Destiny Grimoire

"What? No, I didn't illegally mod the holster. These are just really lucky pants!" —Cayde-6

> REMOTE VANGUARD DATABASE TEXT-ONLY SEARCH INITIALIZED.
> WELCOME, USER "ACEOFHEARTS".
> PLEASE ENTER SEARCH QUERY.
?> beat shaxx
> ONLY ONE GUARDIAN HAS DEFEATED LORD SHAXX IN THE CRUCIBLE. RELATED: REY, I. DO YOU WISH TO SEE POST-MATCH RESULTS?
?> cheat crucible
> CRUCIBLE PARTICIPANTS ARE SUBJECT TO A STRICT CODE OF CONDUCT. CHEATERS WILL BE BANNED.
?> what about cheating like just a little
> SORRY, I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND "what about cheating like just a little".
?> ok what counts as cheating
> TO ACT DISHONESTLY OR UNFAIRLY IN ORDER TO GAIN AN ADVANTAGE.
?> is luck cheating
> "LUCK" AND "CHEATING" ARE NOT EQUIVALENT.
?> are my pants lucky
> PROBABLY NOT.
?> wrooooooong theyre super lucky

Lucky Pants

Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.

Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me.

And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself.

Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.

The fate of everything is made like this, in the collision, the test of one praxis against another. This is how the world changes: one way meets a second way, and they discharge their weapons, they exchange their words and markets, they contest and in doing so they petition each other for the right to go on being something, instead of nothing. This is the universe figuring out what it should be in the end.

And it is majestic. Majestic. It is the only thing that can be true in and of itself.

And it is what I am.

Verse 4:2 — Majestic. Majestic.

"It always ends the same," the gardener complained. "This one stupid pattern!"

Aren't they beautiful? I asked, as the flowers opened and closed in patterns beyond the scope of entire universes to encode, all-devouring and perhaps everlasting. Not even we could know whether a pattern in the flowers would cycle forever, or someday halt.

"They're as dull as carbon monoxide poisoning," the gardener groused, although carbon monoxide did not yet exist, and neither did anything that could be poisoned. The gardener kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut. Although I was the closer of flowers and that was my sole purpose, I felt no fear or jealousy. We had our assigned dominions and always would.

They're majestic, I said. They have no purpose except to subsume all other purposes. There is nothing at the center of them except the will to go on existing, to alter the game to suit their existence. They spare not one sliver of their totality for any other work. They are the end.

The pattern corrected the errant flower effortlessly. The great flow went on unchanged.

The gardener got up and brushed their knees. "Every game we play, this one pattern consumes all the others. Wipes out every interesting development. A stupid, boring exploit that cuts off entire possibility spaces from ever arising. There's so much that we'll never get to see because of this… pest."

They chewed at their cracked lip, which existed only because this is an allegory. "I'm going to do something about it," they said. "We need a new rule."

The Final Shape

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.***

* It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun.
** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes.
*** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence.

They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden.

In the morning, the gardener pushed seeds down into the wet loam of the garden to see what they would become.

In the evening, the winnower reaped the day's crop and separated what would flourish from what had failed.

The day was longer than all of time, and the night was swifter than a glint of light on a falling sugar crystal. Insects buzzed between the flowers, and worms slithered between the roots, feeding on what was and what might be, the first gradient in existence, the first dynamo of life. Rain fell from no sky. Voices spoke without mouth or meaning. A tree of silver wings bloomed yielded fruit shed feathers bloomed again.

In the day between the morning and the evening, the gardener and the winnower played a game of possibilities.

Gardener and Winnower