I joke a lot about it being more believable for the Young Wolf to die as soon as they try to bite off more they can chew w/ a cunning, powerful adversary, and no miracle fireteam and wise/insane mentor/vergil to back them up, but Bungie has been eluding the Young Wolf’s death since Season of Dawn, now, and I’m beginning to feel a little dread.
The Corridors of Time held no other eventual future for them but a teary vigil from Saint-14 and a cold crypt, a carving of Ghost and blade laid atop it.
Now Quria, Dreaming Mind, the ONLY Vex monstrosity capable of simulating and predicting the paracausal, consistently, accurately, and with half a billion years of experience, tells us she sees us broken, taken, dead.
Drifter quips “You say you live for this stuff, Hero? Yeah. You do”. And then goes on to ask us what exactly we think is going to happen, when there’s no more dragon for our knight in shining armor to slay.
I don’t think the Young Wolf is going to get out of the confrontation between Gardener and Winnower alive, and for all my dismal little jokes, I’m gonna cry when they die, inevitably probably saving or protecting someone else, inevitably BECAUSE they felt they had to save/protect someone they love.
I’m afraid they’re going to die before they ever get a chance to live FOR themself, be a person, feel SAFE. I’m afraid they’re going to die doing the exact thing they were reborn doing, a decade or so earlier— Fighting evil no one else could, because they think it’s the right think to do, the only thing they CAN do.
Where’s the Young Wolf’s knitting, poetry, their “Osiris and Saint-14”, so to speak? Where’s their Colonel, their ramen-dates, their harmless adventures? Where’s their LIFE? Don’t they get that? Don’t they DESERVE that? Are they going to die, existing for others, never having LIVED? Is that their Destiny? Is the Gardener that cruel? Are they just Achilles retold in a new voice, a new time, fated to be immortal, unstoppable, until the EXACT moment they AREN’T? When mourners lie flowers at their grave, how many people will be mourning the Young Wolf as a hero, and not a person?