Lore:Sororicide

"And my vanquisher will read that book, seeking the weapon, and they will come to understand me, where I have been and where I was going."The following is a verbatim transcription of an official document for archival reasons. As the original content is transcribed word-for-word, any possible discrepancies and/or errors are included.

Sororicide is a Lore book added in Season of the Witch. Entries are unlocked by identifying the Deck of Whispers' Major Arcana cards at the Lectern of Divination located inside the Athenaeum throughout the Season of the Witch narrative.

I—Eris Morn—Prolegomenon

Verse 8:1 — The Sisters

Thoughts calcify into actions, and actions calcify into being. Such is the ontology of Hive magic. Such is the Deck of Whispers that has unfolded beneath my hands.

These cards are curious objects—esoterica manifested by my power and the Guardians' tithes. They have taken on our forms: myself, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath. Our loves and fears, our memories, our desires.

Contemplate me. Contemplate the Hive.

These cards unsettle me. I did not wish to be unveiled so. But perhaps that is the consequence of my transformation: I am seen as I am, beneath my bandage. Beneath my skin.

So, too, are Xivu Arath and Savathûn unveiled. Through these cards, we have found ourselves connected. Dear devoted sisters, and I, inchoate but for the eyes I have stolen.

I have deciphered the meanings of the cards, drawn from the shapes of their referents. The whispers ask for reflection and meditation, speaking of the paths we have taken and who we have come to be. And so my utterings, alongside those of the two surviving sisters, have taken the form of a new Book of Sorrow: a bound collection of verses sung by their gods qnd delivered to their brood as scripture.

Now I deliver to my brood. Now I number among their gods. Aiat.

II—Savathûn—Imago Unfurl

Verse 8:2 — The Witch

We were the last surviving siblings. That's what this as always been for Xivu Arath. She wanted all of us to survive. She would throw everything she could at us, so we could learn to survive.

Didn't quite work, did it?

My brother's greatest acts of navigation were his metamorphoses. That was his tactic: he would change everything about himself so that could survive this universe. Meanwhile, my sister cuts the universe apart—makes it sharp as she—until that's left is her and her love.

I'm a little bit of both. No need to choose. I don't have my brother's fear or my sister's vanity.

Even in his infinite adaptability, Oryx could not withstand the Guardians. So Xivu Arath wants to prove she can by being as rigid and unyielding ad she always been—no need to fix what isn't broken. Overwhelming forces, tactics, and intimidation.

We are who we are, and we chose our morphs carefully. I wanted life. Xivu wanted vengeance and dominion. Oryx wanted to venture out, deep in thought, and feed on the delicacies of truth.

Well, he got what he wanted. Now Oryx knows death more intimately than us. No bringing him back.

Poor Xivu's distraught. With all that war and ruin to hide behind, she thinks she doesn't show it. Deep down she believes Oryx must have survived through their logic. She believes he'll be conjured back just like he conjured us.

That was along time ago. We've moved past that. Despite everything to come, I will live on. With and without them.

Should I say that I miss my siblings? That I miss the times when the threats of death and short lifespan were still with us, when we piloted our needle, when we dove and became what we became?

No. Xivu is the sentimental one. We are now who we were. Who we were no longer exists.

I sound like my brother.

III—Xivu Arath—Battlesong

Verse 8:3 — The Adherent

What I Am —
Uttered by Xivu Arath —
God of Many Shapes —

I AM THE GOD OF SILENCE. I slit a hundred million wailing throats. I watch as their blood scatters like precious stones. Their screams turn to sighs; their sighs turn to silence. I stand among the dead and listen to the absence of sound.

I AM THE GOD OF LOGIC. I shiver in delight to speak the truth because speaking truth is good. I speak my brother's words, the words he cut from the worm god Akka's throat.

I AM THE GOD OF LIFE. I pare dead things from truth, and in this, I find life that cannot be extinguished. I hold that life, nurture it by testing it against myself, by removing the weaknesses that bring death. In this, I embrace life and all its strength.

I AM THE GOD OF LOVE. Any life that withstand me will be with me in the final shape. There, we will stand together. That life will know me, and I will know it: pared to our true shape, seeing each other for what we are.

I AM THE GOD OF ALL THAT EXISTS. I have endured while others have not. I am the last surviving sibling. I will stand at the final shape and be the end. I will maintain my existence when nothing else has. I will stand alone.

IV—Eris Morn—Evocate Desire

Verse 8:4 — The Harbinger

My vile transformation is complete. What was foretold, what was feared, is now true: Eris Morn has given in to the Hive's endless hunger. She has taken up the mantle of a Hive queen and leads vast armies of acolytes into war.

Inevitable. Inimitable. Who else but her? What else but this?

(Ikora believes my transformation was not necessary. It was.)

I hear whispers, but when I do not? They have been with me since the Hellmouth. This is what I am. It cannot be refuted or denied. This is the shape I have chosen for myself: my morph, the Harbinger.

(Ikora believes I will martyr myself. But what martyr walked towards oblivion with a knife in hand? I will not serenely.)

In my morph, I am unafraid. In my morph, I wield fear, that earliest of fears: fear of devourment. Since we ourselves were prey, we have felt terror at the gaping maw, at the hunger gazing at us with delight.

I have stared that hunger in the face. I have endured it for too long. Now, I will be the predator. I will devour. I will instill that first fear.

I hunger, but that hunger has always strained against the limitations of my Lightless body. But here, in the Witch Queen's endless hypogeum, that hunger has bloomed. That part of me has erupted from my body as from the earth, like one of those obscene, carnivorous corpse flowers—dark cores swallowing sunlight, plush petals open to death.

Ridiculous. Who would compare hunger to a flower? I do not wait passively for my prey. No—no—it is a worm. A worm I have desperate urge to feed.

It can be nothing else.

V—Eris Morn—Mimesis

Verse 8:5 — Blades

What is the nature of war? Ritual.
What is the nature of ritual? Fascination.

Imitation shapes desire, and Xivu Arath has become its greatest meditator. She compels those she wars against to war against her, and the object over which war is existence itself. She takes up her blade, and we take up ours. Xivu Arath cuts at us, and so de we cut at her. We bleed together, mirrored in our pain and violence.

Savathûn looked at us through a veil so that we would not see her. Xivu Arath looks at us through a dark mirror, and she only sees herself.

This is her design, her ultimate mechanism of desire: she would make us into her image. She would cut the entire universe into her image so that she is the only thing left at the end of all things.

Vain and lonely. That is Xivu Arath, bereft of her siblings.

The sword logic is predicatex on such imitation. To return Xivu Arath's violence is to embrace it and its beautiful thesis. We are forced to react,again and again, as she makes her advance. We are forced to desire existence at any cost, just as she does.

Fated? Inevitable? No. An ontological trap.

The Warmind knew this, as he could know her the most intimately out of all of us. His escalation did nothing but mirror her endlessly. His self-sacrifice put an end to that font of violence. It was a frustration in her logic that he did so, as Xivu Arath recognizes no sacrifice that does not end in a scream.

But self-sacrifice could not put an end to hee war march. Only doubt xan do so. And in Xivu Arath's mournful solipsism, she will be left with nothing but that.

VII—Xivu Arath—Deathless

Verse 8:7 — Liminal

My Throne —
Carved to endure by Xivu Arath —
God of Love —

MY COURT IS WAR, AND YOU WILL FIND ME THERE.

I am war, and my throne is deathless.

Come. Cut the outer curtain of my fortress, and it will open its new eye in a bloodless laceration. Cut further to see inside its wall: the yellow fat, the purple viscera, the teeming rust-cut capillaries.

These are the colors of war. THESE ARE THE COLORS OF MY COURT.

My gates open to the most life. The swollen fountains run with blood and burst with arterial spray. The paths are paved with small white teeth. They gnash beneath each footfall, their roots raw and alive.

Look! I have raised cathedrals made of flesh. When a breeze caresses them, they blush and contract, fine hairs sensing the change.

They are worshipped with bare touch. MY THRONE SHUDDERS WITH JOY.

The halls of my palace are echoing throats, slick and filled with breath. Its windows are glazed with skin, opalescent and alive, latticed with blue-black veins.

The seats of my throne are fashioned with living bones. Break them and you will see their raw, red marrow. Break them, and the wet pith will writhe, Two are knotted with scars: broken and reformed, broken and reformed.

Lookout from the terrace and see the worlds we will devour to sustain us. It is a mouth, yawning black and wide and hungering. It is open in screams of base need.

MY COURT IS LOVE, AND YOU WILL MEET ME THERE.

VIII—Savathûn—Swords and Lanterns

Verse 8:8 - Ascension

My sorry, sad, inculcated sister. She thinks she's as honest as a knife's edge just because she never speaks a lie aloud. But she's prone to contradiction, at least since our beloved brother fell.

She could never quite understand it- someone as mighty as Oryx brought down by liars, his bloodline destroyed, his corpse left to desiccate in Saturn's orbit. Xivu Arath actually believed that Dreadnought of his was unassailable, but Oryx knew that he had limits: more than once, he took the power of our deaths to defeat something stronger than himself.

She's just bitter she wasn't there to die for him again.

She says she's the god of death, but I've seen her throne. It's a mausoleum for life with all the close, cloying comfort of a birthing room, wet and raw and filled with disgusting effluvia. I imagine it reminds her of our gardens so long ago, and all the things that grew there.

She really shouldn't be so nostalgic.

There was a game we played when we were young: Swords and Lanterns. Sathona held the lantern, while Xi Ro held the sword. Sathona would search for her hidden sister, and Xi Ro would avoid the lantern's light. If Xi Ro touched Sathona with her sword, she would win. If Sathona found Xi Ro with her lantern, she would win.

Sathona devised the rules, but Xi Ro would let her sister find her.

I still give her presents, too, of coarse. I gave her Torabatl! My gift to my last surviving sibling. She gobbled it up so greedily, she didn't even consider how it proved her precious logic false.

What kind of thing is a gift? The Deep doesn't like gifts. Neither does the logic, but we're sisters: I thought I'd be nice, and share.

Xivu was too busy to notice that little contradiction. She never even thanked me.

What did she say, as soon as she set foot on Torobatl? "FOR AS LONG AS YOUR HAVE WORSHIPPED WAR, YOU HAVE WORSHIPPED ME." Aiat, Aiat. That was Torobatl. I know a joke in a dead language: aiēbat.