The others asked Clara who she saw. When she refused to reply, they realized that perhaps it was best not to pursue an answer.

The moon had been left alone, an untouched relic of humanity's expansive efforts for centuries. It had been silent- until suddenly it wasn't.

Some great disturbance had kicked the hornet's nest up there, forcing Hive to spill out of the hellmouth like a red flood, seeping out of the cracks and crannies that led deep underground to their filthy nests of bones and grime that they'd hid amongst for centuries. Some thought it was the Hunters, trying to explore lost, forgotten regions that had once been their own. Others thought that perhaps the Hive had been planning on this, that they'd been preparing to mobilize for some time and had just needed to pick the right moment.

And then the Nightmares came.

Ghostly, blood-red apparitions of faceless Guardians that had appeared overnight. They covered the surface of the moon, hovering in the air motionlessly as though held there by some unseen string clutched by a puppeteer. No one knew who they were, no one alive anyway. When one was approached, sometimes you could hear their last, terrified words they'd uttered before death. Sometimes they cowered from invisible threats and horrors that plagued them for eternity.

Sometimes they just screamed.

Clara-1 had needed to see what exactly had brought about these specters. As the emissary for the Traveler, she had other suspicions concerning the cause of this event.

She'd traveled to the moon to personally seek out the source of these Nightmares and hopefully put a stop to it. She'd remembered tales told to her of this place by her mentor, winding tunnels underneath the lunar surface that formed a labyrinth filled with skeletons, one only navigable by the Hive. She'd ventured into the dark below, prepared to fight the Hive that would defend their closely guarded secrets.

She met no resistance.

She knew the Hellmouth wasn't empty- she could sense hundreds of eyes upon her, tracking her every move. Every so often, she caught a flash of movement from an outcrop of rock as something darted beyond her reach. She knew that the Hive was here- but they did not attack her. She should have asked herself why, should have caught the signs- but instead, she'd pressed on.

Eventually, her trekking led her to a cliff- a cliff high above a gargantuan chasm that stretched for miles and miles underneath the surface. In the chasm sat an incomprehensible object, some dark remnant of a war she did not know.

The Pyramid had beckoned her inside. She found herself unable to resist.

She hadn't told anyone more of the story beyond that. They knew that she'd gone in alone- and that she'd come back with someone else. A red phantom, just like the others that infested the moon- only this one followed her. Spoke to her. Spoke of what, they did not know- they could not hear it, and she would not tell them.

The only clue they had to its identity was that she recognized it. She would give briefings, issue orders, all with it looming over her shoulder. And the longer it loomed, the more cracks in her armor would appear- her voice would become hitched, her eyes darting to their corners to peer at it when she thought no one was watching. She carried herself wearily, becoming more tired with every passing day it spent haunting her. Sometimes her hands would ball into fists, as though she were an instant away from losing it all and attacking the phantom directly- and then they'd unfurl, and she'd grow a bit weaker to its antagonism.

The others asked Clara who she saw.

How could she explain to them that she was trying to protect them? How could they possibly understand the true horror of the Pyramid's gift to her? To hear the one you cared most about, the one you couldn't save, whispering and pleading and begging for his eternal torment to come to an end, repeating over and over again that his death had been her fault, that maybe if she were a better Guardian she would have been able to save him? Describing all the tortures his soul endured in death and never knowing whether it was real or just some other manipulation of the Pyramid's …

She would not tell them. She would spare them the knowledge of this curse, lest they find themselves forced to confront the ghosts of their own loved ones. She knew not what the Pyramid was, but she knew that it hated. It hated so passionately, so entirely, that it could not help but to try and spread that hatred- to make her hate herself, to hate him, to hate the others around her enough to inflict them with the same fate.

She knew its game. It had given her someone that she'd never expected to see again, and in spite of everything- in spite of the disturbing horror of it all- she could not help but be grateful for the chance to see him again. A sick part of her trilled in delight when she heard his voice, even as he attempted to convince her to commit unspeakable acts. She found herself wanting him around, wanting the Pyramid's curse to persist- she didn't want him to leave her again.

And she knew that that was its cruelest trick of all.

A/N: This is just a small thing I wrote for Shadowkeep's release and an idea it gave me. No, there's not another book coming out. Just wanted to share this.