XI-23-1C · Interview with Mara Sov
Bungie · Original English text
ANNOTATED TRANSCRIPTION FOLLOWS
EIDO: Marakel, I greet you in the Light.
MARA: Scribe Eido.
[She smiled when she said my name.]
// Several lines redacted//
[I hope you will forgive me; in my curiosity, I allowed myself to pursue a bit of a tangent. It is not often that my father speaks of the time before he found me. I have much to ask him, now!]
MARA: But you have come to inquire about another matter. I understand you are searching for all that you can find of the Witness. The stains it has left while passing through this universe.
EIDO: I have learned a great deal and understand very little. It is my hope that you will be able to render my conclusions clearer and more complete.
MARA: Show me what you have found.
[Some time passed. We discussed the documents I have included here, as well as others I believed redundant or only tangentially helpful. Marakel's insight is as keen as any blade; even in those minutes, my understanding multiplied.]
[At last, she sat back, and closed her eyes.]
MARA: I touched the mind of that being - that monster - only once.
MARA: I sensed its purpose. Not the purpose itself, but the idea of purpose.
EIDO: The final shape. What it seeks to achieve, with all the tools it has gleaned over the years. This… eternal, perfect thing.
MARA: The language it uses is illuminating. Peak. Pinnacle. Pyramidion.
MARA: The broad base of the pyramid, focusing and sharpening as it builds toward its highest point.
MARA: Self-improvement, or what that being believes to be self-improvement.
[Here, I began to realize something. Excitement rushed through me like lightning.]
EIDO: Dissecting, reassembling. Taking, merging. All those things point towards what the Witness sees as the final shape.
EIDO: It is not simple destruction, the march of entropy. The ruined garden.
EIDO: It seeks… compression. The combination of a chosen past and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be.
MARA: Taxidermy.
[She had to explain the practice to me. What strange hobbies Golden Age humans had! The metaphor was quite apt.]
EIDO: But it cannot achieve this goal, can it? Not perfectly.
EIDO: What it does instead is mutilation. Its tools leave scars on reality. Great wounds that do not heal. It may preserve some elements, but it always botches the process.
MARA: It cannot accomplish what it envisions—its true ideal of the final shape — without the Traveler's power.
MARA: How it must rankle, to be forced to rely upon the being it loathes.
[She smiled without humor.]
MARA: I hope the Guardian is properly grateful for this gift, Scribe Eido. You have shown them more than an opening move; you have laid bare their opponent's guiding principles.
[I could not help but chirp with pride. I might have felt embarrassed, but Marakel seemed amused…then suddenly serious.]
MARA: Last night, I had a dream.
[I sat up straight.]
MARA: It began in nothing. Neither Light nor Dark; the absence of both. But in that nothing, I began to perceive an impossible something.
MARA: Stone hands clutching at the fabric of the sky. A mountain of screaming bone. A crumbling spire choked by kudzu. A great cancerous growth. Necrotic tendrils digging into flesh, which was earth. Darkness turned gangrenous, strangling the Light.
MARA: But I was not afraid. As I woke, I felt the lingering warmth of a campfire, chasing the chill from my hands.
[She leaned forward. Though I was the one who recorded her words, I believe she was speaking to you.]
MARA: It is not too late.
TRANSCRIPTION ENDS