Bitter

“

Boons I grant you, oh bearer mine, but debts must be paid in time.

”

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Bitter is one series of lore entries that comes in the Lightfall's Collector Edition, alongside Breakdown and Beloved. It contains a series of events between Elsie Bray and the Pouka in the Exos own journey to understand the Darkness.

It was a small ship and, by hope more than reality, a quiet one.

She had intended it just for herself, and perhaps Ana, if things went well this time around. Elsie could deal with the chaos that her little sister injected into her life. But today, chaos took the form of a curious Ghost not grasping the concept of keeping things in their proper place.

"Tokki," Elsie sighed, brushing the phase couplers back into their labeled bin and securing it. "You cannot just rifle through my workbench. Some of this equipment is dangerous."

"I checked the labels very carefully, Ms. Bray." The Ghost poked her gleaming eye out from under a spare length of photovoltaic cloth. Capacitors, couplers, and oscillators decorated her shell in a tasteful pattern. "But I needed new components; you took apart my old shell."

"Because your old shell was made from unstable nanomachines. It could have eaten you."

"Well perhaps, but I still can't float around..." She lowered her tone to a scandalous whisper. "Naked."

Elsie supposed it made sense—and sighed again. Modesty shouldn't mean much to metal skin, but she still wore clothing centuries after her own Exo conversion. Many days, her own presentation—her emotions; her volume; her gestures; and yes, even her clothing—was the fulcrum on which her self-control pivoted.

"You still shouldn't make a mess of other people's things," she finally relented. "I may need these parts for repairs."

"I only took the broken things." Tokki spun in front of a porthole, admiring her reflection. "You don't seem like the type to collect broken things."

Elsie prepared to double down, but her train of thought derailed as she looked up to see her surreal alien passenger slither its way into the compartment. Cutting through the air with a betta fish's grace, the alien examined Tokki's scrap and parts with six glittering eyes—Elsie felt wonder and discomfort creep into her as she watched.

The alien—the fish, for lack of a better word—had lived alone on that abandoned Ishtar space station beyond Uranus for who knew how long before Tokki found it; and Elsie, in time, discovered Tokki. Elsie assumed a Human had brought the fish—after all, the station had shown signs of habitation in the last decade or so by someone Human, or at least close enough to it. The uncertainty ate at her because she knew that everything about her future, her fate demanded understanding all possible influences of the coming conflict. She convinced herself that only victory could break her free of these hellish time loops—whether that meant the grand victory against the Pyramid fleet or the personal victory of saving her sister, she wasn't sure.

But uncertainty, that was the fly in her ointment.

And she was certain of nothing when it came to Tokki's strange friend.

Elsie sat and the tension in her servos began to slacken. Exos didn't breathe, but a long exhale was as good for the mechanical soul as the organic. An electronic tittering brought her back into the moment. Tokki swiped her fins up, and the eel-like alien followed her movements, turning a loop in the air. The Ghost swept her gaze back and forth, and again the creature followed, rolling left, then right. A thought suddenly occurred to Elsie. "Tokki. Did you teach your friend these tricks?"

Tokki turned a barrel roll and laughed as her companion followed. "No, it just knew all this when I found it."

Leaning in close, Elsie reached toward the fish, and the creature dutifully slid into her palm. She turned the form over, then again, digital eyes scanning every detail of the silicate body. Below the head, she found a word etched in the same careful hand that had inscribed the destroyed weapon they'd found near the creature's nest.

"Pouka? Like the faerie? Is that your name or your species?"

"I think it's a lovely name," Tokki offered. Pouka only rubbed its face into Elsie's waiting hand, demanding attention.

"You were a pet." Elsie gave the shiny carapace a scratch, triggering a wave of... purrs? Pouka's six eyes focused independently up at her and glittered. "Someone taught you those tricks. And then left you-

—isolation// "Do not mourn your sisters’ abandonment, Elisabeth. They are small minds." I know Grandfather's words make sense, but that doesn't sate the hollowness gnawing inside my chest. I set the stylus down, plant my hands against the desk, and take a long, ragged breath of recycled air to silence the scream I need to unleash. The feeling passes; I retrieve the tool and return to business as usual in the lonely Europan lab. I am in control, even though I know that changes nothing.—

Elsie gasped and stared. "Did someone teach you that trick too?" Pouka tilted its round eyes clockwise, then counter.

Without Tokki and her off-key humming, the ship felt emptier.

Pouka had chosen to stay behind; had chosen Elsie, for reasons that escaped her. The alien's background noise filled in some of the gaps left in Tokki's absence, but it didn't seem like enough to overcome the lonely thrum and ring of the engines.

"Get out of that, fish!"

It was remarkable how quickly the alien became obnoxious, especially when upending Tokki's treasure canister the minute Elsie left the curious beast unattended.

She shooed the slithering creature away and—

—loss//"I still know my partner is out here. I can feel us moving away from them," Tokki comments. I'm an idiot for expecting a Ghost to stay anywhere but their Guardian's side for long, but this stop on Titan to replenish the deuterium tank was supposed to be simple. Tokki's goodbye blindsides—

"Stop that!" Elsie exclaimed and shoved Pouka aside to tidy the mess once again. Each etched diode and bit of cowling landed harder than necessary in the old ration canister. Pouka retreated to one of the upper lockers and huffed with sounds that could have been sadness or anger.

"My head is messed up enough without you digging around in there to win an argument."

She felt silly, lecturing an alien being like Mother once lectured her Pomeranian. If the creature understood, the six glassy eyes betrayed nothing. Elsie pressed the tension lid closed again.

"I'm sorry."

—loneliness// "You can make jewelry with them. Or... give them to friends?"

"Tokki. I don't want your garbage."

"I just don't want you to feel bad."

"Where I'm going will be very dangerous. You leaving is best for both of us."

"I understand why you need to say that."—

Pouka chirped, now pushing into Elsie's hands, and turned its gaze back to Tokki's treasure canister.

—fondness// I turn over the bolt stop in my hands again. The laser-carved loops and swirls lend the ceramic an organic grace. "I'll admit it. You're pretty good at this, you little troublemaker."—

It cooed and coiled.

—guilt//Tokki refuses to speak, and maybe. I realize. I deserve it this time—

"No, fish, you need to—

—rejection// "No! Il torture ma fille aussi? Elsie, say it's not you; say it's not! Say he hasn't locked you up in that walking lazaretto to die!" I feel my mother's horror at the sight of me as a pressure, a stage instruction more than an emotion.

"Mom. Mom, please. Je vais bien; je ne suis pas comme mon père, inshallah!"—

"STOP!"

Elsie's legs gave out and her body shook there on the floor where she landed hard. Pouka shrieked and wrapped itself behind the discarded tin of treasures.

"How dare you!" She struggled to her feet and the world spun. With three gentle steps, she felt her vision settle, felt the cool, firm steel of the deck beneath her and the gentle thrum of the ship's vibration up through her ankles, her knees, and into her chest.

And in the wake of peace, the sorrow bubbled up.

Elsie wasn’t sure how long she had cried——

the dry, mechanical sobs of her inorganic frame were timeless—a mimeograph of relief—but in the end, she found herself propped up, back against the bulkhead and letting the thrum of the ship serve as her ersatz heartbeat.

Her companion wiggled under her arms and looked up. She sensed a faintness... a wisp of connection like smoke in her peripheral vision.

—concern// Last drops of rain pass by, but I don't notice anything beyond the ladybug toppled by the rainspout, the stillness of it, as Willa takes it in her hand. Finally, it kicks and rights itself. I squeal—

Elsie focused.

"I thought you were dredging these up. But you're not, are you?" She considered her own question and rubbed the creature's check—what passed for a cheek—with her thumb. She lifted Pouka to her face.

Something pressed at her mind, beyond the creature's vague look of confusion. A familiar contour—emotion, begging for context. Satisfaction.

—satisfaction// The Sparrow's engine shudders and spews steam before finally buzzing to life. It drifts lazily off the blocks, and I can't stop smiling, even though I know it's the goofiest grin.—

"You're shaping whatever you feel..." she mused, and her mind drifted back to warm beaches with Willa and Alton—their tiny footsteps slowly filling with saline from the warm, wet sand. Nature abhors a vacuum. “...And my heart fills it up."

"That could be dangerous," she realized. Pouka chittered happily as Elsie began stroking the silicate head. "But you wouldn't be someone's pet if you were dangerous, would you?"

Elsie's mind wandered back to the lonely space station where she found the curious creature, of the enormous Human handprint left behind and the titanic rifle that Tokki had scavenged to dress herself.

"So why does the person who needs a giant gun also keep a little psychic fish that makes you feel memories?"

Elsie planted her feet apart again and braced herself. “One more time.”

Evolution kitbashed the Human mind, rebuilding arboreal rodents foraging for nuts into screaming, tailless apes at the helms of starships. But for all the miracles it performed, the Pleistocene hardware of the brain was bound by its physical limits. Memories were nothing but pathways of nerve impulse, stored as electric signals dancing across them in recall. And atrophied by neglect. Even without considerations of size, the sapient mind could only think about so much in a given day, limiting the span of Human experience to perhaps a few hundred years.

The dirty secret of those who survived the Collapse is that none of them, from drunken Exo to celestial queen, remembered every detail; they remembered moments, minutes, hours—whatever left deep enough scars that they couldn't help but run the fingers of the mind across them every morning. Neglect rendered everything in-between—weeks, years, decades— into murky depths explored by only bare hooks on the thinnest emotional filaments.

Elsie's time loops compounded the problem. Her head locked away an order of magnitude more memories than any living Human, and each plunge backward through causality blurred those details. Like jolting from a night terror, only the final moments stood out in sharp relief each time she restarted. Untangling the mess of cause and effect, sorting where she went right and what needed to change, it ate away at her precious few decades before everything collapsed and she would begin the process anew.

Any tool that let her trawl memories from that lost place—even at random—was a tool worth mastering.

Elsie set her feet apart and let the ship's thrum rise through her body again. They had dabbled with a dozen emotions that helped her dive into her previous loops—throughlines on which to string lost context. She found that emotions sparked by failure—despair, rage, fear—were best for the work.

And the worst for her.

She thought back to the memory that no amount of resets could hope to scrub; her first memory as an Exo: a frail old man unwound like a blanket. Of organic, Human chaos laid in tidy lines by precise, mechanical hands. And of her own overriding need to end the brutality, before she understood she was saving the real monster. Dread filled her. Her companion tasted it and fed it back, over and over, one loop of memory after another.

—despair//"So this is the honor of the Brays," Zavala spits at me. His working hand reaches for Targe, reaches for a connection to his god, even after it abandoned him. The Ghost lies cold and dark. "Cayde was right to put a bullet through Ana. I only wish I'd let him end you too."

"We're past bravado," I explain as the fire dies in my soul. "There's only one step left before this ends."

"And what is that, Stranger?"

I place the rifle barrel to his forehead. "Mercy."—

Nothing.

—despair// "I can't let you stop us," Ikora declares with a chill that rocks even me. I feel the pulse of her Void shudder in my chest, spilling fluids and triggering dozens of status alarms. "Not when we're this close."—

No.

—despair//"What have you done?!" I scream as Mara Sov's body drops lifelessly to the ground.

"Elsie, listen to me. This was necessary. The Darkness cannot thrive while believers of the Light remain. There's a world beyond this conflict. Let's go there together," Ana pleads

"This is not the way!" I cry and ready my Stasis—

Stasis.

It had a name.

That power she felt herself wielding in lives long past.

The knife that could cut the Darkness.

Her mind began to spin, and Elsie consciously planted herself in the present once more. Her sensors registered the hydrocarbon lubricants and distinctive thiol-polymers of ship life, She pushed away the shape of concern Pouka pressed into her soul before it could replace this filament that she'd hunted for.

"Again."

“But how did I learn Stasis?” Elsie cupped her curious pet.

It blinked erratically—one eye, then three. then two. The fish wanted to help, even if it didn't understand the what or how of it. Elsie tried to conjure up the feelings behind her earlier vision; the desperation and fear and loathing in the moments before killing her own sister. They brought her secrets and shames and timelines best left forgotten, but no closer to Stasis.

Pouka slithered under her chin, clicking and cooing.

"You were trained for this kind of work, weren't you? Some kind of..." She struggled for a clever analogy. "Field therapist? Trained you to soothe, maybe work with exposure therapy?" She stroked absentmindedly at Pouka's smooth body, losing herself in possibility the way she hadn't let herself since the Europan think tank. "Plunging people into their nightmares again and again must be—"

—nightmare//"I was a fool to ever place my trust in you, Eris," the Nightmare of Eriana-3 bellows. "You watched the Hive unmake us one by one, and then you bowed to their god to save your own flesh!"

Indecision grips Eris Morn as her doubts overwhelm her. So I dig deep and focus. The bitter alkaloid sensation creeps up my throat. I call out my Stasis and drive it across the battlefield, entombing the haunting vision.

Her detractor paralyzed, Eris turns back to me with a shred of control. "It seems I am not the only one carrying secrets."

"We'll discuss it later," I promise. "First we need to get out of…"—

Elsie jerked back to the present. The memory of bitter, inorganic salts lingered in the back of her mouth.

Pouka shivered against her chest, but she probed at the creature again, losing herself in the sensation. Her companion pressed the shape of the lingering flavor into her heart, and it rushed to fill the indentation.

—alkaloid//I let the sensation fade and notice the acerbic tightness in my chest fade as well. "Now you try."

Eris breathes, then draws out a fragment of Stasis from the Shard. With a gesture, she redirects the energy outward, and a thin spire of crystal erupts from the lunar regolith.

"Quick study, "I comment.

"It is not so dissimilar to how I control the Hive magics. This Stasis of yours is less refined, but considerably more..." She pauses to think. "Overt."—

Elsie tried to probe the memory of sensation again, but Pouka dozed quietly. She let herself nap there against the deck with Pouka, and her memories opened of their own accord. She dreamed of blue light falling like rain and tearing the Last City to flinders.

Tickling along the sleeping dragon’s tail, bygone scientists had called it. Elsie planned to delicately probe the apocalyptic edges and prayed they wouldn’t awaken it.

—alkaloid//For just a moment, it all threatens to run away with me, but I choke back the tears and bury them deep. Without the cloud of emotions, blipping sideways from Saint-14’s grenade is second nature. I whip a spike of Stasis past his head and pierce Geppetto. The Ghost shrieks as it falls to the ground, and Saint's attention breaks just long enough to snare him in a timeless prison.

I bury it deeper. Focus

"My love!" Osiris charges, hurling a gout of Solar to herd me left. I dive right into the flames—there is no pain, no heat. I fix my sights on this combatant's foreign shore and nothing else. Osiris is a barrier to that journey, and so I drive that control deep into his heart.

I feel the Stasis vibrate, clanging off the Warlock's Light. I bury the feeling. Focus. But the echo doesn't stop. Numb stillness tickles my fingers and toes as hoarfrost begins to consume me. I push down the misery, the isolation. Focus only, maintain. It creeps up, and I feel the radiolaria in me seize.—

Not the timeline she needed, she realized. Elsie shook off the memory of an infinitely long and short decade spent in that icy prison. She found her feet and grounded herself in the thrum of engines before turning once more to her strange companion. She remembered licking her lips, long ago when she had them, and called that memory back, along with the acerbic taste of Stasis.

—alkaloid//I put another round through the motionless Hydra. It shatters like glass.

"I know this," I mutter, picking up a broken spike and watching it sublimate into ether.

"I've no doubt," Osiris responds. His rime-caked hands crackle and pop. "I saw glimpses of you wielding this power during my time in the Infinite Forest. It is what drove me to seek it out here after Oryx corrupted Sagira."

"It proved a simple skill," he continues as the Pyramid slides and shifts to create a hallway. "I am already well practiced in manifesting my will, no matter the obstacles."—

The emotional thread unraveled in a storm of dry lecture, and the link dissolved.

With barely a moment to steady herself, Elsie plunged into the acerbic sensation again.

—alkaloid//"This is a power that has made its home in your heart before." Eramis strokes my cheek, and I can feel the chill through insensate steel and ceramic. "You must open yourself to it, lure it with honeyed words. And once it is within your grasp, coil around and crush its will with your own."

I thrust my hands against the Crux again and push aside the pain. There is no whine or crack of metal sheering in absolute zero. There is only what needs doing.—

Pouka broke the link as Elsie began screaming.

It took another hour of listening to the ship around her, losing herself in the here and now, before she could try again.

—alkaloid//My first bolt of Stasis halts the Taken midway through his charge.

"Excellent," Mara comments. "You know this dance like you were born to it. Again."

She parts her hands and calls three more of her Taken servants to the fight. My mind rushes to the Crux once more, and I fill my every sense with it, shutting out the taste/smell/feel/sound of the real world in favor of what I need.—

The Crux.

Elsie felt the nightmare manifest long before she saw it.

The Europan Pyramid pressed shapes into her heart the same way Pouka could, but the molds it cast were deeper and more urgent. The worst parts of her soul rushed to fill the hollow.

"Still not tired of this, Elisabeth?" Red mists congealed into Ana's form. The wound in her ethereal chest dripped and smoldered.

"You're not real."

All that mattered was the Crux. Elsie's visions had revealed the how; all she needed now was enough substance in her present time to flesh out that buried muscle memory.

"I'm more real than the carbon-copy sister you think you'll save this time." The Nightmare's wound snaked up to manifest a fractured skull. "How many dead Anas am I made from? Ten? Twelve? Are we counting them all, or just the ones you killed personally?"

Breaking the Nightmare's bond was easier than it should have been; the Pyramid's gift for constructing this revenant was a grand imitation of Pouka's gift. Elsie felt like any link to her sister—even her own self-loathing wearing an Anastasia mask—should have been harder to unravel. The Nightmare dissolved back into warm mist. She took a moment to feel Pouka shiver beneath her cloak, appreciating the tactile feeling. "It's okay," she comforted.

The Pyramid slid doors and realigned hallways, trying to keep her from its beating heart. It knew she was here too early this time. She'd walked these halls time and time again to pull Stasis from the Crux like an Excalibur of personal hell, but always, someone else found it first. Always, they taught her the secret she already knew. Always, they fell to the seductive whispers on the other side, and she stood as the lone soul uncorrupted by the exposure.

Or at least, she was the only one who recalled feeling guilt for allowing it.

Pouka led the way. It could sniff out the stagnant pools of Darkness as easily as it could root out Elsie's buried emotions. Trauma smelled the same whether it was in the heart or hanging in the air, Elsie supposed.

Dream logic and half-forgotten memories made for a passable map in Elsie's mind, and despite the structure's efforts, she found her way to the Pyramid's heart and the empty plinth where the Crux should have stood.

Finally ahead of the game and still too late.

Shock had taken hold and Elsie wasn't sure how long she'd spent staring into the shadows.

The gentle sound of tapping—like steel rapping against stone—guided her back to reality.

When awareness finally crept from subconscious to conscious mind, she turned to watch Pouka shove and roll an iron scrap across the floor.

"Is there anything you won't make into a toy, Pouka?" But Elsie felt the shadows grow long as she walked over to investigate; the scrap glistened wrong in her flashlight's beam. And as she bent down close, the iron—no, not iron... something not quite metal—was cold in a way no physical object could be.

The Crux was broken.

Or maybe was never whole in the first place, in the way that solid matter should be. The Shard that remained held Darkness, just a fraction—but to someone who had spent a dozen hazy lifetimes mastering how to use Darkness, it was an oasis in the endless expanse of Light.

She reached her will into the Shard, and a part of her reflexively shuddered, awaiting a pain that never struck or a sound that was never heard. She pushed back against her mental recoil and touched the deeply familiar cold. It tickled and clawed and begged something intangible from her, but Elsie closed her mind to everything except her true purpose. In her heart of hearts, the wall of blue-tinged facets was already there; it only took concentration to make it reality.

Focus.

—control//"The will of the Bray is the true fundamental force in this world," Grandfather intones, pulling me upright. My twisted ankle screams, but I can stay silent. I can be a Bray. "Now walk."—

Her foot caught in place.

A gleaming layer of Stasis swallowed her heel, her foot, her leg.

She couldn't lose control.

Focus.

It spread up and across her torso, consumed her shoulders. Not coldness, or numbness. Just emptiness.

Pouka sat on her immobile hand, gazing at her and blinking erratically.

Elsie was in control.

A Bray alone could master this—

The Stasis swallowed her head, and the moment stretched out forever.

Too tight.

—tight//"Oh daughter," Mom squeezes me tight. "You can't make them love you, inshallah. You have to let go."—

The horror consumed her as easily as the Stasis. She felt like a frightened child cast loose in the wind. Alone. Every assertion of control met by a temper tantrum in the face of a hurricane...

"Inshallah." She half-remembered her mother's words, and let go.

The crystalline prison shattered.

Elsie sat in the dim silence for she knew not how long.

Pouka wrapped itself around a mechanical arm and purred, but Elsie couldn't find the will to nuzzle back. Instead, she carefully wrapped the Shard in her hood and tucked it securely into her pack.

Words hadn't saved her, or her mother's faith.

It was then that she realized Stasis thrived off her need for rigid order, to fit foregone conclusions and scientific principles into the messy abstract of creation. And when she lost herself to purpose, Stasis happily consumed all she was. Only that briefest admission that the universe was outside her influence...

Surrender broke her bonds.

Stasis wasn't the sum total of Darkness, any more than Arc was Light. It was an aspect—a shape and a tool. Every sword was made from iron, but not all iron was swords. Stasis was the tool forged by control and focus, and to her shame, she couldn't imagine what else could spring forth if any other force in the cosmos drove her forward like that singular need for control. What other abilities—what shapes and tools—could be forged by deference? Or compassion?

What could she have done, she realized in dawning horror, if she loved and relied on Ana beyond the way she needed to control Ana?

Dread crawled up her spine, but she knew what she needed: allies beyond her control. Allies who were versed in Darkness as well as Light, who could take her secrets of Stasis to the Lightbearers at large. Teach a hundred or a thousand souls to forge iron into a sword, and just maybe, one will figure out how to make a ploughshare too. She'd never tried it before. It was something new.

And perhaps Ana needed to know there was a place for her, saved on Elsie's ship.