The Mausoleum, The Dreadnaught, Saturn
The Guardian listens to memories of the Hive Gods.
Xi Ro: I am Xi Ro, youngest daughter of the dead king. I will take back my Osmium Court and kill the traitor Taox. On my left eye I swear vengeance.
Sathona: I am Sathona, middle daughter of the dead king. I will take back my home and eat the mother jelly. I will raise my spawn on the corpse of the Helium King. On my right eye I promise this.
Aurash: I am Aurash, first daughter of the dead king. I will chase my father’s last screamed warning. I will know what changed the motion of our moons. If the end of the world is coming, I will understand why. On my center eye, I swear it. I will understand.
Aurash: We live short, hard lives. We die in the dark. The storm above us will never end. And soon the God-Wave will take us all. Above us there are only stormjoys, monsters, and moons of apocalypse. Let us go down, down, where we may discover truth, some power to avenge ourselves upon our betrayers, some hope of survival.
Auryx: I shall establish a court, and whoever comes into this court may challenge me. My court will be the High War. It will be a killing ground and a school of the sword logic we have learned from our gods.
Auryx: My worm grows fat and hungry. I feed it with whole worlds. My astronomers tell me they can sense the Deep Itself, and that we are conquering our way towards it. I think joy and sorrow will be the same thing soon. Like love and death.
Auryx: Our might shatters entire species. We inhale the smoke of their burning. This is our compact with the Worm our God — the worm makes us mighty. But as we wield this might, our worm’s hunger expands. If we fail to feed it, it will devour us from within.
Oryx: Once, long ago, I killed Xivu Arath on her war moon, and she blew up the whole moon to kill with me her. She was laughing in joy. I laughed too. A whole moon! A whole moon. It was a waste of a moon, but it taught me how to save myself from exploding worlds, which was necessary to fight the Ecumene. I love mighty Xivu more than a moon loves the tide. I’ll kill her for this. Over and over, forever and ever.
Oryx: This is our message to the things that we will kill. A species which believes that a good existence can be invented through games of civilization and through laws of conduct is doomed by that belief. They will die in terror. The lawless and the ruthless will drag them down to die. The universe will erase their monuments.
Oryx: I considered returning to Fundament. Learning what became of the God-Wave, and the Tungsten Monoliths, and the continents which were all that remained of my people’s primal home. But I know what became of all that. It became me. I am the heir of Fundament, the immortal descendant of those ten-year krill. I asked a question: how can we live in the universe long enough to understand it? And I learned the answer, which is written here in this book. I learned that I had to become most ruthless of all.
The Hall of Souls, The Dreadnought, Saturn
The Guardian listens to memories of the Hive Gods.
Sathona: Oath-bearing siblings, we are five years old. For two years we’ve worked to repair this ancient ship and understand its systems. I am almost too old for the mother jelly, and the knights who killed our father are surely dying of age. We three will die here, in exile. Taox will outlive us. And Aurash, brilliant-eyed Aurash, you will die of old age long before you have proof of your God-Wave, or any way to stop it.
Sathona: Who will you trust? The voice that wants us to live and suffer, as we have lived and suffered? The Leviathan that offers no hope against Taox or the world-wave? Or the plain, honest worm? Let us see where its whisper leads us, Aurash. Let us go deeper, Xi Ro! Let us dive, O sisters mine.
Savathûn: Auryx my brother and king, I have studied the wounds cut by the Worm our God. Also I have studied the manner of your death and return. These two things are the same, for they are predicated on death and the passage through cut spaces. Let us practice the sword logic until we are sharp. We may then cut our own wounds and step through.
Xivu Arath: Sister, I am already sharp, look, my sword cuts into another space.
Savathûn: I am at my end. I plot and plan. But I cannot gather enough bloodshed to feed my worm. And the harder I try, the hungrier it becomes.
Xivu Arath: I slaughter and kill, but the harder I fight, the more my worm demands. I too am at my end.
Auryx: The Ecumene war angels have killed me so many times that I dare not go out into the universe, lest I need my might to protect myself. My worm chews at my soul in hunger.
Savathûn: I don’t have a strict proof yet, you know. This thing we believe... that we’re liberating the universe by devouring it, that we’re cutting out the rot, that we’re on course to join the final shape... I haven’t found a strict, eternal proof. We might yet be wrong.
Oryx: Sister, it’s us. We’re the proof. We are the Hive. If we last forever, we prove it. And if something more ruthless conquers us, then the proof is sealed.
The Trenchway, The Dreadnought, Saturn
The Guardian listens to memories of the Hive Gods.
Xi Ro: Our lives are short and desperate. If that’s the way the world’s supposed to be, I won’t have it! If people like Taox are supposed to win, I won’t let them! I’ll beat the world until it changes! I’ll kill anything in the way!
Xivu Arath: When Oryx looks upon you, you feel that you may vanish if he looks away. The crest of Oryx’s skull is as long as an arm. In the course of its life, a thought moves from one end to the other. Upon his crest I have painted a line in my blood, so that he will remember me.
Xivu Arath: Oryx, my brother, is the bravest thing I know. Upon Fundament he learned that we were the natural prey of the universe, the most frail and desperate of things. He thought about this carefully and he found a way to fix it. He made us strong. He will lead us into eternity.
Xivu Arath: I am war, and my throne is deathless. Come. Cut the outer curtain of my fortress, and it will open its new eye in a bloodless laceration. Cut further to see inside its walls: the yellow fat, the purple viscera, the teeming rust-cut capillaries. These are the colors of war. THESE ARE THE COLORS OF MY COURT.