As the group progressed deeper and deeper into the moth, they came across unexpected things.
The light continued to bloom beneath Roxana’s step, but it changed color from time to time. Sometimes a purple or blue so deep it seemed almost black; other times, taking on several colors, ethereal lacy pink against eggshell and amber. It was beautiful, and Atlanta paused from moment to moment, taking thought pictures to save for later. The two had fallen to the rear of the group, oblivious to the others.
“Do they always look like this?” she asked Roxana.
“I do not know,” the paladin said. “This is the first time I have been in one.” She smiled at Atlanta’s startled look. “Did you think I made a habit of this?”
“You said that it was a place the gods listened, so I thought you had been in one, to know that,” Atlanta admitted.
“Whenever you find Forerunner technology in great masses, the gods are near there, listening,” Roxana said. “Why that is, I do not know, and there are plenty of guesses, each as good as the last in terms of being proven by evidence.”
“Perhaps Jezli has some explanation,” Atlanta said, and Roxana’s smile cracked a little wider.
“The suspicion in your tone is warranted. But I will tell you that she has put more time into investigating such things than most. At least to hear her account of things, and it is an account that I have only a little cause to doubt. No, when Jezli says she is a scholar of matters like that, she speaks the truth.”
“Why, thank you?” Jezli said, and Atlanta realized the two in front of them had stopped. The tunnel was perhaps two meters in diameter here, and Roxana’s head stooped under the occasional lamp fixture. Before them, the tunnel branched, leading in two directions.
“Which should we pick?” Roxana said to Jezli.
Jezli’s fingers danced over the crystals, but she frowned. “That I was hoping you would have some sense of,” Jezli said.
Roxana pointed right. “That one.”
“Is that a guess?” Niko demanded.
“Everything is a guess, only some guesses are more informed than others,” Jezli said. “My artifact has played itself out, and cannot lead us further. But she is an artifact herself.”
Niko looked to Roxana, but the paladin only gestured them forward.
Now, as they moved along through the cramped tunnels, the light beneath Roxana’s feet began to increase. Now, whenever her foot landed, coruscations of brilliant light burst forth. Now, there was music throbbing through the material around so they could feel it underfoot, even though there was no atmosphere to bring it to them. The vibrations grew and grew, pressing in on Atlanta. She felt as though her bones were vibrating, as though she were shifting into some new plane of existence. The air tasted of light.
When had she started walking by herself? She looked around the glittering chamber for the others, but they were nowhere.
Each of them had their own moment of realization that they walked alone. Roxana and Jezli both simply continued walking forward as they had, though Jezli hummed something under her breath.
Niko scowled but pressed on. She remembered her testing back in the days of the Holy Hive Mind, and there was something reminiscent of its illusions and mental chamberings in this journey.
The bodyguard hesitated, every instinct telling him to flee. But he kept moving. Gnarl had told him to do so, and disobeying his captain’s orders brought pain. He had learned that long ago.
Gnarl’s pace quickened till he was almost running, a predatory lope. There was something challenging him up ahead, he knew in his heart. It called to him, Come face me! And he could not resist that challenge.
The bodyguard was the first to fall, overwhelmed. To him it had seemed that the tunnel narrowed and narrowed, pressing in, and that he had Gnarl at his back, shouting at him in anger, urging him to move quicker.
He had been a stoic sort but, fiber by fiber, his nerves frayed, stretching tighter and tighter with the blinding, deafening forces around him until finally, they snapped. He fell to the ground, biting and clawing at the walls, ignoring the weapons at his belt.
The walls tore at him in turn, reaching out with jagged fingers, at least in his mind. White froth accumulated around his mouth. He breathed out in quick gasps and his eyes bled as his mind shredded.
He kicked out twice, coughed something unintelligible, and died.
Atlanta had not realized Roxana had rejoined her until the paladin spoke. “This is the place I have brought you in order to pass on what I am.”
“What?” Atlanta said. Panic grabbed her stomach, flipped it inside out.
“It is still your choice,” Roxana said, her voice cheerful. “If you don’t want it … but if you do, I will carry your petition to the gods.”
“Carry it how? By dying, you mean!”
“That is the usual way of it.” Roxana smiled at Atlanta. “I have lived a very long time now, and I am ready to move on to the next stage.”
“But I just met you!”
“I do regret that,” Roxana said, “but I am very glad of the time we have had together.”
“Did you know this was coming?”
“Of course I knew. How could I not?” Roxana’s face was calm as a still pool. “In your turn, you will know when you have found the right one to pass your legacy—our legacy—on to.”
“And if they say no?”
“Then they are not the right one, and things will move along as they are supposed to.”
“So you won’t die if I say no?”
Roxana outright laughed. “A clever plan!”
It occurred to Atlanta that the paladin was almost giddy with some emotion. How could it be joy at dying? There must be something else. “No, if you say no, I will pass, and all that I have been here will vanish, but it will still have been part of things at one time. I do not care anymore.”
There was an inner light to Roxana’s face, an impatience as though all of her being were tuned to a wavelength they could not hear, but one that she could, and all she wanted was to listen.
“Roxana, I don’t understand!”
“You understand enough. Now I will tell you one more thing. You have accumulated enough luck to get the others out of here. All you have to do is spend it.”
“I don’t know how to do that!”
Roxana did not answer but took Atlanta’s face between her hands and regarded it solemnly. Leaning forward, she pressed a kiss into the girl’s forehead and warmth bloomed where her lips touched.
“Love and be loved,” she said, and released her. She glanced behind her as though someone had called her, then turned back to Atlanta for a second.
“Tell Jezli what I said too,” she said. And then laughed again out loud, as though delight were consuming her from within. “Tell them all!” Light converged on her, swooped on her, outlined her in brilliance, and then tore her to pieces.
The paladin was gone.
Atlanta found herself in an empty chamber, and her eyes were so full of tears she could barely make out the glowing line on the ground leading out of this place.
How did they exit? Later, Niko would never be able to swear to what it had been, but it seemed to her that she finally walked Lassite’s Golden Path, step by step, leading upward to some immense plateau and crowds of people awaiting her there. But no matter how she climbed, how she pressed forward, she could not reach them. She almost despaired, almost thought to give up, but that was not her habit.
She had been leading by example for so long that it was impossible to do otherwise.
Gnarl escaped and it seemed to him that he sheltered beneath his fallen crew, that he pulled the body to him and interposed it between himself and a fearful, golden light that threatened to encompass and devour him.
He felt as though he were being taken apart from the inside and studied, and he tried to cling to the pieces of him that were being removed and all he could cling to was the anger, because that was the part of him that he knew the best.
What remained after the process was not precisely Gnarl, but it believed itself him.
Only Atlanta would later remember the moments at the heart of the moth. How the light washed over her. How the light interrogated her, merciless and loving all at once. How the light took her soul where it spun out of kilter and recentered her.
Do you want this thing that you have come for, truly? the light demanded.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s how I’ll save my friends.”
This is a thing of death; is it just?
She thought about Tubal Last, kidnapping Petalia and poisoning them against the person who loved them most. Of his careless murder of Thorn, just to make the rest of them more frightened. Of his throne room, full of captive things stolen from across the Known Universe as well as prisoners. Helpless creatures, trapped under the weight of injustice.
“Yes,” she said. “It is just.” She felt the import of that statement. If she had been lying, she somehow knew, she would have been found unworthy.
She felt the luck leaving her, the light taking it away in an exchange she did not entirely understand, and no longer wondered why Roxana had not instructed her in how to do this. This was more than knowing her place in the world as she had as an heir. This was being it through and through, to the very core.
I am a paladin now, she thought, and then, terrifying and giddying all at once, and I will spend the rest of my days figuring out what that means.
Milly was beside Niko, somehow, even though she was also back at the shuttle, and when Niko staggered, Milly put up a hand and caught her, more than once. Until finally it was the two of them walking up together, like one thing, a single entity moving single-mindedly upward.
Niko found herself standing in front of the shuttle with Milly, and Atlanta, and Jezli, and Gnarl.
The last of these lunged at Jezli as though to attack, and Milly and Niko both interposed themselves. Niko wondered for a moment where the other crew member was, then caught sight of the body. He must have attacked Milly while we were gone, she thought, and then, I made the right choice, with a touch of relief.
Atlanta was carrying something, and Gnarl fell back in her direction and tried to snatch it, but she was too quick.
Then all of them were scrambling for the shuttle, and then the four of them were gone, and what was left of Gnarl stood in the void within the moth, screaming silently after them while in the shuttle, Jezli shouted angry questions at Atlanta, demanding to know where Roxana was, while all Atlanta could do was cry.
She pushed what she held forward at Niko, and Niko took it, knowing it was the artifact they had sought.
“Roxana?” she said, echoing Jezli’s demand, but more softly, and she did not press when Atlanta shook her head.
“Then we will go home,” she said, and took the helm.