melakheth deals with intruders

Lucent Wizard

Guardians (and Drifter) when they first saw Hive Eris

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(This is also up on my YouTube Channel and TikTok!)

now why is ken dead in the bisexual sleeping position

Mèlgiri ám Agam (ghost: An), Silent Brood-turned-Lucent Brood guardian, who rejected a life of violence toward her fellow lightbearers to focus on the threat in the Disciple's Bog.

Happenstance and shared language allowed her to make acquaintance of an awoken hunter, Selene, who had originally come to the Throne seeking a cure to the curse afflicting her home.

After the defeat of Rhulk, Mèlgiri volunteered to help Selene as she'd helped her, setting to work deciphering the Witch Queen's secrets using insights only one of Savathûn's hive would have. Their combined efforts revealed the 15th Wish.

Already loving this new season, I would have never guessed that eris would become a literal hive god!!! And as usual imaru is being a little shit.

(Side note: My hunter looks awesome in this)

Just a little special something in advance of Season 18 and the Destiny Showcase next week <3

' your shredder is broken? go underground and look for melakheth. she can fix it. she can fix everything. '

//SO, Since there are no refs for Light Bearer Acolytes, I decided to get my own!

Report From Neomuna Mission to First Ghost Immaru

(for @wonderwafles)

Report from Sesneth and Fox, to First Ghost Immaru:

My coven set down on Neptune at night. The city glowed with dead fire. The silence worried us, made us crowd close until Notoph shouted us back in line. Despite this, we caught three humans and hung them upside down and notched runes into their skin. They told us Cloud Striders would rescue them. 

Cloud Striders, the captives said, are filled with nanomachines. These spread throughout their bodies. This transformation is mechanical, like the SIVA virus, not biological like our worms or paracausal like the Traveler’s Ghosts. Eventually, the nanomachines kill the Cloud Strider, and a new one takes its place. 

The Cloud Striders live short lives, a reverse of both the Guardians’ and the Hive’s pacts. Are their shortened human lifespans still longer than that of the krill? What proportion of loss would have made each trade worth it? 

(What is “worth”? The Wizard Sesneth thinks, stilling her stylus. Fox spins his flanges around the perimeter of her small tower in the outer wall of what used to be the Witch-Queen’s palace. Green shadows fall against ribbed white walls. Sesneth will not include her question in the report. Immaru would scoff at it. It is a question that would have been inconceivable to the Hive before the Lucent Brood. 

Inside the Brood, Ghosts bring questions like this. They do not intend it. They bring assumptions, questions. They bring Entaoxuanna and call it good. 

Besides, such a question isn’t tactically useful at all. Thoughts go skittering off like cave crickets. The Wizard Sesneth gnaws on her stylus. How long is a Neptune year? Do the Cloud Striders live half their year? Less? She does not know. How long is a Fundament year? She reaches the limits of her mathematics and moves the stylus again.) 

We cannot be sure the captives did not tell us several lies.

(Some of the Hive have no interest in the krill at all, Sesneth thought. They resist the Entaoxuanna, whether easily or with great effort. Not all think the legends matter. Sesneth does. The legends help her sleep and help her wake up.)

We killed two captives, stored another in crystal. We saw a Cloud Strider from a distance, but did not challenge it yet, as you, First Ghost Immaru, commanded us to “quit that racket.” We returned to the Throne World. 

(The Wizard Sesneth hissed at her stylus. She began to revise her report line by line, adding more specifics, adding more colloquialisms to appeal to Immaru, adding some numbers supplied by Fox. Finally, she scratched out the part about krill lifespans. It wasn’t useful to the war, and besides, removing it gave her a small thrill. Wizards should have some secrets, she thought. They were fat for her to chew on later. 

The day was growing long, though, her mandibles too tired for chewing. She tapped her stylus against her chin and turned to Fox. “Do you think we’ll eat them?” She asked.

“The Cloud Striders?”

“Yes.”

“No,” said Fox. “We don’t need nanomachines.” 

Sesneth nodded. “You are wise.”

“I know,” said Fox.

Letter written, they sat and thought together. Sesneth thought about the lengths of years. 

he said NO pickles >(

There's something I'm not getting here. What is the Lucent Brood's view of the Light and Ghosts? In Witch Queen we had Immaru shaking in rage over the fact Guardians would resort to killing Ghosts, and that the Hive had found Light-killing weapons "distasteful". But in Risen the Lucent Brood are seemingly okay with ripping the Light from dead Guardians? In WQ, when we're in the Apothecary, Eris says the jars are full of "corrupted Light" and this season's first mission opening dialogue is pretty much along the same lines. But then we've got a third-person omniscient narration from Immaru, about how he resents Guardians using the Light as merely a tool but admits that makes them efficient, while "[the Lucent Brood's] manipulation of the Light was inhibited by reverence". And THEN we've got the Sparagmos jumpship loretab, also from this season, describing how Savathûn fuses the Light into her crystals by killing her Lightbearer's Ghosts. The Lightbearers themselves seem pretty okay with sacrificing themselves that way, btw. Oh, and Immaru is okay with us murdering Hive Ghosts in Altars and Spire now? We also get quite a few hints that the Lucent Brood adheres to the sword logic, and Savathûn, at least on the surface, seems to still vibe with its philosophy?

I'm genuinely at a loss. I have some fraught ideas about how to tie this together (particularly the reverence to the Light with adherence to the Logic), but all of it feels to me like multiple conflicting views, as if the lore couldn't make a decision which way to go (or alternatively explain its own stance clearly enough). Am I the only one this confused?? Am I constrained by my pre-existing biases and headcanons, and that's why I feel this clash?

"Worse"

"We can't show her Gambit vids."

"And why not?"

"The point is to show the... the fighting is not killing each other, even when we kill each other. I can't talk."

"You're really gonna say that Gambit is worse than the Crucible with your mouth, throat, and lungs. Your blood sports are just that-- Drifter's are paradimensional detritus."

".... I'm not getting into this argument. If that's where you think he gets them then they're equally bad. The Crucible is a fucked up game to play to living people, I'm not denying it. I'm not sure where you have this noble notion of behaving like living people, but I don't have it. We pick each other up and buy each other drinks afterwards, no one really dies, which is what we need to show Yol. I wouldn't show her any fieldwork, even against Scorn, unless I was trying to teach her how."

"Fieldwork."

"Yes, you know, wholesale slaughter of anyone between me and whatever I want."

"I do know."

"You're just mad you like a Hive and you're running out of people to blindly hate. Down to Scorn and Taken, gonna find out the Taken could be returned to their home dimension the whole time."

"Nothing for the Scorn?"

"Nothing that doesn't sound ridiculous, even to me, the undead firebug. Come back to life-life? Even once? In normal condition? I guess? Be like us? Drop dead all at once? I don't know. I know if I had to strap myself together like that, I wouldn't want to be moving around."

"That is a damn lie and you know it. You'd strap yourself together like that so you could move around."

".... Rude."

"Point is, Titan--"

"... hm?"

"The point is that you were right. If the point is killing for fun, the only one that isn't disgusting is the crucible. You'll need behind-the-scenes, though, Vids leave out the friendly until the end of the show."

"I'll collect some."

~~

@annieruok94