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Awareness is jagged.
It's not peaceful. It's furious, and cold, and hot and bright and dark, and it's thrust upon her with the ceremony of a spear to the gut and just as painful to drag a breath into lungs that aren't there.
Where were they? She should have them. Maybe she never did.
Flashes assail her vision, faces that aren't there when she lashes out towards them as a desperate swimmer might grasp at rocks in a white-frothed river. People she doesn't know. Her fingers only close around shadows.
There was – a tower, in the distance. When the figures disappear there's a field, beautiful and endless, golden wheat that sways in an unending evening breeze, calm and gentle.
And in the middle of it, a shape.
Not a shape: a hole.
A great black emptiness, an ink blot upon canvas, slowly creeping outwards, grain by grain, eating up the field. When the sun finally sets on this vista, the shadows envelop it, but she can still feel it crouched there, that blank void.
One little piece at a time.
Orange light throws edges into sharp relief. A lockbox, and a key. A prison. A ship. She blinks, and the light flickers. She is the light.
Why is she the light?
She remembers something. The tower aflame. A sky choked so heavily with smoke and ruin it felt like the rain should be blood when it finally fell, but instead it brought ash, painting walls a world-weary grey. Children crying.
It makes sense, to remember that, just as it makes sense to draw breaths she doesn't need, and to blink artificial eyes, and to run metal hands through dense cables twined across ports on her head in a way that imitates hair. It makes sense to dream of the tower bathed in gold.
And it makes sense to overlook the precipice of nothing, watching everything fall away, and to wonder if she was ever anywhere to begin with.
She stands on the threshold of becoming, threads clinging to her hands and trailing away out of sight, suggestions, directions. A whisper of possiblity. Enough paths to weave a tapestry, were she to build a loom out of the shadow around her, and it would be so easy, she thinks.
So easy, to be unmade here.
A city rose out of the blackened twisted husk of war, rising, meeting the shimmer and twist of light in the air. Fluid, silken. Walls cut from ice, gilded and then cast over again by moon-glow, imposed with those silver threads that lay across every surface into a neat little grid. Beads of light chase along each length.
Across each white rooftop, red flowers unfurl in an endless parade, an ocean, until there are no more buildings, just a single infinite expanse. A garden.
The nothingness in the middle of the wheat field is not alive. It is shapeless. Featureless. It isn't real.
It raises its head and stares.
“Damascus?”
Voice. Voice. She can hear. Something, far in the distance, plucking at a single thread like a spider to its web and the song of it hums concentric ripples across the sky. It tugs against where it's tied to her finger. Someone's calling her.
Orange light on a sharp edge.
“Ikora, what should I do? She's not responding.”
“Give her a moment. It's been... a long time.”
Damascus. A city. Golden age. There's something bitter in the remembering of it. War-torn, perhaps, destroyed and rebuilt. A testament to violence and resilience, the forging of a steel will, until the slow creep of the dark chewed its heart to rust. The words float out at her from a page, shattering into tiny spiralling fractals that she delves too deeply into, and she's drowning-
The waking, she remembers. Nothing, and then everything, rising through silt and stone and clawing her way into a blinding churn of water and froth, pain blaring through her head, through her chest with lungs that arent there, weighted with fluid that chokes out of the seams in her body even as she heaves herself (heavy, metal) onto the shore.
“The river,” she whispers into the waiting silence, as if the room held its breath. “The river is where I rise.” The words feel wrong and right and snarled up hopelessly into one tangled conflict, two countercurrents meeting and splaying out into a branching delta of loose wet silt that slips through her fingers.
When she sits it's with a hand to her back, helping her upright, but when she's up it feels like something fell away and the blackness around her spins and spins. Minutes drip by with every blink. Dried flowers fall from her shoulders, petals sliding papery against bare metal, whispers of the scent they used to hold. A shroud settles around her waist like a cat, soft and weighty.
Shadows run rivulets down her hair, black oil, nothing's real; the river, rising again to drown her with its cold touch.
There's something in the water.
It's deep and dark, the water endless, infinite, and yet the thing fills up all of it.
By the time she comes back to herself again, she's wearing woven cloth. Her fingers twitch, and then flex against the neutral tone of it, feeling the slight rasp of warp and weft. The words arise unbidden: a low thread count, cheaply made, for emergency use. She doesn't know what the words mean, even as she knows she wore a lot of this, along with the refugees in the city. Not warm, never warm, but staunches the bleeding, hides the dust stains, holds belongings, covers the face.
If she looks too closely at the cloth beneath her hands, she can imagine the loom-weavers, the patterns and strings, quick hands, spiders and moths picking at it and picking at it and picking at it -
Daylight spills hot and sharp across her chest. A loose white shirt, this time, a slice of reflection that sears into her, chasing away the shadows so starkly that its edges carve red phantoms into her vision, clean and precise.
“-third reset,” a voice says from a distance. Outside the door. Outside the universe. “It's unprecedented. The Light should've brought her back properly. Maybe it's been too long...”
“Something's interfering,” another voice says. “I can feel it. Her cognitive processes aren't engaging, and...”
Between one blink and the next, the world shifts.
“Do you... do you think she'll recover?” someone asks, fear rippling the words into distorted static.
She knows that voice.
“Constantine,” she says, and it's with surety and not a question. It wouldn't be anyone else.
“You remember me?” Constantine asks. She's nothing more than a shape, in the air, and that's fine. That's how it's supposed to be.
“My friend,” Damascus tells her. That's also how it's supposed to be. They weren't, and then they were. The river-
“You didn't before.”
Someone else asks her some questions, but she can't find the answers. Everything's working, she knows, she can feel it, but the words get caught like a net full of fish, silvery and slippery and yet unable to push through to freedom. Even so, she can see, and feel, and words drift through her mind and if she tries hard enough maybe one day they'll realize the way to go.
She makes eye contact with Constantine as the ghost gives her a searching look, tries to will it through their connection in a way that words would not. There's hope there, she knows it, surely her ghost--
Constantine turns away.
“I think one more.”
“Are you sure? It's a lot in so short a time.”
“It should – I think... it'll work.”
“Okay,” Damascus whispers down at her hands, trying to pretend the tremor in her voice isn't there, that her eyes don't unfocus, turning her fingers into vague shapes. That the hurt rising in her chest is because something unseen is plucking at the flimsy web holding her together like a mobile of shattered glass still hanging hope against it, slowly cutting itself to ribbons, and not grief. “Okay.”
This time, when the light blinks out, she feels it.
Feels the sharp disconnect between one moment and the next, the blackness pinching closed the last vestige of being, a cut of a single hanging line, and there's nothing and then-
Damascus-12 comes awake screaming.
Something's missing.
It was missing before, but she knows it now, with certainty that burns in her throat despite how she coughs and coughs and the embers won't leave.
She knows it when she looks around the room and sees figures she doesn't recognize, standing back against the walls. It's not the light, where it sits fixed in her chest like a radiant sun, and blazes in deep dark auroras from her palms to lick scars into the floor tile, hands and knees that caught her heavily when she lurched off the bed.
It's...
It's something that feels on the tip of her tongue, but flits away every time she tries to reach for the tail end of the thought, and she can't find the holes in her mind where it might've fit once to feel out the shape. It's like being aware that she has no lungs even as she breathes, that her nerves aren't real but programmed, and trying to explain that to someone who has a body of flesh and bone. It's trying to piece together what was, and sinking her hands through a curtain of maybes only to find that dark endless sea beyond.
There's also an otherness, something a lot more obvious that she's missing – which is quickly thrown into stark realization when the figures in the room speak to her with familiarity, and she finds she cannot return the same to them.
Introductions shouldn't be so somber, she thinks. Even Constantine is silent, watching her with trepidation.
Maybe someone died.
Maybe it was her.
If anyone asked her, in that moment, what awareness was like, she'd tell them it was cruel.
One of the voices is a constant presence.
Ikora, the introduction is made over and over, because she can't get it to stick in her mind. Her face is kind, and patient, hair shorn and eyes full of warmth and understanding. That doesn't stick in her mind either. Eventually she fixes her gaze on her robes – strong purple, well-made, fitted sleek and smart with a proud whisper of the light through every fibre – because they stay, even when the woman's features blur into an indistinct smudge, graphite smears in the unsteady print of her memory.
She says as much, and tries hard to pretend the faint sigh of upset sympathy she gets in return doesn't hurt her. She fails.
History, too, is gone; a lot had happened, since the city was put to fire. Deaths. Alliances. Regrets. All of it feels distant, like it happened to someone else, in a place she's never known, despite them telling her she was there.
She tries to remember the important things, the whispers about Osiris, about the Dreaming City and its curse and how it came about.
Tries not to think about the heartbroken look plain on Ikora's face when she said she didn't know who Cayde was.
They'd been friends, apparently, he and Damascus-8. The Hunter Vanguard. Not even a picture of him was recognizable. Every single detail of him, drawn down and drowned in that black nothingness in her dreams, and now she'd never have the chance to piece it all back together, because he was gone.
Even the Red War, something that shook the Last City to its foundation, is nothing more than distant pictures to her, as if shown from a book. There are snatches of thoughts, the fear and desperation, that dream of an ash-drowned horizon and ships trailing black smoke as they lumbered through the sky. Damascus knows she was there, but it doesn't feel real.
“You saved a lot of civilians,” she's told. “Some of them visited your interrment. The flowers were from them.”
She visits them.
Or tries to, as much as she can visit when the Damascus that knew them is not her, not really.
A slip of paper with an address scrawled on it held tightly between finger and thumb; the towering apartment blocks clothed in plants and banners and lanterns, streets lively with people and sunlight, is all a far cry from the bombed husk of a city she walked in her unmade dreams.
Once or twice she catches a shimmer of something familiar – the doorway of a once-ruined store where she crouched with two whimpering city kids pressed tight to her body, hoping the cabal patrol didn't look their way, didn't hear them over the heavy iron-soled tramp of boots to road shingle; the low rooftop where she hooked a jury-rigged power cable poorly disguised as a tattered laundry line to an outlet and the following bets made on how long it would take the cabal to notice and cut it. She smiles, briefly, to see the line still there, even if she couldn't remember what she placed her bet on.
She doesn't need the address after all, not when every step slowly fills her with equal parts dread and elation with hidden familiarity, and especially not when an overjoyed shout heralds strangers sweeping her up in an embrace that manages to lift even her metal frame off the ground for a moment.
The rest of the visit carries the same undercurrent of sadness and loss, something she feels keenly in the relief and warm secure embraces that understand she's not who they remember, and that she doesn't remember them at all but she kept one of the dried flowers she was laid to rest with, as a keepsake to remind her that she was loved even as someone she isn't any more.
It's okay, they tell her, as a gap-toothed child with a scar cutting across one closed eye hangs adoringly off her arm and tells her about how he put in that hair cable right there, he remembers – it's okay to forget, they say, because sometimes they wish they could do the same. The last bombardment on the night the Traveler broke free, the one that separated all of them when a rogue shell hit their shelter, killed over a dozen on impact, and a dozen more to injury and starvation in the nights following it. How she'd clawed her way out of buried rubble with the body of a child cradled uselessly in a broken arm, and the grief following it drove her to flee the city the moment other guardians with their renewed light could step in. It's okay, they say.
It doesn't feel okay.
Damascus doesn't feel okay.
She decides she'll go back when she's able, and when the decision doesn't crack her in two, she knows it's the right one.
The empty thing in her dreams rasps tiny details from their names like woodborer, chipping and chipping until the edges are ragged.
She writes them down.
Constantine helps her.
“I feel like I'm slowly unraveling,” she says. It's as if someone picked all her stitches undone and she's losing each loop on little snags of her past, pulling her in all directions.
Her fingers shake when she spreads them, as if missing the stability of those threads stretching away endlessly into oblivion, holding her dwindling self in place. “Where did they lead, I wonder?”
If she followed them like the river's current, maybe they would connect up into cloth. A woven bandage to patch herself whole with, or perhaps a tapestry to hold a story, those back-and-forth lines forming a shimmering grid, if only she could find the edges to see it.
“Maybe you need a break,” Constantine suggests, with the kind of perfect nonchalance that belies how truly unnerved she is. It must have been hard, seeing her own guardian so completely unresponsive to the Light, to something that was, to her, as normal as breathing. “We could go somewhere new.”
“Everywhere's new.”
“Anywhere, then.”
She thinks of the garden, strange and unknowable and yet – she knows it better than she knows herself, knows with absolute certainty every one of those delicate red and pink blooms in its endless expanse, placed so precisely they form a network. A pattern where every step is chaos and renewal and all things in their place. At the center of it all the trees grow and grow, and die and fall, and their roots house new growth blooming out in an eerie blue glow, a shy field of stars taking shelter in the shadows. She thinks of how it hungers, as she hungers, not for the new but for the inevitable.
The blades of a windmill with sails of light, spinning and spinning and never finding closure, but its place is set. Part of a system, as sure and steady as a beating heart.
She wants...
She wants.
“...Okay.”
When she says it this time, it feels less like a death knell and more like a promise.
It's a little past four in the morning when a lone ship departs the tower hangar, aiming out past the limits of orbit and towards a tiny gap of potential between the stars.
Ikora reads the note left to her, and reads it again.
With a sigh, she pulls up a screen, and writes a message to Eris.