Lume calls his people "Barant": a name once used by and for his kind. One, he says, they are still owed as children of Torobatl. "Cabal" is a name without weight; it is the label, Lume says, of decrepit imperial bureaucrats. A dry moniker.

Lume's Barant are raucous in their new identity. They worship their distant home star, the heroes who once fought in her name, and the dream that they might pile banners of the conquered upon her plazas once more. They strip themselves bare and howl their praise to Torobatl, calling her warrior and queen, boasting so that she might hear and smile upon them. They trample the ground into a migratory temple, ennobling it with the impressions of their feet. They make orbits of worship around their old idols, mighty challenge columns, as their ancestors did on her plains. Though born on an alien world, Lume's Barant are fierce patriots for a homeland they have never once beheld. This fervor inspires me, this clear dream, this grand project.

Lume has given me a gift: an awareness of this type of power. The Vanguard and the Light have their silent deity in the Traveler, but their celebrations are muted. They do not bid the people to exult in their power because they do not want people to realize their power. They want only the Guardians to be powerful, only the Vanguard to be mighty. I want all humanity to be strong. I want us to celebrate alongside the Barant as they do, but with our own undeniable strength.

My teachers—my brother Lume, my long-dead master Twin Bird—both speak of the same thing, which I have now found for myself. Years ago, I exercised my body through rituals of agony. As I write, it appears this new power will do likewise for me. My vision will be made clear, and with that clarity, I will actualize. I will become greater than the gifted.

I had found a place of power on Europa. A trove of artifacts tainted with Darkness. Rumors of real power, hidden deep within a forgotten Praxic temple. I took a maniple of Lume's most fearsome volunteers into that place, losing many to the elements before we even reached its entrance. It was sweltering inside, the air so thick with damp dust that we were burning our filters at thrice the baseline. Lume's warriors chanted liturgical cadences to fill the halls with celebration from the deep organs, but that dead place swallowed all sounds they made. They thought it was a trick of acoustics or some other paracausal phenomenon, and so they armed themselves accordingly. But the closer we approached the heart of the temple, the more I grew assured of the futility of conventional weapons.

I began to hear a voice. A whisper. Not one of us or Lume, who was watching from his convalescing bed aboard our ship. A new voice, just for me.

In the heart of the temple was a great sepulcher that contained a fantastic, glittering crystal. From my studies, I knew it to be a crystal of Stasis, a paracausal manifestation of Darkness, that power to which I had spent years attuning my body and mind. I touched it, and invited power in.

A voice. His voice. Lume still swears it was a devil of unknown power who spoke to me, but I know the truth. Unseen, a voice leaped between his soldiers, possessing them to speak one word at a time. A message born from howling pain that found its final home in me. The agony was unrelenting, the pain immense, but I had prepared for this moment for years. I did not ignite. My soul did not burn out. The devil's voice became my voice, and the devil became me, and I understood: This was not a devil. This was not the Light. It was not even the Darkness. This was a third power. A new thing. My own path.

TO SATURN, the voice and I cried. TO THE RINGS, MY WEAPON.

VI. This was the name of the great one, the third power. VI held my hand and showed me Lume wounded and Lume mighty, myself wounded and myself mighty. VI. This was the power's name. Tombs and temples. We entered a tomb and made it a temple with our cries, as the Barant once stamped migration prayers into Torobatl's dirt, as I once ran through the halls of my family manor fearing and yearning.

In the quiet after, I was alone. Lume bellowed in my aurals, screaming at me in fury for the death of his brethren. He swore to kill me when I returned, but I knew he would not, so I told him, and I began to laugh and made him another promise: I would heal his wound, erase the Hive magic that rotted him from the inside out.

I am happy. I was chosen. I had been right. I was the vessel; my actions—perhaps from even before my birth, but certainly from the moment I became conscious—were guided by these hands that now rested on my shoulders. My explorations of Darkness, my readings and agonies, were indeed the method by which I would attain a power that could be shared among the masses, a counterweight to the Light—but it would have to begin with me. It could only begin with me.

I am, was, and will be the conduit through which all futures flow.