She sat fighting back the urge to cry. She remembered what she said to Gaia that morning. “I should have died in that room.” Why was she scared then? She was sad at the thought of not making it out of this place. Somewhere deep down she must want to live. Suddenly a hand rested on her shoulder. “What happened?” “Nothing.” she said trying to wipe the tears out of her eyes. “That doesn’t look like nothing to me. Who did you lose?” he said sitting on the opposite side of the stalagmite she was leaning against and started drying off. She was silent for a moment but finally gave in. “I lost…..” she swallowed back her tears. “I lost my whole team. I was the only one who made it out. And the funny thing is, I wish I hadn’t made it out. I should have died there with them. I wish he had never pushed me through that door.” She waited expecting him to tell her to get over it. That guardians died all the time. But for the longest time there was just silence. Finally he spoke. “Grab my helmet.” He said in a low tone. She was confused but walked over to his helmet and grabbed it. It was lighter than she expected for such an armored piece of gear. She handed it to him and sat. He reached inside it and pulled out an old folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, he held it so she could see what it contained. There were three guardians in the photo. On the left was a hunter, the middle a warlock, and the right a titan who she guessed was Azrix. “The one on the left was Erin. He was always so serious and uptight. Always thought that I never took the mission serious enough but after a few years I grew on him. He would always crack snarky jokes that would lighten the mood even in the worst situation. The one in the middle is Sasha. She was the youngest of the group and loved being a warlock. She would always get so excited when we would find some old information or uncover a piece of golden age tech. We use to call her the mad scientist. She hated the nickname at first but eventually came to own it. The one on the right is me if you hadn’t guessed that already.” He said folding the picture and tucking it back inside his helmet. “What happened to them?” Velox asked. “It was about a year ago. Intel said the Cabal were mounting an offensive on the Vex in freehold. We were supposed to just go and watch what happened. Way too many enemies for us to actually do anything about. Well we had set up on the ridge of a canyon and were watching a massive column of Cabal moving out of their fortress towards one of the main Vex timegates. There must have been a thousand of them on foot and at least twenty tanks.” “Suddenly our ghosts started screaming that there was a massive surge in Vex activity. We expected that they might counter attack but we had no idea what they were going to send out. Suddenly the whole area darkened like a cloud was blocking the sun. Vex teleport clouds were everywhere along the opposite side of the canyon, beside the Cabal formation, and even a couple on our own side of the canyon but quite a ways away from us.” “Vex appeared everywhere easily twice as many as the Cabal. There were Harpies, goblins, hobgoblins, minotaurs, hydras, axis minds, and even several gatelords. The Vex fell upon the Cabal with no mercy. Within minutes, the remaining Cabal were fleeing for their lives. Their tanks lay in smoldering ruins. We had seen enough. We had collected our data and the others wanted to get out of the area. I wanted to stay and see what the Vex would do. They argued with me but I wanted to get everything I could to make sure this never happened to guardians.” “After another five minutes of watching the Vex pursue the Cabal back up the canyon I thought it was time to go. I packed up my transmission equipment and stood up. As I turned around a dark cloud started forming. We readied our weapons.” He said pausing a moment to gain his composure. “A gatelord appeared surrounded by several smaller Vex. We were caught out in the open. No cover within a two hundred meter radius. We fought with everything we had but it wasn’t enough. Erin was the first to die. The gatelord grabbed him and held him at eye level as if studying him. Erin pulled out a grenade and threw it right in the things face. It recoiled but was undamaged. It smashed him into the ground. I heard his bones crack and break under the immense weight of the gatelords arm.” “When Sasha saw that she panicked and summoned her sparrow. I tried to tell her to wait but she took off before I could reach her. I got on my own sparrow and followed her. We hadn’t even made it three hundred feet when two hobgoblins picked her off. She slumped off the sparrow and hit the ground going almost fifty miles an hour. When I got to her, I stopped to see if she was still alive. She had two holes through her chest large enough for me to stick my hand through.” “A line rifle round hit me and drained the last of my shields. I turned and knew that my team was dead. I didn’t care about my life. My whole thought was killing every last Vex I saw on that battlefield. I ran headlong into their fire feeling the rounds tear through my armor and body. I didn’t flinch. Wielding my assault rifle in one hand and my shotgun in my other, I ran straight towards the gate lord. As I reached him, I dropped my weapons and pulled my rocket launcher out. I fired only a few feet away from the gatelord and hit it right where its face should be. That’s the last thing I remember on Mars.” “The next thing that was clear to me was I wasn’t dead. There were people standing over me wearing all white clothing with masks and bandanas. They were murmuring and then realized I was awake. They quickly injected something into my IV and my vision blurred again. I woke up a week later in the Medical bay. I had sustained thirteen gunshot wounds, had forty five pieces of shrapnel taken out of my body, a collapsed lung, eight broken ribs, burns over twenty percent of my body, and a concussion. The doctors said it was a miracle I was alive. I thought it was a curse.” “After six weeks of therapy I was discharged from the hospital. I wondered aimlessly from bar to bar wondering why I had lived when my friends had died. I thought about just killing myself or going back to Mars to finish the job but I was too much of a coward to do it. After a month of passing out in the gutter every night, the tower security force dragged me back to the brig. I sat in there for a week before I had a visitor. Ikora said she had a mission for me. I told her that I was broken and couldn’t handle it. That’s when she asked me if I wanted my friends deaths to be meaningless. I thought about it and ultimately came to this conclusion.” “I have to live to carry on my friend’s legacy. Everything that they might have done I now have a responsibility to do. I keep their memory alive by living and fighting so that what happened to them might never happen to any other guardians.” The cavern was silent and the quite dripping of water could be heard echoing around. Azrix wasn’t sure if she was going to say anything and looked over at her. She had her head tucked to her chest and he could see tears dripping off her face and pooling on the rocks below. “I get it.” She finally said regaining some of her composure. “I think I will take that bath now.” Hope you guys enjoyed chapter 4! Chapter 5 will be out next Friday. Leave a comment if you want me to message you when it is out. Please do not hold back with your criticism. I need to know if i am doing something wrong or leaving something out. I will adjust fire in the next chapters based on your guys input and try to make changes. Also guys do me a favor and check out Onyx076's work and let him know what you think. His first chapter is here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/98747619/0/0 Chapter Index can be found here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/101226805/0/0