"When you get that big, I think maybe black and white are the only colors to work with," Mac replied, gesturing vaguely with his hands in attempt to indicate that the Traveler was quite gigantic. He'd really have to make a few sketches to carry around for when explaining things to people.
"The Darkness is something we've never even seen, so far as I know. It's more a concept than a physical thing, but anyone and everything in service to it has been cruel and monstrous in the extreme. There is no negotiating or reasoning with the Hive. They operate on the level of insects, pouring out of their Dreadnoughts en masse, swarming across the field, overwhelming the opposition. They take prisoners, but not to trade or torture for information or anything like that...they process them. They...I don't know how to explain it, but they process and refine people into material they use to build their armor and their ships. If that's not just evil in the strictest sense, I have no idea where the line gets drawn, I'm afraid," he chuckles uncomfortably, looking away for a moment and tapping his fingers on the open pages of another book.
"The Traveler might not be entirely benevolent, but to a race on the brink of self-destruction it was about as close as you could get to what people thought of as God, back then. When it finished raising us up it left and could have stayed away, but the Darkness came and when we would have died, the Traveler returned and saved us, sacrificing itself. Again, as close to the flat definition of good as we could imagine," the Guardian expresses without any note of insult. It's really no less uncertain and confusing for a native. Even one that directly owes his life to the Traveler.
"Oh! Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, when I fell through the hole in the sky, seems the world tried to make of me something more sensible. I was reading a bit about Spirits coming out of the Fade here, and how their forms are affected. I guess what I looked like before didn't quite fit into the fabric, here."
He reaches up, tugging his horns a bit and shaking his head.
"I had on a helmet with horns, but no horns myself. The pallor of my skin is right, my hair is right, but my eyes glowed, and my skin shimmered in the light the way the inside of an abalone shell would," he sighs, looking at his gloved hands with a vague pout. He wasn't vain, really, but he did miss his own skin, to a degree.
"Back home I'm called Awoken. Some humans went off planet and out into deep space. Generations later they showed up again, changed forever. Evolution, y'know? Human but...different. Being out in all that dark strangeness changed them. Now, Awoken know magic without the Traveler's help. Maybe that's where all the magic people went, and the records just got lost to time? Or the Awoken might have those records and no one else does...I wouldn't know, thought. I'm not considered a proper part of the people. Guardians, like myself, don't have direct connections to them anymore. No memory, no place."
no subject
"The Darkness is something we've never even seen, so far as I know. It's more a concept than a physical thing, but anyone and everything in service to it has been cruel and monstrous in the extreme. There is no negotiating or reasoning with the Hive. They operate on the level of insects, pouring out of their Dreadnoughts en masse, swarming across the field, overwhelming the opposition. They take prisoners, but not to trade or torture for information or anything like that...they process them. They...I don't know how to explain it, but they process and refine people into material they use to build their armor and their ships. If that's not just evil in the strictest sense, I have no idea where the line gets drawn, I'm afraid," he chuckles uncomfortably, looking away for a moment and tapping his fingers on the open pages of another book.
"The Traveler might not be entirely benevolent, but to a race on the brink of self-destruction it was about as close as you could get to what people thought of as God, back then. When it finished raising us up it left and could have stayed away, but the Darkness came and when we would have died, the Traveler returned and saved us, sacrificing itself. Again, as close to the flat definition of good as we could imagine," the Guardian expresses without any note of insult. It's really no less uncertain and confusing for a native. Even one that directly owes his life to the Traveler.
"Oh! Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, when I fell through the hole in the sky, seems the world tried to make of me something more sensible. I was reading a bit about Spirits coming out of the Fade here, and how their forms are affected. I guess what I looked like before didn't quite fit into the fabric, here."
He reaches up, tugging his horns a bit and shaking his head.
"I had on a helmet with horns, but no horns myself. The pallor of my skin is right, my hair is right, but my eyes glowed, and my skin shimmered in the light the way the inside of an abalone shell would," he sighs, looking at his gloved hands with a vague pout. He wasn't vain, really, but he did miss his own skin, to a degree.
"Back home I'm called Awoken. Some humans went off planet and out into deep space. Generations later they showed up again, changed forever. Evolution, y'know? Human but...different. Being out in all that dark strangeness changed them. Now, Awoken know magic without the Traveler's help. Maybe that's where all the magic people went, and the records just got lost to time? Or the Awoken might have those records and no one else does...I wouldn't know, thought. I'm not considered a proper part of the people. Guardians, like myself, don't have direct connections to them anymore. No memory, no place."