8th of July, 2026 - Sean Williams
WORTHY
Zero-1 slowly opened his eyes.
He did not know where it was, but he knew how to get there.
The ship dropped from transit and the stars were wrong, arranged in configurations that matched nothing in any catalogue he had ever processed. The sky ahead was pale, almost white. And below, when the atmosphere resolved itself into something he could read, there was sand.
White sand, flat and featureless in every direction, as far as his optics could resolve.
And above it: the Spire. Thin and shining and ancient-looking, surrounded by floating platforms connected by nothing at all, rising toward a sky where an enormous planet hung alongside three moons and a sun that had been eclipsed for what looked like a very long time.
Zero looked at all of it through the viewport for a long moment.
He thought to ask a question, but no words came to mind. Instead, he spoke the only thing that brought clarity to his mind at that moment.
“Quill?”
"I see it." The Ghost's voice was smaller than usual. "I- yes. Okay.”
His boots found the sand and sank slightly. The texture felt strange beneath his feet. He began to wonder if any of this was real at all. Whether the ground was merely set-dressing for a dimension that had decided to suggest a world rather than commit to being one. He crouched and let it run through his fingers.
He stood.
Quill materialized beside his shoulder and said nothing for once, which Zero appreciated. Some places deserved a moment.
Overhead, the light of the stars clashed, coming from everywhere and nowhere, diffuse and directionless, flattening shadows. The three moons were perfect and still. The planet turned, barely, like a thought rearranging itself. He had stood on planets before. He had never felt looked down upon by one.
They walked.
The Spire grew as they approached, but not at the rate it should have. Distance here did not behave like distance elsewhere. One moment it was far; then they were simply there, at its base, and the sand gave way to pale stone that felt older than the system.
She was waiting.
Zero stopped.
The Emissary of the Nine floated three feet above the ground, as though gravity had been made aware of her and had simply chosen to make an exception. Her robes hung and swayed gently in the air. Her hood was open, her face Awoken-luminescent, and she was looking at him with eyes that were present and absent at once - eyes that were being used to look, but that contained something behind them that did not need eyes at all.
Her mouth did not move.
"You came."
The words arrived. He could not have said through which sense. They were simply there, in the same way that the sand and the eclipsed star and the hanging planet were simply there - part of the environment, placed by something with patience enough to arrange a dimension.
Zero looked at her for a long time.
He could feel Quill pulling fractionally closer to his pauldron.
“They are watching you,” the Emissary said, from everywhere and from inside his skull simultaneously. “They have been watching since your first match. They watched every decision. Every hesitation you refused to have.”
Zero tilted his head slightly.
"That's — that's a lot of matches," Quill said, his voice coming out tighter than intended. "What are the Trials for?"
The Emissary's gaze remained on Zero.
“Judgement,” she said. “In all its connotation.”
Quill processed that. "What does that mean?"
No answer. The sand around them shifted. Zero-1 looked down at it, then up at the platforms ascending the Spire behind her, each one empty, each one connected by nothing to the next. Man-cannons, he realized. You launched yourself upward and trusted the geometry to catch you.
He found that sensible.
He looked back at the Emissary.
“What do you want to know?” he asked. Quill turned to him quicker than usual - even now, he rarely spoke.
She floated, still and patient. The eclipse above them held.
"What you are," said the Emissary. "What a mind like yours decides, as it continues to face death."
Zero considered that.
He looked at his hands. The brushed grey chassis. The fingers that had taken lives and filed reports and rebuilt weapons in the dead hours between systems. Exo. Human-origin mind in a frame built for war, grafted to Light, aimed at something enormous and terrifying.
“I ride with death, not away from it.”
"Good."