Fire, it's an important element in this world, one of the things that make us able to live. A ball of fire that our planets revolve around. Our bodies boil, and apparently, long ago, humans used to be stupid enough to go out and lay under the ultraviolet rays of the sun, absorbing it into their skin to temporarily change the shade of it, running the risks of skin cancer after we began to associate with the Greenhouse Effect and our ozone layers of the atmosphere crumbled in the wake of what we, humans, had done.

But the Earth doesn't matter to me anymore. Nothing matters to me. The only thing that could potentially matter to me is Venus, and the hallucinating Vault of Glass that lurks deep underneath it.

Does the Vault even really exist?

It's a question that I've realized many who have gone into the Vault have begun to think about. Since the Vault is considered a portal to all the holes in time the Vex have opened, who's to say it isn't actually a mere thought that Atheon plants into our minds when we step through the looming door overlooking the Waking Ruins and the Shattered Coast in the Ishtar Sink of Venus? It could very well be possible, that when you raise the Spire on the outside, that the electromagnetic fields are sucked straight into your mind, and that this mythical Atheon activates them to make you believe that you are lurking in their pit once you reach the floating pillars just before the Templars Well.

Here's what I've gathered about the existence of the nightmares lurking in the desolation of time; every time a team of Guardians conquers the Vault, the Vex that those Guardians killed inside remain dead until the next Tuesday. Some have claimed they've gone in only hours after another team came out to find them alive and attempting to kill everyone once again. The Vex are known for Time being their main key, Time and Void,

But His was Solar. His was Fire.

Sensations of a burning down my throat and boiling in my stomach were two physical attractions, but the emotional ones were hope and Vengeance at the thought of jumping into that pit with this team of Guardians that approached me. "Alexandra Vaskas?"

That was when I met their eyes, and I was staring into the warm ones of a blond haired, hazel-eyed boy. The number 29+ in gold writing was stamped on his shoulder, the same stamped on mine. He was a Titan, tall, and there was a strange essence glowing around his palm, making it difficult to tell if he was a Striker or a Defender when I couldn't see the specific color in the dark bar. "We were wondering if you'd be willing to join us in an attempt to take the Vault of Glass? We're confident in our abilities and advanced—"

"Sure," I say, cutting him off, leaving all of them with stunned facial expressions. "I'll join you, but I need to know your names first."

This was the way I greeted people now. I only knew the last names of those on my prior squad; Kaden's being the only first name. If someone's going to die on my watch, then I'm going to ensure I remember him or her the right way.

And he speaks first, the name causing me to knock over my drink and stumble out of that bar, back into my room as quick as I can.

"Cadien Jensen."

~xXx~

Many who have entered my room talk about it being the room of someone who lives in an insane asylum, whatever that is. Someone tried to explain that asylums were places where they would send people with mental issues to hopefully help them be natural and "calm', but I debated that they were just people, locked away in the beautiful reality of their minds and that they shouldn't have had to be sent away. That's when the person stormed out of my room and said I probably belong in one. That Guardian has never stepped a foot near the part of Venus that the Vault resides on, so they'll never understand what I'm going through.

My room was the same as every other Hunter room in the Tower, if you look at the color of the walls. My bed was desperately unmade and messy, specks of blood on the sheets from where I subconsciously take my knife and slash out, sometimes ripping the sheets, other times my mind using what Kaden taught me and throwing it at the wooden board on the wall made for Hunter Knives that every Hunter dormitory has, and then the times where I slash and rip my skin open, really waking me up, and causing me to clutch the bleeding wound and rush to my bathroom, where I have a large stock of gauze and various medications prescribed by the hospital wing as last ditch efforts to make me whole again. My originally bare white walls were now covered in drawings of what I remember from the Vault, scrawled handwriting of the Relic and the Templar's Well and of the overlapping many pictures of the Spire, trying to comprehend what I had missed because SOMETHING was missing from the damned thing. Little notes were written on the sides, whole sheets of my paper spilled with my thoughts also were taped up on my walls next to the pictures and self-made maps. My little desk in the corner was overflowing with crumpled up papers and shattered bits of glass. There was a single window on the opposite wall of the door, in between my desk and my bed. Before we attempted the Vault, that window used to let in beautiful rays of sun and moonlight, allowing me to look beyond the Guardian Tower and out into the City, the Traveler being able to be seen as well, but now, a curtain filters out most of the light, casting a hazy shadow throughout the room, making it look post-apocalyptic, the same way I felt.

My helmet resided on a stool in the corner, my cloak folded beneath it. I stared at the golden lines along the design of it, wondering just for a moment how perfect life could have been had our Golden Age blossomed and the Traveler didn't have to leave behind enemies. At the same time I wondered if we would soon be another set of enemies for the Traveler, that it would leave us behind and cause us to hate it. Would Humans and Awoken and Exo soon be apart of the Darkness? Would we be looking to devour planets that the Travelers Light attempts to touch in hopes of reclaiming a new world for ourselves? Fighting against all of our enemies, including the new worlds Guardian's that the Traveler births?

My thoughts were interrupting by a beeping noise and a green light blinking with that rhythm on my desk. Clearing my throat, I spoke up. "Ghost, what is it?"

"You have a visitor," my Ghost answered from his spot next to the blinking light.

Sighing, I place my face in my hands and clear my mind, not wanting to hear even another person tell me how my room belongs to someone else despite the fact of my room reflecting the person I was deep down on the inside. "Let them in," I say from between my fingers, hearing the slight sliding of the lock out of place and the door opening.

As I look up, I see Cadien walking into my room, arms folded over his chest. "Well," he says as he glances from me to each little picture on the wall behind me. "When Commander Zavala said you were compulsive and content about the Vault, I didn't necessarily imagine something as incredible as…this."

I scowl at his, at his attracting smile and hold myself to keep a steady face. Cadien wasn't anybody to me, just an ally. Nothing more. "What do you want, Jensen?"

"Damn, I just gave you a compliment," he says with a chuckle. "I came up to check on you."

"You don't need to check up on me," I tell him, thinking about adding something to that. "And my stuff isn't interesting, it's just my thoughts."

"Then you have an interesting mind," he comments as he sits down next to me on my bed. Looking around my dark room, his eyes fall upon Kaden's Ghost, the damaged thing with the fading blue and orange streaks going across the front of it. "What is that, Alex?"

My eyes follow his to the Ghost, and my heart fills with dread, slithering through my mind the same way the thoughts I have do, except this hurts more than vengeance. "It's a memory, a memento of someone," I tell him in a quiet voice, not wanting to explain much more.

But Cadien is respectful, and he just nods, looking back down. "I lost someone to another member of the Darkness," he tells me, and I look at his face, hurt and fear reflecting in his eyes. "That's why I came to check on you."

Then he rises and grabs some of the maps on my desk, on of the Templar's Well, another of an overview of the Sync Plates outside of the Vault, and finally, a map that was given to me, of the layout to get down to where Atheon resides. He takes out his Ghost, and his Ghost silently scans each of the maps. "The team will be meeting tomorrow in the morning. I'll come and get you, so don't worry about being late."

With that comment, he walks out. I'm not sure if he believes that I'll actually get sleep, as usually nighttime is when I wake up and start drawing and writing my thoughts. A new thought has occurred to me, the thought of Atheon, and I call for the attention of my Ghost.

"How can I assist you?" He asks me, and I think about how I want to word this.

"Search Cryptarch records, Atheon, Time's Conflux."

The Cryptarch files were very thorough, and this is as much as I got out of the records;

To speak of Atheon is to accept certain limitations. I am ill equipped to understand an entity that defies simple causality. I needed to accept these limitations and proceed.

Atheon waits in the Vault of Glass. Just as Atheon sidesteps 'past' and 'future', it is impossible to say whether Atheon created the Vault or the Vault created Atheon. Casual pathways converge on Atheon from every axis in the space-time bulk. Atheon has a function. I hazard that it regulates and oversees the Vex conflux system. What are these confluxes? How do they relate to the physical Vex network that has devoured so much of Mercury and Venus?

I might guess that the Vex confluxes represent the extension of this network across space and time. Perhaps the Vex use closed timelike curves to solve unfathomable computations. Or the Vex may seek to transcend a physical substrate and move their thoughts directly into the fundament of the universe. If physics is a set of rules that the cosmos uses to calculate itself, perhaps the Vex seek to worm their way into these calculations: to become a law of reality, inseparable from existence. A virus in the system. Perhaps Atheon was the centerpiece of this project, a command nexus that unified efforts across time, to ensure that the Vex would be apart of our reality and a need for us to survive.

But I have already accepted that all of this is speculation, that all of these thoughts were mere thoughts created by my mind to somehow fathom the true meaning behind those that helped kill my friends.

So this chapter was mostly just a filler because I need something to set the stage for what comes next, and hopefully you guys will enjoy it. I'll also be posting another One-Shot, a prequel of sorts, about the time that Alex and Kaden first met, and it will be in Kaden's point of view, so look out for that, as it will be titled Scorched. Thanks guys for reading.