Lore:Gifts and Bargains

"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.

Gifts and Bargains is a Lore book introduced in Season of the Wish. Entries are unlocked by completing the Shooting Stars triumph.

First Gift

|| O listeners, open your ears! There are choices ahead that you must make for yourselves. I will not act for you. I can only help by giving what I have left: my voice. ||

Taranis hatches bathed in the light of the heliopause.

The solar wind dries his damp wings, and the depth of space gives him room to grow. There's no hint of the Ahamkara who crafted his egg, nor of how many of them there were. No dams or sires wait for him.

Taranis's first meal is the shell that nurtured him through his incubation. It snaps between his teeth, a first taste of life.

Taranis grows his first sensory organs. He uses them to look for more life.

The universe contracts and expands with the force of will, the tension between what exists and what is wanted. Taranis learns to scent his way across these lines of tension, to navigate around other Ahamkara with no benign wishes for a little whim like Taranis.

An Ahamkara's life and power are bound in their voice. Taranis sneaks silently in to listen to his elders at their feeding, the twists of their tongue, their multiplicity of meanings. He tracks other Ahamkara by the strength of their power, watches them hunt, slips past them to their catch. Their meals are bitter: Taranis can't swallow his stolen bites.

Taranis learns he is plainspoken for an Ahamkara. What pleases his tongue is not what pleases others.

The first wish Taranis grants is to a Cabal soldier patrolling her firebase in honor of empire and emperor. Hot sand blows in Mars's winds, whipping against her pressure suit, scratching the enamel on her greaves. She wishes for respite. To put down her equipment for a single day. To rest without being derelict in her duty.

With a wish that broad, an Ahamkara could eat her whole.

Instead, Taranis nudges weather patterns. It's easy to whip the wind up higher, let it pick up more sand. Till the growing sandstorm triggers the firebase's hazard alarms.

The Cabal soldier hurries back to her firebase, hunched against the increasing wind. Her squadron leader is unprepared and has no plans drawn up for indoor duties. It is a failure he will answer for. But until he rectifies his failure, the soldier may go to her bunk and read a borrowed novel without compromising her duty. Her satisfaction grows rich and, hidden in the piping above her bunk, Taranis basks in it.

His belly isn't full, but the sip she's given him is sweet. Nothing bitter in it, nothing sour, light on his tongue the way no other food has been. It is a good end to his first hunt: a meal from his first partner.

—-

Taranis grows more slowly than his age-mates. The sustenance he finds doesn't fill his belly like their hunts fill them. They grow in strength; tongues long, teeth fierce. They lose patience for a runt with overly delicate sensibilities. Taranis finds himself in need of a retreat.

Taranis doggedly follows a faint trail—a hint of secrets in the air—all the way to pinch in space. He makes his own door and enters. It is a place of life, lush with crimson flowers and trees speckled with water, trunks dripping sap. It is a place of potential, of possibility: a nursery for life itself. A garden, a grove.

A fine place for a nest. A fine place for Taranis to teach himself who he is.

—-

There is something lacking from his nest.

The grove sustains him when the sips of his partners' dreams aren't enough. His belly is never empty enough to ache, cradled in his garden.

But Taranis tastes an itch in his heart and knows it is not enough.

He leaves his nest to hunt for it.

—-

Taranis drifts through Venus's atmosphere on albatross wings. The Vex are a dull prickle, a flat endless weight. Taranis will make no bargains with them.

A drekh on patrol in water up to their knees wishes for growth, stumps itching under docking caps. They picture themself with a hundred arms, a thousand eyes, a spine like a tree. Tall enough to lift themself out of water, to take their House by Skiff and Ketch back to their first home, a hero crowned in honor like Chelchis.

Taranis circles far overhead, riding on the thermal of their desire, till a brighter spark on the horizon pulls his attention away.

He follows the spark and finds Lightbearers. He has seen their kind before: Earth's Lightbearers get into every corner of Sol. They poke around for mysteries to solve. They pick fights with Psions. They peel Vex structures for prizes to wear on their belts. A Lightbearer makes a strong partner, with a firm will and steady belief in their own importance. A Lightbearer creates ripples through the world with the weight of their concentrated potential. A dozen walk alone or in small groups on Venus now, unbothered by decay and the threat of death around every corner.

Eleven Lightbearers dig through archives, battle Vex, and skim lightly over deep water, their desires shifting with circumstance. The twelfth Lightbearer sits unmoving under the spilling branches of a willow. His desires are faint, despite the firmness of his will. His presence is a cool taste in the back of Taranis's throat, pale as the light from the Lightbearer's lantern.

Taranis slips through the water to watch him from a distance, nothing but eyes and nostrils peeking out above the surface.

The sun sets, and still the Lightbearer sits. Venus turns, and the Lightbearer sits. Only the smallest threads of desire reach Taranis. This Lightbearer alone wishes for nothing.

Taranis sinks back into the water without a ripple.

—-

Taranis drifts towards something new: a gateway tucked carefully into an asteroid belt. He feels through rock and debris to a city opalescent with dreams. He can feel the marks of its makers on it, a powerful Ahamkara with a powerful partner.

The city is filled with souls who know Ahamkara. All those minds, those wills, potential partners holding fragments of grit for Taranis to envelop in pearls. Something he could build to match this masterpiece of a city.

Mist curls in fractals around Taranis, leaving a faint bitter taste on his tongue. There's danger baked into this pocket world, a risk its citizens are only half-aware of. The source of that danger is the source of the city and all its beauty. Taranis can't help but track towards it: a distant chiming, a laugh in the underpainting of the city.

Taranis slithers towards what he will later learn is the Spine of Keres, and a massive claw pins him to the ground.

"What do you think you're doing in my territory?" multiple voices inquire. The laugh emerges into the foreground. Leathery frills frame a massive head. An uncertain number of eyes glow bright with curiosity and malice.

This Ahamkara has gravity like a black hole. Taranis feels her grip on the warp and weft of desire encircling them and knows he can do nothing to stop himself from being drawn in.

Second Gift

|| O my eggs! O my whims, more precious than my eyes, dearer than ny tongue! Eat my story, take it into your bodies. Grow your egg-teeth. Crack your shells. Choose. ||

Two forms move above the Dreaming City, curving between the pressures of gravity and desire.

Riven turns long, streaming whiskers and mane behind her, sunset golds draping themselves across her sides. In response, Taranis's bare hide sprouts carp scales in gleaming blue. His wings recede as his mane grows.

He twists around Riven, neck on neck for a moment, before he slips ahead through the mists of Divalia.

There's a wish on the wind. A mind far below, dreaming of a change to the world. Taranis noses towatd it.

One of Mara's Awoken sits under the vault of a broken geode. He dreams, looking over the shifting mists. Ambition is woven through his thoughts, a wish for a more comfortable home. One shaped like a memory, with a parent in the Distributary making sesame pastries soqked in honey. Too sweet, too sticky, but beloved.

Riven crouches like a gargoyle on the cliff above as Taranis spirals down to meet him. They speak. They learn one another's names: Taranis. Gwilym.

A tripod-legged silver tray with a teapot and plate settles beside them.

Taranis, curled into a catlike form, sits with Gwilym. A few crumbs land on his side. A few tears.

Gwilym rises when the sun slips to the edge of the fabricated horizon. He holds out a hand in thanks and startles when Taranis grows a thumb to clasp it.

"No wonder you're so small," Riven says, when Taranis has wound his way back up the cliff to her. It's barely a mouthful, filling one small desire without grasping for more. Not much more than a sip.

"It's enough," says Taranis.

"It's foolish," Riven snarls with all the forces available to her. A strong, well-fed Ahamkara in the heart of her power. A king enthroned.

"I'm a fool."

The tip of Taranis's tail reaches for Riven's. They twine together. She doesn't shake it off.

—-

Riven prowls through the grove. It thrills Tarans to see her here, to feel her will pushing at its borders.

His nest has been potential life. It was missing this: active life. The pressures of will and desire. The chance to choose more.

"May I show you my nest, O Riven, O creator of a city of pearls, O shaper of souls?"

Riven shutters her eyes with great plates of bone. "That mode of speech is unworthy, O foolish companion mine."

But naming without claim suits Taranis. It's an argument he and Riven will never settle. He will call her O beloved, O master artisan, without ever appending the "mine," and she will forever call him her fool.

"Riven, then. I'd show you my grovead you showed me your city."

They walk the stone pathways softened by moss. They climb through flowers, and condensation from the damp air rolls down their necks. Taranis guides Riven to the heart of his nest. He watches her stride through it, taking the lead.

"I've seen the things Mara's brother brought back from this place. They didn't smell of your nest."

"His ambitions didn't suit my palate."

The prince and his partner hadn't approached Taranis's nest on their journey. Taranis had made sure of it.

Riven's will causes eddies in the fabric of Taranis's home. It begins to grow around her into more of a place of mystery, a place of dangers for the unwary. Tarwnis rests his jaws on his forelimbs, watching, nudging her will with his own when he changes grow too vast. He wants this. His home is stiĺl his own.

Riven circles back to Taranis, who is sprawled in s patch of grass. She sits on him resentfully.

"You are singularly unlike any Ahamkara I've met. I am astonished you're still alive," Riven vrows heavier. Taranis snorts into the grass as his body presses into it.

"Hasn't your time with the Awoken changed you? We both made the choices our homes gave us."

"You're less than you could be."

Taranis settles more firmly into the grass. "I'm myself. That is the end of my ambition."

"Your brain has shrunk with your stomach." Riven presses hwr claws into Taranis's spine. Her voices thrum together in frustration. "We will build her. Together. If you won't let yourself grow, then we will make something that does."

And they do.

The language of secrets and desire passes between them as they build. Mysteries bury thrmselves in the grass. The grove grows wilder, paths sprawling out to meet Riven's nest in the Dreaming City.

Alight witg creation, Taranis says, "There's one more thing I want to make with you."

He does not stop to lay out a contract. There is no bargain, with each Ahamkara giving precisely what is owed and no more, in fear of being devoured by their own partner. There are no clauses to whittle down. Taranis doesn't hold back.

Instead, he gives himself as a gift, and Riven gives herself to him in return. Together, they make something new.

Taranis unspools his own cells into embryos, pulling from his lungs and heart and blood, taking the initiator's role, that of the dam. In response, Riven kindles them, feeding Taranis a sire's strength for the task. Together, they spin will and memory into shells to house the embryos, their future whims.

A great gamble. And a solidified future.

The two of them and their clutch, a new generation of Ahamkars raised in the Dreaming City and the Black Garden. To one day be as they wish.

What other Ahamkara had created life like this? With generosity and affection, with teeth unbared and voice unspilled? If any had, Taranis never met them, nor heard their story.

Taranis sprawls out against the cool stone and moss of his nest, exhausted. Riven stands by him, inspecting their eggs with cool, critical eyes.

Their first gift to their whims is existence.