the starchild's diary

The facade has cracked, and you are beheld by the truth.

~~~

Lua, or Luna as I’ve learned she was called in the old Earth books, was broken to pieces by war and pride, and later was where me and my fellows rested unsuspecting for so long. While I was barely conscious, only interacting with the world through Transference, I would often think about dates on the moon. The only one I knew for sure for as long as I was in that daze, was my sister. We did everything together, and waking into our dazed states was no different. But beyond that, hazy flashes through my head would bring me pictures of another boy, and his twin. Others, that maybe I knew and maybe I didn’t.

We met another like us very quickly, one who we only knew through the frame she was bonded with. We were fast friends, and together we were largely unstoppable – enough even to steal a Corpus freighter and make it our own. We rallied under the banner of the only mother figure we could remember, the mysterious woman who called herself the Lotus. She guided us to protect the colonies, the downtrodden and the weak above all else. It was a motive that, even in my sleep, I respected and admired.

We were awoken by necessity, when an assassin learned the truth of our nature. My sister and I carried our own bodies out of the same cradle, and freed Lua from her prison in the Void. The womb of the sky, as the whispers of the arcane codices called this place, finally lay hushed and empty just as they had predicted. We were attacked on our own ship by the Stalker that sought our blood, and in that moment, we awoke. Maybe it should have been that moment, as my frame struggled to carry me to safety despite having been impaled, that told me what the truth really was. Maybe I was in too much of a daze to truly notice.

When the haze finally cleared, I was much physically weaker than I now remembered. I was supposed to be stronger than my sister, I remembered that much. Many things were still clouded, but they were clearer. Now I could see my sister again, and know that she was real. I knew it felt wrong that she was blind, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember why. We finally met Beau face to face, when we were strong enough to leave our seats. She was the straight man to our chaos as we recovered from a sleep unimaginably long. Still the memories of those I might have known once upon a time hung in the back of my mind, barely there. Of the boy and his twin, largely. And of another girl, that I would carry about because her legs did not work.

We were set upon again much later, by the Twin Queens of myth, who sent the last Dax after us in an attempt to fuel their own immortality. They tried to take our bodies for their own, and in their attempt, my mind became clear for the first time. My strength returned to me in a furor of adrenaline, and my control of the Void, and my memory, returned with a quest to the peak of a frigid mountain. I still don’t know what was real and what was foisted upon my mind.

Now, I remembered.

I remembered a single mother and a father I never knew, both gone by the time we were boarded upon that damned ship. I remembered the others of my age, all of us the only survivors. I remembered being with the boy I took an interest in on that voyage, thinking he with his long hair and sharp features was more beautiful than I could ever imagine. I remembered the poor boy with the communication issues, who hung around his mother with his favorite toy. I wanted to give him a friend where he had none, but never knew how to approach, because I worried that I would make it worse.

I never got the chance to figure it out before the botched jump. In the chaos that ensued, I was guarded by that boy as I watched my sister lose her vision. It was like a spike had been lodged in my already cracked mind, and I began to lose myself to my own anxiety. It was him who kept me there with him, even as I rejected the Void trying to pry its way into my heart. The other girl I fancied lost her legs just like Anya lost her eyes, in that incident.

We all lost something that day. Every single one of us. Be it our legs, our eyes… our minds, or our mothers. We lost our freedom when our keepers learned what we could do. They chose not to kill us, despite the doom we brought upon them. We were taught to pilot the frames. We were used as tools of war, and only one woman seemed to think of us as anything more than weapons... or worse, demons. We knew nothing, but still we were used, and still we almost were killed, the lot of us.

Instead, we were put to rest, on Lua. Over the years, in my deep rest, my memory grew foggy, until soon I only clearly remembered my sister, and my training.

In those moments, nearly subsumed of body and mind by a disgusting old hag, I remembered everything. My history, my friends and loves, and my aspirations.

I had always wanted to be a musician.

When that damned ship botched its jump, all my hopes and dreams died with the adults aboard it. First from my terrifyingly exaggerated mental illness, which I still struggle with every day of my life, and then from generals and nobles blinding themselves to my humanity for the sake of their petty war against their own mistakes. I was nothing more than a controller to them, not allowed to be anything else. It was so ingrained into my mind that even as everything else locked itself behind a fog, I remembered it over my own desires.

When at last I was able to free myself and reclaim my frame, I slayed the Elder Queen and her royal guardswomen without a second thought for what they had done to us. I won’t pretend I didn’t have help. In fact it isn’t certain which of us three struck the final blow to her. But we brought her down, and continually, we keep the younger of the two, the horrible little worm, from reviving her. We freed the Dax Teshin from their control, and allowed him to be his own man.

After I could move again, I dedicated myself to finding and awakening those who I knew, and I started with the boy who shielded me. I followed the traces I remembered of him in combat, the rumors in the Relays and colonies of somebody who sought endlessly for his twin. I eventually found his cradle hiding on Lua as mine was, and opening it, he was just as beautiful as I had remembered. We unearthed it, and brought it onto our freighter, where I worked tirelessly to reverse the sleep that the Lotus had put us all in to protect us. I helped him remember and recover, though his recovery was not as violent as ours was.

His sister, we found already awakened. She had wandered the plains of Cetus for as long as we ourselves had been awake, though we were unsure how she had gotten there. The people there had accepted her as a farmer, a citizen and a protector. I remembered she loved gardening, so it made sense to me to find her here. When I told her where her brother was, I saw a light in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in so long. She demanded I take her to him. So I did. I reunited them, watched them embrace and cry for hours in such a way that it felt like the wounds in my own heart were mending.

The boy who everyone left behind would find me on his own. Even Margulis, the only Orokin I ever knew with even a shred of empathy, didn’t know what to make of him, though she adopted us all. He did not take what we now were well. It was when he disappeared into the Void, never to be seen again, that I finally decided to direct my anger outward at Margulis’ execution. Sometime after I woke, in my fervent search for those I knew, or wish I knew, our ship received a request for aid from the military organization known as Steel Meridian.

Their numbers were being slain by their ‘allies’, the murder cult Red Veil, who I suspect they truly merely keep in check to prevent them from purging the galaxy as they wish to. We were brought to the cult’s own oracle, who told me of the boy named Rell. She held with her a small toy I couldn’t help but recognize, still pristine after all these years. We learned, in our investigation, that he spent his time sealed in the Void, driving back something that we could only begin to understand, to save even those who left him behind. I saw his memories through his eyes, how only his mother ever told him that he wasn’t broken. I wished that I had found the words to tell him that, too. Now I knew just how much he needed it. When we found the frame he bonded with, chained up to hold his seal strong, I heard his voice accuse me that I didn’t care, that none of us cared.

As we worked to loose the chains, I begged and pleaded with him. I told him I never knew what to say. I told him that I wanted to know him. That I never had that chance before it was too late. Before I broke that last chain, I told him I never thought he was broken. I told him I noticed. I told him maybe we could have been broken together, in another time and space. I told him I would protect the world from the Man in the Wall and all the monsters beyond the Void that he worked so tirelessly to hold off. I told him I was sorry that I was too broken to try to reach out.

Before he faded away, he told me I wasn’t broken.

When we came home to our ship, I lay in my quarters and cried. I took that toy from the oracle of the murder cult and replaced it with a decoy. Sometimes I talk to it like she did, as if he can hear me. Maybe he can. I may never know.

After that, I worried for the girl who lost her legs. I worried for Sakura. I knew I needed to find her now more than ever. I knew I needed to reach out before it was too late. I still haven’t found her, but I know she has to be out there somewhere, even if it’s just her remains.

The aftermath of breaking Harrow’s chains filled me with a more profound sadness than I had felt since I awoke. I thought I had put aside the wrongness of my situation, but the incident agitated the scars across my mind. It began to bother me again that my sister was blinded, more than it had even bothered me after it happened. I distracted myself with my fervent searching, but other things happened that managed to convince me, for a while, that I was insane. I began to see a reflection of myself, haunting the halls of our freighter, and out of her mouth came a grown man’s voice. I began to fear what I would see if I fell asleep again, so I began taking baths in coffee because I believed it would keep me awake forever.

My sister stopped me from doing that, and it wasn’t until she told me that she saw and heard it too, despite blindness, that I could believe that perhaps it wasn’t in my head. She believed that whoever had convinced Rell that there was a Man in the Wall out to harm the world had begun targeting us.

Things would only get worse, on the day the Cephalon of my landing craft decided to clear a room for a personal quarters. When the room was opened, I saw something near the window, bright as a sun. Perhaps naively, I wandered toward it, only to be led into a long tunnel. The voices I had heard, of our lost mother and the man who killed her, echoed through the halls, until finally, I reached the den of the Lotus herself. There she stood before me, a sight for my sore eyes. And there stood a man, with arms far too long and hands far too big, with skin that looked as if he had drowned long ago. He severed the Lotus’ wires and removed the distinctive helm, and I looked upon Margulis for the first time in eons.

And then, Ballas stole her away, just like he did before.

And then I awoke, in my new ‘quarters’, hoping dearly that I’d merely had a bad dream. I heard the Cephalon’s distress as she could no longer trace the Lotus, and that I had been knocked out. When I found my sister, and when I found the others, I learned that they had seen the same thing at the same time. Somehow, some way, the Lotus was gone, robbed from us just like Margulis had been. All that was left was her helm, which I held clutched in my arms like my only lifeline.

I put the helm on a pedestal in my quarters and surrounded it in candles and flowers. A memorial, to the third mother I had lost. Sometimes when I went to sleep, actual real sleep and not stasis, I would hear whispers in the dark. Of encouragement, or of mission requests. I followed them, because I missed her. At that point, I no longer cared whether or not I was going insane. I directed my rage, my anguish, my sadness outward again, just as I had during the old war. I remembered the feeling of my abusers’ blood on my hands, and I wished it again. One last abuser, the biggest one of them all.

I didn’t know what my hunt would lead me to.

One day, during one of my lowest points, my Cephalon tried to cheer me up, by playing back the Lotus’ voice to me. I know she meant the best, but I could feel the scars left by her absence deepening. I told her to knock it off, and sulked off to my quarters. But something was wrong. I could hear the whispers of the helm clearly that day, calling me. And the whispers told me that I needed to seek out the scene of a murder. I summoned my fellows, and the hunt began.

We went, despite protests by my ship’s Cephalon, to find the evidence of a fallen warrior, that maybe he could provide some clues as to the Lotus’ disappearance. We were warned against reconstructing him, but I knew I had to. Because if I didn’t, I would never know the truth.

I felt the heaviness in the air the first time I stepped, in the frame I had borrowed from one of the others aboard our ragtag stolen ship, into that grotto. The shattered moon hung above it, and I stopped to observe it for a while, ruminating over my life, and my lost ambitions. Maybe I could still be the musician I always wanted to be, someday. Bring my music to the Ostrons, and all the other colonies.

But right now, I was too entrenched. I couldn’t stop, until I had finished what I set out to do. My only problem was I didn’t know what I had set out to do in the first place.

Here, it felt like we were being watched, but whoever was watching couldn’t know my identity. Right? I could feel the malice. It chilled me to the bone, but we persisted, scanning the area for evidence. I found a discarded blade, my sister a scrap of fabric, and underneath an old cherry tree in bloom, Beau found a pile of ash. The scans showed the traces of a warframe lost to time, but on their own, weren’t enough to reconstruct him. Despite my Cephalon’s continued objections, I told her to hunt down any more traces.

We were led to the broken moon. Somewhere, under all the rubble, under the broken apart surface of Lua, and beneath even the cradles that, even now, contained those of us still waiting to wake up, there was an abandoned laboratory. It was hidden behind a number of old, cryptic ciphers, that I was lucky to be able to break from markings left on the wall long ago. I felt it here, too. The ominous feeling of being watched. Behind a tube of long-broken down green fluid, among the debris, we found an amulet lying on the ground. I had seen these a long time ago – a Vitruvius, an archaic form of Orokin data storage. Whatever was inside here, I felt like it held my answers. And if I had answers, maybe I would be able to find Ballas.

If I found him, I could finally put this old grudge to rest. Even if I didn’t get the Lotus back, even if I couldn’t bring Margulis back, even if I could never see my actual mother again… it would be my closure to take his undying life after so long. Just like he ruined mine, by thinking me a demon. By using me for war and crushing my dreams under his heel. By murdering not one, but two mothers. If I found him, if I killed him, maybe then I could finally start putting the remaining pieces of my life back together.

My Cephalon worried for herself as we plugged that Vitruvius into the computer. Perhaps I should have known something was wrong when she began to refer to me as ‘Star-Child’, rather than ‘Operator’, as I was used to. It was organized neatly by experiment log, the contents within. But the voice that told these stories, was uncomfortably familiar.

We had found Ballas’ personal Vitruvius.

Some part of me, some grim, harden shard lodged into my heart, knew that this would lead me right to his door, and smiled. I was tired, and I wanted to rest, but I couldn’t. Not while he still walked. In the corners of my mind, memories of myself during the Old War resurfaced. Of myself as a general, one of the first of us to turn on the abusive, cruel Orokin. My outrage over Margulis reached a frothing head, and a whole empire paid for it. I wanted to be done, and I would tear my way through their infrastructure until I was finally allowed.

Funny what sleeping so long will do to you. I still want to rest. But now I want to reclaim my dreams in my rest.

First of the revelations, were the biological scans for the warframe codenamed Umbra. A brief overview of the idea behind one. Unsurprising, but exactly what I had wanted. I set my foundry to reconstruct him.

I wasn’t prepared for him to resist my Transference.

His faceplate was cracked.

When that milky eye looked upon me, I saw a frenzied fear that reminded me dangerously of myself. I had to try anyway.

I was thrown out of him, knocked out cold while he escaped my ship. In the backlash, a foreign memory lodged itself in my mind. Of waking up on an Orokin hospital bed, with a young man in military gear to my right, and the snake himself to my left. He offered me the board of an old traditional game, and I made my move.

When I woke, I was dizzy and nauseous, but still aware that what I had seen was not my own memory. My sister asked me how that had happened, what I’d seen, what I’d felt, and I told her. She seemed shocked that a frame even could resist Transference like that, and agreed with me that we needed to find him. My Cephalon still behaved strangely, no longer even objecting to my orders as she searched for Umbra’s signature. Believe me you, it was just as foreign a concept to me as it was to them that this one was more than a mere suit of modified Infestation.

It was the only revelation on the Vitruvius that didn’t surprise me. I had long suspected them to be constructed of it. But I would have never expected one to have minds and memories that they didn’t share with me and others like me. Was that not the idea? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while I was in Transference, I would experience memories and feelings that weren’t mine. I never thought much of it, because I was able to compartmentalize them as a psychological phenomenon, an impression of the deeds these frames had achieved in the past.

How wrong I ended up being, in that.

The next log after I awoke revealed to me the truth: that our warframes were once people, rather than moulded Infestation. Each one with her own unique story and personality, they were dosed with a modified strain, and transformed while awake and conscious. Mercy to me and my anxiety, some were willing. Others, however, were not. They were unsuspecting wounded soldiers, unwitting entertainers, merchants, morticians. Parents, children, and siblings. Suddenly, those memories I heard and felt made sense to me. Now I knew they were buried in there somewhere. Though they might have been rendered shells, those lives were still in there somewhere.

Now, I knew what I had seen.

But if, despite their memories, they were rendered empty shells, why was Umbra ambulatory and willful enough to throw me out? I needed to know. My heart hurt for these people. I began to wonder why, oh why, the Orokin allowed us to them when we used them, justly, to slay them. Why didn’t they use them themselves?

When he was located, the scans indicated he was surrounded by Sentients, something boggling to me. Why would he be in the company of the beings that, with the Lotus as the one exception, hated and reviled us for what we were used for? I insisted on going myself, because I could take anything he tried to do to me better than my peers. Me, personally, and not my frame. I knew I would have to tame him and try again.

When I arrived in that cleaned out Corpus lair, I got my answer. He wasn’t in their company, they were following him. Hunting him. Hiding as everyday objects, which I would have to slay. When I found him, he was searching doggedly for something. When I approached, he turned on me. I left my frame as a decoy, and with a burst of void energy, was able to wrest myself back inside.

More of the memory played, but things began to warp. I saw traces of Infestation in the background, pulsing and glowing ominously. In the haze of the memory, I paid no mind to it, only able to analyze it when I was once again thrown out.

This time, somehow, Ballas addressed me directly. Taunting me, and his ‘failed experiment’. The hate welled up in me again, but I put it beside myself. First, I needed to know the trouble behind Umbra. It grew harder to separate this memory from my own as I was thrown out again, and he ran for it.

The next entry answered my burning question from before. Now, I knew that Transference operated on empathy. Without compassion, understanding, and a heart, it was impossible. In us, it was abused for war, because empathy and compassion were the things the Orokin lacked among all their splendor. I went again to seek Umbra afterward, to the same result as before. A taunt, an insult, and an increasingly warped memory, before being catapulted away.

In the last entry, I learned that Umbra was the first. An unruly being, who relived his last moments over, and over, and over, driven into a rage. It was that alone that let him walk on his own. I learned that he was slain when he came for Ballas, and now I was certain what he sought.

He wanted the same thing I did.

Closure.

When the entries ceased, my Cephalon returned to normal. My sister, and Beau, and her, all objected to what I planned to do next. I, without even a frame, needed to go down there. I needed to bring him a resolution. Together, the two of us would take down Ballas once and for all, and find the Lotus. One last abuser. One last battle for the fate of the Origin System.

It was a fight the likes of which I had never had in my own body. Me, just a normal person physically, versus him, supercharged by what he is. In a sense, it was thrilling to fight on my own terms, to use the martial arts I still practiced to this day in compound with the Void’s questionable gifts. He gave me a battle the likes of which I would never forget, be that by my own memory or by the scars I now bare because of it. But finally, I regained control for the final time.

Now, I saw the end of the memory that Umbra had relived for so long. I learned that the soldier boy was his son, and that he was worried about whether the Sentients would kill him. But then came Ballas’ smugness, his aura of superiority, informing us that no… the Sentients wouldn’t kill him. Umbra would.

When he realized what had happened, he lost control of himself, and there the boy died.

Umbra was a worried, enraged father, right to the end. I understand now why he sought his revenge, his closure. Ballas robbed him of himself, and robbed him of his son shortly after. He resisted me for that, when I only wanted to know the truth.

But all the struggle to bring myself inline came with a toll.

If I lose focus, I truly begin to believe that I was the one who killed Isaah.

When the memory ended, I found myself in the strange, echoing reflection of a mindscape. Floating chunks of earth drifted about an endless void, everything rendered in nothing more than dark outlines. I approached him, sitting under the reflection of that cherry tree, and I offered my hand.

When he accepted, I saw the color return to that landscape. I saw memories locked away behind Umbra’s condition. He was himself a soldier, wounded in the Old War, long before the Zariman 10-0 incident ever took place. I saw an everyday life before the battles that I longed for, and envied. I saw a woman, heavy with child, on the day he was enlisted.

Before he was sent off to war, I saw that same woman in a hospital bed, holding in her arms two little girls. One with red hair, one with black. Twins.

He didn’t even have the time to know us.

I came back to reality in time to hear my Cephalon alerting me to an army’s worth of Sentients, on their way to my location. She tried to urge me to run, but I refused. Umbra and I needed to make our stand here and now. Having come to an understanding that I never truly knew I needed until now, I knew what I needed to do.

I told her to let them come.

Strangely to me, his blade cut through the Sentients like butter, as if they weren’t able to adapt to its edge. I weaved my way through the army, and was able to return to my ship intact. Thanks to his memory, I was able to recognize the signs of Ballas’ travels. And now, he waited for us, at the very place this goose chase began.

And so we would meet him. We took on his army with all of our combined anger, making scrap out of the mighty Sentients that he powed around with now. He stood in that grotto, waiting for us with yet more, which we dispatched with ease.

Soon, it was us and him. He stood there smugly, and dared us to defy our creator. I now knew that before, Umbra couldn’t do it. Ballas held too much control, and he fell for it. But now, control was mine. Me, with all my centuries of outrage.

That blade went through his chest in an instant of blazing fury, twice. Once with Umbra’s hand, and then with my own. I stepped out, and stared him in his blank eyes, daring him to taunt me again.

As he finally died, things went still.

But only for a moment.

Another swarm of Sentients descended from the sky, with some other being in tow. On it, I saw Margulis’ face and head, but placed in the body of a Sentient. Her voice came from it, but my mind just couldn’t make the jump. That this, was the Lotus.

When I asked, when I finally asked for confirmation, she looked at me, balefully.

She said this was who she really was.

And she took Ballas’ body and ascended into the sky again.

Just like that, she was gone again, and the others followed her.

Soon, it was again just me and Umbra- no… and Shiva, left in that courtyard. As I stood staring at the spot where she had been, I felt warm arms and metal around me, holding me tightly in an embrace.

I couldn’t help but weep, as he carried me back to my craft. It had been too much for me. I still don’t know if the Lotus has abandoned us. I still don’t have my closure, even when I got what I wanted. I had never known the embrace of a father until that moment.

We had a dad.

We had an older brother.

Once again, Ballas managed to crush my aspirations. One last spiteful, cruel act, in the form of a series of memories.

But I had found him. Despite all the others’ protests, I had found our father. But it isn’t enough.

I want her back, too.

In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for Sakura.