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lizzieraindrops · 3 months

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Ikora/Eris (regular or hive flavor) throne world exploration, and/or discussion of hive magic and void light - playing with the idea that void is/was considered dangerous and difficult to wield

this prompt fill got combined with some other things I had going and turned into Chapter 2 of Presence and Absence! thank you for such a thought-provoking idea. enjoy!

Presence and Absence - Chapter 2 (2533 words)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

Endless vibrant wetlands encircled Savathûn's castle-city in her throne world. Lush vegetation coated the rises. Water filled the valleys, moving too quickly to stagnate, yet too slowly to prevent prodigious blooms of Traveler knew what kinds of algae, bacteria, or other unclassifiable microorganisms.

Few of the Lucent brood bothered Ikora and Eris as the two of them picked their way along the high ground. A distant acolyte did fire one inquisitive shot, but the Void soul Ikora flung in the direction of its patrol squad quickly drained them all of existence. Their forms folded out of this and every reality as neatly as if they had never been. After that, the two humans were well left alone.

The energy her Void had consumed flowed back to Ikora, renewing her connection to it. With some discomfort, Ikora wondered if this felt anything like the tithes Eris had—until very recently—been taking for the past several months.

If so, Eris had walked away from a power that came as naturally to her as a Lightbearer's Light, after she herself had been long bereft of it. No one could deny that she had excelled at the sword logic, once she was the hand behind the blade rather than the throat beneath its edge. Elsie had been right about one thing: the smile that danced in Eris' voice. She had enjoyed this.

It was Ikora's job to worry about such things. And she had, of course, even while defending Eris to anyone who would listen and many who wouldn't. She had never been so profoundly afraid that she would finally lose Eris to her quest for revenge. How could she not, when Eris had become Vengeance itself?

But Eris' strength of character had put Ikora and all her necessary doubts to shame. Now Eris walked by her side lighter than ever: freed from both the shackles with which Savathûn had bid her bind herself, and from the burden of the task she had claimed long ago. She would never be free of what the Hive had done to her—what she had done to herself because of them. But she had proved, to herself and the entire world, that she was far more than just that.

Conflicting emotions knotted tight in Ikora's chest in a complicated snarl. With the intent of soothing it, she dropped her mind into the clear focus required by the Void and called up another Void soul. She did not activate it. She cupped it spinning between her hands for a moment, as if caught in the eddy of a current. Then she released it to orbit about her head like a little ringed moon.

Breaking the silence that had held them since their arrival, Eris spoke. "Your mastery of the Void is...exquisite," she said. As she spoke, she easily kept pace with Ikora’s longer stride, even fully armored once more.

Mild surprise seeped through Ikora, more at her own reaction than Eris' words. She had thought herself long past the point of being affected by flattery regarding her chosen, primal element. As Vanguard, she knew precisely to what degree she was the most competent and effective channeller of the Void currently in existence, at least as a Warlock. Ikora saw no purpose in comparing herself to past Guardians, not least because there was no accurate way to measure such things. On the other hand, Chalco always said to stop being so humble and admit that even then she was quite likely the best, period.

So why did Eris' simple yet genuine praise warm Ikora's cheeks?

"You never were that fond of Void, were you?" Ikora asked. A deflection.

A rueful smile flickered across Eris' lips. She shook her head. "I was always too impatient for its gravity. Perhaps now, after everything, I would be able to hold it differently. But alas, we shall never know.

"Arc called me to run as quickly as I desired. Then it bade me go even faster." Her smile returned sharp-toothed with the memory. She grinned at Ikora. "I could once Blink faster and farther than even you."

Ikora's eyebrows shot upward. "Oh, is that so?" she returned. "You're lucky you never told me that back when we hunted Ahamkara together. Otherwise I would have insisted that you prove it."

The sound of Eris' responding laugh was quiet. Yet it pealed and rang within Ikora as if her body were a bell of finest bronze tuned to its exact frequency. Hearing that unexpected mirth on the rarest of occasions, gradually more often in these last few years...it grew hope in her like a garden. If Eris Morn could laugh again, then even the greatest challenges of their era might yet diverge from their dire straits.

Violet unraveled into indifferent indigo as Ikora's Void soul decomposed into a more typical absence. The two women paused atop a tall bluff overlooking both the Miasma and the Quagmire. The green sky was brilliant and inscrutable with clouds and unknown celestial bodies that did not truly exist. The blunt Pyramid bleeding resonant burnt orange lay in the depths of the swamp like the antithesis of the Lucent city's lofty spires.

"It's funny, isn't it," Ikora mused. "For so long, we thought of Void as the most difficult, the most dangerous element to wield: the most prone to confuse, to corrupt. But you went on to learn to wield far more dangerous powers without falling."

Eris tilted her head back and forth. "Mmm. It is difficult to compare such things now to my previous lives. The powers I have claimed have been more unfamiliar, yes. Perhaps, from such a perspective, that is the same thing."

Ikora acknowledged her point with a yielding gesture of her hand. They began descending the other side of the bluff, following its sheer edge.

"Then again," Eris continued, "I cannot deny that the Hive's preoccupation with the sword logic does indeed make missteps in their spells more likely to be...costly."

Ikora was confident that her face did not betray an echo of her concern regarding the particular immense spell Eris had been casting for the past few months. It was over; Eris was still here. Nonetheless, a twinge of residual unease echoing from the memory of such deep fear unsettled her stomach. "That makes a certain amount of sense."

The two of them stopped again on a low rise of overgrown earth near the water line. Thick-trunked trees and crumbling spires studded the marshland. It was never silent here, where a hundred unknown small creatures flew and buzzed and swam and sloshed and grumbled and fed and grew and died. Some were unlike anything Ikora had ever encountered, even in the outer reaches of Sol’s system. Ikora wondered if any of them were resurrected memories from old Fundament, dredged from the witch queen's oldest recollections.

In the distance, a Lightbearer knight summoned twin Void shields with a resounding roar and flung one after another at a Scorn ravager brandishing a lantern full of sublimating ice.

"I wonder how the Lucent brood interprets the Void. They reject Stasis, yet despite the Void's similarity to it, they don't seem to have trouble using it. Although that may be because we only meet the competent in combat. How does the Hive's distinct concept of death influence their relationship with the ultimate paracausal expression of absence?"

Eris listened to the monologue of Ikora's thoughts as attentively as ever. She was so easy to talk to in some ways, so difficult in so many others. For the moment, Ikora opted to continue in this easier vein.

"Sometimes I still have to warn new Guardians not to get drawn in too deep by that vortex. Even though there are far more dangerous tools at their fingertips these days, it's still a little easier than I'd like to become lost in it. Perhaps, as a civilization on the brink of death, it is the echo of the Collapse that lives in us."

"That may be. But I think it more likely that such risk is the nature of any power."

"Perhaps. Or maybe, as you mentioned, it is more a question of...perspective."

Gently, Ikora reached into thin air and slipped her hand into the Weave.

"Oh!" Strand immediately coiled up her wrist and forearm like an excessively friendly colubrid. "It's very close to the surface here. It tends to be more challenging to summon this far away from Neomuna and the Veil."

"Hmm." Eris stepped closer, peering at it with eyes that were a slightly yellower and more luminescent shade of green. "Savathûn's throne world rests deeper in the Ascendant Plane than our own. And it is, by her own personal design, a realm that embodies thought and consciousness. Perhaps that is why."

"I suspect you are right."

"I did not expect to see you wield Darkness."

No trace of accusation tainted Eris' tone, but inwardly, Ikora flinched anyway. The advent of Stasis had precipitated one of the longest silences between them yet. Ikora had let Eris' letter regarding it go unanswered for so many months. She still hadn't replied, in truth. But hopefully, after everything—after supporting Eris through her ascension to dark godhood, however brief—hopefully, she knew that Ikora did not judge her. She never had. But the Eris who had survived the Hellmouth had always taken judgement in stride more easily than concern.

Ikora gathered a bundle of Strand like a handful of living green fronds. "I did not expect to, either," was all she said. She did not mention anything about how different Strand seemed from Stasis, nor about the intricacies of her mixed feelings toward either element. For now, she let it go.

She took pains to keep her grip gentle and nonurgent on the green fibers, lest they snap or ensnare her. Strand ran like a segment of an otherwise unseen river over the horizontal surfaces of her palms, vanishing as smoothly as it appeared. Then she lifted it up to chest height and held it out to Eris like a peace offering. As far as she knew, Eris had not yet had an opportunity to assess this newest emanation of the Darkness. Among so, so many other things these days, they had not yet discussed it.

"Here," Ikora said. "Careful, though."

With another step closer, Eris skimmed the surface of the spun emerald with the fingertips of one hand. Even before she touched it, it reacted to her with a ripple. Of course it was affected by perception; it was the essence of consciousness itself.

Eris stood only a pace away, hands floating like leaves above the riverbed of Ikora's palms. Channeling Strand as she was, Ikora felt the closeness of another being more intensely than usual. Eris was a ponderous presence in the Weave, a remarkably powerful conflux of catalytic intention, coiling recursively upon herself in unpredictable ways. Ever the Hunter, she was adaptive in the extreme. She was near impossible to pin down, even for Ikora, who had refined prediction to a paracausal art of probabilities with her Light.

Without moving or withdrawing from the magnetic parallel of their palms, Eris looked up.

Her eyes met Ikora's in a moment that rang like a soundless bell. Different threads of verdant potential cast themselves invisibly about their forms. She was very close.

The knowledge that Eris would kiss her if Ikora leaned in dropped into her mind like a plumb line, direct and true.

A few threads of the Strand in her hands snapped like static discharge. They both jumped back. Ikora dropped the ropy bundle back into the Weave and shook out her stung fingers. With the same alacrity, she leapt forward again to ascertain that Eris was unhurt.

"Eris! Are you alright? Sometimes it throws unraveling needles when it snaps. Did any hit you?"

A distinct lack of concern kept Eris' voice smooth as she said, "Only one." She lifted her hand up to eye level to peer at the tiny green needle embedded in her glove. "How curious." She plucked it out with ease and tossed it away as if it were a mere wooden splinter. Before it could hit the ground, it had vanished whence it came.

Ikora grabbed the hand that had been struck and examined it herself. Impossibly, paracausally sharp as it was, the needle had left a pinhole in even the tough chitin of Eris' gauntlet, as clean and perfectly round as if an awl had punched through paper.

"Did it pierce the armor?"

"Only by the smallest amount. Even so, it–"

Ikora had already thrown a healing rift about the two of them.

"Ikora." The annoyance in Eris' voice was balanced with something softer, something perhaps almost fond. "I am, as I know that you know, now, not so fragile. I have had papercuts far worse."

"That isn't the point." Ikora scowled at the pinhole and rubbed at the spot with a thumb.

"Then what is?"

Ikora looked up to answer and found Eris, once again, very close. Closer than comfort would condone, if Ikora were honest with herself. But she had not lived this long, had not become Warlock Vanguard—had not become Ikora Rey—by letting her fears make her back down, back away. She held her ground, and spoke a truth.

"I don't want to hurt you, Eris. No matter how little."

Eris did not retreat, either. She held Ikora's gaze with all the intensity of the soulfire that animated her pupil-less eyes. Her reply came as the softest possible utterance. "Then what do you want?"

"I—ah..." What did she want? It was not a question she often gave thought to, other than the larger-than-life calling to see the remains of humanity preserved and protected; the need to see Eris safe. Furthermore, it was difficult to devote thought to the matter now, with Eris so close, hand still in hers. It only reminded her of the unexpected knowledge that had startled Ikora enough to make this whole scene in the first place.

Eris lifted the hand that Ikora was not holding. It hovered in the space between them, and for a moment, Ikora thought that it would touch her cheek. Her eyes widened. But then Eris lowered it to their clasped hands and gently squeezed.

The rift centered on them collapsed in a puff of humid air.

"Perhaps we might...continue this conversation elsewhere," Eris said, releasing her and stepping back on the damp grass. "Think on your answer. I am curious to know it."

Ikora shook her head to clear it. "Of course," she said, not quite knowing what she meant. But she could not imagine denying Eris an answer. Not now. Not after everything they had been through together. Not less than a week after the fear of losing Eris had shaken her to her core, more deeply than ever before. "Have you found what you were looking for?"

Eris smiled at her. An actual smile, small but unmistakable. Undeniable. "I do believe I have."

They took a last long look over the vast plane of the seething wetlands, then left that gleaming conscious world behind.

#ikora rey #eris morn #erikora #eris/ikora #ikoris #destiny 2 #destiny 2 fanfiction #season of the witch #destiny strand #lizzie's adventures in writing #lizzie taking up space #fic #long post #synnthamonsugar #write about ikora long enough and your fic will turn into a philosophy dissertation jflkdsa;skdlfd #this prompt has been living in my head and inbox for MONTHS.#delighted to finally share with you all as im quite proud of it.

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