Revenant

Revenant's origin is not told as history. It is relived — a dream that repeats — through the Mask of the Lost One, worn in the present day by the Cetus vendor Nakak, who begins to remember things that were never hers. What the mask carries is set at the place that would become Gara Toht Lake, where the Warframe Gara once vanquished a Sentient and drove its essence into the ground, trapped in some unworldly between.

The thing wanted out. At moonrise its tendril would rise, seeking to reform, and a frame — the warden — was set to keep the ground. Night after night the tendril rose; night after night the warden cut it down. It did not end the way vigils are supposed to end. The tendril took him. He became the lost one, an anchor through which the Eidolon could pull itself into the living world — and only as it began to surface did he understand what he had been made into. So he stopped fighting to get free. He let go, and fell, and carried the thing down into the lake with him. From that drowning he rose again, made Revenant: a Warframe wearing the powers of an Eidolon.

The record holds because of what stands beneath the dream. An Eidolon is not a ghost. It is the shattered remnant of a Sentient killed in the Old War — a mind broken across the ground of the Plains, still trying to gather itself back into something whole. Revenant is what happens when one of those remnants and one of the Orokin's war-frames are pressed into the same body and neither lets go.

The archive marks the edges the tale leaves soft. The Sentient Gara felled is unnamed; the warden's name is lost with him; and Nakak tells the whole of it as memory she does not trust. His kit keeps the shape of the possession — enemies taken as thralls, a spectral skin that turns a killing blow aside — but the frame's own history is a thing recovered piece by piece, not a thing the Empire wrote down.