Eris started running across the courtyard the moment before the Ghosts flinched. Her heavy robes hit her knees hard enough that she looked down at the red dappled flagstones, suddenly tired. A moment ago, she had not been. She had been dreaming, but not tired - opened up to the noise and the smell of the solar winds, feeling the photons smack like bites across her skin.

The Hive thing that had been on its slow way through the world had finally arrived.

It was still out there somewhere past Jupiter, she knew; it was crawling inward at a cosmic slog, trying to sneak its way into the Solar System or else functioning in deference to some strange physics of the Hive drives. Guardians in Tower cloisters and the Lighthouse holy of holies were secure in the warmth of the world of the living, but out there -

Something cold.

She swayed, dizzy going down the stairs, but gained control of herself and of the Hive eyes enough to raise her gaze to the Guardians around her. Fingers hesitated over vault screens, mouths opened mid-conversation, and then their Ghosts all opened and closed like flowers while the signals came.

Eris jumped the last three steps.

In the Vanguard's hall, she saw that Lord Shaxx had abandoned his post. The Crucible supplier was still behind his counter, but he stood with his back to the wall, wide-eyed as if he had just witnessed an attack. Shaxx's usual place looked twice as empty as it should, as if all traces of him had been erased; the light in the room remembered his loss, Eris thought. Zavala slammed a fist on the long Vanguard table as Eris approached.

Cayde-6 sat on the table beside him, legs swinging. There were wrinkled papers folded underneath him. It had been a long time since Eris had last been here, but it had been only herself and Ikora alone last time, talking about the Hidden. The other Vanguard were disinterested or ignorant of those conspiracies. Now, Ikora stood the farthest away, two fingers touching her own nose, hurting the most.

Of course, she could sense them too.

"The signal has gone out," Cayde said, his buzzing voice echoing slightly against the brightly-colored walls. Typical Hunter observation, wanting to make sure he knew how far out into the field his troops were scattered, making maps.

"I've seen how their Ghosts buzz," Eris said.

"Like bees." Zavala looked over at her, his shoulders still hunched. "The Queen hasn't reported any weapons fire, although we haven't gotten anything from the Nine."

"Don't expect it," Cayde muttered.

"This is worse than Crota," Zavala said, bluntly; there was no hesitation in his words, no apology for naming the name that Eris had almost taken herself in her obsession with the Hive prince's destruction. Crota's Bane agreed with him.

"This is different," she said, looking at Ikora. The Warlock Vanguard would understand without being told, because she could feel the tides. The others would have to listen to Eris' words.

"Is it worse?" Ikora said, fixing her gaze on Eris' eyes with a tip of her head and a sardonic smile. "You know the Hive better than all of us. What does Oryx bring?"

"The invasion will be slower than Crota's," Eris said. "He does not have to rush to conquer, although perhaps to build his armies. It will be worse."

Ikora crossed the room, making herself a part of the tense council of war after she had separated from it for reasons that Eris thought, maybe, she herself understood. "If they travel at the speed of the Hive tombships we've seen before, we have time to prepare before they reach the inner planets. We go on the attack."

"I thought you'd never say it," Cayde said.

Ikora turned that gaze to him, giving Eris a chance to look at the blue sky outside beyond the Hall of Guardians. The clouds hung like pennants in peaceful tatters.

"And we learn," Ikora said. "If it's revenge they want … revenge is simple. It's when it starts becoming bitterness or war that it gets complicated."

Zavala straightened up, crossed his arms over his heavy armor. "So let's focus on that part."

"You brought us the news of Crota's return," Cayde said. "Is there anything else you can tell us this time?"

"Oryx's message is too big for one messenger," Eris said. "You saw the Ghosts feel it. He wants the Guardians to know that his shock wave is coming."

"Useful." Cayde's hands twitched before he flattened them against his legs.

Ikora met her eyes, and Eris remembered a conversation the two of them had once had about pity.

"Together or apart," Eris said. "Or in pieces."

Their Ghosts twitched again, flanges floating out on strings of electric current. "There are queries coming in from around the Tower," Cayde's said quietly. "And the Speaker wants to pass on a message."

Eris shivered. Maybe the feeling creeping up her spine was not unlike what the Ghosts were sending; prickles of danger and mistrust, the Traveler suddenly like a prophet in the sky about to rain blessing or brimstone. Hanging in this moment, none of them knew which. They'd run there head-first.

"And you've seen the Guardians," said Zavala's Ghost.

He had; the Titan had been looking past Eris' right shoulder while Cayde was speaking. Eris, though, hadn't noticed; the signal was rushing in her ears, no, in every sense she had, and physical things were just shadows on a curtain.

A crowd of Guardians had formed near Lord Shaxx's abandoned post.

"We must broadcast to those in the field," Ikora said.

"But maybe the ones here first." Cayde slid to the floor, landing on both feet with a solid thump.

"You're the people person," Zavala muttered, his Awoken eyes unreadable.

Ikora tapped a decisive finger on his bracer. "Do both," She said. "You know the drill."

They did. The Guardians massing at the stairs had pushed three reluctant volunteers to the front of their ranks, and now a tall Warlock, a Titan with hands clasped firmly behind his back, and a Hunter who appeared to be trying to disappear back into the crowd by pure force of inaction were standing at the edge of the Hall. The Vanguard straightened their shoulders, became immediately more comfortable and more forceful in their surroundings; here again were the soldier-teachers who had sent their small armies against Crota. Eris' spine still prickled.

Ikora looked at Eris over her shoulder. "Talk to the Speaker. Relay his message to us."

At the mention of his name, Eris felt the tides of photons and light spiraling around the Speaker. Up there with his machines he was almost as open to the Darkness as she was; they used different conduits, but — "If only he could speak," Eris said, and ran toward the stairs.

The Guardians parted for her.

There was something tumultuous brewing in the Speaker's corner. Guardians and pass-holding civilians stepped toward Eris as she ran, asking questions they had already tried to ask the back of the crowd in the Vanguard hall. Other Guardians, not so physically close, were asking Ghosts and Frames for news, were catching one another's eyes and raising weapons. A few whooped or sighed.

Tower North was humid with body heat and mist. Eris' boots splashed in it as she passed the people huddled in the outfitter's niche. Xur would be here, sometimes, but for now there was no one standing beside the heavy door. It was a vulnerable thing for anyone, Earthling or Jovian, to stand there in the open, Eris thought -

Clouds of steam were boiling out of the Speaker's library.

Eris pushed forward. The mechanism installed between the floor and the sky was still working, the star map slowly rotating across the view of the silent, silver Traveler. She could sense the Speaker before she saw him. It wasn't Warlock magic that held him, not exactly - it was a trance he had made for himself, she thought, something new and different that came from his connection to the Traveler. The Darkness in her, the Hive scales under her cowl, recoiled and hurt, and it was through them that she knew she was dealing with something which elevated itself above her with pure, uncompromising goodness; this strange force emanating from the Speaker was readying to go against Oryx all by itself.

Her eyes didn't want to look. They had been fixed on the moving arms of the bronze gyroscope, preferring even the Traveler in the distance to the one-man battle happening on the top of the stairs — where — Eris dragged her own body around —

The Speaker was standing with hands upraised and his mask cracked from the branching eyepiece on the right to the chin.

"Of what must you speak …" Eris asked, her voice thick with pity and fear - he was in it now, fighting a fight she couldn't see. She stalked up the stairs.

When she reached the top, the mist rose up. She was subsumed into the vision the Speaker had called up or been dragged through, feeling the connection he held with the universe. Stars and darkness replaced the Traveler and the gyroscope. She tried to blink the stars away, because there were too many and the sky was too big, but it had been a long time since she had been able to do that.

And there were voids.

The Speaker had the tombship in the palm of his hands - or at least, he was trying. Merged with his perception of the Light, Eris could see images with black patches of emptiness between them. The black voids resisted her understanding with a kick that was frighteningly personal. The universe would tear itself away before letting a Warlock or a Hive - which part of her did it hate? - peer into the Speaker's mind.

What do you want of me here? The Speaker thought.

Eris was still aware of her body, of one foot on a step above another and her hands stretched out toward the Speaker's impossibly white cloak. They both seemed so still, though, compared to the speeding orbits of the cosmos and the ship flaring its leisurely way between planets. It dripped poison that eddied, confused, in the solar wind in its wake.

Eris looked out across the paths of Earth and Mars and tried not to follow them all the way around, because then she would be stuck in their orbits.

Although she had made her effort to save him, the Speaker was in territory which was familiar to him, if not entirely to his will. He turned the perspective one way and another, examining the tombship and dizzying her.

There will always be more ships, Eris thought. You must not doubt that he has a force the size of a fleet behind him.

Thank you, the Speaker thought.

You have a message for the Vanguard.

This, this, all of this. (The ship, the universe.) It speaks to us. (It speaks on the Traveler's wavelength.)

Eris had a thorough understanding of parsing out sense from the overwhelmingly dark and senseless. You feel Oryx and the Osmium Throne. Is there more you wish to tell them?

Rare and dark and toxic.

Come back to us. She reached out, Hive-power, and brushed the poison aside. Reached out, Warlock-power, and turned the Speaker's attention to the sensation of standing on the stairs. Those gaps in the universe shook and glimmered, and Eris had the strong, immediate sense that they were not a sign of decay or corruption - they were simply beyond her, locked in a realm of knowledge that she had not yet opened.

I want to tell them that they're right, the Speaker said. He meant the Vanguard. The sensors have detected the same thing that the Traveler has. The Speaker was becoming more focused, less formless. He was remembering what it was like to be a body that did not contain stars.

Good.

Eris tugged on the cord connecting his Light to the world.

Her approval brought the Speaker back to himself in a way that Eris, afraid of the Hive, was not sure was entirely his own. Perhaps the Speaker touched this realm often. When he did, was he vulnerable to the Darkness as well as to the Light?

Then they were back on the stairs, and it was still humid and cloudy, and the Speaker was touching the crack in his mask with hands so thickly gloved he could barely bend them.

"What are the gaps in your perception" Eris asked. Took curiosity and threw it like a knife.

He lowered his hands. She couldn't see anything behind the crack in the mask except for shadow, and she knew better than to either look away from or stare at a ruined face. "There are no gaps," he said.

"I saw the voids."

"The Traveler's knowledge digs far down."

Eris looked at him. He was not disgusted by her, not curious; he did not ask for explanations, and did not offer them either.

It both irritated her and engendered a feeling of, if not the respect she had felt for him as a tyro, companionship. They both spoke in languages of sensation that the Vanguard did not share.

"Tell the Vanguard that Oryx is coming, and that he is dangerous," the Speaker said.

That was all? Eris felt her lips twitch in unconscious annoyance. "Surely you felt something to do with the shrines. I have studied them. Oryx is mentioned hundreds of times."

"Perhaps you know more than I do about that particular topic," he said gently. "Muster the Guardians."

"It is already done," she muttered.

"There will be young ones who need help, who have many questions. The Vanguard can send them to me. The older must do the work they know how to do." He retreated into his library, looking at books and at sashes folded on the table. The smoke began to clear. What would the Hive do to this place, Eris wondered? Where would they place their polyps on the walls? That corner, there, and Oryx would smash the astrolabe himself.

Eris returned to the Vanguard.

The crowd had dispersed, although people still stood in groups near the walls. She heard the name Crota whispered from most of them. What once had been a warlord was now a reference point, a point on the scale of on which Oryx was the next rung. "Not that easy," Eris muttered, catching the eyes of a tiny Awoken Titan and two gangly Warlocks.

Alone, the Vanguard were solemn and formal, standing in a circle beside a pile of papers that had slid off the table. They looked up one after another, Ikora first and Cayde lagging.

"The Speaker was lost among the Light and the Darkness," Eris said. "But he has returned, and his words speak to the same stories that yours do. Oryx is coming, and he is dangerous. The Traveler feels this."

Ikora nodded. "And are you all right?"

"I think the Speaker may be thinking of his youngest charges more than some of the mysteries he sees," Eris said. "And thank you, for your concern."

"What mysteries do you think he has missed?"

"Oryx himself is flesh and bone. He is nothing else. He could be the guard dog at an open gate, or he could be the cap keeping the drain closed."

Ikora considered this seriously, her eyes distant.

"Before you go," Cayde said suddenly. "The Guardians who came out in front of the crowd. I think you know them. One of them was from that group that killed Omnigul. They're up on the Traveler's Walk."

"We'll have time for talk when we're dead, Vanguard," Eris said, and smiled.

There were rumors starting by the time she made it up to the Traveler's Walk. Crota was back, some said. Others, that Oryx wanted revenge for his son's death. That wasn't right, Eris thought. That was too direct, too personal for the Hive. They wanted to expand, and it was all they did, and they would have done it whether Crota's armies had stampeded over Earth or otherwise.

On the Walk the shallow channel of clean water sparkled, and three Guardians sat beside it.

Eris recognized Kass' bright hair and Guile-11's broad back. The Awoken was the newest member of the group, and still flighty about both it and the Tower; she looked at Eris with large, reflective blue eyes as Crota's Bane approached the channel.

Kass reached up toward Eris as she approached. Hive-skin gloves, Eris thought. Revenge made visible. The fist closed and retreated. "What did the Vanguard tell you?"

Eris sat cross-legged in the space where Kass' arm had reached.

"When's it coming?" Guile sat close on the other side.

"Not at this moment," Eris said.

"Thank the Traveler," said Kass. "We know it will be all right."

"Thank it for scattering us to the stars," the Awoken said. "Why Earth? The Hive must be threatened by humanity and its fellow species in some way if it keeps making such a push past the Moon."

"As well as what's nipping at their heels," Guile said.

The Awoken shook her head. "No. It's a pull instead of a push. The Hive want the Traveler."

"They want more than that," Eris said. "More that can be seen and more that cannot. Immortality is the first step for all of us."

The Awoken sat back. She was not used to Eris' pronouncements, and Eris saw the same expression of consideration and nervousness that she was used to on the presidium.

Oryx had been just an unease in the ether and Crota had been dust when she had met Ilena on the Reef for the first time, but Eris thought that the Hive had brought the four of them together nonetheless. Ilena hadn't been comfortable with Guardians any more than she had been comfortable being one without either a past or a future among her own kin on the Reef.

Ilena's first glimpse of Kass, emerging bloody from a long fight in the Prison of Elders, might have given her a good first impression of the Warlock had Ilena valued pure panache. It was Kass' patient kindness that won the Hunter over in the end. Guile's recent emergence from a vex conflux was more difficult to explain, but the three had become familiar with one another through Eris, and hunting Hive together was an activity that Kass especially was happy to encourage.

Now Kass looked up with her eyes wide, shaken. Ilena shifted, wanting to move closer to both her and Eris.

Guile, who was wired not for an attraction to body heat or pheromones but still for unconscious reactions, bared his aftermarket teeth.

The atmosphere was still tense; the Ghosts drooped as if in debilitating heat.

"I will not direct you in the same way this time," Eris said. "This Darkness is different, but we have hope now that the Hive does not."

"So now we wait," Guile said.

"Maybe kick a ball around some," Ilena said, sharp.

"I will find out more," Eris said. "Our alliances will help us, although I fear for the Speaker."

"It went for the Speaker?" Kass asked.

"Like a needle for a vein."

"Will you stay in the Tower?"

Where else would she go? Eris still equated leaving the Tower permanently with going back to the tunnels. There were no places other than these two, upper and lower, light and dark. Any in-between place was a void as strange as the Speaker's mysteries.

She lit a foxfire in her hands for her own comfort.

Eris' reaction must have been stronger than she intended; red light glowed through the gaps in Guile's face plates, and Kass shifted backwards. Only Ilena didn't respond. Perhaps the Awoken were used to these things, if Hunters weren't. Eris let the green light swirl along her forearms, not trying to restrict the eddies it made when it hit magnetic fields and the tiny radiation of their bodies. Then she took control of it, rolling the ball of light between her hands.

"Where would I go?" she said.

"To the outer planets," Ilena answered immediately. Perhaps that was her own backup plan. Follow the armies and live in their ashes?

Eris shook her head. "I will be the herald here. I could have my revenge by my own hand this time."

Guile's jaw lights dimmed. Kass sat back, moving her cloak aside so she could rest her gloved hands on the ground. Eris kept the ball of light in her hands, fighting against its entropic urge to fade. Keep it burning long enough and the impetus of the Light would reverse, sustaining itself. Eris would stay in the Tower indeed. She had plans to make.