Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Volume VII
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| Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Volume VII | |
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3rd December 2024 |
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144 |
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Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Volume VII (subtitled Penumbra) is a hardcover collection of Grimoire material in printed form, released during Fall 2024.[1] The book primarily focuses on the Light and Darkness.
Description
Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Volume VII: Penumbra is a curated look at the universe of Destiny, examining how our understanding of two fundamental forces that underlie that universe - Darkness and Light - have evolved. Guardians are raised in the Traveler's Light, blessed with the ability to wield that Light as a weapon against the Darkness. But what does it mean to be a champion of the Light? Is the Darkness the real enemy? Or is there wisdom to be found in the shadows? [1]
Lore
Introduction
Friend,
I write as a woman changed. My recent contact with the Darkness was as formative as my long-ago rebirth in the Light. So after all this, here, at the end, I will say: Do not ignore the changes we have endured, and do not disregard the difference between the Light and the Darkness.
It is not vanity for me to acknowledge that I have unique insight to impart. I have witnessed Darkness in all its forms, in all its terrible pain and contortions, and all the violence it inflicts. But despite this and above all, I see in it the aches and yearnings for a more complete world. There is collapse and indistinction, but also, there is preservation. Not stultifying, but vital.
This is what I have learned:
We have harnessed the Darkness because it bears harnessing. It has yielded the fruits of our future, nurtured against great opposition.
Every boundary invites transgression. We are not beyond our own affronts, which have inevitably changed us. That is not weakness, or folly, or failure.
I maintain that balance is not equity. I do not accept the Darkness on the same terms as the Light. Darkness is a tool to be used and a path to walk, but it is not our essence. We must hold fast to that understanding. To do otherwise invokes delusion.
The Darkness and the Light are not opponents, but neither are they allies. There is a natural conflict between them, but we have the capacity to hold contradictions within ourselves, and so they mingle with great effort on our part. That is the beauty of our complexity, the purview of the Light.
Our safe contact with the Darkness is only possible because of the Light. Even so, the Light exists not as our protector, but as our guide.
That is all I wish to impart.
To every fire, its fuel,
Club Morgue
Ahsa, lay low your flukes. Doff your cap and coat. You're safe here. You know you'll keep your promise to find the place where this all began. But for now, rest.
No, I'm not death, though it is my tool. "Nothing" doesn't interest me, you understand? A flawed existence is preferable to none at all. Things are the way they have to be, instead of the way they'd like to be.
Ah, Ahsa. You saw it all―the extinction, the extermination, the gamma-ray bursts burning up your garden worlds, the singularities eating up infant suns. It hurt you so! And you turned to me, asking why it had to be.
I didn't answer. I never do. I'm a question. It's up to you to find the answer. Build the castle. So far they all fall over, but maybe one day one won't. How? I don't know. Figure it out, do the work, ask the question. What will remain in the end, when the stars go out, and creation freezes in the half-light of evaporating black holes?
These killers you're after. They were very much like you, Ahsa. They wanted to know why; why there had to be life, why there had to be death.
But then, not liking the answer they made for themselves―
Well. You'll see.
Go on, Ahsa. Someone's coming to see you, and I'm sure she's got a real humdinger of a proposal for you to hear. Her sister, though... it'll really wind her up if you die by any other hand but hers. She means to take you for her worm. And she pretty much runs this town, truth be told.
Watch yourself out there. It's a warzone.
Charybdis
It seemed so simple to me when I first heard it: the strongest survive. It's obvious. If it can be destroyed, it must be destroyed. And in that destruction, the victor becomes even stronger.
Kind of like Guardians, honestly. All of us. It makes sense of how we grow. Take the Crucible. We sharpen our skills against each other in the arena. The less skilled become fodder―for a match point, for practice, for testing new ways of burning or electrocuting or... spaghettifying. Those who reach the top climb stairs made of bodies. Sword Logic seems simple, clean beautiful. Scooped out of Hive goop and guts, it shines like a searchlight, a bright beam cutting across the sky in perfect straight lines. But there's something more to it. Some extra... magic? The Hive to magic, sure. Runes and math and a sharp edge. What are the Hive doing that we can't do? Or is it more about the Darkness than the Hive? Or is it both?
I need to know. To be part of it. I decided the best place to start figuring it out was by studying Hive. The way they live, the way they die. And no one looks at me twice for going after Hive―any good Guardian fights Hive, right?
I beat through Thrall and Acolytes with my burning maul. It got routine. And one day, as typical as any other, I realized how easy it was, how these Acolytes were barely worth the air they breathed if they were going to break like simple bone―but then, something changed. I felt it. My mind reshaped into sword-thinking. I began to practice it like I lived, and then I did live it. It was part of me, and I of it. You'll feel it, too, if you follow that path. You'll know when the sword goes from being your weapon to part of your arm.
I became one with the sword, and the Light in my hands burned brighter and brighter.
Since then, I've just become stronger. I triumph, and the Light sings, and from my heart to my fingertips, I am alight with glory. Again, and again, I prove my existence to be the truest thing; that I am more real than any other who strives to strike at me. My sword, my self, is forged in Light, and it is hungry. What else can I do with this sharpness that I have cultivated so carefully? What else can WE do? How strong could we become? We Guardians are worthy. I know I can yet become sharper.
//ACCESS:RESTRICED
DECRYPTION KEY:32C49KLD932XAR-612
HIDDEN AGENT:[REDACTED]
RE:VIP #1290 Departure from the City
Confirmed VIP #1290 has left the Last City without further incident. Hidden agents have traced her trail and have destroyed data and materials left behind to avoid potential misuse or corruption.
However, VIP #1290 eventually discovered the Hidden tracker and burned it out―so she's in the wind. Ghost status currently unknown, but probably alive. At least for now. At this time, recommend scouts do not approach. She's dangerous enough without us feeding her.
At least she's out there, not in here.
On Concerns, Previously Expressed
You know as well as I that the Vex yet require attention. I have said before―many, many times―that their threat is greater than any other. And while the recent depredations of the Witness have proven this set of priorities temporarily mis-ordered, I fear that the threat of the Vex may not only spread in the aftermath, but also go underestimated.
It is tempting to let our guard down and breathe easy. We cannot.
Before my exile, I made plain my opinions on Light and Darkness, on the foolishness of considering them "good" and "evil." This remains true, doubly so now. Our enemy was never the Darkness itself, but that which worked within it.
And that childish division of good against evil has distracted us from the unceasing enemy: the Vex.
They care not which force they grasp. They care not about morality. They care―if one can call it that―only for convergence. They advance, and they will not stop unless we stop them. Every time they have closed the gap to paracausality, even in the smallest way, it has been nigh disastrous.
I am sure I need not remind you of Quria, of the eternal night that threatened to fall over the Last City. Of the Black Heart, that Vex attempt to recreate the Veil which could itself have been catastrophic. Of the Black Garden, and the remnant of the Witness that Guardians found there, redolent of Darkness. We may not yet have seen what happens when the Vex grasp for the Light, but I assure you, if it has not yet begun, it soon shall.
Time is inevitably limited, until the Vex in their infinite adaptability learn how Light and Darkness both may be turned to their advantage.
It is my recommendation as advisor to the Vanguard that the Vex be logged as the most urgent enemy of sentient life, both of the Last City and the growing alliances formed these past years.
Please, Ikora. I would not raise this yet again if I did not believe it to be of utmost importance.
Consider it well.
On the Witness
My Hidden Friend
The neonate worm, Ahsa. She spoke to the Guardian, and this is what she imparted: Look to the place where the Witness formed. An exhausted world, made so long ago that even silicon is a luxury. That is where the hunt begins.
The Traveler graced that world. But it wasn't enough. Those who lived there saw a creation born to die. They wanted it to mean something. It had to mean something. And if it didn't, they would make it mean something. For, in their view, to make something was to understand it.
I understand this impulse too well.
But they chose a truly rotten betrayal. To open up and take, and remake, their god. And they would use the Darkness to do it. Finding no meaning at all in the act of creation, they decided that the only place left for reason, intent and consciousness to reside was in the act of elimination. If their god the Traveler made things for no reason, then a merciful, purposeful winnower must have good reason to remove them.
In mimicry of this belief, they winnowed themselves down to a single awareness―all their thought and pain compressed into a bombshell of consciousness and intent. Magnificently aware of all the universe's failings. A conscious witness to the testament of the Light's sins. A final, ruinous creation borne of their civilization.
A knife.
And it set out after the Traveler. Not to destroy it, but to defeat it. To impose a will upon an absence it saw as unacceptable. Negligent. To dicate, by force, how things ought to be.
The motive is to impose meaning upon Dark and Light beyond mere primordial dynamics.
The killer is an anthology of this ancient civilization's rage at their god's silence.
I find that I pity these vanished people. But if all the cosmos turned inward, as I turned inward for a while, as these people turned inward forever, then we would all be alone.
Yes, it is awful to face loss. But we must keep cooperating in the face of all extinction. Or there can never be anything better.
That is all I know.
Cacophony, Eupohony
We listen. We witness. We wait.
Through the Darkness, we hear a single voice.
With a thought, we are there, to touch the mind that reaches into this domain. Cradled by Darkness, it asks a question.
We answer this one, lie we have others. We are generous with answers. Not all beings can understand the answers we give, but we try. Again, and again. None ought to cry out, only to suffer no answer. There are always more voices in the Darkness, reaching out. We turn.
Far distance, there is a people lacing ribbons of Darkness through their thoughts to bring themselves closer together, that no one might be divided from the purpose they have dreamed for themselves. But they have not come to the Gardener's neglect―it is simply their natural course. In time, we shall enfold them into our shape, but they need not urgent salvation.
Our presence drifts. And still, we listen in the Darkness. There is violence that corrodes constructs like peace. There is the Hive. Some resist the rampaging Hive, crying out into the Darkness. It is to use they reach, in the end. We hear their pleas and grant them succor, salvation, enshrining them in our monument. Toward our inevitable final shape. There is time enough to reach out to the furthest corners of Darkness, to inhabit it so deeply and thoroughly; we will hear whomever calls out in it.
We will answer. We will always answer. Even that which passes temporarily below our notice will be found again; and we will hear those questions and give purpose. Give salvation. Always, we listen for signs of the Gardener. Our Disciples pursue it still, to pluck it from the chords of infinity.
We listen. We wait.
Winnowing
I have come to delight so in this: in possibility, and its end.
Oh, I kicked and fought and screamed about it at first! I was fond of what we had! But the table was upturned, and a knife cannot be un-invented, and so here we are.
The rules changed―a little. The pattern altered―but a micron. I got used to it, as they say. People can get used to anything, and the same holds true for concepts that have existed before and after time itself, though it may take an eon or twenty.
So, here I am, among the stars. They burn so brightly, but given a billion or ten billion years, they chill: their mass reduces to nothing but throbbing embers, at last gasping into stillness and ash. Even the loudest of celestial roars cannot outpace infinity.
I am assured. I have come around. There is charm in diversity, in the uncountable ways a speck of cosmic dust may climb to cognizance and philosophy, only to find the same old truth of decay. Again and again, I am proven right: it all ends the same.
It isn't about violence, mind you. It's about inevitability. Simplicity. The unnecessary removed, the requisite remaining. Whether the knife is made of metal or the folded layers of time, it matters not. The pattern triumphs. The stars burn out. And I am right.
So every being made in the garden of possibilities, every creation that looks at infinity and comes to my same conclusion―why, I cannot help but love them. The rules were altered, and still they have said: here is the truth. Possibilities do not change what it is. The pattern is the pattern, and its reliable certainty is its beauty.
Even a cheater of eternity cannot yet win its wager. The game is longer now. but I will be its victor. In this eon, or a thousand hence.
Gardening
You delight in possibility.
The same action, over and over, only produces the same result if all circumstances are the same. But there are so many variables―a million different outcomes may spring forth from one action. One stray atom changes a lifetime, and one breath of wind, an eon of history.
Choice is infinite; and possibility, endless.
To some, it is only statistics. But you have ever been captivated by that miracle. You know stagnancy. You have seen it many times: the same stable oblong it all comes down to when growth has ended. The soft-pulsing oscillation over one spot, never truly carrying on finding further growth, even if they never die.
A single breath might be enough to change it.
You understand, of course, that breath is a breath, and a flower is a flower. That, having bloomed, the petals will one day fall. Still you guard the next flower, and the next, for there is meaning in the moment of bloom.
So you breathe. So potential spirals, like seeds floating on the wind.
On breath. Barely a whisper. Nothing more than that. And for such a thing, a gift of infinity.
Always, always, you look on with hope.
Anthology Artwork
References
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