Listen: The Guardians have come unstuck in time.

Listen: The Guardians have come unstuck in time.
It’s something we all know, but seldom acknowledge. We constantly find ourselves returning to past missions, running them in a flat loop. No one in charge seems to notice. Our mission briefings are always the same, our ghosts get locked out of the same systems, and the Vanguard always think our work will have a lasting effect — right before we rerun the same mission.

It didn’t use to be this way.
I remember being the notorious rookie. I was remade in the Traveler’s Light outside the wall of the Cosmodrome. In absurdly short order, I discovered the Hive on Earth, awoke the sleeping Warmind, freed a poisoned piece of the Traveler on Luna, encountered and decimated the Vex — on both Venus and Mars. That thing with the Cabal — I maintain that it was just a misunderstanding. My ghost devotes less power to jokes when breaching secure systems now.

 

Listen: I destroyed the Heart of the Black Garden.
I entered a Vex portal on Mars, and fell out of time. I saw the end of the Sol System, and the Vex worshipping a literal Heart of Darkness there. I took the Traveler’s Light into that forsaken place, and cut the very cores out of the Vex Progeny with my blade of pure, carmine, arc-light. In removing the Vex, I returned to my original time, and the Black Garden came with me, its bizarre chrono-distortion dissolving with the remains of the Vex.

But here’s the tricky bit: I remember doing all of this, by myself.
Ask any Guardian — any real guardian worth the cloak on their back — and they’ll tell you that they did all these feats. Almost every single one of us will argue until we’re blue in the face (though the awoken among us get there far faster — sorry, I had that joke ready for Cayde-6) that these are our accomplishments. We contend that we are a Legend on par with Lord Saladin, Pahanin, or Kabr. I’ve tried to argue with the other “legends”, but they all have too many details just right. It’s one thing for someone to say, “Oh yeah, I fought some Hive near the Hellmouth,” and quite another to repeat the exact phrases my ghost used throughout the mission. It doesn’t make sense — Guardians of all races and classes have these memories. I know they were my missions, but the fervor they argue their claims with — it almost makes me believe they were there.

My events in the Vault didn’t help. Fresh off my success in the Black Garden, I assembled a fireteam of powerful Guardians. Several of them were renowned for their fury in the Crucible, and the Sunsinger among us suggested he was one of your Hidden — which I didn’t believe, but maybe that’s part of his cover. Regardless, this fireteam of mine went to Venus, entering the Vex’s Vault of Glass.

Inside the Vault, we were faced with terrifying Vex weapons capable of denying our very existence.They used shock troops, simple gob’s and hobgob’s to distract us with their rifles, but their real fight was one of ontology. In their simulations against us, they must have realized traditionally killing us was an impossible war of attrition — with a ghost on standby to rez us as we fell, death was merely a stumbling block for us. So the Vex sought to erase us from existence. The Vault was designed to be a focal point where they could manipulate time as they saw fit. If we never existed, their logic said, then we could never have been there to fight them. Ipso Facto, the Vault of Glass remained unopened, and Kabr, the Legionless merely disappeared, like so many guardians before him.

We did find Kabr though. Alone, in the nest of these time-controlling enemies, Kabr managed to break one. It took most of his light to crack it, but through that crack he poured his remaining power and light. What’s that old saying? “We are our own worst enemies?” Kabr took that to heart, reshaping the creature into both a sword and shield for the guardians that would follow him. I took up his shield in fighting the Templar, and later, against Atheon himself. In holding it, I felt a deep understanding of all that Kabr had done, a warring sense of awe and revulsion at the twisted power. While I held the aegis, I was Kabr, and one of those Vex stars — some part of me was beyond time itself.

 

Listen: We didn’t mention this on the official record.
I-I’m pretty sure we lost a Guardian in there. We surmise that much of Kabr’s fireteam was removed from existence, based on Pahanin’s findings that Kabr opened the vault alone, but not alone. You know that feeling of walking into a room, only to forget what you came for? You can feel an inkling of purpose and reason, but the memory never quite catches up? There was a similar feeling of unease amongst my team. Sometime after we had reached the Well (or was it in the maze?) I noticed that our numbers didn’t add up. Including myself, there were 6 guardians, but 7 ghosts floated around us. I thought back to being pinned down by a group of harpies as the Templar fired down on the rest of my fireteam. I couldn’t get to them with these harpies on me, but there were so many that I couldn’t fight them off. Just as I was beginning to make a suicide run for the group, a shockwave of strong arc-light erupted from the center of the harpie flood, and my way was clear. I was able to return to the group and shield them in the relic’s light while the Templar roared in simulated bells of frustration.

I remembered that moment every time I saw the seventh ghost. A sense of relief and gratitude playing at my emotions, immediately followed by a nauseating sense of wrongness. I avoided looking at the lone ghost, and in not looking at it I found my teammates glancing in its direction, then quickly looking away. The poor thing seemed...scrambled. At one point it zipped off far ahead of us, then came warbling back, fighting to stay in the air. It tried to interact with my ghost, in the antechamber of the Crystal Throne, but my ghost said she only heard jingles in the wind. For all I know, that ghost is still down there.

Maybe that seventh ghost was Kabr’s. My own ghost tells me it’s unlikely, that Kabr’s ghost was likely consumed in creating the aegis, but she’s been wrong before. I like to hope that it was his though, and that it gained some sense of peace with Kabr’s mission fulfilled.

We fought from the time before primordial ooze to time immemorial. The Time Conflux at the center of the Vault sought to deny our existence as well. Where his gorgons had merely folded time in and around them hard enough to destroy an entity, Atheon bent time around us to physically move members of our fireteam into the distant past and future. By what we saw, the Vex have always been on Venus, and will always be there. This may not have always been true, but in the power they controlled in the vault, funneled through Atheon was enough to make it true.

Atheon was arrogant. It took all of his concentration to remove us from the present, and even then he could only take half of us. The throne room held Vex gates to these distant times in the present though, and we were able to use them to reconnect with the mistimed guardians. Before the away team could return, they would have died to the ontological weapons, were it not for Kabr’s aegis. Whenever we were sent away, we found Kabr’s Aegis waiting for us. In the same way that the Vex worked to deny our presence, the Aegis demanded our existence, shining brightest as our light began to wear thin. The “Hidden” sunsinger thinks in combining his light with the Vex’s weaponry, Kabr managed to write the weapon into every time or existence the Traveler’s Light was in. I’m not too sure about that, but I do know I was almost relieved that the weapon disappeared as Atheon fell.

 

Listen: Something happened when Atheon died.
How do you remember the act of remembering? Please don’t look at me like that, I’m serious. Think back to your favorite memory, now try to remember every instance of remembering it. I try to remember my thoughts back then, as a young, hot-shot gunslinger just beginning to dabble with arc-light as I fought my way through the Black Garden. I remember the first time I went through most of the memorable firefights I encountered along the way — my first encounter with the Cabal, a harrowing firefight against the Vex in the ruined subways of Mars where my only sources of light were my ghost and the radiolaria from the Vex’s cores. I know I remember fighting these fights, again and again after I left the Vault of Glass, but I don’t remember repeating, reliving, these fights before then. Ever since the Vault, I’ve been aware of it. I’ve cut Crota to pieces with his own blade multiple times, and fought against the Fallen Wolves’ uprising again and again. The only memory I’m sure I have only had once was the fight through the Vault of Glass. At least, that’s what I remember. How can I be certain that the Vault is some catalyst, when I’m grasping at shadows in my own mind?

 

Listen: Every Guardian has come unstuck in time.
In some of the ancient religions, humans believed in reincarnation. The tales are, like most pre-Golden Age history, largely scattered and difficult to parse into a singular understanding. From what I’ve gathered though, they didn’t believe in the resurrection our ghosts provide; instead the idea was that I, am you, are the older man guarding the door, who in turn was also Saint-14, and everyone in between and beyond. Each life was supposed to be another chance at restoring — something, the translations are foggy here — but each life was also another chance at learning.

Here’s the thing: I can’t help but wonder if it’s true.
Those early fights - where my fledgling solar light meant I could only draw a golden gun from the air once in ten deaths — I remember the clank of exo-joints as my hands swung down to strike the ground in rage, my will and my light forming waves of destructive arc-light against a clump of Hive Acolytes. I remember a particularly frustrating death to a gruesome Fallen captain, and the discordant laughter echoing from its throat pulled my will into a singular focus, and I remember burning with a fire so deep that I pulled myself back from death in a blazing shower of fire. Occasionally, I catch a warlock staring at me, but when I meet his gaze, I feel further pulled into my memories, as if I’m seeing him relive my fights. I’ve heard a titan wax poetic about the joyous ephemera of a blink jump in such vivid color that they had to know, from experience, but there are no records of a Titan blinking.

I have an explanation. Well, I have three, actually.
The first, is that I’m still in the Vault, and this is all a simulation put on by Atheon. The second, as an extension of the first, is that the Vex are simulating a larger timescale. You’ve seen the records from the Ishtar Collective. Their capability for simulations is frightening. Who can prove that this is not some higher order simulation by them, learning the intricacies of how we fight so that they can destroy us in their reality? Arguably, their inability to predict Rasputin refutes this hypothesis, but what if it’s merely a feint, to make us lax?

I don’t actually believe we’re in a simulation — not a Vex-based one, at least. No, my explanation is that killing Atheon created a disruptive wave in the space-time continuum. If Atheon was the singular point of time — the needle, as Kabr phrased it — for the Vex in our system, then perhaps killing him created enough of a distortion that the Guardians find themselves reliving past fights over and over again.

The same paracausal power that allowed our light to deny Atheon’s will is the reason why we notice these loops, but everyone else seems unaffected. The problem is I can’t explain the ghosts. They’re little pieces of the Traveler, right? So if it’s the traveler’s light that lets us retain our memories of these events, why don’t the ghosts also remember? Is it some kind of quantum physical entanglement where we’re capable of acting as observers, but our ghosts aren’t? And if that’s the case, why do you and the rest of the vanguard not remember? You, personally, have debriefed me after a strike on the Hive Abomination in the Summoning Pits no less than 37 times. Yet that glare you’re giving me says I’m wrong — and yet, you do remember me as the guardian, right? I don’t mean to insult you, but I’ve stood in the command center and seen dozens of guardians stream in, and you debrief each of them the same way. Occasionally there’s a smart-ass that interrupts you, quoting your words full seconds before you can say them, but you don’t even notice.

It’s not just you though, I had this entire conversation with Cayde already, and at the end, you know what he said to me? “Hey, stay alert out there.”

Excuse me? No, this is the first time we’ve spoken about this. I’m hoping your scholarly studies will let you retain this, because if you don’t — I think I’ll have to join the cult, and my fellow justicars won’t appreciate that.

 

Listen: I have a plan.
In all your spying and information-seeking, did you ever get an exo to mention the Deep Stone? I’d been looking everywhere trying to find mention of this place, or get an exo to talk to me about it, and I finally stumbled onto something. I was out in the Cosmodrome, wandering around in the colony ship that’s out there, when I stumbled onto another hunter’s cache of hidden goods. There was the usual, a well-made hand cannon and a nimble sniper rifle, along with an absurd amount of glimmer, but there was something rare too - a handwritten journal.

The writer makes mention of a monolith out on one of Saturn’s moons, and a company that sent him out there. Initially, I thought it was just some mining facility, pulling out as much ice as possible during the Golden Age, but there was a sketch on the next page of a man’s face. The right side of his face is human, young, with a sharp blue eye and a glint of a smirk on his lip. The left side though - it’s close to a mirror image, but where there was flesh and soft lines, there are only the cold, hard tones of Exo-metal, and the same sharp blue eye staring out. I think I’ve found the Deep Stone. He didn’t name the moon though, and the files I can find on the company don’t list any holdings beyond the Jovians.

I need to go out there and see what they know about time and memories. The exos say they don’t remember most of their past, that the Stone does something to their memories... Maybe it’s a suicide mission, but I’ve been on plenty of those before. So it goes, you know? If there’s any chance of finding an explanation for these time-loops, I feel like I have to go. If my hypothesis is right, then it may be that the Deep Stone is far enough from Venus to be less affected, and time will flow in its proper form.

I just need to know the right moon so that I’m not wasting time. If I can just make it out there, I’m sure I can get some answers.

  #*#*#*#*#*  

As I finished my speech, I stared into Ikora’s terrible gaze. She wasn’t looking at me, like Cayde had, instead she was piercing my soul, her eyes squinting slightly as time went on. She lifted her cup from the table and took a long sip of coffee, before standing up from the table. I quickly rushed to join her.

“Tell Cayde I’m not falling for this.” She said, as ghost scanned the coffee cup, transmatting it away. “If you two are done wasting my time, I need to return to the command center. Good day, Guardian.”

My shoulders slumped as I sat back down at the table, my own ghost appearing in front of me. Her eye moved from my hands to my face, then she spun to take in the empty meeting room.

“I’ve reached out to her on all the previously used channels, but our strange friend hasn’t responded. I think you’re overlooking a few other contacts though. We could try to parley with Rasputin, or speak to the Awoken Queen again, we’re in her good graces after that Skolas incident… Wait, hold on, I’m receiving a message from Cayde! He says to meet him where you found the journal.” There was a moment of silence, and then she spun to face me, her form tilting to the side. “Have we done this before?”

I stood up, smiling as I pointed to my own cup, then pushed in my chair. It had taken months to get Ghost to accept that guardians were reliving events. Sometimes it seemed more like she was humoring me than anything else, but if it meant she was on my side, it was good enough for me. Ghost turned to reduce the cup to glimmer, then joined me as we walked toward the shipyard. “Better pack heavy for this one, I don’t know what we’re going to run into out there this time.”