DISCIPLE — The Warning
The sun is your enemy today
Have you heard the news that the world isn't ending?
It's starting again
But all the nonbelievers they keep on pretending
The sun is your enemy today
You love to look away from the face of your vices
Embrace them instead
And welcome yourself into the new modern crisis
Oh, oh, I've been waiting
Oh, Disciple in the making
Kill the system
Kill the man
Strip the power from their hands
Your eyes will bleed as you stare at the screen
You shall remain
Inside your space
2, 3, Go!
The sun is my enemy today
I'm running from the misery like there's no tomorrow
Let's share it with them
And show all the world that this life isn't borrowed time
Oh, oh, I've been waiting
Oh, Disciple in the making
Kill the system
Kill the man
Strip the power from their hands
Your eyes will bleed as you stare at the screen
You shall remain
Inside your space
Swimming with the fishes 'til they drown
Love is just another excuse we rely on
Palpable but hidden in the sound
Hate will always be a good friend when the sun goes d[r]own
Oh, oh, oh, hear my calling
Oh, oh, oh, nonbelievers start running
Oh, oh, I've been waiting
Oh, Disciple in the making
Kill the system
Kill the man
Strip the power from their hands
Your eyes will bleed as you stare at the screen
You shall remain
Inside your space
of ignorance
The Warning — DISCIPLE
A delusion of a being long dead, an idea of living only to serve, only for one purpose. It leaves behind a sharp-edged data fragment to mark its passing.
There is a conflict in me, O Witness, that unsettles your weapon, my self. Why is it that you allow flawed understandings of your great work to persist in all those who serve you, even in your Disciples? Every one of us seems to have some different conception of your Final Shape.
I do not need reassurance in my own comprehension. Only to understand what purpose it serves that you have chosen such disparate servants to carry out your will.
Is it a simple answer? Perhaps none who serve you have the capacity to grasp your vision. And so, rather than waste more of your time and attention on explaining something they will never hold, it is enough that they act as you will. The Witch and her Hive carving single-mindedness out of the cloth of the universe, that whispering Nightmare seeking the fullest gamut of existence, the Upender destroying all differentiation. Shadows on the wall.
In this case, it would be hubris to think I have understood your work, that I alone among your Disciples have grasped what purpose it is we serve. All of us must see darkly reflected.
But there is relief in simplification. There is kindness in winnowing. So then, why is this proliferation permitted?
The shadows, showing the truth by their casting.
Perhaps it is enough to simply trust that we are weapons in your hand, O Witness—even if we cannot see the perfect shape of your plan, we serve it by your wielding of us. Each Disciple has come to be only by your will, and so that incomprehension is also in your making. You ask for trust, and obedience, and promise that whatever you do, whatever finality you achieve, will suit each of your followers perfectly.
Your Final Shape will be a hundred promises kept. I have seen the reflections of it through all of we Disciples, through the tracks you leave in the universe, a truth understood through the shadows it casts.
There: I have resolved the conflict within my thoughts, and I am at peace again. Once more, I am only your violence and nothing more.
The Final Shape will realize us as we strive.
RECORD 978-ECLIPSE-4165
lo? Hello? Are you...oh, please, let it be alive. Wake up little Ghost, wake up. Just please give me some sign that you're listening.
All right. I don't need...I know you're listening. Why would you be out here if you weren't here to...It's a miracle I found you out here. On this thing.
I didn't know the Traveler sent its Ghosts out this far from home.
Poor little lost thing. Please wake up.
I am an Arach of Dead Orbit. I am the last of the crew of the Sophia. And this place is...it doesn't have a name. We called it A-113.
How long have you been here, little Ghost? Why did you come?
Listen. We came here on behalf of the Fleet. We were scavengers. Sixty-one days ago a Dead Orbit scout detected an unknown presence in stationary orbit about Ceres. 133 west. Looked Golden Age, by the signatures. Human. A small station. No prior records. We -
I suppose we should have disclosed it to the Tower, but we didn't. I didn't. That was my call. We wanted it for ourselves, whatever it was. For the Fleet. If we'd told the Tower, maybe they might have sent a Guardian not of our making instead...Doesn't matter now, does it, little one?
If I ramble it's because I haven't slept in seven days.
Seven point five days ago; that was when the Sophia dropped into the Belt. They saw us at once. We dropped and the alarms went off and that was the end, that was the end right then, but they let us go on for another seven-point-five days, didn't they? The alarms. Hostile scan detected. An Awoken ship had us in its sights, just a couple hundred kilometers away. Like it had been waiting for us. It could have wiped us out of space right then but instead it crippled our engines and our comms and then for days it played with us, like a cat, we limped half-way round the Belt and it was always there...
We abandoned the Sophia one-point-five days ago. We jumped ship for A-113.
I don't know what else to call it. I don't know what it was built for. There are these things, like keyholes. The rangefinders say they go on for thousands of kilometers. The others went inside and found - well, some of them are still screaming about the eye. All the other voices that come back are more terrible.
There's salvage here but it'll never come home, none of it. None of it except maybe you, little Ghost.
Wake up.
Wake up. Go home. Tell them to strike A-113 from the records. Tell them to forget the Sophia, and the mission, and her crew.
END RECORD
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Narinder had expected many things.
To return to power. To punish his traitor family for millennia before erasing their miserable souls. To despise the Lamb and their methods.
But to his surprise, the Lamb, infant god that they were, was a dutiful one. Honoring the lives of their followers, burying or composting them as requested, and bringing back from the dead those who the Lamb felt needed more time.
They even gave him alone decorations of bone for his new abode at his… request.
What Narinder was not expecting was the Lamb - Lambert they insisted he call them - return with another sheep.
This one was different, however. He was tall, taller than even Narinder, with such dark fur and wool that he looked almost to be made of shadow. Long horns curling towards and away from his face, the new arrival returning to the base of the (recently designated) New Faith sent the flock into a near frenzy if Narinder hadn’t bullied the Witnesses into aiding him in calming them down.
Lamber pulled the black sheep, Narinder, and the Witnesses into the temple, ordering the flock into compliance. They would expect a celebration.
They would expect a new holy day.
Narinder expected nothing good would come from Lambert informing them that the Mystic Seller demanded they rescue his heathen family from Limbo.
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