Only On Paper

1- Lone Patrol

Mars.

Mars is a big, stupid, barren wasteland of a planet that probably looked good at some point during the Golden Age... but it sure doesn't anymore.

The only thing that makes Mars worse is it's gigantic off-worlders.

Of course, this could mean me as well, but I'm tiny compared to the Cabal. A race of giant... bears? Space hippos? I don't know. I'm not sure that I really care. Between their guns that barrage the air with explosive rounds, the ones that tote about those big, stupid shields,or the smaller ones that use psionics just to screw with your sanity- I've had enough of them to last me the rest of my life.

The one thing on this planet that I enjoy doing is something that I also find perplexing. During The Fall, when humanity abandoned Mars, there were a select few that remained behind to try and fight off the Darkness. In their eagerness to preserve their legacy, some of them left behind cachés of all kinds of different items. Perplexing tome, because finding these things means finding more lives and Light expunged by the Darkness, but also interesting and partially exhilarating to find these relics of times past.

It's all the same, I suppose. I am finding solace in old items or the ideas of people living in the past. Everything else is a bland mess right now anyway. News from the rest of the solar system is just as stale as the wastelands of Mars:

Mercury is still gone.

Venus is still dominated by the Fallen House of Winter.

The Cabal are still monkeying about on Mars - sending out long-range radio signals and such.

Not much else of interest until you remember that the creepy merchant, Xûr, is from Pluto.... or somewhere around the Jovians

Not even being in the Guardian's Tower can bring joy to me. The last time I had been there was months ago, just shortly after spending my time patrolling in the Cosmodrome. I had been scouting a few areas for the Vanguard, as I was told they were close to discovering something in the area but would not specify what. It wasn't until my only surviving friend - Jorun - was called away to serve with a few others on some high-priority bullshit that Commander Zavala cooked up.

Of course Jorun was chosen for the mission - Zavala favored Titans. Just like when Cayde-6 had called our other friend Lannin out to hunt some Fallen Archon-Priest on Venus (a mission to which I had also been the lead scout.) Neither of them had come back to our makeshift base after their respective missions.

When Lannin didn't return right away, Jorun and I had chalked it up to Cayde's long debriefings. It wasn't until Lannin's shattered Ghost had tight-beamed his final message back to us that we knew his Light had been extinguished.

I didn't even get as much for Jorun. He was able to briefly tell me that the Vanguard had tracked down the Servitor Prime for the Fallen's House of Devils - right there in the Cosmodrome. I received a message from him a few days after his group had departed to find the Prime:

>://

Have you ever punched a god?

\\:<

It was shortly after that when Ikora Rey beckoned me back to the Tower.She tasked me with scouting the Meridian Bay on Mars. I guess some hotshot Guardian had kicked down the Cabal's front door and now we're locked in some kind of conflict with them.

So that's how I wound up on this boring, desolate, waste of a rock:death. Death is part of a Guardian's job... hell, I had been dead for centuries until my Ghost got desperate and resurrected me from the rubble outside of The City. Death is something that we are tasked with. Death is how things go for us.

But now I'm alone. Nobody remembers my friends. I can't even get hold of Jorun's fireteam. All I want is a recount of how he had died, but none of them will answer my call, let alone acknowledge that he ever existed. I'm almost certain Ikora Rey and the other Leaders of the Vanguard only remember me as an asset on paper, to call out only when it suits them - then I go back to being forgotten.

Even my Ghost seems impartial to me. It's quiet more often than not, only divulging updates sent from the Vanguard about our new push on the Cabal strongholds. It never talks directly to me, it's more of a shadow than a companion.

So where does all this culminate? Right here in this cave I'm standing in. It's carved into the side of a cliff, just shy of a large Cabal complex off the the east. I had been wandering the wastes for hours just trying to find something to give the Vanguard - if only to make it appear as though I'm doing something - when I stumbled upon the cave. I was just trying to take cover from a group of Cabal soldiers on their daily patrol, and I found it.

Inside this cave, I'm standing here and I swear I can hear... sobbing.