Waffles had her legs hanging over the edge of a platform, elbows on her knees, staring down into the rift below.
TheOneWhoKnocks was crouched nearby, spinning a ghost shell idly between his fingers. IEatPaint sat slumped against a pillar, doing nothing that could be productively explained.
Undecided and BearSpray were locked in their own world entirely.
"—so I'm standing there," BearSpray was saying, his voice climbing with the energy of a man building toward something he considered a perfectly reasonable story, "cereal in one hand, the bowl in the other, but no milk."
"Why," Undecided said flatly.
"Because my dad forgot to buy it."
"What? How did you even run out of milk in the first place?"
"Oh, I drink it when I get thirsty."
Undecided stared at him for a long second. "Bro, I genuinely worry about you sometimes."
"Huh?"
Gandalf logged in and erupted into the sanctuary like a man on fire, his character model still flickering through the loading shimmer as he came sprinting across the stone floor, his ghost spinning frantically at his shoulder as if it had caught his energy entirely.
"IT'S OUT! IT'S OUT IT'S OUT IT'S OUT—"
Waffles nearly toppled off the platform. "What? What's out?!"
"THE RAID!" Gandalf skidded to a stop and spun to face all of them, arms thrown wide. "THE FIRST RAID IS OUT! I SAW IT ON THE DIRECTOR! IT JUST — IT APPEARED AND THEN—"
"Gandalf." TheOneWhoKnocks held up a hand. "Breathe."
"I AM BREATHING."
"You're really not, man," IEatPaint said.
"Check your Director! Just check it! I'm not crazy! I saw it!" He zipped and spun in a frantic loop around the rest.
Silence gripped the group as the five players pulled up their Directors.
The familiar solar map blinked open. The system fanned out beneath their eyes, faction markers, waypoints, the constellation of active missions hanging in their usual positions.
Mars glowed at the edge of the screen, red and still, the same as it always was.
Nothing had changed.
The silence stretched.
IEatPaint turned his head toward Gandalf with surgical deliberateness. "Maybe," he said, "all those Crucible losses finally got to the bastard."
"Oh, shut up—" Gandalf retorted.
"I'm just saying. That's a lot of grief to carry. It accumulates."
Gandalf stammered, "BUT I SAW IT—"
"We believe you," Unknown said, in the tone of someone who absolutely did not.
Gandalf pressed both hands to his helmet. "I am telling you—"
"Hey." TheOneWhoKnocks went very still.
The bickering stopped.
He was staring at his Director wide-eyed, his ghost hovering motionless at his shoulder. "The game is updating," he said.
Nobody moved.
The low chime of a system patch whispered through all their HUDs. Progress ticked upward in the corner of their vision, quiet and methodical. For a moment, the Director flickered — the entire solar system blinking out like a torch extinguished in a sealed room.
Then it came back.
And Mars had changed.
A new marker pulsed above the planet's surface — once, twice — as though drawing its first breath. The icon was unlike anything else on the map. Dark and layered, threaded through with coils of deep violet and dried-blood red that wound around each other like something alive. Like something waiting.
Text materialised beneath it.
-
THE HEART OF DARKNESS
Raid Activity — VENOM Faction Exclusive
Recommended Fireteam: 6 Players
Warning: This activity contains extreme difficulty encounters.
-
Nobody spoke for three full seconds.
"...He actually saw it," BearSpray said.
"I TOLD YOU—"
"Gandalf." Waffles's voice had shed its usual ease entirely. She was on her feet now, standing at the platform's edge, eyes fixed on the marker. "When did you see it?"
"Right now, I saw the release time on the official forums. I am telling you, it releases right now!"
"Six players," TheOneWhoKnocks read again, slower, as though the words might rearrange themselves if he gave them the chance. "It's the first activity that requires a full fireteam."
"And it just dropped," Waffles said. She turned to face the group, and something had shifted behind her eyes, the idle weight of a quiet evening replaced with something sharper and deliberate. "This went live right now. Which means—"
"Everyone is seeing it at the same time," Unknown finished her sentence.
An anxious ripple passed through everyone present.
BearSpray looked around the group, and when he spoke, his voice had taken on a particular quiet. "Then whoever clears this first..." He let it sit there a moment. "...will be the first on the entire server to do it."
The sanctuary felt smaller suddenly. Six players stood in pale lunar light with the weight of that single fact settling over their shoulders.
"I'm recording the whole thing," BearSpray said, his ghost already active at his side. "Every single second."
"Obviously," Waffles said, already moving toward the launch point. "We go right now, before anyone else even gets their fireteam sorted."
Nobody argued. Nobody hesitated.
TheOneWhoKnocks sent out a fireteam invite, and the five present accepted it.
The transmat sequence began immediately.
One by one, they disappeared.
-
A cutscene played as the world loaded around them.
Black ink flooded everything. It was not just the absence of light. This Darkness was something denser. Something with weight. It swallowed colour and depth and distance until all that remained was a silence deep enough to feel, and within that silence, a single pale grey sword emerged.
It simply appeared, suspended and cold, its edge catching a light that had no source and casting no shadow.
A hand appeared from the dark and closed around it.
Shadows unfurled from the figure like smoke drawn from cooling embers. And then the face resolved from the dark, and a jolt ran through his eyes.
Void, wreathed in shadow, stood at the threshold of something enormous.
"Everything has secrets."
Ikorra's voice settled into the background, narrating over the scene with gravity and a stoic certainty.
"Even the dark."
The ink pulled back. What it revealed was Mars.
Illustrated in black and white was the scorched basin of Freehold, littered with the wreckage of a battle that had only just ended. Smoke rose in thin, wandering threads from the blackened crater. A legion of Cabal tanks were toppled, facing an unstoppable army of the Vex that marched in the distance.
The sky above was the colour of rust and dried blood, and the horizon was choked with the haze of a war that had just begun.
Void moved through it. His boots pressed into the scorched sand, his cloak catching the dead wind, and his eyes were fixed ahead on a fissure in space that hung overhead.
It split the horizon like a wound that had never been allowed to close. Vast. Absolute. Its edges pulsed in slow, rhythmic throbs of violet and deep red, and the interior churned with a mysterious energy that called out to him.
At his side, without warning, a figure appeared.
The Exo Stranger said nothing. Her gaze was fixed on the tear, and the expression on her face held stillness.
"What if, somehow, someway, these secrets were revealed to you? The world unravelled at the palm of your hands?"
Ikorra's voice continued, low and even, as though narrating something already written.
"What would you do? What would you give to right the wrongs? To save the fallen? To push back against fate?"
Void took a step forward. Then another.
The sands shifted beneath him, parting around the weight of something more than a man moving toward something more than a door.
"What would one risk..." Ikorra chimed in.
Void stopped at the edge of the tear. Up close, it roared without sound with a silence so total it pressed against the chest and settled in the throat.
"...to wrestle against the very heart of the darkness?"
He took one last glance behind him, facing everyone who watched, and then stepped through.
The fissure took him whole. Space came apart around his form, the geometry of the universe folding inward as the Vex gate swallowed him and closed. It pulsed once behind him, a single violent throb of violet, like a heart beating for the last time.
Then there was stillness.
"The answer is everything."
Ikorra's voice dulled and faded.
Elsie remained. Alone at the edge of the open sky, the dying gate flickering at her back, the scorched sands of Freehold spread out around her in every direction.
She looked up.
Something immense was closing around the world. Its shadow was blotting out the stars one by one until the sky above Freehold was no longer a sky at all.
Then darkness descended.
Elsie watched it come with bated breath. She did not run. She did not look away.
The screen went dark.
-
A/N: THROW, STONE, Leave a review or leave the story.
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