarl. It felt like his own mind was being halved. Nausea welled up and drove him down to one knee. Get out of my head.

 

+The first experience is always the most unsettling. Do not worry. It becomes easier.+

 

Who are you? What are you?

 

+I am your sword in the dark. I have been with you since the beginning.+

 

The beginning of what? Don’t violate my mind and leave me with more questions than explanations.

 

+ I woke you from your aeons-long slumber, and set the course of your craft as it hurtled through space. I am the one who sent you here with the others.+

 

I…remember nothing.

 

+Of course not. None of you do. I promise you that the answers you seek will be yours in time, but for now you must do I say.+

 

You invade the privacy of my thoughts without so much as a prior warning; what makes you think I’m inclined to be your lapdog?

 

The thought-whisper turned, for a moment, into a quiet and soft laugh.

 

+Because only I brought you here, and only I can get you off this ship. You’ve already started on your task, anyway.+

 

There was a long pause.

 

What do you want me of me?

 

+I want you to kill them all. Anything that moves on this ship – end it. Leave nothing but ghosts, corpses, and the eternal sorrow of these vile subhumans.+     

 

The sibilant psychic voice receded, and withdrew from his mind. Horn-helm and the rhino were standing some paces away, watching him concernedly.

 

“What,” he began, “was that?”

 

“Voices in your head?” the rhino asked. “The Lotus. It, she, them – I don’t know what the Lotus is. But it does that. Likes to pop in now and then and run around your mind for a bit.” He tapped his forehead with a bloody fist. “Good thing there’s too little space up here for it to do that often.”

 

The rhino turned, and began striding off into the adjoining antechamber. Horn-helm extended a hand, which he took cautiously, and helped him rise to his feet.

 

“What is your name?” he asked the skinny frame.

 

“I…” horn-helm began. “Loki. That’s what the Lotus told me. I don’t know if that’s my name, or what my frame is called, or something else entirely. But you can call me Loki.”

 

He nodded slowly. “Loki,” he repeated, rolling the name around his tongue.

 

The two of them left the corpse-strewn charnel house of a hallway, and caught up with the other ‘frame. “What about yours?” he asked.

 

“I don’t care,” the rhino grunted. “Call me whatever you like. If it’s not going to help me kill these meatbags any better, it doesn’t matter to me.”

 

So they walked. Three Tenno, three Warframes – stalking through the arteries of a Corpus ship in the middle of deep space. Charged with the duties of murder and genocide, bearing nothing more than blades, guns, and the empty spaces where memories used to be.

 

Dry air, cool, with a faint hint of salt. The shoulder of Sagittarius glittering like multi-coloured flotsam, far out in the galaxy, against the velvet black of space.

 

Slowly, he would remember.

 

-fin-

 

[Zuzzie]

That was amazing, good job!

[Destro6677]

This is great stuff.

[Darayas]

Thanks for the high praise, guys :)