It was not a pull it recognised. Not the nauseating fold of a Vex gate, nor the jagged tear of a Hive summoning. This was smoother. A persistent, insistent tug, like a current in a deep-sea trench, pulling it from the silence between worlds where it had drifted for an age. One moment, the cold peace of nonexistence. The next, green grass and a sky of impossible, unbroken blue.
A circle of young humans stared. Their clothes were absurd—capes and frills and breeches that belonged in a pre-Golden Age costume drama. My internal chronometer is shot, must have been for centuries, but these people felt… old. Not ancient, like the first exos, but primordially, technologically old.
My shell spun, a nervous habit, my single blue optic taking in the scene. A field. A crumbling stone tower. Not a single glint of plasteel or flicker of a data-conduit. I ran a passive scan on the nearest cobblestone. Basalt, feldspar, quartz. Expertly mortared. Quaint. No, that was the word. This entire place was quaint.
My purpose, the directive that had burned at the core of my programming since the Traveler shattered my first shell, reasserted itself. Find a Guardian. I had searched across the poisoned seas of Titan, the rust-dunes of Mars, the frozen crypts of Europa. I had seen generations of scavengers live and die. This place, this Halkeginia as the girl’s mind screamed it, was just another barren field.
Then my sensorium focused on the girl at the centre of the circle. Small, pink-haired, vibrating with a force that had no name in my databases. It was not Arc, Solar, or Void. Not Stasis. It was pure, unfiltered will. A will to exist, to prove, to not be a failure. It radiated from her in waves, a desperate signal in the silence. It was this will that had dragged me across the stars.
The other children jeered. “The Zero strikes again!” one of them, a blonde boy with a rose, crowed. A redhead with a fiery lizard on her shoulder laughed, a cruel, sharp sound. “Did you expect anything else from Louise the Zero?”
The girl—Louise—flushed, a blotchy red creeping up her neck. Her knuckles were white where she gripped a stick of polished wood. A stick. They were going to fight the Darkness with sticks. Hopeless. Utterly hopeless. And yet… that will. That desperate, incandescent will.
“Be silent!” a man with receding hair and kind eyes pleaded. “The ritual is not yet complete. Patience, Miss Vallière.”
Louise took a breath. Her lips formed words I did not know, but I felt their shape. An appeal. A demand. A prayer to anything that might listen. She poured all of that ferocious will into the final syllable.
And the world blew up.
It was not a clean detonation. It was a messy, violent eruption of energy that felt achingly familiar. Void Light. Uncontrolled, unrefined, but unmistakably *Void*. It ripped out from her, a sphere of screaming purple-black chaos that tore the turf from the earth and sent the other students scrambling.
I, being made of sterner stuff, simply tumbled through the air, my shell clattering against flying stones. When I stabilised, the scene was chaos. The students were shouting. The professor was shielding his face. And in the centre of a new, smoking crater, Louise lay still. Very still. Her uniform was shredded, her face pale. A thin line of blood trickled from her lips. The light of her will had been extinguished.
Silence fell, thick and heavy. The redhead, Kirche, no longer looked so smug. The boy with the rose, Guiche, looked pale.
Professor Colbert was the first to move, his face a mask of professional grief. “Medic! Someone get a medic!”
But I knew. Life signs extinguished. Catastrophic cellular damage. Terminal.
I hovered over her body, my shell tilting. This was it, then. Another false alarm. Another dead world. For centuries, I had searched for the spark—the indefinable quality that made a hero. The blend of bravery, sacrifice, and sheer, stubborn refusal to die that marked one for the Traveler’s blessing. This girl… she had the stubbornness. The desperation. But she was dead. My search was a failure. Again.
I should leave. Find a quiet corner of this backward world and power down for a century. Wait for orbital decay.
But I didn’t.
I hovered over her face. Even in death, her brow was furrowed in frustration. She had died trying. Died reaching for something more. She hadn’t surrendered. Her body had just failed her.
That was a story I knew. It was the story of humanity.
My shell opened. The two halves split, revealing the core of light within. The professor, halfway down the crater’s edge, froze. “What… by the Founder…?”
The others just stared, dumbfounded.
I had no Guardian. I had a corpse. A girl whose greatest act was to die in a flash of power she couldn't control. It wasn't a choice based on data. It was not logical. It was, perhaps, the most foolish thing I had done since I was born in the Traveler's light.
I took the initiative.
A needle of pure Light, refined over centuries of lonely waiting, lanced out and touched her forehead. My voice, a transmission only the dead and dying could hear, echoed in the space where her mind used to be.
*Eyes up, Guardian.*
Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière gasped, her eyes flying open. The air she drew in was not for her lungs, which were still torn and useless. It was a gasp of pure energy, of raw power.
She sat up. The smoking tatters of her uniform hung from her. The crater was silent. Every eye was on her. But she wasn't looking at them.
She was looking at her own hands.
She spread her fingers, turning them over in the sunlight. Then she looked up, at the sky, at the grass, at the stunned face of Professor Colbert. A frown touched her lips. It wasn't a frown of anger, or failure. It was one of intense, profound confusion. The world was the same. And it was all wrong. The light felt different. The colours were too sharp, too deep. The very air hummed with a music she had never heard before.