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eldritch-spouse · 9 months

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I imagine Mother will just order angels to hold us by force so she could breed us, if we keep cockblocking her

Just think of four angels hold us by the arms and legs, like a rabid cat at the vet during an examination

TW: Noncon.

And the worst part is, at that point, your copulation has become a sort of public spectacle.

Sure, no one's there to make fun of you, quite the contrary, you're being congratulated and hailed as a living treasure -Which might just be worse than mockery- But Mother understood your concerns. She was willing to extend sacrifices for the sake of gaining your favor. She would promise to make the occasion of your joining a private one, hidden from the eye of her beloved followers and servants. She would do things the human way, if it meant having your cooperation and love.

But she supposes maybe you don't deserve want that after all, do you?

Four guardians hold your limbs, petting them, cooing, all collectively shushing your concerns, lacing their fingers with yours. Jonesy holds your head in his lap, murmuring how blessed you are in spite of your attitude, whispering sweet nothings, willing you to let yourself become Mother's, let yourself rise to a sacred role under her watchful eye, all the while an archangel with a skilled tongue works between your legs, their mouth the sweetest torture as your clit is rolled and sucked and they stop to kiss around your lips everytime you start getting close.

All of these angels are taking immense pleasure from this. You've learned that they're more akin to a hive than merely individuals. They'll do anything to please Miara, to pleasure her- And, by extension, you. Getting to prepare you for the first meeting of passions is a job many, many angels in Miara's island squabbled over. These lucky few are over the moon to be chosen. Wherein you might be sobbing and furious, they're trembling in arousal and anticipation. Some of them moaning, chirping in helpless pleasure as they watch you surrender to hormones, though never once touch themselves.

They can't. They haven't been allowed to. All that matters now is getting you sufficiently receptive to welcome Mother.

And, when Miara does join you, they can hardly keep themselves quiet, cheering for you with all the joy the world could hold while the guardians part your legs and Jonesy shifts to frame your glistening pussylips, spread them for his shrunken siadar's use.

Mother offers you a goddess' kiss when her fat cock stretches its way inside you, touching everything, leaving imprints on your body that you know will remain there forever, as evidence of this ritual. The celestials present peck and pet you, chittering sweetly as soon as she bottoms out.

Between Miara's gentle moans, the hands threading through your hair, the cooing, the fingers on your tits, hips, ankles -You don't even know who's pinching your poor clitoris anymore- It's hard to ignore what's happening, to distance yourself from these people, this fate that's been dealt upon you, from the active warping of your mind as empty words and soothing sensations erase your sanity.

What mere mortal mind could ever survive a god's lust?

You don't know what made you cum, or for how long you stretched out of your own skin, arched like a bow. All you know is that the archangel's slurping the area where Mother's shaft plows into you with a vengeance and you're going to start speaking in tongues if they don't stop. Adoring eyes look down upon you from all sides, your vision spins into different shapes and colors the more you're bounced by the higher's ardor.

Surprisingly, it's not the sensation of Miara's seed bloating your small body that causes you to freeze in primal terror.

It's feeling the last few remnants of resistance drown in her depraved love as your face softens, screaming inwardly when a content smile settles on your lips and your eyes glaze-

Forever lost to the world at large.

#Mother Miara #can you tell I like cult-y stuff?#i'm so subtle *cough*

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laurarolla · 6 months

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So Destiny 2, yeah? There's an element I've seen running through this season that, when combined with a common theory of how we will cross through the portal into the Pale Heart, gives me an idea about a possible old detail that could be important next season.

This year, each season sees the Guardians and their allies using dangerous powers to overcome a substantial challenge, pushing themselves to their limits in the process but pulling back from the edge just in time. Mara Sov empowers us with access to the ascendant plane that puts substantial strain on her, Sloane uses her partial taking to facilitate communication with Ahsa at the risk of being driven mad by Xivu Arath, Eris Morn becomes the Hive God of Vengeance while refusing to give in to the temptation of dominating the whole of the Hive in perpetuity, and next season, the big prediction is that we will use the incredibly dangerous Wish magic to open the portal to the Pale Heart.

I'm left to wonder if the dead ahamkara have the power to actually help us in this case, as while their magic continues after death, it seems far less powerful. But what if there were a living ahamkara to help us, or rather, a soon-to-be living one?

Credit to @thefirstknife for snapping a picture of this:

In the middle of this room, only in the game during Season of the Lost about two years ago, is the last egg of Riven, the last ahamkara. Fynch's little conspiracy theory from The Witch Queen campaign was right: there is one left. And while this little detail is years old by now... this is Bungie we're talking about. They wouldn't put this here without some idea for it, and they hopefully wouldn't forget it when the perfect opportunity to use it rolls around.

After all, what could be a more fitting way to push dangerous power to the limit than to entrust our future to a godlike child?

#destiny 2 #destiny #ahamkara #season of the witch #season of the lost #lightfall #pale heart #prediction

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planet4546b · 8 months

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something so funny about eris back in shadowkeep being like ‘i’ve made peace with my past and moved on, i’ve let what happened to me go and no longer need revenge’ to the degree that for like 3 seasons in a row she got treated as everyone’s therapist (lol) and now she’s like. hmmmm. actually i’d like to become the hive god of vengeance thank you. AND SHES RIGHT!

#pers #destiny 2 season of the if someone wrongs you take their form and power to get your revenge on a previously i achievable level #like im genuinely really interesteb in this i like it quite i lot. i tend to get prickly #at excessively linear recovery narratives in most media of which eris’ has always bugged me the least in destiny #(i heart shadowkeep forever) but like. nah man. don’t get better. start growing claws and killing AM I RIGHT BROTHER!!!!#s22 spoilers #227

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thefirstknife · 19 days

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I have not played since The Traveler left and Rasputin died. WHAT is GOING ON in there? THere's pyramids, Eris is a Hive god, Xivu Arath is dead(??? unsure), there's a. A Veil in the Traveler? ??????????????????????

Oh dear, welcome back! I highly recommend checking Destiny Lore Vault for playlists for the campaign, post-campaign quests and seasonal stories (Defiance, Deep, Witch, Wish)!

Speedrun cliffnotes:

Lightfall! Witness found something called the Veil on Neomuna. The Veil is to the Darkness what the Traveler is to the Light; a paracausal entity that controls aspects of it. We also knew about it because Osiris had a vision of it and Rasputin confirmed that! We go to Neptune where we find Neomuna and Cloud Striders, a civilisation that escaped the Collapse. The Witness tricks us into getting near the Veil and uses our Ghost to create a link between the Veil and the Traveler which opens a big portal on the Traveler. The Witness goes through and has been missing since. This whole year was dedicated to figuring out how to follow it into the Traveler!

Defiance! The Witness left its fleet to attack Earth, we defend the Earth from its forces. Mara and the Awoken help us, Crow and Mara begin their reconciliation, Amanda dies sacrificing herself to save civilians.

Deep! Titan returns from the anomaly! We've been told previously that we have to go there because an "enemy of the Witness" lives there; the enemy is a proto-worm Ahsa who fled the Fundament and settled on Titan back in the Golden Age. Ahsa helped Sloane survive on Titan. The two of them team up to help us against Xivu Arath and to figure out the portal. Ahsa tells us that Savathun knows how to get into the portal which means we have to rez her.

Witch! We meet up with Immaru who tells us that Sav left instructions for this exact situation; she will only tell us about the portal if we "deal with" Xivu Arath. Eris embraces her Hive side and bonds with Ahsa, to become a temporary Hive God of Vengeance. She collects tithes from us, the Guardians, and becomes super powerful. Once she's ready to face Xivu, we rez Savathun and Eris kills her, scooping up all of Sav's power on top of our tithes and becomes the most powerful Hive god briefly. She uses that power to cut off Xivu Arath from her throne world; Xivu is now mortal. Eris releases her power and returns to normal, rejecting the Sword Logic and laughing in the face of every Hive ever. Savathun honors her deal and tells us that she already showed us how to get through the portal, then she strikes another deal; she is to be free, but we keep Immaru so if she does anything we don't like, we can crush him. Savathun's answer is hidden in the pattern of her wings - it's the 15th wish. The 15th wish is to get one person through the portal. We need an ahamkara!

Wish! Mara and the techeuns conjure Riven's spirit through her cleansed heart; ahamkara persist after death! Riven tells us she will grant the wish only if we help save her remaining uncorrupted eggs because she wants her children and her species to go on. We agree to this and spend weeks saving her eggs which were scattered through the ley lines to protect them (this was done by Riven's mate, Taranis, a kind and benevolent ahamkara). We fight the Sol Divisive Vex for these eggs, who are doing incomprehensible things as Vex do, and when we succeed, Riven grants the wish. Crow is the one to go through the portal because he and Mara share a bond and through that bond, Osiris and Mara figure they can use the Veil just like the Witness did and forge a connection that will open the portal for the rest of us. We're currently waiting for the final mission of Season of the Wish which will likely conclude by showing us that Crow made it and that the portal is opening.

That's the shortest I could get! Definitely recommend checking out DLV and all the stuff because there's A LOT going on and there's a lot of stuff also happening in the background, especially in dungeons, and with everything that appears to be hinting at post-TFS content. There's also a lot of stuff with the Veil and the nature of Light and Darkness, mostly in LF campaign and Parting the Veil quest from post-campaign; some incredibly cool reveals and information going on.

I'll be happy to answer any further questions, if anything interests you more than other stuff, but also feel free to dive into the content yourself! And as usual, Ishtar Collective will help as well, with all the lore books and lore tabs.

We're currently in the free update, Into the Light, which focuses on the continued attack of the Pyramids on Earth, something that appears to be a last ditch effort of the Witness' forces to prevent us from following it to the portal.

#destiny 2 #lightfall #ask #long post

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imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese · 20 days

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hi I'm learning destiny lore the hard way and I've seen you in my notes, who's Eris Morn? What's her deal? This is an invitation to infodump you seem like the person to ask XD

Oh wow! I will answer your question, despite feeling unworthy to do so, but before I do, since you mentioned you're learning the lore, this is the Eris page from the Ishtar Collective website: https://www.ishtar-collective.net/categories/eris-morn It gives a list of main plot points for Eris up until just before the Season of the Witch and links to all Eris lore that exists in-game, going into far more detail than I can in one Tumblr post.

The Ishtar site pulls a large amount of its info from the D2 API and then supplements anything it can't get from there with human volutneer transcribers pulling from sources like the Destiny Lore Vault: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqJlWJF0IucG7HXcEao78Cw .

If there is lore you can acess in-game, now or in the past, Ishtar has it and it is searchable via keywords. It is official lore, not someone's interpretation of it, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

However, not everyone realizes that the Ishtar Collective also has a Discord: https://discord.gg/v8GsggCV

And that Discord is full of lore nerds who you can just go to and ask obscure lore questions and they will happily answer them (or sometimes get into adorkable near-academic-level debates over them, with citations as well as historical and philosophical references) because that's their definition of fun. They are, for the most part, genuinely lovely humans and I adore them all.

Everything I know about Destiny I learned from either playing the game or reading that website or asking those people.

Now, to answer your question, I'm going to give you a short quick answer and then a longer more in-depth answer afterwards.

The short quick answer is a quote from a story I wrote (A Dance with Vengeance) where I have the Drifter explaining where Eris got her eyes to an Eliksni character I made up:

Please note: this is fanfiction. This conversation never happens in lore, and the closest we've gotten to Driferis in-game is a delightfully sweet hug buried in the lore tab for a sparrow vehicle, but the events the Drifter is narrating (with a bit of dramatic flourish) did happen to Eris in-game.

The longer answer:

Eris, a former Hunter (and Ahamkara wish-dragon slayer), is the sole surviving member of the First Crota Fireteam, a team of six guardians looking to avenge all the friends and loved ones who died in The Great Disaster (when humanity sent an army of guardians to try to reclaim the Moon from the Hive) and, in particular, to avenge the death of a badass Titan named Wei Ning (Eris' friend and lover of Eriana-3, the fireteam leader). Their goal was to kill Crota, the then-leader of the Hive forces on the Moon (Crota is the son of Oryx, who, himself is both a Hive god and the Taken King, brother to the other Hive gods, Savathun, Hive god of Lies, and Xivu Arath, Hive god of War).

Everyone on the First Crota Fireteam except for Eris died horribly and Eris was lost in the Hellmouth on the Moon for a century. Eris' ghost (Brya) killed itself to protect her and Eris no longer has access to Light-based guardian powers. She killed a Hive acolyte and took its eyes (cutting out her own) since she had wished on her bone to know the way out of the Hellmouth but could no longer see. (Ahamkara wish magic is always tricksy - they're basically wish-granting genies who always twist what you ask for into the worst possible outcome.)

Eris has a few titles: "The Forgotten Blade," "Bane of the Swarm," "Crota's Bane" and, more recently in Season of the Witch, "Hive god of Vengeance." She is our main point of contact on the Moon (the Shadowkeep DLC is fantastic and the Moon is awesome and creepy and one of my favourite places to go in-game - I could go on and on about my favourite spots there).

Eris has devoted the rest of her (now mortal) life to exterminating the Hive and has guided the Guardian (the player character) to do so through many adventures, notably the Crota's End raid (where we kill Crota and finally accomplish what her fireteam set out to do), the Kings Fall raid (where we kill Oryx), the Pit of Heresy dungeon, and the Scarlet Keep strike (where she has one of her infamous fantastic lines: "Do you feel it as I do, Guardian? A hatred as pure and potent as sunshine, soaking through your skin?"

Season of the Witch is all about Eris becoming the Hive god of Vengeance to deal with Xivu Arath. If you've ever watched Full Metal Alchemist, the logistical problem with Xivu is the same: going to war with something that feeds off of violence and death just makes it stronger. Season of the Witch is still available (at the time I'm writing this) and there's some amazing scenes in there. I highly recommend playing through it but if you can't, here's an 8.5 minute video of the 3 main cutscenes including the ending [i.e. this is a spoiler if you haven't played it yet and still want to!]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUWu-DqZvU

Eris' storyline in-game is all about recovery from trauma. Many of her quests are either helping her seek vengeance or helping her find peace (such as recovering mementos of her fireteam from various spots on the Moon). She is haunted (literally) by the ghosts of her past (here's 19 seconds of her yelling at them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcs1io-kvdg ) and her recovery from that has made her the unofficial trauma therapist for the Vanguard.

In Season of the Haunted (sadly no longer playable) she guides Zavala, Crow and Cabal Empress Caiatl through combatting and laying to rest their own nightmares-of-the-past-made-real. Here's a link to a 9 min video of the main cutscenes from that season (there's more content if you watch a full playthrough): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWHphu-iT3w

Eris taught herself how to wield Hive magic from a combination of her century of wandering on the Moon and the journals of Toland the Shattered (one of the members of her fireteam who betrayed them to the Hive and is now a floating sparkle-ball who sometimes helps us and sometimes just insults us on the Moon).

Eris is the Vanguard's Hive expert and Darkness expert. She is also one of Ikora's Hidden (Ikora is the Vanguard spymaster and the Hidden are her network of spies.) One of Eris' main story elements is that most people don't trust her, and not without cause. Another D2 character, Elsie Bray, aka the Exo Stranger, has been living her own personal Groundhog Day time-loop hell where she has watched humanity fail over and over against the Witness and then goes back in time to try to stop it. In most of Elsie's time loops Eris succumbs to her trauma and the corrupting nature of the Darkness powers she wields, goes full Hive, and leads the forces of evil to wipe out humanity in what is referred to as "the Dark Timeline."

Eris is constantly dealing with accusations that she's crazy, that she's evil, that she's unstable, and every time it's proven she's not, but people still find her untrustworthy and it isolates her from most of humanity, noteworthy exceptions to this being Ikora, Queen Mara, the player character, and the Drifter.

I am (obviously) especially enamoured of the relationship between Eris and the Drifter, and their in-game banter is absolute top-tier (he flirts and Eris roasts him and it is glorious), but the very core of their relationship is built on comfort and understanding. He trusts her (something almost no one else does) and she gives him hope (which is genuinely impressive and beautiful because the Drifter's own backstory is brutal and bleak as fuck).

Throughout most of Eris' narrative in-game she is a recovering survivor, but in Beyond Light (the DLC where we get our not-ice magic Stasis powers) we get to see Eris not just psychologically and emotionally recovered, but also getting to be a badass in battle. This is, in my opinion, the best cutscene in the entire game: (it is 1 min an 35 seconds and far, far too short): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAD6E_vESJY

I love this cutscene not only because it is visually spectacular, but because Eris has, for most of her narrative, been an injured survivor needing the player character to fight in her place because she no longer can. But in Beyond Light she is now able to kick ass and, perhaps even more importantly, be a part of a fireteam again.

There's more but I'm going to stop there. Eris is badass and amazing and creepy and fantastic. She uses the weapons of the Hive against them. She uses her own traumatic experiences to heal others. Her dialogue lines are evocative and snarky and brooding and poetic. The voice acting for her is some of the best I've ever heard anywhere. Her character has a complex, empowering, healing, hopeful, and beautiful narrative. And I love her intensely for it.

Ideally, this has answered your question at least somewhat, but do feel free to ask me any follow up questions you have about this or anything. I maintain I am not an expert in D2 lore. I am a writer and I don't just have biases, I use them to make art. But I do love the game and while I am not an authority on anything, I have immersed myself in much of the lore with wild abandon and will happily point you to places where you can find more information where my own understanding is limited.

And with that, I leave you with another fantastic Eris quote that so many people have connected with and found beautiful but that also encapsulates "who is Eris Morn" pretty well on its own:

"Recovery is a spiral, not a circle. You may return to the same patterns, but you will break free." —Eris Morn

#eris morn #destiny 2 #ask #i love getting asks #ask me more things!#destiny lore #writing #i fucking love eris morn #aiat

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doc-the-wanderer · 8 months

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I keep seeing so many people expecting a betrayal from Eris by the end of the Season, and I agree, but not in the same way.

I believe in Eris and her intentions. That's where I think the "betrayal" is going to stem from.

She is now the Hive god of vengeance. In the name of her fallen fireteam. In the name of Brya. In the name of everyone she lost to the Hive.

Her vengeance started with Crota. But it did not end there. She extended that vengeance to helping us be rid of Oryx. She extended that vengeance to Savathun. She's extending that vengeance to Xivu Arath.

It will not end there.

Once Xivu Arath is defeated, I feel like we are going to see Savathun resurrected by Immaru, only for Immaru to be killed by Eris. From here, she'll either kill Savathun or keep her imprisoned in some form or fashion and take her place as the chief, and only, god of the Hive pantheon. She will remain Hive, but only to ensure the Hive bend to her will. Or at the very least, the Lucent Brood.

Of course, the Vanguard would not be thrilled by this development, but wouldn't oppose her, as Eris would still be on our side. I feel like this would lead into the final season before The Final Shape in some form or fashion. I feel like either Savathun will divulge what we want to know out of fear of being killed for good, or Eris will kill her and we will have to go a different route.

This is all speculation and theory, of course. I could be completely off the mark, but I find it really hard to believe that Eris will be able to keep herself from enacting final vengeance upon Savathun somehow.

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #savathûn #savathun #the witch queen #season of the witch #the final shape #eris morn #ikora rey #ikora #commander zavala #zavala #the hive #oryx #the taken king #xivu arath #aiat #Lightfall

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tech-stomper · 8 months

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In The Great Words Of Eris Morn Hive God Of Vengeance GET OVER HERE!! or was that someone else? #Destiny2AOTW

#destiny 2 #destiny 2 art #destiny art #destiny the game

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scourgediva · 8 months

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I keep thinking about a Reddit post I saw about how Eris being the god of vengeance inherently causes a stalemate between us and Xivu and shows the flaw in sword logic. We learned that Xivu wants to fight Eris to avenge her siblings, however that would empower eris, being the god of vengeance and all. Similarly, if eris fights back against Xivu, xivu will get stronger and then use that strength to fight Eris in the name of vengeance and we've created a loop in which no one "wins" unless xivu forfeits sword logic. Hell, vengeance itself goes against sword logic as Savathun explained to Xivu over Oryx's death. If someone dies then it was deserved because they weren't strong enough to survive. Even sword logic disproves sword logic if we look at the books of sorrow.

I love the hive

#destiny 2 #i love the hive #aiat #going feral over destiny lore again

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lizzieraindrops · 1 month

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Liminal - Chapter 2 (2034 words)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

Ikora is terrified of losing Eris now that she has become the Hive god of vengeance. The long tension between them has finally been driven to breaking point. Can the two of them reconcile their conflicts and misunderstandings before it might be too late?

Some good old-fashioned monster-loving.

Eris transforms.

Eris stands indomitable in the center of her spell circle, catching her breath as her body attunes to the pulse of ichor and soulfire rather than blood.

She does not turn around. The tatters of her Hunter leathers hang about her waist, girding her full-body chitin plate armor like a Hive Wizard's careless robes.

Ikora steps closer behind her. Boots sound against the stone-flagged floor like a sonar signal. Slow and deliberate, she approaches Eris' broad, spined back.

Hands close on Eris' upper arms from behind in a grip that is firm but not rigid. Eris rumbles in surprise and goes stock-still. She hadn't known Ikora's arms could reach hers, not without impaling herself upon the massive spines that have sprouted from her back and shoulders like raised hackles. Slowly, Eris relaxes somewhat into the touch. Those human hands are ungloved; she can tell by their flush, static friction against the roughness of chitin. Through Eris' modulated sense of touch through her exoskeletal plates, those hands feel different, their pressure spread more lightly but more broadly across the subsurface of her body.

The two of them stand there like a diorama within the ring of columns, unmoving except for their breath.

Stealing a quick glance over one shoulder, Eris catches a startling glimpse of Ikora's face among the forest of spines. Her eyes are closed, her head bowed. Smooth, elegant features have tautened into an expression of deep worry. Her mouth has fallen slightly open, yet her breathing is very shallow.

Eris averts her eyes before Ikora's can open, feeling like she has seen something she shouldn't. She has never seen emotion that extreme writ across Ikora's face before.

In the center of the Athenaeum, their soundlessness is wreathed by the quiet-whispering flames of Eris' spell drawn into the stone-paved floor.

"Eris..." Ikora murmurs.

"Yes?"

But that is the only word Ikora says. "Eris," she says again. "Eris." Her name is a beautiful ache in her mouth. It makes the woman who bears it both uneasy and touched.

"What? What is it, Ikora?" The layers of her new voice tend toward restless dissonance.

Another repetition is her only answer, this time approaching a muted, pained whine. It alarms Eris enough that she lays a rough palm over one of the hands on her arms, then unlatches the other so that she can turn to face Ikora in her morph at last.

The silent tears streaming down Ikora's brown cheeks shock Eris to her core. She takes Ikora's hand between both of her own and weaves her claws carefully around it in a protective net of living chitin.

"Ikora, what is wrong?! Why are you saying my name like that?"

"I am afraid, Eris." Her voice is wet, broken gravel scraping over the raw muscle of Eris' heart. Eris drops her hand with a stab of hurt which is instantly overridden by a wave of complete confusion as Ikora seizes her face with both hands, bare skin against her carapace. Eris stares back into those deep amber-brown eyes, speechless.

"I—I," Ikora says as if choking on the prospect of her own perspective. She takes a deep, ragged breath before letting the words out in a sprawl of agony sharpened by her own reluctance. "I need you, Eris,” Ikora scrapes out as if her throat is bleeding. “And I don't know if you're coming back this time. How many more times can you survive certain death?" Unable to hold Eris' aghast stare, she hangs her head. Her body tremors like a tree in a quake, steadfast yet shaking. Her hands fall helpless from her face to the upper edge of Eris' chestplate where her collarbones have fused into it.

The depth of Ikora's raw pain horrifies Eris. She cautiously circles her armored arms around the shaking form, gentle and then fierce as Ikora throws both arms around her neck and sobs with an ugly sound. Eris bends over as she holds her, as much because her morph is taller than Ikora as to bring her under the shelter of the Harbinger's immense shoulder crests. That great forest of spears points backward and skyward in defiance of any tormented past or presumptive higher power. She barely notices the rumble that emanates from her own chest, half protective and dangerous, half solicitous and soothing.

Their sounds soften as the storm blows over. Ikora's arms slacken in the just-wide-enough space between Eris' neck and the first angular spikes that spring from her shoulders. Sorrowful echoes fade, glancing more quietly off of each green-gilded pillar of the pavilion until they vanish into the throne world's haze-shawled, burning sky.

Eventually, Eris kneels in the center of the Athenaeum holding Ikora's drooping shape against her chest, bearing most of her weight. The claws of one hand dance lightly over Ikora's scalp with soft scratches. Various small creatures chirrup and buzz and rustle in the quiet patches of marsh outside the gazebo. Through it all, that vibrating thrum in Eris' chest never falters, only softens into a more comforting timbre.

Eris will stay here as long as is needed, as long as it takes for the strongest person she knows to be able to stand again.

With a brief articulated gesture of one hand, Eris collapses the glittering portal to the HELM. They need no interruption. Ikora needs her—needs Eris, for once. When she returns to caressing Ikora's head, she leans into the touch.

"Are you well?" Eris says in a rattling whisper.

Ikora's eyes open. "Don't let go," she answers.

Eris chuckles like boulders crashing underwater. She strokes the back of one claw down the side of Ikora's face, making her eyelids flutter. In this form, somehow, some unseen, unspoken wall between them has crumbled and fallen away. "You seek strange comfort. Many fled from merely the sight of my eyes years ago, much less this."

"I never did."

Eris hums a deep harmony. "No. You didn't.” Ikora has never been anything but kind to her even at her remarkably terrible worst self, and her gratitude for that is boundless. So are the depths of her affection, even if she does not act on it, and has never planned to.

In thanks, she bends to touch the crest of her brow to Ikora's forehead. That's all. But when she tries to lift her head away, fingers catch at the ridges behind her jaws. She cannot draw more than a hand's span away without wresting herself loose. She does not want to do so. Ikora's nearness is a balm, one she has never permitted herself to seek. So she gazes back at her in contentment and waits to see what she will do.

Something changes in the bearing of Ikora's supine frame within the unfamiliar cradle of her arms. Her movements become both more tentative and more purposeful. Exploring her craggy face with deft fingertips, Ikora traces the line of her chin, the pitted hollows that pock her cheeks, the bony ridge that surrounds and shelters all three eyes. Ikora's two search every feature with a golden brown gaze as darkly brilliant as sunlight struggling to seep through summer honey. Something that Eris has never seen before floats up through the depths of that gaze as if from an abandoned well. She wants to understand what it is, needs to know with a consuming hunger akin to the exponential voracity of the knife-void that has split open wide within her, clamoring to devour the entire Hive for her divinity.

Those captivating eyes dip toward her shielded mouth more than once. If not for the protective plate covering it, it almost seems as if Ikora would–

Fingers skirt the marge of Eris' mouthplate; then lips brush, once, twice. Eris trills in surprise. Both sensations are strange, yet not unpleasant.

"Ik—what are you...?"

Her fingers run along the seams of the plates of Eris' face and neck, where chitin gives way to toughened connective membrane that yields slightly to the touch. Below those thin bands, the nerves are not shielded by rigid armor. The sustained contact gives Eris chills that make her spines bristle like windswept trees.

"Trying to understand all of you," Ikora says. "Should I stop?"

"...No, but—"

"Then let me. Please." She braces one hand on the flat plate of Eris' chest and weaves the other among the jagged spikes on one shoulder like a curious serpent. She examines each one from multiple angles with both touch and sight, dedicating her every attention to the cartography of Eris' utterly inhuman body like—like—

Even in her most idle, unrealistic fantasy, Eris could scarcely imagine Ikora ever touching her like this, even were she still human. How can she do so now? With greater caution than she would approach the maw of the Hellmouth, Eris eases one palm onto Ikora's hip, slowly wraps her fingers around. Including the talons, her hand circles half of her entire waist. Ikora doesn’t retreat.

"What...why?" Eris asks, but she cares about the answers less and less every moment.

"Eris," Ikora says again, damn her. The rampant want and pain in her voice rends Eris from the inside out like a blade of bittersweet tithe.

An involuntary growl rips out of Eris as Ikora scrapes her nails against the grain of the fine ridges across her chestplate. Although less sensitive than the seams, there are far more tactile receptors beneath each plate, and any pressure activates all of them in tandem. The rattling scrape, multiply so. The combination of the unexpected feeling and their current close situation is nothing short of intoxicating.

Ikora's eyes go wide with surprise, then narrow with a satisfaction approaching smugness. That won't do.

"I-chorr-ahh," Eris says in her deepest growl. She plants both hands firmly on Ikora's shoulders. Her eyes fly open wide again, accompanied by her blown pupils. Eris presses the tips of her claws into Ikora's flesh—not hard enough to puncture skin, but enough to make her freeze. "Are you certain you want what you are asking for?"

In a subtle yet sublime implosion of effortless Void Light, Ikora surges forward and pins her acolyte morph to the floor, bent back over the spikes of its crest in the center of her own spell circle. The mouthplate drops away from the hidden jaw in an appreciative, terrifying grin.

"What I want is Eris Morn. Are you not her?" Ikora retorts. A drop of blood seeps into her pristine robe beneath the indent made by Eris' thumbclaw. With every striving sinew of her Light-suffused body, she challenges the being before her to deny it, challenges herself to doubt it. She is incandescent, powerful, passionate. Beautiful.

Like a whisper from a crypt, a deep chuckle ascends from Eris' throat. It grows louder and redoubles upon itself until she is but the chamber for a choir of pleased humor.

"I am."

The look in Ikora's eyes is both tenacious and tender. And it is completely, entirely for her, as she is.

In a sudden contraction of movement, Eris reverses their positions and fully looms over Ikora. She runs the point of one claw along the entire length of her soft, strong body. They both shiver.

With a casual hand, Eris waves a new portal open, one that leads directly to the private quarters set aside for her in the HELM.

Despite the fact that this netherworld's queen is currently dead, Eris begrudges her every iota of joy she has found in this last life of hers, and she will not share it with her throne of memory. Besides, Ikora deserves better than this accursed place. Eris' morph will last for a little while, outside of the spell circle. Long enough for the way Ikora clutches at the chitin of her shoulder crests, making the muscles attached beneath them strain with sweet pleasure.

With an earthen croon, Eris gathers Ikora up into her arms as carefully as if she were made of orchid petals the color of her robes. Then she sweeps them both away to somewhere more sheltered from prying eyes. The portal winks out in a glimmer of green sparks behind her.

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synnthamonsugar · 4 months

Note

for the kiss prompts, how about "for comfort" for Eris/Toland? :3

Author's note: Oh my. This spiraled out of control a bit. I had three ideas I liked, and spent a lot of time trying to decide which ... and decided to go with all of them. :] Warning for lore-appropriate Eris and Toland grimness.

A hunter and warlock strolled the cratered plains of Mare Imbrium, their gloved hands close enough to touch.

“The ancients thought this the site of lost and tormented souls,” Toland remarked. “The Shrine of Hecate, in their language. The triple-faced goddess of boundaries, crossroads. Magics and their counters. May she be our patron on the journey below.”

“I heard it was formed in cataclysm,” Eris countered, “An impact that shattered the crust, forever reshaping the moon. We walk on its healed wounds.”

“Reopened now,” Toland gestured at the Hellmouth. From their vantage, it was a cut on the horizon, ringed in scaffolds of hive architecture, wafting dust cast in soulfire-green light. The infernal flame of the pit. “The spirits are restless, straining at the walls of their prison. We shall stop them, or join them."

“This is a long way to walk to talk trivia,” Eris needled. He huffed a brusque, low laugh under his breath. “I do not believe Omar would be so irritated by our discussion of gods and ghosts and disaster that we could not have it back at camp. Sai or Vell might even like it.”

He reached for her hand, lacing his fingers between hers, worrying at the joint of her pinky with his thumb. There was an unspoken rule among fireteams for members to not show preferential treatment toward any individual. Too dangerous for group cohesion to atomize down into pairs or trios or any other division when the only way to survive is to work as a single unit. Eriana didn’t have to tell them because such knowledge was implicit.

Eris and Toland knew. They also knew that she knew they broke their promise — if only by inference. There was no way she couldn’t have, not when they were stalking away like foolish young sweethearts fumbling for a place to express their passion on the eve of the raid.

She slid her free hand to his jaw, traced her fingers against the scars on his face, the contour of his cheek. Settling somewhere along the hairline at the back of his neck. They studied each other for a moment, his face tireder than she was used to seeing, hers brilliant with determination. She was about to lean in for a kiss when he interrupted —

“Promise me you’ll get out.”

“Come again?”

“If we cannot kill the Prince, you'll abandon the mission.”

“We all will.”

He looked askance. “Vell and Omar are occupied with heroics. Sai, proving her skill. Not even death will stop Eriana. She would sooner become a wraith scratching at the doors of Crota’s throne as her chassis oxidizes away than relinquish vengeance for Wei. Do not abandon yourself to folly as they would.”

Eris’ hand found its way to Toland’s throat, the ridges of his windpipe and tendons of his neck familiar to her grasp. “Justice is not folly.”

“Dying for it is.”

Though she wasn’t pressing hard enough to hurt, barely pressing at all, his voice was thin and cracked. She had dallied in enough of his thanatonautic experiments to recognize fear in his voice, even if his expression hardly wavered from its usual world-weary mien.

She knew, too, how to stop his tongue and silence his thoughts, lifting to the ball of her feet to press her lips against his, in a soft, almost chaste kiss.

“And what will you do, Toland?"

"Not join the ranks of the trapped souls."

. . .

As he followed the trail of hive magic to its source, he was still determined not to.

Toland had read, once, of the ways sight adjusted to total lack of light, how the brain, guided by an internal sense of where the body should be, could regurgitate pictures to the optic nerve where none existed. Guren lay cold and broken as the victims of his namesake and he himself hemorrhaged Light; the darkness and the false-images of his hands before him had both become familiar.

Eris too was a projection on the void, his brain filling in a gap where he expected her— until she collided into him, a jittery, panicked scramble for his arms that threw him off balance. Not total darkness, he realized as the shock subsided and he was better able to resolve his surroundings, making out a cluster of crystals and the hive moths swarming in their dim amber glow. He'd last seen Eris … he didn't know when, without external clues or Guren to keep time for him. But she had been with Omar then, and he knew Omar would not have split off on his volition.

He thought about asking but stopped himself. Pressed his face to the crown of Eris' head instead.

"Moths were regarded as the souls of the dead in old earth superstition."

"What—?" She paused, thrown for a loop by the statement. "We have to leave—"

"You have to leave — take her with you if you can, but don't waste time finding her, absolutely don't let her drag you further— no, don't give me that look."

"Where are you —" He untied his bond, and reached for her arm in the dark. "Toland, what are you doing?"

He set to cinching the bond around her armored biceps. "With this, the hive will believe you’re one of theirs. That is the only way."

"I'm not leaving you without a bond. It isn't right … here." She unclasped one of the bangles that decorated her vambrace, one of the remaining ones at least, and wrapped it around his gaunt arm. Her touch lingered there, as did his hand on her shoulder. The misplaced significance of the gesture didn't escape either. The exchange of bonds, a marriage rite between warlocks, twisted into . . . whatever this was. A last ditch effort for survival. For dignity.

"I'm afraid."

"I believe in you."

"You’re a madman. You'll believe anything," she prodded, a bleak note of humor beneath the exhaustion.

"But not anyone. You're the best of any of us, Eris. Never forget that."

Toland leaned in, experimentally, forehead-to-forehead with Eris, and she pressed back, hands braced against the lapels of his robe. Grazing fingertips below her chin, he tilted her face upward. Their eyes met for a second in the low light, before their mouths joined in a desperate kiss, teeth against lips, almost biting at each other. The taste of copper mingled with salt and dust on their tongues.

When they finally parted, Eris asked again: "Where are you going?"

"Where I belong. Just like you."

. . .

Eris can tell she's close, from the fissures in the high cavern ceilings that let down earthshine in thin streams that burn her stolen eyes. She isn't sure how long she’s been lost, but with indication of the surface awareness of time’s passage slowly returns. A sense of being grounded in reality, something that had been tenuous, at the best moments, in the labyrinthine, pitch-black tunnels of the deeper warrens.

Still, she sees things with her hive transplants. No longer is she plagued by the false-image of limbs in total darkness or her brain projecting pictures from sound, but something else. She finds that she can look through, beyond, in ways barely describable in human terms. She wonders if she’s peering into the Ascendant Plane through the veil of reality. Pores over Toland’s old journals and doesn’t find an answer.

(What if she had seen in such ways before the raid —? She pushes down the thought as it develops.)

Sometimes, she thinks he’s still with her.

She heard him, once, after she cut the eyes from the acolyte and herself . . . in the hellish, disoriented moments when she finally awoke from shock, she remembers him brushing against her forehead, against her lips, telling her she did well, that she was strong, to keep going. In her delirium she had felt overcome by love, reached out for him and found nothing. A hallucination, she reassured herself later. It made her irrationally embarrassed he was the one her brain conjured to comfort her as she writhe in the mud.

Other times she thought she heard him like a signal through the noise of an untuned radio, accompanied by a flicker of light that never lasted long enough to focus on.

She is closer than she’s ever been. The bowels of the Hellmouth, meandering and claustrophobic, provided so many routes to travel undetected that she rarely ran into her tormentors. (Only when she was unfortunate, or needed to eat.) Not so in the upper levels, where the corridors converged into large central arteries, patrolled and densely-populated. The way is clear in her mind’s eye, but fraught with danger at every step.

Above the cacophonous din of the hive, she hears her name spoken. In the shadows, she sees the flame.

It — he? — does not extinguish as she draws close.

“Toland?”

The flame burns brighter, dancing gently like the light cast from a lantern. There is no form with which to convey body language, but she cannot help but read warmth into the gesture.

“I told you … you are the best of us.”

He streaks away, illuminating the passage.

#destiny #destiny 2 #eris morn #toland the shattered #eris/toland #synnth fic

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