The Story Behind the House of Wolves: Part 2, Skolas' Rise

Link to Part 1: The Reef Wars - http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/37jyt4/the_story_behind_the_house_of_wolves_part_1_the/

Part 2: Skolas' Rise

My letter is a plea, my lady. A simple one. Please let me come home.

It has been years now since my appointment as your Emissary. Once, I was proud to call myself a Corsair in your service. My sisters and I were the sharp edge of your will, cutting across the stars in protection of the Reef.

It was your service that kept me from sorrow after Amethyst was razed. The loss of my sisters, my whole life, as our station burned... it took something from me.

By your will, it was given back to me.

Promoting me to the Corsairs, allowing me to strike back at the Wolves. Letting my fury find purchase in defense, in support, and in glorious battle. I know, as I’m sure you did, that without focus my heart would have grown toxic.

It was my pride in my position that sustained me through the Hildean Campaign. That led me to victory in battle against Veliniks, the "Forgotten Kell", the last hope for the unchained Wolves. I know now that it was my willful pride that brought me low.

My lady, I offer again the only explanation I can: I did not know the Guardians would act as they did. All I had known, all I had ever known, were the ways of the Awoken.

The Wolves were entrenched in that valley. The approaches were blocked, all sight lines covered. An assault on their position was madness. We would have spent precious Awoken lives. For nothing. I saw the Guardians, knew they were on the move, but I assumed they saw the situation as we did. That it was folly to call in the Crows.

Prince Uldren’s fighter wing did a masterful job. The blast was pinpoint precise. The blasts tore apart the Wolves, and the Guardians, and their Ghosts. Three strike teams of Guardians, gone in an instant, on my order. The City’s anger, the Speaker’s condemnation—all earned. All fair.

But it has been years since the Reef Wars. The City, these— people. They are not like us. They do not understand their place in the world. And do not listen when I speak it.

Please, allow me to return home to my people.

To serve you once again.

……….

The cell cracks open. Skolas, Wolf Kell, stumbles out and crashes to his knees.

He tries to leap at the creature before him, the shape in the fog, to show it why it should be afraid. But the weight of grief smashes his legs against the cell. The rage upon him beats him to the floor. He falls on all four hands, his mighty armor thundering against itself.

His House of Wolves is enslaved! His people have been played! And it was his hubris, his would-be cunning that did it! While the other Houses fought for their future on Earth, throwing themselves at the Great Machine, Skolas wasted his people in games of betrayal and ambition. Bitter pride brought a bitter end!

If Skolas were a Kell he would ask his Archon to dock him. Ether hisses in his mask and it tastes cold, so cold.

He looks up. At the tiny hooded shape before him. The cell's mist is clearing. He can see.

"I believe that I am here," the creature says. To Skolas' ears it has a strange voice, a strange accent. It speaks his language. "I have a clear purpose. I cannot explain it. Forgive me."

From beneath its hood, tiny fingers of shadow probe the air.

Skolas rises up to smash it, to show his strength, because the alternative to violence is waiting for violence to come from a universe that has neither respect nor compassion. But he checks himself. His ambitions have brought him here, to this cell in this strange place... only it's not so strange, is it? It's the hold of a Ketch. "The Queen," he says to the thing. "You work for the Queen."

"The Nine made me aware of my purpose," the creature says. "If I am here, then it is because the Queen sent you to the Nine, and they wish you sent back."

"I will do no one else's work." Skolas has been a pawn long enough. A Dreg told him, once, that she would play in a game as long as the game made sense. Nothing makes sense now except the thought of Variks' throat shattering in his fists. Variks! Variks the utterly disloyal, Variks who should be welded into a Ketch's prow atom by atom and left there as a figurehead to burn away.

"I am comfortable," the creature with the moving face says. "A part of me wants to go somewhere warm. Now I will certainly tell you what you have been given."

Skolas looks at the shrapnel gun in his hands. Skolas imagines what he would do with it if he could reach Variks, or the brother of the Queen, or the alien Queen. Will it save anything they've lost? The worlds docked from them? No. It cannot change the past. Only the future. Only the chance that his people might one day know themselves as more than pirates and scavengers.

He should never have tried to be Kell of Wolves. He should have tried to be Kell of everything. Everything wants to kill his people, the machines and the militants and the green-eyed Hive. The dead soldiers that hoard the Great Machine and come out crusading to wipe all hope away.

"The ship will be yours," the creature says. It hunches over itself as if burdened by its own shape. "If you speak, you will be heard. I will go now. You are free."

He tries to follow it. He fails. Somehow it is gone. He goes up to the throne room, and sets his weapon down on the great seat. Skolas, Kell of Kells, goes to the ship's comm, where a Servitor waits to plot a course, and broadcasts over all open frequencies:

“Ask them our name. Ask your masters what they call you. Ask the hollow, the hateful, the Awoken with alien dreams encysted in them! Ask them our name!

Fallen. They name us Fallen.

Listen to me, Wolf-born! Heed me, Whirlwind-scattered! I am the ghost of Cybele, the cunning claw of Iris, betrayed, chained, encrypted by the Queen, sent back from the Darkness to save us all! The days of Kell and House end now. The calendar of slavery and abasement goes to the fire. We are a new calendar! We are an age of beginnings! Each of us is a day!

I am the first, Kell of Kells, and I am the last, the Dreg of Dregs. I have conquered and been conquered. I am all of us and all of us are I. In the shape of my life I bind up all of us, all of our fury, all of our grief, all the lives we have wasted against each other. Together we speak our new name.

Remember the hope that brought us here. Remember the age before the Whirlwind, when ether ran free, when we ruled ourselves and our futures as kings. We wanted more than glimmer and glints and herealways. Always remember that we came to this star in hope. And remember that we were denied! Remember the City of the Death of Children, the City That Docks, which claimed for itself the Great Machine that might have saved us. Remember the City that even now sends its ghouls to murder our Primes, starve our ether, and leave our young to die gasping. Curse that City and its name. The curse is just.

We gathered to take that City and save ourselves from extinction, saying to each other, we must be a storm, a Whirlwind, a darkness, for it is said that only pain may be stolen from the dark, and we can let no more be stolen from us. We gathered to fight against our twilight, King and Devil and Winter, all of us but us, the Wolves. Why? What kept us from the Gap?

The Reef. The Queen. The slavers who played us against each other and docked us into subservience. These sly sterile un-people, these mirages with cold minds twinned to their own, these Carybdis butchers, they set us against each other. She played us. She made herself our Kell.

We were fools, o children of the Whirlwind. We fought each other when we most needed unity. I fought my rivals when I should have fought the Queen. But I remember now, my dregs, my captains, my Kells, each of us is all of us and I remember: we are a people of resilience. I am the Kell of Kells because I want what we have lost. I am the Dreg of Dregs because I remember that a dreg will grow back what is lost to him.

Ask them my name! Ask them with the shock blade and the shrapnel launcher! Ask them with the skiff and the ketch! Ask your masters by what right they master you, you who have been hardened by centuries of flight, you who inherit the Whirlwind! Ask the Queen for her throne!

Ask them our name. Let them answer: you are Skolas, Kell of Kells. You are Fallen no more.”

……….

Variks: My Queen, my Kell. It is Skolas they say.

Petra: That's impossible. My Lady, you assured us all that Skolas would never be seen again.

Queen: Has it been confirmed?

Variks: What does it matter? They always fear him—dead or alive. If not this Skolas then another Kell. It is why the Saviks and the other Queenbreakers rise, and the Prison breached. No one will call you Kell when a true heir makes a claim.

Queen: Petra, report to my brother for any intel from the Crows. Variks, see to your channels. Find the one who calls himself Skolas.

Variks: Yes, of course, my Queen, my Kell.

Petra: Your Grace, I will not relent until it is done.

Queen: I know. That's why I've called you back.

End Part 2

Link to Part 3: The Hunt for Skolas - http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/39l815/the_story_behind_the_house_of_wolves_part_3_the/