Toland on System Inhabitants

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Dialogue Regarding the Hive

The rules of Ascendance have changed according to the will of the dragon.
Sjur will undo her death if you give her half a chance.
Do you know the Awoken bury their dead in open-air crypts? It’s a tradition born of a dreadful optimism. Foolish, if you ask me.
Why do you come here? Is it duty to your slavish orthodoxy? Fealty to an absent queen? Sympathy for your Awoken friends?
Oh, Mara, Mara, Mara – I don’t think she knew this would happen! Ha! She presents such a brave face to the world, but she hides her naivete…
There were those who believed that in Crota, the end had come. From the Moonbase, they cried out for help.

Their message beamed far and across the system. It would land with those who would not respond. Deemed to be only “affairs of the City.””
Do you covet Sjur’s bow?
Mara is right about one thing: A second Collapse is on the horizon, and this time, there with be no crawling out of the trash heap of humanity.
There was a crew of Fallen who took to the Hive’s sword logic. They are all dead now – by their own hands.

They sought Ascension, but understood nothing of its meaning. I watched as they slaughtered one another over the course of months.

The last of them, with no crew left to lead, walked to Hellmouth’s edge and cast himself into the depths.
How many crews have called this Ketch home? How many worlds has it plundered in the name of Fallen Houses that have since Crumbled?

Now the grand Houses, like this Ketch, are broken things – shades of old glory, like poor Luna.

Once majestic, once an inspiration, now nothing more than a shattered relic of glory days beyond reclamation.
“The Fallen’s obsession with Luna has cost them much.

They come to pillage the remains of human innovation and pick at the Hive’s arcana.

But I have yet to understand what drives them to take such a risk when there are other worlds more easily scavenged.
The House of Dusk is not the future of the Fallen, but it is a sign of their evolution – of a future yet to come…

No longer the desperate fools clinging to a lost history and misguided faith in machines.

I am curious as to what the Eliksni will become on the far side of their current struggle.
The pirates came in the wake of our Collapse to pick at our bones.

I have no answers as to whether it was bravery or desperation that drove them to scavenge at the edge of the Hive’s most hallowed ground.

But the Hellmouth has been rich in its bounty.

And many Fallen crews made a name among the old Houses for the treasures stolen from this dead rock.
I offer no set conclusions, but it is my belief that the Fallen dare plunder the Hellmouth’s depth.

They know the value in mastering the strange science of their enemy – be it Hive, Human, Vex, or Cabal.

They risk much to steal pieces of understanding from us all, until that time when they no longer fear extinction…but inflict it.
Before Crota’s death, the Hive viewed the Fallen as nothing more than annoyance.

But now, as they struggle to regain their purpose, the Hive have no patience for distraction.

This has led to a renewed conflict as both fight to survive in the face of sustained Guardian aggression.
The question I ponder when considering the Eliksni and their fractured society is how we, the supposed heroes we claim to be, react to a species on the brink?

As we are.

To my mind, we must be cruel. End them now, while they are on the brink, or risk whatever it is they will one day become.
It’s unclear to me…are the remaining Fallen less because they have shed the dead ways of Kells and Archons, or are they more?

Is the shedding of their societal chains and the dissolution of their faith their end?

Or an evolution? I fear the scattered Fallen of today are forebearers of a terrible threat yet to come.
Delusions of purpose, heroism, hope… these are what stand between humanity and true understanding.
Tragic. Casting a line out into the ocean of space, ignorant of what swims out there, waiting in the depths.

If they had known the truth, even the barest inkling, they would have shrunk away from its shores in terror.
Had the Traveler not come to our fragile home, humanity would’ve carried on as it always had. Reaching blindly in the dark.

We likely would’ve extinguished ourselves well before the Hive took up the task. So I ask. Are we fortunate? Or unfortunate?
Quria is the key. The Mind simulates Oryx, and thereby masters the power to Take. But of course, Quria is no power unto itself.
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