The Death of Hope: Shattered Past Book 6 (Destiny 2)

19: The Spire

After following Nemia through the portal, James entirely expected to find himself trapped in the future again. Having to fight and kill Ikora over and over, and finding each time that she wasn't dead, and reconstituting herself, slowly driving him insane. However, he was astonished to find himself not in a desolate future, but in a glistening, beautiful metropolis. He looked around him and saw Vex conversing with one another as they walked, several smaller units walked beside larger ones. James looked up to see a massive eight-limbed creature crawling over the radiolarian fluid ocean in the distance, he estimated that it was at least fifty stories tall, and glistened in the light of what he assumed was an artificial star. The beast had one eye that he could see, and it was scooping up radiolarian fluid by its mouth that he assumed was on the bottom of it. The massive thing had a large pointed head at its photoreceptors were a bright blue. Its shell was the same white and silver color as the rest of the Vex here who shared the appearance of precursors.

"What is that?" Ghost wondered.

"I think it's a Vex Kraken," His guardian replied looking at it as he followed behind Nemia. He looked around and noticed how high the buildings ascended; some were so tall that he thought that he couldn't see the top of them. The smaller Vex wasn't just another unit, but what he believed to be their children, due to their small size and playful nature, he thought to call them Nymphs. As he was looking around, he couldn't help but feel a sense of wonder and excitement. This was the Vex when they were peaceful, and what felt like to him, intelligent.

It was known that the Vex of Mercury, Mars, and Venus all followed the same objective: to complete and prepare the worlds for a master plan that no mortal could comprehend. Yet, the Vex of Nessus, appeared to be different, in that they didn't build structures for a mindless purpose, but they constructed cities; places to live, and all of them, with the exception of those he had seen prior, were wearing robes. Bright, white, glistening robes with golden clasps. The buildings themselves seemed to be what the Vex interpreted as a neoclassical style. With tall elaborate columns ascending as high as the Exo could process to hold up the prismatic roof's with angular carvings of the Vex etched into their front halves, with undeniable attention to detail.

"Forgive me for my dress, I wasn't expecting to come here," James said, reflecting his slight embarrassment over being so dirty in the pristine city.

"All is forgiven James," She replied looking over her shoulder slightly before focusing back on where she was walking.

"Excuse me for asking, but, where am I?" He asked with his attention falling away from the busy markets and large walkways of the Vex people surrounding him.

"You are in the Spire, the city of which the Nessus Protectorate call home," Nemia replied. "Of course, where you are specifically in relation to everything else in the universe, well, it's far more complicated. You see, you are currently in the core of Nessus, but in what we call a Time Bubble, where time passes by much slower here than on the outside. What you see here, is a city that we constructed within the bubble and the star that hovers above was a by-product of our design." She replied as they began walking toward an elevator of sorts, complete with a glass facade that shifted its molecular shape to open a doorway.

"How long, in Earth time, did it take for you to build this?" James probed the Vex monarch.

"In Earth time, what you are seeing here, was all built in little under two Earth hours, and the time that it took for us to build this was upwards of four hundred years in the bubble."

"Four hundred years in two hours?" James said in utter astonishment.

"Of course this is just an approximation, give or take a decade," She replied as the elevator started to ascend. At that moment, James finally understood the scope of the world that he had visited. The urban sprawl extended as far out as his photoreceptors could see, entire districts were defined by the ascendant Vex skyscrapers that humbled those of Earth in their sheer scope. To think that they were building something like this, and that mankind never knew, was astonishing. From what he understood based on what Cayde told him, a different guardian rescued him from his predicament in the teleportation loop; one who was silent, and his ghost spoke for him. There was never a mention of The Spire.