Matters of Faith

A Halo oneshot

By

EvilFuzzy9

Rating: K+

Genre: Spiritual

Characters/Pairings: Sangheili; [N/A]

Summary: A young Sangheili and an old one have a talk about gods and men.

Tarn 'Vadam was young, very young. His elders would still speak of the Covenant, at times, but to him this was a far off and unknowable thing. He had been scarce more than a hatchling at the time of the Great Schism, and even now, with the Sangheili finally stabilized and united under the leadership of the Arbiter and his Swords of Sanghelios, Tarn was only just old enough to begin formal tutelage in the warrior arts.

Sador the Lame was old, very old. He had been a seasoned commando at the time of the Unggoy Rebellion, and a venerable field master in the first battles of the Human-Covenant War. Now he was ancient, probably one of the oldest Sangheili alive, and also perhaps one of the wisest, at least according to Thel 'Vadam.

While Tarn revered the Arbiter, the kaidon of his mother's house—as was only proper—he couldn't help feeling a certain incredulity about this assertion. The aged Sador did not seem at all wise to young Tarn. He was strange and eccentric with a broad spectrum of complicated, seemingly contradictory beliefs: his views on war and honor, in particular, were very difficult for a lad as young as Tarn to grasp.

It did not help that Sador was lame, either, as implied by his epithet, and that he had been for a very long time. This was simply indecent for a warrior; personally, Tarn felt that he would rather die than live on in such a state.

The youth cringed inwardly at the thought of Sador's misshapen leg as he approached the old field master's dwelling, pulling behind himself a small hover-cart laden with various supplies. Sador did not live in Vadam Keep itself, nor indeed in what most would call a proper abode at all. He made his home in a rocky dale cloven from the roots of Mount Kolaar, near enough to the keep for convenience, but far enough to be called separate.

In this, at least, Sador appeared to display some modicum of wisdom and discretion. There were many who disliked or mistrusted the wizened warrior, finding his maimed leg repugnant or his opinions absurd. It was only the favor of the kaidon that kept Sador from being harassed or driven out altogether. Sangheili pride could not abide such a disgraceful creature as him, a warrior who lived into eld unmanned, a cripple clinging to life until his body was utterly useless.

Tarn did not know how Sador had escaped harm when the Servants of Abiding Truth laid siege to Vadam Keep. He could only assume that the hoary old cripple had hidden in some hole and cowered.

He snorted to himself at this thought, listening to the babble of a nearby stream.

A few scraggly plants clung at odd places in the narrow dale. Grasses shot up from the soil, some thick-stemmed and woody, others slender and flexible. He saw wild elakir growing by the river, the grain of which some Sangheili favored over irukan, and also the broad, jagged edged leaves of duya plants that were used in many herbal remedies, as well as the blue-mottled flowers of thorny arath bushes, plus the slender white trefoil blossoms of kenek whose tuberous roots could provide a number of vital nutrients, although they were starchy and wearyingly bland.

While the dale was rocky, it was far from barren. There were many plants that grew here, and even presumably a good number of animals, although most of the latter were naturally and sensibly wary of Sangheili. But the terrain was still rough, and in places the feet of Kolaar rose in sheer, inscrutable walls.

Picking his way up the narrow path, Tarn saw the cave draw near in which Sador made his home. The mouth was open, and with a practiced eye he could spot the more obvious signs of habitation in the area, including the half-camouflaged hulks of several scrapped, battle damaged machine parts.

Tugging the hover-wagon after him, Tarn tentatively approached the threshold.

It always startled and unnerved him a little when he caught his first glimpse of Sador after a time apart. The old warrior was surprisingly good at moving without a sound despite his limp, and for all his extreme age he could still occasionally cover ground at a truly astonishing rate. He seemed to melt in and out of the shadows despite the age-bleached pallor of his hide, and he had an uncanny knack for getting behind visitors unnoticed. Plus his appearance itself was distressing to young Tarn, so weathered and withered that he could not help but feel dismayed whenever he saw it.

Tarn didn't detect Sador's presence until he heard a soft, wheezy voice. Despite his youth, the lad did his family and his keep all due credit in his steadfast refusal to display overt fear or shock at the sudden "Hello, child," breathed into his auditory meatus, but he did tense perceptibly and flicker a half-moon eye in momentary discomfort. But then he largely calmed, if still just a little uneasy, and turned to face the wizened former warrior.

Sador 'Usad was well in excess of a century old, nearly two dozen times the stripling Tarn's age, and he showed every last one of those years with excruciatingly clear detail. In places the skin hung in loose, flaccid folds from his body, robbed of elasticity and ill-fitting his shrunken frame. Nearly a bleached-bone white was his hide, mottled at points with the last feeble coloration of a skin once rich black. Whatever color his eyes had originally been, they too were now like cloudy pearls, thickly occluded by severe cataracts. It was a marvel that he could still see at all.

His arms also showed very little of the stout, rippling musculature they may once have possessed, being diminished and atrophied by sheer senescence. They looked bony and feeble, and the skin hanging from the elbow and underarm had an indecent tendency to flap about when the elder gestured, as if to emphasize the lamentable loss of mass and density in muscle and bone. His hands trembled constantly, too, and while usually slight it sometimes grew obviously difficult for Sador to manipulate objects.

The retired warrior—retired as much by choice as necessity, another thing which Tarn found inconceivable—was smaller than a Sangheili in his prime would be normally. Part of this, perhaps, was simply because he had always been so, for as Tarn understood the matter, old Sador had never been the most robust specimen even before his maiming, but another part of it was from the degenerative miniturization sometimes seen in Sangheili of exceptionally old age. He also had strange, hair-like protrusions emanating from various cracks and crevices.

And, of course, there was his legs. One was reasonably shaped, still retaining a shadow of the firmness and volume one might expect to see in the limbs of a warrior, but the other...

Tarn had to concentrate hard not to avert his eyes too perceptibly from the lamed, shriveled member. It was the most atrophied of Sador's aged limbs, twisted many decades ago into a form that was barely recognizable as any sort of appendage, withered and misshapen and grotesque. He did not know whether it compared better with a stump or a brittle twig, for there was a little of both to the leg. The frame of a brace fashioned from the blue-purple avani alloy favored by the Covenant clung to the limb, somewhat like a builder's framework around an incomplete construction, its curved armor plates scored and pitted with many old battle scars.

This brace had been a boon from one of the lesser San'Shyuum prophets back during the War, as Tarn heard it told. Sador had been injured in the line of duty, maimed in a losing battle against the humans on their first glassed world, one of the few battles where humans were ever able to achieve a meaningful victory both on the ground and in ship-to-ship combat. Sador was one of the high fieldmasters on that world—Harvest—and one of the only officers to escape with a reasonable portion of his troops.

Many Sangheili muttered about this as cowardice, that Sador had been distraught at the maiming of his leg by a human tank shell, shaken by a narrow escape from death, and in disgrace had ordered what most of their people would consider a premature retreat. Many of the Sangheili serving under Sador protested this action, but he had persisted, and none had dared to challenge him. Whatever their personal feelings on the retreat, they'd had enough respect for their commander to not desire, by rebellion, to compound the shame of his crippling wound.

Tarn sometimes wondered how any self-respecting shipmaster could have agreed to retreat from a battle still being fought, to yield to the wishes of a shocked and blood-weary fieldmaster and disengage from an enemy before the final clarity of victory or defeat. The way most adults talked, it seemed most of them would never have complied, would never have turned tail and fled before the enemy. Yet the commander of the vessel which retrieved Sador and his forces from the planet had done exactly that. Either that shipmaster, too, had been just such a soft-boned coward as most called Sador, or, as a burgeoning shrewdness within Tarn lately whispered, the shipmaster had been, like Sador, able to see that the battle was already lost.

Because from Tarn's studies of the war, that was what all the records on the last battle of Harvest said, behind all flowery prose and praise of the fallen, all the bias and tinting and slanting to put Sangheili in a good light and all others in shade. Tarn was proud of his heritage, but he was not ignorant. The human vessels at Harvest had numbered at least thrice those of the Covenant's, and whatever the inferiority of their shipboard weapons technology, it was an open secret that on the ground human forces had usually been able to hold their own against the Covenant, even when not fielding any of their spaar'tun demons.

The humans had been winning on the ground, and the numbers of their ships in that battle were sufficient to counteract the usual disadvantages of their ill-suited projectile weapon systems against Covenant energy shielding, even if they suffered catastrophic losses as the price. They had been able to gang up several of their ships, with their crude one-shot-at-a-time mass acceleration cannons, to each one of the Covenant's technolgically superior vessels and overpower their defenses through sheer volume of fire.

After action reports showed heavy losses on both sides, but the rate at which the Yuu'en'essee ships destroyed their Covenant counterparts had been, in hindsight, clearly greater. Sufficient to turn the tide, at least, and by the time Sador was extracted by the Firm Benediction, the flow of the battle seemed—from the holographic simulations Tarn had studied—to have gone irreversibly in the humans' favor.

As for Sador's leg brace, apparently one of the False Prophets had favored the old warrior, and offered to have his leg restored despite the loss of the battle for Harvest. Tarn found it hard to believe that such could have been medically possible, or that any of the San'Shyuum, whom his elders decried as liars and charlatans, would have shown anything like compassion to a shamed warrior. But the Covenant's technology had been very advanced, they said, and the San'Shyuum, for all the curses heaped upon them, were rarely accused of having lacked cleverness.

Perhaps the False Prophet had offered the procedure as a punishment, a greater deepening of Sador's already considerable shame, or perhaps they had simply wished to keep an experienced soldier in play a while longer. But whatever most said in regards to the dubious courage of Sador, he had at least had the dignity to refuse any further loss of honor with the shedding of his blood in surgery. As an alternative, he was then apparently given the leg brace, although the exact circumstances were unclear to Tarn.

Still, that was very long ago to Tarn's mind, many decades before he was hatched. The brace seemed to function only partially these days, and Sador had to rely now as much on a makeshift prop which might have once been the scrapped, half-slagged energy spear of a Sangheili honor guard. That accoutrement did not look out of place in this setting, for there was much such scrap and salvage within the outer mouth of Sador's makeshift dwelling, even a few fragmentary human and Covenant vehicles leaking out from the cave entrance.

Finally distracted from his ruminations by a particularly wet and ragged wheeze from decrepit old Sador, Tarn forced himself to look into the ancient Sangheili's pale, occluded eyes. It sent a slight shiver down his spine.

"Yes. Greetings, elder," he said in rather belated reply, the honorific lacking somewhat in reverence for Sador's age.

But Sador simply pressed his slender, delicate mandibles together in the Sangheili equivalent of a smile.

"You bring much that I need, young one," he said, laying a somewhat disturbingly light hand on Tarn's shoulder. "Come in."

Tarn followed the elderly man with some reluctance, and the cart bobbed along behind him on its mostly-functional antigrav units. They passed into the cave which Sador made his home, the entrance obscured by a paradoxical mixture of greenery and machinery, living plants and rusted salvage.

The cave's interior was more homely than its exterior, somewhat. At least, it was furnished in a way that resembled a livable space, unlike the scrapyard glade aesthetic on the outside. There were rugs, adequately woven, and buzzing plasma lights at mostly-regular intervals, and various trinkets that had been gathered over a long life. It was a less austere adornment than most Sangheili warriors would favor, but old men of all species liked to have their creature comforts.

A chair of the sort that only a Sangheili could comfortably use sat beside a coatrack—and this was nothing fancy, no plasma power or antigrav units, just a plain bit of solid material with a flanged crossbar for the hanging of travel garments. Indeed, many of the things in Sador's home were relatively low-tech: some, things that functioned on concepts so basic they could be puzzled out by complete primitives, others, more complicated but well within the expected capacity of an average Sangheili to be able to make and maintain.

Indeed, Tarn understood most of these things to have been assembled personally by Sador. The elderly soul was no mechanical genius, but he had a plasma pistol and a charging station. He could weld, and he could wire, and he could create functioning electrical circuits. This, in itself, was somewhat impressive, as the ancient arts of electrical engineering were all but forgotten on their world. Partly because they were used to Huragok doing all the menial work, and partly because actual metallic wiring hadn't been used for the transfer of electrical potential almost since the times before the Covenant.

But impressive or not, it was still crude and undignified. Tarn didn't like the idea of a warrior doing such mundane work, not even a disgraced and crippled warrior in the last years of his life. It was indecent, in some way he couldn't yet elaborate, almost like a female becoming a warrior—except, no, that was normal now, under the Arbiter's rule. Even to young Tarn it seemed a new, strange idea. But it was easier to accept women fighting alongside men than it was to accept a warrior doing electrical work.

With a grimace, Tarn looked further around Sador's cave home. The further end was blocked off by the flickering field of a half-functional barrier generator, leaving a fairly straight space of maybe twelve paces lengthwise and five paces wide. That was the old man's living space. Generous, in some regards, yet it felt very cramped with all the little odds and ends the elder seemed to accumulate. Even now, Tarn noticed a few new effects here and there.

One in particular caught his eye. It was a thing of wood hanging over the inside of the cave entrance, right within a dip of hanging stone. The shape of it was simple, almost runic in its suggestion, reminding him of one of the human letters he'd seen in his studies. T. He felt certain that this thing was new.

Somewhat against his better judgement, he turned to old Sador and pointed.

"What is that symbol?" he asked. "I do not recognize it. Is it Forerunner?"

Tarn had little particular reverence for the extinct aliens his ancestors had once worshipped as gods, having been too young to receive more than a vague impression of their majesty before Kaidon Thel returned to Sanghelios with the Revelation of the Halos. Nonetheless he was curious about the Forerunners. He was curious about nearly everything, as befitted a youth.

Sador turned a blanched and slack-skinned head to look where Tarn pointed. He pressed his mandibles together in an expression of pleasure or quiet amusement, or maybe something else that was more difficult to place. But there was a twinkle in his eye.

"It is a cross," he said simply, using a Sangheili word that meant intersection, lattice, and perpendicular overlap.

Tarn cocked his head.

"I can see that much," he said, shooting a sullen look at the hermit. "I'm not so young that I don't know shapes. But it means something, doesn't it? You wouldn't hang it inside your door if it didn't. It wasn't here the last time I came, anyway."

"Oho, now that is a more difficult question, young one," Sador rasped, still smiling. He stroked his hanging neck skin, a vulgar habit. "What does anything mean, really? In itself it is but a shape. Only a mind can give meaning to such a thing, and that makes it depend on what the mind thinks it means."

"Ah. I see," said Tarn, who did not actually see at all, but did not wish to appear foolish.

Sador inclined his head, clearly seeing right through this.

"Well, what do you think it means, boy?"

Tarn set his mandibles into the equivalent of a frown, twitching outward as if ready to bare his fangs. It was an expression of displeasure short of actual threat and hostility, hunching his shoulders and lowering his head, an instinctual warning that he might progress into anger if further provoked. But his eyes were intent on the crude assembly, and it was clear that he was actually concentrating and trying to puzzle through the elder's question.

"Is it a tree?" he tentatively guessed, pondering, squinting and trying to decide what the symbol might represent. "Or... a star?"

Sador clicked his mandibles and rumbled deep in his chest, a wet and vaguely phlegmatic, wheezing sound.

Tarn only just restrained an expression of disgust at the noise.

"It is called the former, sometimes, but that is not what it represents," Sador informed the youngling. "Nor has it ever, I believe, meant star. I will tell you this much: it is a human symbol. A religious one."

Tarn scowled at this, quirking his head and glowering at the cross. He did not have nearly so deeply ingrained an enmity and mistrust for humans as most of the older Sangheili, but still it seemed very distasteful to him to hang one of their enemies' icons above the entrance to one's dwelling.

"I don't know anything about humans, elder," he said, applying just a hint of disrespectful sarcasm to the honorific. "They are the Kaidon's allies, and before that they were our enemies. That is all I know."

Sador was unfazed by this. He pressed his mandibles together in another smile.

"That symbol represents one of humanity's major religions," the hermit said, gesturing to the cross. "Kriss'tchee'annitee."

"Religions?" said Sador, perplexed by the pluralization of a word he had only ever heard in singular, with capital emphasis. For Sangheili, for millennia, there had been only Religion singular and unquestioned, the worship of the Forerunners and their machines. "Do you mean sects? Divisions? Cults?"

He understood the idea, within his capacity as a youngling, of subdivisions within the Faith. There were many little differences in doctrine and practice over which priests and monks had bickered for centuries, forming their various petty followings. He also vaguely grasped the notion that there was religion outside the worship of Forerunners and their artifacts, but young as he was, it had not yet occurred to him to view such non-Covenant faiths as anything more than a vaguely homogenous Other, a mash and slurry of pagan ritual, heathen idolatry, and heresy.

Even having spent many of his formative years growing up on a post-Covenant Sanghelios, Tarn had inherited many of the biases of his predecessors. He believed what his elders taught him to believe, and many of them still practiced veneration of the Forerunners above all else, even if the Covenant notions of the Halos as "Sacred Rings", the implements of a transformative "Great Journey", had passed out of vogue. He was young and understood little yet of the wider universe, religious or otherwise.

"I do mean religions, not merely sects," said Sador in a vaguely indulgent tone, not at all like how most adult Sangheili would treat a youngling. That was another thing about the elder which Tarn found inimicably bizarre. "Humans have a wide range of beliefs. It is actually rather fascinating... nothing quite like it is to be found among the old races of the Covenant. It is one of the most intriguing things about humans, in my opinion, that they can support such a variety of culture, language, and even religion within a single species..."

Tarn did the equivalent of shaking his head.

"So that cross represents one of their... religions? This... Kriss'tchee'annitee." He cocked his head. "Why do you hang it inside your dwelling, then? You're not a follower of human religion, are you?"

Sador clicked his mandibles, a shrug.

"I do not know if I would call myself a follower," he said. "Their beliefs are focused on their own peoples, their own worlds. They are human-centered, regardless of what shape they give their gods, and I do not think the humans have room in their religions for us—not after all that has happened between our kinds. But I still find some of their beliefs intriguing. This cross, for instance. It is based on a tool used for an ancient human form of execution."

"Execution? How would you kill someone with that?" said Tarn skeptically, looking at the crucifix. "Was it a kind of ritual bludgeon?"

"No. It was... a prop, you might say," Sador replied. He gestured to either end of the horizontal bar. "This is only a symbol. The real thing would have been much larger. But in ancient times—in the early days of the Covenant—Humans would nail criminals to these crosses by the wrists with their arms spread out. It was a very slow and disgraceful way to die. They would be left to hang until they bled out or suffocated. Sometimes they would be left hanging long after they died, as a warning to others."

Tarn stared.

"And this represents their religion?" he muttered. "Humans must be incredibly vulgar, morbid creatures. Cruel, too. I cannot imagine any Sangheili consigning another to such a shameful death."

"Can't you?" Sador asked. "But I suppose you are still young. Not so for myself. I know what our people can be like when roused to real anger."

"You are a miserable old creature, then," said Tarn, "if you think Sangheili could ever sink to the level of humans."

"Perhaps," said the hermit. "But then, the very idea of 'the level of humans' suggests that we are morally superior, or else that humans are somehow lesser or degenerate. I doubt this. Humans can be cruel, certainly... but there is something about them, a spirit or attitude that..." He gestured ambiguosly. "This symbol encapsulates it, or part of it. The Kriss'tchinz believe their god to have taken human form and lived among them as one they call Kraist or Messaia. They also believe their Kraist to have been executed as a rebel or heretic by wicked priests and kaidons."

"On a cross?" said Tarn, glancing up over the entrance.

"Yes," said Sador.

Tarn scoffed.

"How then could he have been a god?" he asked. "If he could die?"

"How could the Forerunners?" Sador replied simply.

Tarn frowned, flickering a half-moon eye in confusion and irritation.

"Some say the Forerunners weren't gods, either," he answered, though there was a touch of hesitance in saying this.

"Some say," Sador agreed. "But not all. Maybe they were. Maybe they will return one day. Kriss'tchinz believe so about their Kraist. They say he rose from the dead and walked among his followers for a time, before ascending to a higher existence. Returning to godhood, perhaps. It is a fascinating belief, and I find the associated doctrines most intriguing. Humans who believe in the Kraist say he died to purify the unworthy, so that they might ascend as well when their time comes. They teach that the blood of their god was shed in dishonor so that those who believed in him could be cleansed of folly and iniquity and brought into his presence with eternal life after death."

Tarn eyed Sador bemusedly.

"Is that what humans believe, then?"

"It is what many believe," said Sador. "Not all. They have many religions, as I have said. Some are related to Kriss'tchee'annitee, but many others are not. Some call the Kraist a wise teacher, or a prophet, or an avatar of their own deities, or simply a heretic. What humans believe about other faiths can be as informative as what they believe about their own. Still, in some small way it brings the Forerunners to mind, does it not? They too died to cleanse and purify, to dispel evil and give hope to lesser beings for life, and possibly transcendance."

"They did not come back to life, though," said Tarn. "The Forerunners are dead, and if they are dead then surely this human Kraist is also dead, if it ever truly existed."

Sador inclined his head.

"Now we approach the subtle distinctions and curious ambiguities between fact and faith," he said slowly. "Humans have no real material proof for the power or divinity of their gods, not like we have had for ours, yet still many have believed, and continue to believe. I do not know if it truly matters whether the Forerunners or the Kraist were mortal or divine... I think it may all really be just a matter of belief, in the end."

Tarn's expression betrayed a blend of incomprehension and incredulity.

"You're not making any sense," he said. "Either they're gods or they aren't. They cannot be both."

"'It is not for mortals to impose qualifications on the divine,'" Sador quoted. "That is something said by the Servants of the Abiding Truth. Even if they were rebels and traitors, their teachings and beliefs were not all wrong or invalid."

"Weak-minded sophistry," Tarn replied, parroting what one of his uncles had said about the Servants. "Grasping at straws and clinging to outmoded traditions, trying to excuse their ridiculous beliefs. They were fools, plain and simple."

"And thus we betray our greatest failing as Sangheili," sighed Sador. "Pride, alas! Hubris it is, this self-destructive obstinacy that drives us along the same as we have always gone, unwilling to change or to acknowledge any independent worth in others. We judge all things against ourselves, and far too often conclude those things to be inferior where they are simply different."

"I do not understand," said Tarn a little irritably.

"No, you do not. I can hardly expect you to, given how young you are, and how innocent of the world." Sador clicked his mandibles again.

"I am not so young," Tarn said defensively. "I can fight, now. Before long I shall be a warrior, and I will go into the Arbiter's service as soon as I may."

"Thel 'Vadam..." Sador murmured. "I do not agree with him on all matters. He is still too concerned with the honor of stubborn fools, and too fixated on strength in combat above all else. But, then, that is not his failing alone."

"I would not call it a failing at all."

"No, you would not, and that is why you cannot understand. Not yet. Not truly."

But Sador smiled and patted Tarn on the shoulder.

Tarn did not pull away.

A/N: Why is it that every one of my Halo fics thus far has, in some way or other, involved discussion of religion, whether specific or general? Most of my other contemporary work has only the most tenuous associations to my personal religious beliefs, typically being just in regard to how said beliefs serve as a fundamental framework for my general moral perspective and my culture. I can only guess it's because most of the other fandoms I write for have little to do with Christianity or Christian symbolism, while Halo is, at least superficially, linked to a variety Abrahamic concepts and/or traditions.

Also, happy new year! This is my first fic of 2017. Or, well, my first fic posted in 2017, at least.

Updated: 1-1-17

TTFN and R&R!

– — ❤