cinders

She wondered where to go now.

This wasn’t the System, and there was dead air on her communication channels, every single one of them. It was her, alone, in an abandoned, overgrown building. For lack of anything to do, she took a seat on the platform in the middle of the stone room with the pushable slabs. She didn’t even know why this was here. What was any of this? How was a whole book, a whole apparently-magical book, still intact after millenia?

Chandra shook her head out, and noticed that she was approximately three feet higher off the ground than when she had sat down, and that she was steadily rising into a hole in the ceiling. There were no elevation devices anywhere near this thing, no cords and pulleys, no tracks, nothing. Electromagnetism, that must be what it is. But that seemed way too advanced for a place like this.

The platform eventually came to a stop in a wide room. She found herself in the center of a small, lowered pavilion, surrounded by four archaic torches, each a different color. The ground was covered in soot and footprints – somebody had been here before, and recently. This place had been on fire before, but had long since grown over, seemingly in the shape of the original structure, with trees and vines and plants.

It was hauntingly quiet here. If someone had been here, they weren’t here now. This place looked nothing like anything she was familiar with. No metal, no synthetics. No… meat walls (god why). Just stone and plants, and wood. She had never seen wood extensively used in architecture before, not over metal and compounds. Anything that would have used it was gone alongside Ancient Earth.

She pulled herself up onto a ledge and proceeded through a door, finding herself at what must be the exit. The light hurt her eyes after so long used to the dark of space, but she went toward it anyway.

She found herself standing in the middle of an old-growth forest. It was the same kind that had overtaken most of Earth in an effort to reverse all the terrible damage that had been done to the home of mankind, but there wasn’t any evidence in sight of steel remains or military bases. The only thing for as far as she could see inside, was trees and foliage.

She wasn’t in the Origin System anymore at all, was she?

All she could do was go forward.

Was this what the system of Tau looked like? The home of the Sentients… she would have figured it to be far more alien than this. More hostile to human life. She didn’t expect trees and greenery and the calls of animals. Why would Tau have archaic things like books then? Beings like Sentients should surely have no need.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard the running of water, not unlike a river. So far, this place was very Earth-like, but she knew it couldn’t have been. There was not a single place that hadn’t been ruined before the work of Margulis.

It was a while of walking before she reached a collection of tents and fallen logs, gathered around a circle of stones. She did recognize this from Plains stalking, it was a primitive campsite and campfire. Used by the Ostrons and their antagonists alike to get sleep when it counted. But this campsite was out in the open, not tucked away in places Eidolons couldn’t reach. She wasn’t used to walking this long without breaking to stalk Vomvalysts, or to search a camp, or to transfer back into her frame, so sitting here would have to do.

Now that she looked around, this camp site looked kind of plain.

The children of the Zariman, after waking again so long in the future, developed a sort of culture centered around fashion and style. It was a coping method, to be sure, but a good one to look at. Chandra was no different, and her itch to decorate was irresistible. She started with some flowers along the ground, used them to outline the tents and their poles. Took some discarded bottles in a bin and some candles, used her void beams to cut and melt the glass, and used vines to hang the new holders from the trees, turning garbage into stunning light sources, at least from her eye.

Any little odds and ends she could get her hands on that looked nice became putty with which to shape a nice, pleasing-looking campsite. She wondered, if this place wasn’t owned by hostiles, who would set something up like this and not at least decorate it. She supposed it must belong to colonists. In that case, they wouldn’t be opposed to her staying here until Ordis found her again.

When she was finished, she sat again. She let the metal crawl over her skin again, became Ember so she could light a fire. If she sat here in warframe form, a colonist would know what she was, and she would be able to defend herself if hostiles came around. Even without guns and weapons, she still had her powers.

She wondered how she was able to outright transform. It was the only way to explain it, she knew what Transference felt like and this wasn’t it.

Unable to come up with an answer, she looked around the campsite some more. It certainly looked well-loved, even underneath the decorating she had done. There were carvings on the trees in that same language that she couldn’t read. A metal folding chair rested against a tree stump…

… a tree stump that had a sword stuck in it.

She wasn’t one to pass up an opportunity. The weapon was left here, and she was going to use it. It wasn’t exactly a Tenno-made blade. It looked more like Ancient Earth materials, steel and leather and resin. It was a straight blade with a curved tip and a pointed edge on the back of it. But she figured it wouldn’t be too much different to use than any other sword, and gripped it tightly to pull it free.

Freeing the blade was an easy task for the enhanced strength of her warframe, and she took a closer look with it in her hand. There was a detachable emblem on the hilt that glowed a low, fell red – a pair of wings shielding some emblem that looked like a heart with thorns within it. Just looking at it felt evil to her, like holding that container of kuva on the mountain, standing next to the Dax Teshin. Yes, that was the exact feeling she got from this emblem, that radiating sense of evil and madness that she felt even knowing the meaning of the fluid.

She glowered down at it for a moment, before removing the emblem. A shock of some indescribable pain shot through her body, threatening to knock her out if not for the shielding of her voidborn powers. She stood trembling for a minute or two before regaining her composure for long enough to crush the emblem in her steel-woven hands. It fell apart like it had rusted for a thousand years under her touch, and bled a blackness so pure that no light could pierce it.

And then, the blade felt dead in her hands. Inert, like nothing more than metal. It confused her, because by all rights it should just feel like a sword. She wondered if this weapon needed an energy source, like mods on her own arsenal, that changed the effect the damage had. But she had no way to mod this weapon, not without access to her orbiter. She wondered what to do.

She focused on the blade. She wondered if she could pour her own void energy into the blade, like she did with her warframe normally. She wondered if she could, if she was transformed this way. It wasn’t Transference. She wasn’t giving energy to this body by acting as possessor. She was this body, and it was her. She poured everything she could into the sword in her hands.

The cutting edge lit up with pale blue light and Orokin script wrote itself along the sword like arcane runes. The empty hole where once the emblem was bled more with that horrible blackness before being replaced with a shining white sigil with a lotus blossom mark upon it. All at once, she heard a hissing voice in her mind, not unlike the greatest of the Infested hive mind.

I am Falchion. You are the new master. Your power is mine, and my power is yours.

She stared at it for a moment, unsure what to make of that. Suddenly, she felt a weight on her back, and felt backwards to find the sheathe belonging to her new weapon. If this thing was alive, it had accepted her, and so apparently whatever animated it had gifted her with a scabbard to hold it in.

She felt a little less naked now, at least. She was armed.

And so, she sat down, crossed her legs, and meditated in the quiet. This place seemed safe enough that she could take the time to hone her mind here. A good balance was never a bad idea.

She didn’t know how long it had been when finally she heard footsteps, rattling her out of her meditative stance. She took the blade, Falchion, into her hands, and brandished it in the direction of the noise.

In the slowly dimming sunset light, and the new light of the hanging lanterns and the fire, there stood a woman. She was much older than Chandra, based on the wide hips, the powerfully coiled muscles and the breasts, and she was covered, every inch of copper skin below the neck, with vibrant tattoos. On her right shoulder was a poem in Orokin, something about the dreamer and the misfit being alone or something, and another down her right leg talking of the limelight, the universal dream. There was a musical staff down her left arm, and other places were covered in flowers. She looked extremely confused, electric purple eyes blinking at her warframe form through cinnabar hair.

Chandra couldn’t help but wonder what the hell this woman was wearing. It looked loose and comfortable, and she kind of wanted something like it.

There was a distance in the woman’s eyes, but she clearly meant no harm. She wasn’t even armed. So slowly, Chandra lowered the sword.

The woman was first to speak.

“Who… are you? Who’s there, inside the frame? How did you get here?”