(Page 60) [b]The Hole, Prison of Elders [/b] "Hey, welcome back." The voice is distant and muffled, but not without an obvious note of anxiety. Shadow pushes herself shakily to her feet. Her eyes blink open slowly, one after another. She raises a hand to her throbbing head. "Augh... what happened?" "We fell 20 stories down, and I can't reach Cayde. Or Petra." Shadow scrambles through the debris, stumbling upon swirling trails of ether. She eyes them curiously, cautiously. "Ether trails. Look out for escaped fallen... but, this ether is... wrong, somehow." Shadow's brow furrows. What was it they had been trying so hard to stop from escaping? She receives her answer when a horde of grotesque, fallen-like creatures burst through a door ahead of her. "What the— ?!" She doesn't get to finish her sentence, forced to open fire. "These... things... they used to be fallen," Glitch murmurs once the room is cleared. "Used to be?" The awoken woman curls her lip in disgust at the boils protruding from their limbs. "The fallen didn't just become this. Someone did this to them." Shadow's jaw clenches. Who? Hadn't they been through enough? "Detecting activity below us, but I still can't get anyone on comms." The silence of the prison now is eerie to her. No blaring alarms, no shooting, no screams of hive.... no Variks. She gazes into the smoke filled distance with a sharp eye. "Variks?" she calls out hesitantly. All she hears in return is her own voice, echoed back to her. Her heart sinks, though she didn't expect a response. Failing to open a fused door, Shadow begins crawling through air ducts to reach the lower levels of the prison with a growing sense of dread. The sight of eliksni crawling around, exploding into clouds of ether, does nothing to soothe her discomfort. Chills spread along her ivory skin with the sudden, pulsing explosion from below. Shadow has never heard this sound before— but her ghost's next words do not surprise her. "No!... Cayde's ghost... she's dead..." Shadow stops in her tracks, hair raising in horror. "Without his ghost, Cayde dies."   Glitch's urgent reminder breaks her out of her trance. "Hold on Cayde! We're coming!"