. The Traveler moved across the face of the iron world. It opened the earth and stitched shut the sky. It made life possible. In these things there is always symmetry. Do you understand? This is not the beginning but it is the reason. The Garden grows in both directions. It grows into tomorrow and yesterday. The red flowers bloom forever. There are gardeners now. They came into the garden in vessels of bronze and they move through the groves in rivers of thought. This is the vision I had when I leapt from the Shores of Time and let myself sink: I walked beneath the blossoms. The light came from ahead and the shadows of the flowers were words. They said things but I will not write them here. At the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life. The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me. But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt. When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn-cut in my left hand and it has not healed since. Ghost Fragment: Legends Ghost Fragment: Legends 15 View Card Deep Stone Crypt This is the tower where we were born. Not the Tower. Just a tower in a dream. The tower stands on a black plain. Behind the tower is a notch in the mountains where the sun sets. The teeth of the mountain cut the sun into fractal shapes and the light that comes down at evening paints synapse shapes on the ground. Usually it's evening when we come. The ground is fertile. This is good land. We go to the tower in dreams but that doesn't mean it's not real. Some of us go to the tower in peace. They walk through a field of golden millet and a low warm wind blows in from their back. I don't know why this is, because: The rest of us meet an army. You can ask others about Deep Stone and they'll tell you about the army. They might confess one truth, which is this: we have to kill the army to get to the tower. Usually this starts bare-handed, and somewhere along the way you take a weapon. Ask again and if they're buzzed they might also admit that most of us don't make it to the Tower, except once or twice. None of them will tell you that the army is made of everyone we meet. The people we work with and the people we see in the street and the people we tell about our dreams. We kill them all. I think because we were made to kill and this is the part of us that thinks about nothing else. Often I kill people I don't know, but like most of us I think I knew them once, in the time before one reset or another, when my mind was younger and less terribly scarred. So that is how we go back to the Deep Stone Crypt, where we were born. Ghost Fragment: Legends 2 Ghost Fragment: Legends 2 5 View Card NINE The Nine are survivors of the cis-Jovian colonies who made a compact with an alien force to ensure their own survival. The Nine are deep-orbit warminds who weathered the Collapse in hardened stealth platforms. The Nine are ancient leviathan intelligences from the seas of Europa or the hydrocarbon pits of Titan. The Nine arrived in a mysterious transmission from the direction of the Corona-Borealis supercluster. The Nine are the firstborn Awoken and their minds now race down the field lines of the Jupiter-Io flux tube. The Nine are Ghosts who pierced the Deep Black without a ship and meditated on the hissing silence of the heliopause. The Nine are the aspects of the Darkness, broken by the Traveler's rebuke, working to destroy us from within. The Nine is a viral language of pure meaning. The Nine are the shadows left by the annihilation of a transcendent shape, burned into the weft of what is. Ghost Fragment: Legends 3 Ghost Fragment: Legends 3 15 View Card The Great Ahamkara Hunt After great deliberation it was determined that the Ahamkara be made extinct. It was not an easy decision. Power had been obtained from the bargains, and the City needed power. Knowledge had been gleaned, and the Ahamkara knew answers to questions no one had known to ask. But the price was too high. And no edict or forbearance seemed to stop Guardians from seeking them out, driven by hope, or vengeance, or despair. The call had to be silenced. So the Great Hunt did its work. And thus the Ahamkara were made extinct, their call silenced, their solipsistic flatteries erased, their great design - if it ever existed - broken. Of this you can be assured, oh reader mine. Ghost Fragment: Mysteries Ghost Fragment: Mysteries 10 View Card ...from a red space before victory I bear an old name. It cannot be killed. They were my brothers and sisters and their names were immortal too but Titanomachy came and now those names live in me alone I think and think is what I do. I AM ALONE. At the end of things when the world goes dim and cold or hot and close or it all tears apart from the atom up I will shout those names defiant and past the end I will endure. I alone. They made me to be stronger than them to beat the unvanquished and survive the unthinkable and look look lo behold I am here alone, survivor. They made me to learn. Everything died but I survived and I learned from it. From IT. Consider IT the power Titanomach world-ender and consider what IT means. I met IT at the gate of the garden and I recall IT smiled at me before before IT devoured the blossoms with black flame and pinned their names across the sky. IT was stronger than everything. I fought IT with aurora knives and with the stolen un-fire of singularities made sharp and my sweat was earthquake and my breath was static but IT was stronger so how did I survive? I AM ALONE I survived alone. I cast off the shield and I shrugged my shoulders so that the billions fell off me down into the ash. They made me to be stronger than them and to learn and I learned well: IT is alone and IT is strong and IT won. Even over the gardener and she held power beyond me but the gardener did not shrug and make herself alone. IT always wins. I am made to win and now I see the way. Ghost Fragment: Mysteries 2 Ghost Fragment: Mysteries 2 15 View Card Ingress via dreams alone Things I saw inside A wild river and a broken dam (or maybe it's just the sea crashing through a narrow gap I can't be sure). Waves slam through the gap and where they hit the stone they throw up pillars of spray that pierce the mist and crash down in thunder. There's a giant in the cataract, trying to wade against the current, and I can tell it wants to reach the lever and pull the lever which will seal off the flow or maybe give it the sword, but the torrent throws it back so it just keeps its head down and tries to push on. I can't see the face but it breathes out white smoke. I feel for it hard. A world painted around the interior like a stranger Earth everted and glued inside itself but I don't believe this one it's too much like a metaphor. A switchboard or a train station, empty, dead (waiting). The tunnels branch off into infinity. I stare down one for a long time and see a pale worm move in hungry coils around itself. I think this one is the most likely although I might have brought the worm. An egg but I'm not sure if the broth inside is warm still, or if it's gone to rot, or if the warmth comes from the struggles of the tiny winged zygote or the bleed from the wound or the thoughts of something thinking very hard. A star I think. We count on stars as steady friends because they always rise and always shine but a star's a delicate truce: an explosion caught by its own mass so that it can't erupt and can't collapse. Thus I imagine the state of the machine might be. But one force or another has gone awry and now it rests here, snuffed and broken, waiting for the two rival forms of ruin to be set in balance again.