Destiny 2 Lore hunting
Looking for ahamakara bones ghost shells
And Corrupted Egg's?
Ghost hunter
Destiny 2 lore Ghost stories
The Speaker's warnings were clear: Always mind the Light. If you feel it fraying, you've strayed too far. There are places even the Traveler's Light cannot reach.
Now, here I am, lost in the shadowy pastiche known as the Reef. And not a single tether of Light touches me. But that… that is what my Guardian wanted.
His name is Cyrell; and Cyrell called me Strain. I found him on the far edges of Mercury, in a valley that the Vex transformation had never reached. He seemed resilient, unwavering, old, and wise. I'd searched so long for my better half that I didn't hesitate. If I had considered but one moment more, I might have sensed how tired and burdened and tangled his soul truly was, and I would have left him in peace. And I would not be a murderer of my kin.
Cyrell told me we came to the Reef in search of Awoken. He had heard stories of how this far-flung offshoot of Humanity had returned to Sol with unparalleled knowledge. He believed they had the answer to a question he refused to share. I know now, however, that he really came here to spare me.
He confessed he could not bear another battle nor fight in the name of something no one could possibly understand. Though he could not remember his past, he knew deep down that he had already fought his last war.
He couldn't kill me. I was his friend. He doesn't kill friends. He wouldn't kill himself, either; that was cowardly, weak. And if the Ghosts' sole purpose was to raise the dead to kill in the name of unexplainable forces, he could no longer let that happen. He would end the cycle. He would spare his brothers- and sisters-in-arms. He would let the dead rest.
Years later, I saw Cyrell again, clad in wretched-looking armor, dragging a chain of dead Ghosts in the name of peace. Still searching for an Awoken who could answer the one question that has haunted him since his rebirth.
If you are a Ghost who has not yet found your Chosen, let this be a warning: Cyrell, the Ghost Hunter, will end your search for you. If you are Awoken and perchance have the answer he seeks, please, do not keep your secrets from him.
Your life depends on it.
The We Before Us
Destiny 2 Lore
Ghost storys
I remember the moment we were born.
There was pain, and loss, and a feeling of falling. Was this the end? The shadows gathered, colored bruise-purple and gray in Our fading consciousness.
Our shell cracked and splintered. Parts of Us were lost, or carried away. We felt those wounds, jagged and sharp. We could feel them still, attached by a gossamer-thin strand of understanding.
We felt a garden with no blooms. A valley shrouded in gloom.
We felt ourselves dying. We didn't want to go.
Then there I was, separated from the whole. I could feel it shrink, slip back into itself, dim and unseeing. I knew it was waiting. Resting. Watching. Considering.
And I knew what I needed to do. Somewhere in this wide, amazing galaxy there was a person. They were quiet and dead, like We had been, but I could bring them back. I could share what was inside of me, this glorious warmth and life and breath and being.
Together, that person and I would do what We, the We before me, could not.
I wrapped the spark that was me in metal and glass, a tiny bit of something that reminded me of the home We had shared. Then I set out to find my person. The keeper of my Light.
There were so many people. So many still, fragile things, decaying into dust, lost to memory. I touched each one, looking for… something? A fragment of ember under the ash?
I didn't find it. I know now that there is one person, only one, that is mine. I have been to many planets. Seen things I never knew were possible. Hid from monsters. Followed dreams.
I have seen others of my kind, the other pieces that were once Us. Their search is over.
They are complete. Stronger. Braver because they found their counterpart.
I am alone. I know you are still out there. That you're waiting for me. But it has been so long, and I am so…
Very…
Cold…
I will rest here and think about Us.
For…
Compliments
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
I remember talking to Ophiuchus one day about the connection between Ghosts and Guardians.
This was years and years ago, back when we were still in the City and Osiris was Vanguard Commander. Osiris and Ikora would talk for hours—days, sometimes—and frankly, it was pretty boring. Especially when I got stuck entertaining Ophiuchus. Seriously, that Ghost is not a conversationalist.
Anyway, O said he had a theory why there was one Ghost for one Guardian. He thought that each of us had strengths that complemented weaknesses in our Guardian, and vice versa. That we needed to be together, or neither of us would be whole.
"Like soul mates?" I asked. "Because I'm not in love with Osiris or anything. Not only would that be really weird, he kinda gets on my nerves a lot of the time."
"It is not a romantic attachment," O said. If he had eyes, he would have rolled them at me. "It is my belief that the Traveler understood that normal people would not be enough to protect humanity. That it would take those who are extraordinary in both body and spirit. And that only by the merging of Ghost and Guardian into a single unit could this be accomplished."
"I don't know where Ikora keeps you," I told him, "but Osiris and I are not 'a single unit.' You've heard us argue. A lot."
"And why do you challenge him?" O asked.
"Because no one else will. He's the great and powerful Osiris: hero, scholar, savior, yadda yadda. And no one, I mean no one, not even Ikora, really challenges him. They do what he wants, even if it's a terrible idea. Not me.
"Everyone needs someone to tell them to get over themselves once in a while. Especially Osiris."
"Would you say that is a strength that complements a weakness?"
I didn't answer. I hate it when someone else is right. Good thing it doesn't happen often.
"All right then, smarty Ghost," I finally said. "What about you and Ikora? You're both rigid and stuffy, read too much…"
"I am a calming influence. I encourage her to think before she acts and not to let her emotions get the best of her."
I couldn't help it. I cracked up. It actually took me a minute to get under control. "Ikora?" I said, laughing so hard I could barely talk. "Have you met Ikora? All she does is think!"
"You don't know her at all," Ophiuchus told me
Confession of Hope part 1
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
The choice haunts me.
It was not reasoned. I let emotion get the better of me. The Fallen had moved on. The few survivors were huddled close in the dark of a cave, muffling their heavy, quick breaths, stifling their sobbing.
When I found them, many nights before, I also found renewed purpose. I had traveled these dead and dying worlds for longer than I cared to remember, all the while in search of a spark worthy of ignition.
Over time I'd grown weary, but in this small band of survivors, I found hope. If I couldn't find a lost soul worthy to be touched by the Light, then I would find another way, a smaller way, to be of service. I would lead this small gathering of desperate men, women, and a single child to the growing sanctuary beneath the Traveler.
If I could not find a hero to challenge the Darkness, I would be a guide to those in need of salvation.
It took some time to gain their trust. I was odd—other. They thought I was an angel. I told them I was not. They named me Tiānshǐ. I did not object.
The child marveled at me. Still too young to speak, much less comprehend, he had a presence that was a burden and a boon. His parents did all they could to nurture him, protect him with the aid, comfort, and care of their traveling companions—once strangers, now bound deeper than blood by their shared experience in this new life after the end of the world.
On that day, in that cave, huddled in fear as the Fallen Skiff's roar faded over the tree line, the mother wailed—a sound I had never before heard and hope never to hear again.
Such pain. Such sorrow.
Grief. Suffering. Loss.
Her cry echoed through the forest. Her husband, weeping and on the edge of breaking down, simply held her.
And the dead child in her arms.
The others tried to calm them, out of fear that the Fallen would return. The attack had been swift and brutal. Twenty dead. Only nine survivors, here, in this cave. I watched the tree line, anxious and afraid.
The mother's pain filled the space between the thick trees. I turned back to her and saw it for the first time: the child's spark.
Faint. But there.
This little boy was not my charge. Those selected to return were champions. This child was so small, so frail. What devotion had he shown? What bravery? What had he sacrificed? But a thought lingered…
Was it not my purest purpose to deliver hope? Every hero raised fought not for themselves but for the whole of humanity. If saving one life—if redressing this one terrible loss—was not a worthy cause… what was?
I watched the mother as she cried.
I felt myself expand. Felt the Light that was me intensify. In a way, it was outside of my control, as if something had reached inside of me and flipped a switch. A beam erupted from my core and bathed with Light the child's small, broken body.
A second passed—
And he began to cry. All fell silent. The Traveler's gift had been given. A child, returned. And with him, the beginning of my journey's end.
Did I do the right thing? Would the child grow to reach his peak physical self? Would he, like all returned, be ready for the wars to come?
But then a thought came over me, one I had never before considered: maybe death would have been better.
Had I saved the child, or doomed him?
As his cries echoed, the survivors looked on in shock. There was joy in their silence—wonder.
I looked down on him, and pride began to well inside of me. I had done what was right.
But that was then—only months ago, but long enough to seem a lifetime.
Now the Fallen are back, and we are running. And I fear the promise of a gift given is far from enough to save us from a pirate's blade.
—Fragment of the last transmission from an unknown Ghost
The Pressure
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
She was the first Ghost to arrive, but it wasn't long until there were dozens of them, scanning every pile of debris that remained of Tower North. They came in search of the one who guided their journeys, the one who once spoke for the Traveler.
"He called me Dejana. Before I met him, I didn't know what to call myself." She was speaking to a red-shelled one, who hovered where the Speaker once studied the Light. His eyes were ever fixed on the new brilliance of the Living Traveler.
"He called me Anwar. You never found yours either, did you?"
"No." Her journey had spanned centuries—on Earth, the Moon, and Venus—but she never unearthed a single soul she felt worthy of the Light. "I used to think it was me; perhaps I was too picky, but… he assured me, humanity was vast. The gift of the Light must be deserved, and it was better to be thorough than to end up with someone too weak to bear the burden, or worse, misuse it. He, at least, made me feel… useful. I put my search on hold and served him as a cartographer. You?"
"Deconstructionist." Anwar paused. Drifted a few feet toward the luminous Living Traveler. "Dejana, can you feel it?"
Dejana followed Anwar's gaze up to the Traveler. "Feel what?"
"The pressure."
The Chosen's Choice
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
She focuses herself to resurrect him once more, only this time—she hesitates. She looks around, taking in the human carnage surrounding her.
She thinks back to their arrival into this village. How its population lauded him and showered him with gifts, begged him to stay, to defend them, to keep them safe.
At first he seemed reluctant, but the longer he remained, and the more Fallen he slew, the more they praised him. That praise emboldened him; he grew expectant, addicted to their exaltations and gifts.
The more he consumed, the more the village's resources dwindled. He led expeditions to take from others—no warning, no diplomacy. He showed his might as one of the Risen and demanded he be lauded as savior. Those he once protected now died under his charge, and they venerated him all the more for it.
As much as she tried to guide him back into the Light and remind him why he was Chosen, he could not hear her over the adulations of his newfound vassals. Resurrection after resurrection, his legend flourished while the dead remained dead; he grew ever more covetous and unforgiving. He stopped learning from his losses and came to feel entitled to his immortality.
One winter night, clad in golden armor, he made war on a seaside settlement of fishers and spiritualists. Not a man, woman, or child survived. Flushed with the high of easy victory, he and his followers were ill prepared for the Fallen war party that had been stalking them the last few moons. It was a massacre atop a massacre. And only he, one of the Risen, would walk away from this.
She looks away from the human carnage surrounding her. Looks down upon the one she chose. His golden armor, dulled with the blood of his victims and his adorers, still reflects back to her the light of her single eye.
He made his choice. And thus, so will she.
She turns her eye away from him, away from herself, and floats eastward toward the rising light.
Don't call me Ghost
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
"I want a name."
"Is this because of Sagira? She is a terrible influence on you."
"She has a name. People don't just call her 'Ghost.' It's insulting being called 'Ghost.' I'm not a thing. I'm me."
"Who are you, then?"
"I'm… I don't know. I'm me."
"And you want me to define you? That sounds like you're a thing."
"You're insufferable, do you know that?"
"You didn't have to bring me back."
"You know that's not true."
"Is it?"
"There you go again, Tyra, questioning everything. Treating the entire world like a puzzle that you have to record, and analyze, and put in your files."
"I cannot do anything else. If I do not question, do not study, do not learn, I have no purpose. 'Every mind has its own form.'"
"You've been reading philosophy again."
"Rousseau. Ikora lent me a copy."
"Hmmph."
"Don't pout, Ghost. It's annoying."
"So is being called Ghost. Might as well cover me with a sheet."
"Choose your own name. You don't need me to define you."
"I will!"
… … …
"Well? What is your name, Ghost?"
"Don't call me Ghost."
No Rez for the Weary
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
My Guardian is immortal. My Guardian is forever lost to me. He boarded the derelict Almighty with his fireteam, hoping to salvage Cabal secrets from the star murderer.
I should have seen the trap. Was it Cabal? Was it some Vex infection from Mercury? I don't know. It's all my fault. I remember how the moment of activation felt like falling. He lunged for the center, crying out to his friends, "I'll disarm it!"
He is still lunging. Fly to the Almighty and you will find him there, caught in the amber of slow time, reaching forever. I have observed his motions carefully. He will arrive at the mechanism and deactivate the trap in only a little more than fifty thousand years.
I cannot resurrect him. I have tried so hard. The City's Warlocks and thanatonauts answered all my desperate questions, even when I began to ask if he could be destroyed. At least if he were gone, unmade, then I could make him again…
Why can't I bring him back? If a Guardian falls into Titan's methane sea, they do not die instantly, but we can still bring them back on the arcology. If a Guardian hurls themself off their ship into space, do we need to wait for them to disintegrate in the solar wind before we bring them back? No. No. It was never hard before! I see him right there, and he seems so close! All I was ever meant to be was his Ghost!
But all Ghosts know there are places where we cannot bring our Guardians back to life. And this is one of them. Why? Is the Darkness gathered against us here? Is the Light too weak?
I think I know why. Some share my theory. What do we do when we bring our Guardians back? What is the magical heart of the process? Are we like the City's probability kilns, twisting the quantum vacuum in our favor to yield matter?
Perhaps. Perhaps. But certain members of a cult I shall not directly name have their own specific interpretation of this process. "When you bring him back," they told me, "you must have a template… an image to provide you with the information you need. Where do you find that template?
"Simply in a neighboring timeline. A place where he is still alive and intact. And wherever there is great danger, wherever the probability of death is too high, then those timelines become scarce and hard to reach. And so you find the zones where Guardians cannot easily be remade."
If this is true, then I am doomed and free. There will be no alternate worlds in which my Guardian escapes that trap. There will be no hope of resurrection.
I will be a Ghost alone.
But the thought haunts me that I might be wrong, and that he is still waiting for me…
The Watchfull Eye
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
I've made my peace. If my other is not out here somewhere—if my Guardian can't be found—then I will find ways to be of value to the greater good.
It's been cycles since I told myself to be useful in any way possible, but it is a mantra I repeat, a constant reminder: "If I have no other, MY actions must be enough. If I have no other, I will become the hero I cannot find."
It sounded noble at the time. Turns out nobility is the kind of thing that places the well-intended in harm's way and, apparently, I'm fine with that. Maybe we all are. Maybe that's what makes us heroic—accepting risk as a consequence of doing what's right.
I've been tracking Fallen crew movements along the edge of the EDZ for some time, careful not to venture too deep into their territory. After all, I'm only one Ghost. Without a Guardian, I'm no use in a fight. But I can watch and learn and report. I can find my own ways to combat the enemies of the Light.
All Ghosts keep an eye out—we chronicle and share the highlights of our travels. It helps us and our charges navigate the frontier, though the vast majority of these wild lands remain unexplored.
The only difference between the Ghost I am today and the Ghost I used to be is my focus. Whereas I used to be driven solely by the need to find and sync with a Guardian, I am now fully dedicated to spy craft—the art and execution of information gathering.
And I am not alone.
There is an entire network of Ghosts like me. Should we find our others, we shall rejoice and shift our mission to serve as the right hands of the true warriors of the Light. Until then, we move swift and quiet through the vast wilds of the frontier, scouting our enemies' movements and cataloging their every action so that the Vanguard, and others, may better assess and confront the dangers beyond the Last Safe City.
We are small. We are few. But we are brave and we are heroes.
—Link, an unconnected Ghost, part of the Vanguard's covert spectral network
Into the Fray
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
She wasn't ready, but I had no choice.
The Cabal mining rig was set to scorch the earth and then churn the soil to get at whatever they were after underneath.
Problem was… my Guardian—the one I'd spent a very long time looking for—was lying dormant in their path: a lifeless husk in need of a wake-up call before her remains were atomized and I was left, for eternity, without my chosen.
That I'd found her seconds before the Red Legion's survey team arrived was… unfortunate. But I had to do what I had to do. Some risks, after all, are worth taking. It was now or never. And besides, there's no timing like bad timing.
I opened myself up to the Traveler's gift and enveloped her in Light just as the mining rig settled.
My new Guardian gasped and sat up, crying out as if waking from a nightmare.
Not good.
The Cabal security team was on us quick. Their slug shots rang out.
Before she could take a second breath, my Guardian was dead… again.
I spun and hit her with another scan as the rig warmed its burners.
The Cabal released their War Beasts on us.
My Guardian was up as the ground heated and the War Beasts charged. She was confused, as was to be expected.
"Run! Now!" I tried to warn her, incite her to move. But she just looked around—dazed, confused.
Then she saw the Beasts. Instinct, as it turns out, is a compelling motivator. She was up in a flash, sprinting away from the rig's burners and away from the gnashing teeth that were quick on her heels. As soon as she cleared the rig, the Cabal opened fire. And here's where risk became reward…
My Guardian didn't flinch. Didn't cower. Instead, she got angry. And aggressive.
This long-dead woman was back among the living for only a moment, and already she was one with war. I wonder, perhaps, if that's what makes humanity the perfect weapon—if that's what makes it a force worthy of concern. Not my place to say. Though what came next gave me pause and more than a hint of pride.
My Guardian charged the nearest Cabal—a creature of war she had never seen, a hulking brute in thick-plated armor.
She docked and dodged, left to right and back again to avoid slug fire. A War Beast lunged, clamping its jaw on my Guardian's forearm. She yelled.
The Cabal laughed. The other War Beasts closed in.
Then…
My Guardian—this woman only just reborn in the Light—grabbed the Beast clamping down on her arm by the hind legs, Lifted, and brought her entire weight down on the creature's spine, knee first.
The sound—cracked bone and a sudden, sharp yelp—caused the other Beasts to halt and the Cabal to quell their laughter.
She resumed her charge. No hesitation. The Beast's limp body was still locked on her arm. She pulled it free—I could hear the flesh tear, but she did not flinch. Instead she closed the distance, rushing the Cabal, the Beast held tight in her good arm's grip.
The Cabal raised his weapon, but too late. The other Beasts charged as my Guardian pummeled the Legionary with the corpse of his pet. It was brutal, swift.
I issued a warning as the War Beasts lunged, but it didn't matter—she already had the Cabal's slug thrower in hand. What followed… I am reluctant to recount in full.
She was new then—awakened into a world of sudden, fierce violence.
All I will say is that I am here, and my Guardian is near, and somewhere deep within the EDZ there is ground still darkened with the stain of Cabal blood.
—Tam, a Ghost recounting his Guardian's resurrection
Confession of hope Part 2
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
Out here in the wilds, survival depends heavily on your ability to elude Fallen patrols. Everything else, every other danger, is secondary. Exposure. Starvation. Hungry beasts. Crazed bandits. All can be assessed and managed. But Fallen—these vicious pirates—they hunt and kill not only for their own survival… but for sport. They relish the slaughter.
I was guiding our ragtag group through dense woods, but with a child to carry and many survivors wounded, we didn't move quickly enough. We'd been spotted a few miles back. The attack was swift, violent. The child's mother fell almost immediately. His father foolishly—though maybe it's best to imagine he was brave—let his grief and fear get the better of him. He ran to her aid, but there was none to give. Now he is gone as well. Two parents dead. One orphaned child gifted in ways he can't yet understand.
Others grabbed the infant and fled. He cried—confused, frightened. They muzzled his fear and made for the thick of the forest. I followed. The child was mine to protect—if I could. I had no choice but to stay with him.
And yet, here I am…
This hasty dictation is meant to give some insight, if needed, into my choice—into my moment of weakness that led to a child reborn. I'm recounting as I flee, so mind the clipped nature, this truncated plea for understanding and a brief history of what happened here.
I will send this message on signal to any Ghost who may hear. The Fallen are on me. I have run from the pack to lead them away. Should I survive, I will return to the child. Should I fall, he will be left to others to raise—and will ever have only the one, second, life to give.
I left him in the care of a terrified man and woman. But they are smart and caring; they have courage but know when to run, when to survive. They will stay hidden until the Fallen are away, my Light serving as a distraction to lure them as far from these Humans as I can.
I made my presence known to the pirates and darted from the last of the survivors—made myself a target to buy them time. But that time is short.
The Fallen are close now. And closing. I can hear the bark of their war cries. I can feel the spark of their blades. They've long since learned that to kill one like me is a future problem solved.
I am not sorry for the choice I made. The child gave hope, though fleeting. What comes next for him is unknown. But there is promise in him, should he find sanctuary. Should he find guidance.
This is not a confession. This is my hope. This is my—
—Fragment of the last transmission from an unknown Ghost
From Fallen Ground
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
I am quiet, I am not here, the Fallen cannot see me, they cannot know me. I am not a shadow, but I move among them, silent, deliberate of motion, and intent as when I entered their hollow one month prior. I used the light of day to mask my own, because the forest here is barren, it's, it's, it's a dead place, to and fro, a constant buzz as the scavengers go about the business of stripping this world of its old glories. And I watch, I learn, I record and preserve; their every movement is my obsession. I hang on their every word, even though I am not versed in their nightmare tongue, but others are and they will decipher it; they will find the secrets hidden within. Secrets are like weapons, and I am an instrument of their unmaking. They are enemy, they are cruel, and I will learn and share, and they will be undone.
What is that shouting? I am deep now, no telling how far in. I have tracked each meter. Mapped every path. But this maze is ever-winding and their cheers now echo, violent with joy, and I hesitate to investigate as I am entering unknown corridors thick with security… Yes, yes, this is a special place, a holy place, a mechanized place, and the shouts merge with screams and the grinding of gears, and the joy joins with pain. There is suffering here, punishment—a, a… a ritual? I must know so we may know, and I move slow, careful… must… not… be seen… cannot be detected… Meter by meter, anywhere where cover is provided. Quick and with purpose whenever exposed. I make my way, leaving other avenues unexplored; the cheers must be understood. But eventually they die. Replaced by the harmony of the pirates' busy days and nights, oh my how they never rest—or rather… when they rest, others continue the work, prepping scavenger sorties, sifting through spoils, readying their fleet, their weapons, their worship. The manner in which they revere machines, I should feel safe here, I should be among their gods… Am I machine? I don't know, I don't know anything. Their worship is not so simple. With the cacophony of excitement no longer echoing, I slow my pace but remain vigilant in my efforts to locate its origin.
It is weeks before I do, weeks before now. A ceremony has just ended and I am sending out a recollection of what I have seen, because I am seen—these are my final moments, of this I am sure. The ceremony is combat, ritual, and fury, it is a pit and arena where the lesser and unworthy must prove their value or suffer and die. Oh how they fight dirty, oh how they fight to survive—or to thrive. In this pit, before the eyes of an Archon, shamed Eliksni may redeem themselves, lesser pirates may improve their station: a Dreg to a Vandal, a Vandal to a Captain, a Captain to… This is their forge, their place of judgment, their trial before their betters. This is what we are up against; kill or die, thrive or perish, they have no use for the weak and they watch and cheer and scream as their Archon looks on. But I have become careless. The fervor became a distraction and now the Archon's eyes have found me and I am too deep to run and I think he is smiling…
—The last frantic transmissions of Wren, a brave Ghost of the spectral network
Difference of Opinion
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
Peregrine Institute of Higher Learning Presents:
"Ghost Stories: Interviews with Two Ghosts of the Traveler"
A guest lecture by two Guardian-less Ghosts about life, Light, and the search for their Guardians
Featuring: Balthazar (unpartnered) and Peach (unpartnered)
Transcript of the Q&A session is as follows:
Q: What is the Traveler, in your understanding?
BALTHAZAR: Great question.
PEACH: Terrible question.
BALTHAZAR: In a sense, it's the ONLY question. The Traveler is our primary, our mother, the primordial and the pinnacle. A dear friend, the Ghost of Pujari, once compared the Traveler to a song that has never been sung—
PEACH: Look, the answer no one likes to give is that no one knows what the Traveler is or anything about it. Not even us.
BALTHAZAR: We know she wished for us to raise Guardians to be her avatars and defenders—
PEACH: Do we, though? Just because we CAN do that doesn't mean we were MADE to do that. And who says it's a "she" anyway? Why does "it" need a gender?
BALTHAZAR: The Traveler, in her omniscient wisdom, looked into the past and the future, and from all the generations that emerged from the cradle of Earth, she chose the best of them to be her champions. Each Ghost was lovingly and carefully created for their one true Guardian. The Ghost and Guardian complete each other.
PEACH: If that's true, then the Traveler's kind of a jerk.
BALTHAZAR: Excuse me?
PEACH: Look, I know tons of Ghosts who died before they ever found their Guardians. I know some Ghosts who still haven't found a Guardian. You haven't. And I haven't, but I don't think I'm "incomplete" because of it.
BALTHAZAR: I have the humility to recognize my own shortcomings and to submit myself to the Traveler's plan.
Q: Do you remember being inside the Traveler?
PEACH: No.
BALTHAZAR: I do. We call it the Womb.
PEACH: I have never and will never call it that.
BALTHAZAR: Imagine a cosmos inside a bottle. Trillions of stars orbiting each other in a complex weave. But they aren't stars. Perhaps a better word would be… souls. Souls, dancing in an infinite space enclosed within a celestial egg.
PEACH: Which is it, an egg or a womb?
BALTHAZAR: It's called a metaphor.
PEACH: Well then, pick a metaphor. Not twelve.
BALTHAZAR: Well, what would you call it?
PEACH: I wouldn't call it anything, because I don't remember it, and I don't think you do either.
Q: Some people say that each Ghost is an aspect of the Traveler—that is to say, that each Ghost represents a part of the divine Whole.
PEACH: [loud laughter]
BALTHAZAR: Would you please? This is unbecoming.
PEACH: First of all, that wasn't a question. Second of all… [more laughter] Third of all: if I'm a part of the Traveler's brain or soul or whatever, then the Traveler sure isn't divine, I'll tell you that much.
Q: What will you do if you never find a Guardian?
BALTHAZAR: I shall find a Guardian. The Traveler has willed it so.
PEACH: Did you get that in writing?
BALTHAZAR: It is true that some Ghosts die before finding their partners. If that happens to me, then I suppose I will "do" nothing, since I will no longer be. But I have faith.
PEACH: If I never find my Guardian, I'll go steal someone else's. I hear Sagira had a good time with that.
Q: If you could eat, what would you eat first?
PEACH: Finally, a good question!
BALTHAZAR: We do not know the desire for food. Our semicorporeal form—
PEACH: Nectarines. Or hot sauce. Ooh, or crickets. Crunchy roasted crickets. Crunchy food sounds so fun. I wish I could get cricket carapace stuck between my teeth. Here's a question for YOU: what's it like to have teeth?
BALTHAZAR: Is this over yet?
Savin
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
I am searching. I am close; I can feel that I am close.
What will my Risen be like? Will she be honorable? Will she be a brute?
I should be able to tell, shouldn't I? I don't know. I don't know that it matters. I have been searching since the day that I was born. I will take anyone.
I crest a dune. The Gobi is endless in the evening light. And then I see it: a burnt-out building, the only man-made structure for miles. I do not know whether to fly faster or keep a stately pace. It doesn't matter. The dead cannot see.
I am nervous. Why am I nervous?
As I draw closer, I rehearse what I might say. First introductions are important. "You are a child of the Traveler's Light," I say to myself. "You have been chosen in defense of this solar system… No. No. Hm. You… We are both children of the Traveler. You and I are both children of…"
I forget my words as I slip into the building. I find meteorological equipment. I find an empty office. I find a dingy breakroom. At the back of the breakroom, I see my other half: a Fallen Vandal crushed beneath a toppled refrigerator.
I am devastated. I have seen the Fallen. They are butchers. Castaway murderers. I would take anyone, but not this. Not this thing.
I turn away. I count seventeen slow laps around the room and then another four around the building. I should be decisive, shouldn't I? I should be filled with pride that I have fulfilled my first purpose. I am not. It doesn't matter. I cannot ignore the pull.
I return to the breakroom. I do not know what I will say, but—Fallen or no—it is the Traveler's will that I do this. I reach toward the Light, then reach toward that pull to join them together.
The refrigerator trembles as the Light suffuses him. I hear a low groan. "Push it away," I whisper. If my Risen dies beneath this refrigerator and I fly away into the sun, no one will know. Perhaps I will have done the Earth a great service. "I'm here with you, but you must help yourself. Push it away and sit up."
The refrigerator shifts, then topples to the side. An Awoken man sits up and pushes the dead Vandal off his chest like an unwelcome blanket on a hot summer night. With effort, he wiggles free and stands straight.
"Who are you?" he asks. He looks around, then down at his blue hands. "What am I?"
"I am your Ghost," I say with more than a hint of obvious relief. "You are one of the Traveler's Chosen, a defender of humanity. What is your name?"
He flexes his fingers, works his jaw, blows a raspberry. Then he looks at me. "Savin. Yes, I think I call myself Savin." He nods, satisfied. "Let's go, Yourghost."
Struck by Wonder
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
I look upon them, and I am struck by wonder.
All they do. All they endure.
Not a single one asked for this life—this second chance. And when they woke—when the Light hit their eyes in that first instance upon their return—they were welcomed into a broken world.
Yet…
They stand. Time and again. Against odds insurmountable. In defiance of all who would see their end.
Such determination. Such pride. Such fire. Love. Joy. Hope. Fear. Lust. Such powerful will. Strong enough to carve the promise of new tomorrows across the barren landscapes of yesterday.
It inspires. From the smallest victory, to grandest of conquests, I've seen it all…
The raising of the first walls. The bravery of Six Fronts. The desperation at Twilight Gap. The war with the Devils. The taming of the Wolves.
I've seen Iron Lords rise and fall, witnessed the last cycles of dark ages, and cheered as new triumphs gifted all with the promise of renewed hope—our return to the Moon and Mars, the pruning of the Garden, and the defeat of Hive royalty.
Even Ghaul and his armies… So many threats, so many challenges, yet our Guardians stand—humankind persists.
They are touched by the Light, but no longer do I see it as a gift. Instead, it is their courage, their strength, their humanity that has been, in truth, the greatest gift—their greatest weapon.
This thought brings me joy and a bit of peace amid so much chaos, and I find myself asking, often and with great anticipation:
Where to next?
—Observations of a Ghost named Kaiser on Guardian inspiration
A Hero's Requiem
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
You're all special. He was no different. At first. Just as special, same as the rest.
All that's changed, obviously. Over time he… distanced himself—stood out.
It took some time for her to adjust to his personality. From what she's shared, it took him time as well. The Cayde-6 known to all is not the man he was in total. His wit and his playfulness were a shield—a weapon as trained as his blade or his hand cannons.
He called her Sundance. I was never sure why. She said it was from an old legend—a fable from the time before the time before. I always thought it was because of her spark, the grace with which she moved—so effortless, so sly. They were a perfect match.
There's no doubt he recounted his return to those closest to him on more than one occasion; and there's no doubt as well that the events shifted a bit with each telling. Like his wit, the building of his legend was a weapon.
For those who don't know… For those who were not lucky enough to hear the tale of Cayde-6's first from his own mouth—with that charm and the way he'd act out his favorite parts, complete with sound effects—here is one telling…
It's a recording from cycles past. It's not the whole story, but where Cayde-6 was involved, nothing ever was…
"BOOM! I wake up. Groggy. Confused. Hungover. It's the same for us all, so that initial shock's nothing new. Sundance is in my face, and I'm freaking out. My brain works, but I don't remember a thing 'cept that I seem to be a functioning life form—I'm human, I'm a man. And then my mind starts reeling a thousand miles a minute. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM. Like I'm downloading the 'Idiot's Guide to Basic Human Existence.' Cool. Great. Still can't remember anything. And I sure can't wrap my head around the talking, floating magic robot orb-thing jabbering in my face. I'm freaked. So, I freaked. Smacked her to the ground. Hard… And I ran.
"I'm runnin'. She's runnin'… Or, ya know, whatever she's doin' since she doesn't have any legs… She's right behind me, going, 'Wrong way! Wrong way!' She's screaming. I'm screaming. Whatever she's yelling, I just keep running. It's night. Did I mention that? It's nighttime and my eyes are still adjusting. So, I'm runnin', I'm runnin'. Can't see. Can't remember. Scared to death. Confused as all get-out. And then—
"I fall. I'm straight up falling. Just like that, I ran… Right. Off. A. Cliff. It wasn't a short drop. I bounced… so many times. Felt each and every one. Till I didn't. Till it all went black again. And then…
"BOOM! I'm back! She got me right up on my feet. Just like she always does. And that, my dudes, was the start of a beautiful friendship."
Most haven't heard that story, and in listening, you hopefully weren't looking for any definitive truth of who he was as a man or a Guardian. That's not what the story's for. Its purpose, now more than ever, fits nicely into the armor Cayde wore best…
He thought it was funny. And now, more than ever…
Cayde would want us to laugh.
—Shiro-4's Ghost, at a gathering in Cayde-6's honor
Ghost Community Theater Presents
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
The Ghost Community Theater presents:
ORYX THE NIGHTMARE DADDY:
One Brave Ghost Versus the Death from Outer Space
A four-and-a-half-act play
Written and directed by Didi, Ghost of Marcus Ren
STARRING:
Marcus Ren............................................Hero's Ghost
Didi the Ghost.....................................Guardian Hero
Enoch Bast...........................................................Oryx
Pixie, Ghost of Ariadne Gris............................Ir Halak
Sweeperbot.....................................................Ir Anûk
Ghost, Ghost of Enoch Bast....Ghostly Shade of Crota
See the play that Commander Zavala calls, "An insensitive and disrespectful travesty of a production, with truly abominable prop design—an insult to the art of papier-mâché."
The eponymous Ghost himself calls it: "Is this supposed to be me? Oh… oh no…"
Ghost, the Ghost of Tyra Karn, calls it: "A four-and-a-half-act structure? But that makes no… Stories do have rules, you know! You can't… What constitutes 'half' an… You know what? I don't need to entertain this nonsense."
Ophiuchus, the Ghost of Ikora Rey, calls it: [judgmental silence].
Lord Shaxx calls it: "Undeniably enthusiastic, I'll grant you that. But is the dialogue meant to come across so… sexually charged?"
Ghost, the Ghost of Tyra Karn, calls it: "I've been thinking about it, and I really do think it would be worthwhile for you to learn the basics of narrative composition. Sit down, we're doing this now."
Protector of Ghosts
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
From: Micah-10
To: Tallulah Fairwind
Category: 5-sat bounce
Priority: 3
Hello, old friend:
I have a knack for finding Hunters. Another of my little pack has found her partner, a Human male, and now the two of them are coming to you by watercraft over the Pacific. Keep an eye on this one, Tallu. He has taken the name Andal Brask, and I believe he will be trouble.
Perhaps all this travel has made me sentimental, for when one of my Ghost wards finds their Guardian, I am sad, because my pack grows smaller. I miss them when they are gone. Now I am down to one Ghost other than my own. Pup, we call him. The runt of my metallic litter. Pup has yet to speak, but always his little blue eye searches for his Guardian.
I plan to resupply at the Cosmodrome and then take Pup north. Those steppes are uncharted territory, except by that lone wolf, Conar. My correspondence with him is regular in the outbound direction; I consider myself lucky when he answers every fifth message. Still, you and I both know his intel is good. No one else knows Old Russia like he does.
Perhaps in the Cosmodrome I will find a ship capable of breaking atmosphere. Though there is much of this Earth I have yet to see, I have come across more than a few Ghosts who believe their Guardians are offworld, waiting in the Golden Age ruins of Freehold and Ishtar and beyond. Some of these little Lights have decided to brave the null on their own to reach their fated partners. I tell them there's still so much of Earth we've yet to sniff out, that perhaps their Guardians have not yet been born, but some of them are convinced. If my next Ghost pack wants to make the journey, I am determined to join them.
These last few months we've enjoyed the pleasant absence of Cyrell. Now I feel more confident that we lost him in Australis. If he tries to hurt my Ghosts, I will rip his throat out.
I hope you're not feeling too cooped up. You're still doing good work, Tallu. And as they say, better you than me.
Your Faithful Den-Mother-of-Ghosts,
Micah-10
Pulled Pork
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
Nkechi-32 lies on the hull of her ship, skimming through gossip and salvage requisition lists on VanNet. Agu nestles in the magnificent feather ruff of her chest plate and looks out at the debris of the Reef.
"'Revised Crucible rules are garbage,' blah blah blah. How does this have like three hundred comments?" she says, flicking to the next page. "Where's the juicy stuff?"
"Hey, it's Pulled Pork," Agu says, peeking up over one of Nkechi's tremendous pauldrons.
She sits up right away, eyes lighting with interest. "Really? Where?"
Pulled Pork is the name they've given to a very sweet, very earnest Ghost that has been looking for his Guardian for about as long as they can remember. Pulled Pork is not his real name, but it feels right, like calling Mara Sov by her full name instead of just her forename.
Agu directs Nkechi's attention out into the floating scrap. Sure enough, there he is: a tiny speck moving with meticulous patience across the surface of a blasted-out Fallen Skiff. "Let's go say hi," Nkechi decides, disabling her VanNet HUD. She climbs to her feet and begins a lazy zero-gravity parkour run, leaping and drifting from one hunk of scrap to another.
"Hey, buddy!" she calls when they get close. "Whatcha doing?"
Pulled Pork finishes up a scan of a floating piece of concrete and rebar, then turns toward them.
"I am looking for my Guardian!" he chirps.
"That's nice. You gonna find him in that rock?"
"You never know, Miss Nkechi Thirty-Two. Maybe my Guardian is very small."
"Maybe," Nkechi agrees. "But you might want to consider scanning the dead, bud. That shell's pretty snappy. Is it new?" It's Reef-purple, with a flowerlike silhouette and silver detailing.
"Yes! It is. It was a gift. And, thank you for your suggestion. I have considered it! I do often scan the dead. I also scan other things. I like to be thorough." Pulled Pork bobs in place politely, almost bowing. "Please excuse me one moment!" He turns to scan a piece of warped plasteel.
They watch. Nkechi shakes her head.
"Oh, leave him alone," Agu whispers in her ear. "If he goes through every bit of scrap in the Reef, he'll find someone eventually. Sky knows there are plenty of bodies (and body parts) floating around here…"
"Yeah, we said that when we found him on Mars, and that was before Twilight Gap," Nkechi replies.
"Well. With that in mind, let's check back on him in a couple months. Who knows? Maybe he'll get lucky and find the greatest Guardian of all time."
"Shoot. YOU found the greatest Guardian of all time."
Who Guards the Guardians?
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
All around me, the pitter-patter of desperate steps.
The thump-thump of armor-piercing microrockets. The cries and screams that fill the air.
I feel… nothing. I am filled with… nothing. Just frozen. Empty. Soulless. Lightless.
The Red Legion has come and taken it all away.
Eventually the desperate steps diminish. For a few minutes, the Last City falls silent. Then… The low growl of their breathing. The clanking metal of heavy slug throwers against their crimson armor. The tremors of their heavy booted steps as they draw near.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Mortals ask themselves the same question all the time—that question about meaning. About their place in this universe.
But WE don't. Perhaps at first, as we tried to make sense of the day the Traveler pushed us free from itself, but no, not anymore. We know our purpose. Why we're here.
In ancient times, humanity dreamed of gods and heavens and winged protectors that watched over them, kept them safe from uncontrollable and unpredictable harm. In this age, I believe humanity sees that in the Guardians. Yet, when the Guardians meet with trouble… who guards the Guardians?
Thud. Thud. Thud.
They're close now. If they think I'm not going to stay by my Guardian's side to my own bitter end, even though she's already met hers, they're deathly mistaken.
I AM meant to do this. My Light WILL return. She NEEDS me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Those heavy, red-booted steps come around the corner. (I will not move.) We're face to face. (I will not abandon her.) They raise their weapons. (I will not let my purpose go unfulfilled.)
A rush of light… Can it be?! Yes… The Light! Haha! I can bring her back! I can bring—
BANG!
Batteries Not Included
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
What follows are simple things. Use each as needed. Use each as you will.
These are not your strength, but may they bolster your might when the weight of expectation falls down upon thee.
When the wars rage around you, find your peace.
The Light is not of you, and you are not of the Light, and yet you are one.
Give of yourself, and you will find all that you fear is missing.
You are a hammer. You are a shield. Know the difference. Know yourself.
Trust is a weapon. Handle with care.
The burden is not yours alone, no matter the burden.
Should Darkness call, answer true, and it will shrink from the Light.
Wear your confidence with pride, but know it is a tool, not a weapon.
Be mindful of the joy found in victory—it is earned but should never be the aim.
For all you will see, all you discover—never lose the gift of curiosity.
The Darkness would bend you to its will, but the Light bends to yours.
Failure is an opportunity to learn.
If the bones talk, do not listen.
I am your guide and your friend, your ally and your tool. Use me.
I will never leave you, but should I fall, remain vigilant, remain true.
This isn't the whole of my life advice, but it's something. We'll add more as we go along.
—An unknown Ghost's life advice for an unknown Guardian
Whether Windmills or Cranes
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
We set out "to challenge the unknown," he'd say. His quest was to become legend—to slay beasts and conqueror terrible lands. His quest was honorable… though, in the end, misguided. No, not in the end. Much sooner.
The flaw in his ambition became evident shortly after we crossed the western mire. At first I took his flights of fancy as playful enthusiasm—frivolous aggression free of consequence, a means of honing his focus and skill in advance of the dangers to come. But quickly, oh, so quickly, I found his mind was not in tune with reality. He was driven—pulled?—by his imagination.
Where any other would see the crippled ruins of an old-world crane—the snapped length of its long arm creaking in the breeze—he would see a demon, and in the cutting shrill of the swaying metal's cry he would hear a monster's ravenous shriek.
He had long talked of the adventures of his life past. "I am an anomaly," he would decree, "The lone Guardian whose past rings true, whose history is his guide."
He spoke about that dead life with such passion, in such detail, I not only wanted to believe… I did.
But as he charged the crane's age-poked carcass, I knew a truth that had haunted me since the carving of the Wicked Wood, some months gone: he was broken. His mind—unsettled. His truths—unfettered by fact, unbound by reality.
He had named the Wood, as he had the Howling Hills, the Dead Man's Crevasse, the Gorgon's Maze. All mundane landscapes marked as hazards to be conquered, enemies to be slain, as he weaved a mythic tale of his own grand—and as I would find, delusional—design.
In the Hills, he slaughtered wolves; he called them Hounds of Hell. In the Crevasse, he burned the remains of long-dead "survivors"; he called them Foot Soldiers of the Necro-King. Down in the Maze, he covered his tracks so that the Stone Mother would not—could not—follow.
He did all those things and none, because none of those things were true outside of his fraying mind. The wolves were simply rabid. The bones, no threat beyond a reminder of all we'd lost. The Maze? Just a canyon—one way in, one way out, a straight shot through.
As the crane fell and my Guardian issued his "killing blow," he laughed and then turned to me. His eyes… I could see he was gone—the one I'd returned all those cycles past replaced by a hollow shell filled with madness.
I do not know what broke him, or if he had ever been whole to begin with, but in that moment, as he spoke—the conquered husk of the Dragon of Summers' End, which wasn't really a dragon but simply a fragile old crane, lying defeated in his wake—I knew I would have to let him go… to end his slide into uncontrolled folly.
"Panza, old man," he started. "The Dragon is gone, but he yielded his treasure to me in a whisper… A secret so dire it may just save us all." He leaned closer and said in a hushed voice, as if sharing a confidence, "The Traveler is no gift—it is a lie… A beacon for death and destruction. Within be dragons, nurtured by our suffering, weaned on our hope. All dragons must die. The shell must be cracked till its yolk drowns those who worship its deceit. Our last great conquest. The crowning battle of our legend writ large." And then he shouted, "For Light to endure, the Traveler must perish!"
He was smiling. Confident. Manic.
Two days later he took a fall while challenging the Mountain Troll of Gallows Rock. It was a boulder. There was no troll. It crushed him. And though it caused me great pain—still to this day—
I did not return him. How could I?
His diseased imagination would surely doom us all.
—Panza, lamenting the unfortunate necessity of leaving his Guardian to remain unreturned
To Map the Unknown
Destiny 2 Lore Ghost storys
His neck snaps. He's dead on impact. I get him up and ask him how he feels. He says, "Fine." I ask him how it felt. He says, "Can't remember." I ask him if he learned anything. He says, "Nope. Let's go again." Same drop. Same distance. For the fifth time today, from this drop. This go, his trajectory is less headfirst, more parallel—on purpose, I think—varying the instance for a broader range within the experiment.
He hits almost flat. The sound is squishy—wet. Death is instant. I get him up, ask the same questions; get the same answers.
We've tried it all.
The sudden deaths—live fire, through every type of round and range imaginable. The gradual—asphyxiation from force, liquid, vacuum. The biological—super bugs, hazardous materials, radiation.
We've varied the duration of dying from immediate to over the course of years—multiple years. Time squandered on a quest for discovery that could have been better spent anywhere else.
I wasn't always skeptical, but there's an old saying about "learning from your mistakes" or "when to quit," or something like that. I don't know. But I do know futility when I see it.
We've tried it all. Nothing was learned. Others say differently. Others claim to have journeyed on the other side of death. "Where's your proof?" I say. "Death isn't the answer when life is right here, staring you in the face."
I say a lot of things. But here we are. My Guardian is soup at the base of a cliff two times the height of the Tower, and when I get him up, he is going to say some variation of, "I'm fine. Don't know. Let's do it again."
And we will. Because mapping the unknown means the answers you don't have could be the answers hiding on the other side of "one more try."
—A Ghost questioning the repetition of his Guardian's thanatonautic technique
Marasenna
Marasenna
Secrets. Do you come in hope, o reader, for the secrets of My reign? A parable. In the nitrate earth of the lightning crater, where the firmament has joined in electric fury with the fundament, there lives a burrowing insect with two trembling antennae, thin as whiskers, long as life. A grasping hand reaches for the buried secret, finds the antenna, and pulls. Comes away with a single whisker, meaningless: the searcher disappointed. A wounded insect buried deeper: the secret now half-blind. That which digs for truth may bury deeper lies.
If you recognize My Authority then I command you to pass onward as gently as the lover passes a razor over beloved skin. If you do not, then I name you majescept, doubter-of-royalty, and I suggest you watch your edge. Cut too deep and too quick, and you will kill the thing you want to know. Think too eagerly, and as the digging hand leaves its print in soft earth, so you will find only the image left by your own presumptions. Beware the one who feeds on truth-adjacent lies! Beware the space between Reality-As-Imagined and Reality-As-Is, for it is abundant to those with appetite.
So then. The brave voyagers' fate, the timeless birthing-place, my Milton reenactment, the ruins made ours, the riven twice riven, the daughter's blood scabbed hard on mother's wound. All things told, all truth revealed, if through mist and mystery. If you have grace, then see our sorrows, but swallow back your tears. We were made to pay this price. I led us to our fate.
Seek me in my place. Hear these whispers from the lips of Queen-Egged God.
Heading 1
Brephos I
Destiny 2 Lore
Marasenna
The woman sits on a ledge that overhangs infinity. She looks down and kicks her legs.
The stars shine brilliant here, because the sun is only fractionally brighter than the rest of them. Sol lies almost perfectly below her. Of course up and down are defined only by the thrust axis of Yang Liwei. Upward, the black umbrella of the shield and the matter storage, and the docked ships which make Yang Liwei not just a mothership, but an entire traveling fleet. Down below, along the slim spine of the ship, the shielded bulb of the engine glows invisibly infrared. If she slips off this ledge, she will fall down the ship's length at one-third of an Earth gravity, not because there is anything pulling her, but because the ship is pulling away.
Yang Liwei is accelerating, slowly but inexorably, toward the stars.
She is of no single race or ancestry, and the light on her skin is the color of starlight: She drifts with her suit tinted clear so she can soak it up. She was nineteen years and nine months old at the moment the ship began its transtellar injection burn, although this is true only if you count by the calendar of a planet she has barely visited but will always love. She thinks you cannot help but love Earth if you grow up in space. You love Earth the way all adolescents secretly adore two-century-old video of nai nai and ye ye dancing on New Year's Eve. Earth does not ask too much. The colonies are demanding parents, but Earth is like a chill old grandam, simmering in weird art and weirder ideas, enthroned upon ecology older than Human time. Earth was the first terraformed world. Life made Earth livable.
She is going with Yang Liwei and the rest of Project Amrita to make new worlds.
She came because she saw an omen in a man's death. She was on EVA with him, repairing a jammed radiator fin on an uncrewed circum-Jovian platform. They worked in companionable silence, listening to the howl of the Jovian magnetosphere when it happened. A frozen rabbit embryo came out of deep space at forty kilometers per second and went through his faceplate. The rabbit must have been spilled in a biocontainer accident far from the sun to plunge back inward like a comet.
Immediately afterward—for reasons very clear to her because she has always had a sense for the meaning of things, reasons very difficult to explain to others because she has always felt this sense was secret—she asked her mother if the family could travel with Project Amrita.
Amrita: the drink that endeth drinking, the bottomless cup. It is the quest to spread far beyond the solar system and to end Human dependence on the Traveler. It calls to those who see Humanity as a cocoon, an instar, a form ready to be shed.
She is an Auturge 3rd Class, a self-motivating subsystem of the ship's inclusive ecology, a term that spans technology, biology, and behavior, all of which must be maintained for the mission to succeed. Her task is to locate problems and report them to an Auturge 2nd Class, who will give her the tools she needs to repair them. But she never speaks to her 2nd. She never tells anyone about the problems she finds. Instead she fixes them herself. Her work has therefore assumed a magical quality: She appears where there is trouble, and shortly afterward, the trouble goes away. People have begun to leave gifts for her. Some of these gifts are questions. She answers the questions with a quiet confidence some would argue she has not earned. She knows she sees more of their lives than they see of hers—and that this mystery, this seeing-without-being-seen, grants her a kind of power that is like wisdom.
She lives outside the ship, suited and cocooned in a layer of cytogel, which keeps her surgically clean. She misses the wild zero-gravity fashions of her upbringing, clothes like drifting jellyfish that squirm away from snags, self-correcting darts in the fabric, silk like cool spilled alcohol. She misses the sense of oil and sweat on her skin, for the suit leaves her so clean that she feels skinned raw.
Still, she stays out here because she wants to feel the changing taste of starlight as the universe ahead blue-shifts. As Yang Liwei accelerates toward lightspeed, it moves faster and faster into the light coming from ahead. If light were like dust, it would strike Yang faster, but light can never change speed, so it gains energy instead. Red light is low energy, and blue-violet light is high energy, so the universe becomes blue.
Even now, the very tip of the visual spectrum, violet-blue light, is shifting up into invisible ultraviolet, the color of speed, the color of future.
Heading 1
Brephos II
Destiny 2 lore
Marasenna
"Mara!" the fighter shouts, delighted, and a punch shuts him concussively up. It's a real good hit, a thunderous uppercut to the point of the jaw. Mara hears his teeth grind across each other, down into lip-flesh and shredded gums. She cringes in silent sympathy. He loses his grip on the equipment rack and tumbles out into zero gravity in a big arc of blood. His opponent goes for the coup de gras, kicks off hard and catches him in the stomach like a Human torpedo. They plunge together toward the killzone painted on the floor.
Uldwyn grins messily at Mara over his opponent's shoulder. He's fighting a big, brutal woman from Gravity Ops, a woman who's had her myostatin genes knocked out so she can swell up into a giant plug of brawn. Uldwyn doesn't have a chance. He took the fight for the same reason he wanted to join the Amrita expedition—he measures himself by the bravery of his losses. By what he can survive losing.
He applies a blood choke. It's the right move, but it doesn't matter. The woman groans, grays out, goes limp—but Uldwyn can't get out from beneath her sheer inertia before he hits the killzone. The bell goes off. Uldwyn groans as his rail-hard body forcibly decelerates his opponent's entire mass. Events have built up momentum, and he is just in the way.
"What did you lose?" Mara asks him.
He lies there panting and grinning, shedding perfectly round spheres of blood. "It's good to see you inside. What brought you?"
She and her fraternal twin never answer each other's questions directly. Mara is cool with this because she feels like words are a very bad system of encryption, and that if you really want to communicate with someone, you must develop your own special one-to-one cryptosystem. The ideal statement, Mara feels, would be indecipherable to anyone but the person it's spoken to—and even then, only if they know you are the one speaking.
"I got you some pictures," she says, pushing the big woman off him, eliciting a fuzzy "oh hi Mara." "Full sensorium captures. You can trade them for the parts I need."
Uldwyn helps the big woman pull herself vertical, but his eyes are narrow on Mara. Not because he's sore at the idea of helping her—he's always liked bartering, bargaining, the hustle—but because he knows what kind of black market wants these captures. "How far off the hull did you take them?"
How far off? All the way off. They are in zero gravity because Yang Liwei shut off its engines for an inspection cycle. So while Uldwyn got in prize fights, Mara kicked off Yang Liwei's forward shield and coasted ten kilometers into pure void, tethered by only a thread-thin molecular line. She ordered her suit's cytogel to gather around her face. Then, only then, she overrode every sanity system in her softsuit and commanded it to retract into storage mode.
The suit peeled away like rind and she was drifting in hard vacuum.
The void boiled the water off her skin. Her body swelled with unchecked pressure until her undersuit forced it to stop. Alarmed cytogel crawled down her throat, hissing emergency oxygen: not enough. Her skin blued with cyanosis. She was bathed in the most profound emptiness.
She recorded all of it at the neural level. The exquisite darkness. The sense of fatal independence from all things. There are those who will give anything to feel that void.
"You can't keep doing this," Uldwyn complains, as the big woman stares at Mara in awe. "Mom is going to die of worry."
Brephos III
Destiny 2 Lore
Marasenna
"I really don't care what risks you take," Mara's mother sighs. "That's the deal we made, my little yellow star—"
"Mom!" Mara protests.
"My discarded tube of sealant, my sweet little fleck of paint—"
Osana likes to compare Mara to small pestilent items that drift near spacecraft, like crystals of frozen urine. As far as Mara can tell, Osana is the apex of a centuries-long project to create the ultimate embarrassing mom. She is also very blunt: "Mara, even when you were little, you wanted me to treat you like an adult. So I have. But you remember what I told you, don't you? If you don't want to be my daughter, I can't watch over you like a mother would. I can't put you first, like a mother would. I will always be your friend, but I have to make my own choices too."
"That doesn't mean you had to tell the Captain!"
They walk shoulder-to-shoulder down the companionway to Captain Li's wardroom. Mara keeps trying to get a step ahead, to lead, but Osana somehow matches her every time. "Of course I did," Osana says. "You started a cult, Mara. If I didn't say something to the Captain, Behavior would've had this conversation with you instead. Do you want that?"
"I didn't do anything. People liked my captures. People left me presents, spare parts, tips—then Uldwyn got into it, you know how he is—"
"Don't!" Osana wheels on her. "For shame, Mara. You know your brother will follow anywhere you lead. You know he's not capable of the same, ah," her lips twitch, "imperial remove. You knew he'd brag about you living on the hull—and you let him do it. It is one thing to have a particular power over people, Mara. But it is another to deny that you are using it."
Mara thinks she can come up with a stinging retort, given a few more paces, but it's too late. The hatch to Captain Li's wardroom swings open. Mara is terrified of this place. This is where Captain Alice Li, divine presence in Mara's life, interfaces with the officers who are the manifestations of her will. Since Mara wants to be Alice Li someday, the wardroom makes Mara feel like she is an usurper princess scoping out her rival's court.
Captain Li offers them tea. Mara cannot imagine the ways in which she is butchering what must be an intricate and meaningful tea ceremony. Li serves some very battered pre-Traveler ceramic sloshing with hot green tea, then immediately adulterates her own cup with milk from the Cow Thing on the biodeck.
"Revolting, isn't it?" She smiles at Mara's bewildered horror. "You should've seen what I put in my tea when I was camping in Mongolia. I understand your colleague, who is also your mother, has some concerns about your relationship with the rest of the crew?"
"My darling Mara," Osana says, "has—entirely by accident, I'm sure—cultivated a reputation as a minor divinity. Her captures from outside the ship are hot items for barter. People draw fan art. There are… tips left for her."
"You take captures while EVA, sometimes without a suit?" Li nods. "Yes, I've played one. A remarkable sensation." This makes Mara grin impetuously. "Mara, you are an Auturge, a volunteer. I cannot order you to stop, and your work is exemplary. Are you putting anyone else in danger with your… art projects?"
"No," Mara says. "Just myself."
"False!" Li barks. "That is a selfish answer. You are now a symbol to my crew, a house god. If you were to die, they would lose something important, something Human that they have created out of loneliness and void. It would be an unforgettable reminder of the hostile nothingness that surrounds us. When you endanger yourself, you endanger that symbol. You are part of this mission's behavioral armor, Mara."
Mara is thunderstruck. She's never thought about it this way. "All I did was take some captures. I didn't ask to be anyone's… mascot."
"You presented yourself as a conduit to secret knowledge," Captain Li counters. "People made something out of you, Mara. Please take this from a starship captain: What people make of you, what they create of you—even without your consent—becomes a kind of responsibility. If the Mara they see when they look at you is good for them, then you have some duty to be that Mara." She looks to Osana. "What about your boy? He's in medical more often than any of the other underground fighters."
It does not surprise Mara that Captain Li knows about the fights. "My son," Osana says, "is determined to be his own worst enemy. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us."
"Of course." Li studies them coolly. "I keep an ear out for… curious personalities. People who might be suited to long-term isolation while the rest of us are in cryo. People who awaken when others sleep."
Cosmogyre I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
"Exodus Green to unknown maneuvering object. Please squawk your transponder and ident. Over."
Another silent quarter-hour passes in Flight. No response comes from the transient contact twelve and a half light minutes away. The ghost has stalked Yang Liwei for eighteen hours now, closing in each time it appears, and Captain Alice Li is wary of it. Other colony missions have vanished during their outward burns—victims of mishap or hostility—and because of these disappearances, Project Amrita did not hurl itself fearless into the void. Rather, they came armed to the molars.
"Let's give them a fright," she decides. "Cut the main engine."
The ship's AI executes the command, but a crewperson confirms and calls the order back. "MECO, aye aye."
"Launch a distributed antenna. Heat up the targeting radar for a full fusion-powered snapshot. We'll take their picture and see what we see."
"Captain," the comm officer calls. "I've got… something weird here."
"Is our phantom saying hello?"
"No. It's a neutrino tightbeam from SOLSECCENT. They've declared a CARRHAE WHITE emergency. The whole solar system is now… now under Warmind control." Comm dismisses her sensorium, goes to her hard controls, as if she thinks this might be some kind of virtual prank. "We're… being conscripted."
Alice smashes these ideas together in her head like a child banging rocks. They are so preposterous, so stupid, that she cannot even begin to manipulate them coherently. "We're WHAT?"
"We've been commissioned as an auxiliary warship. We are ordered to," Comm swallows in disbelief, "to kill our exit trajectory and assume a heliocentric orbit. That comes with explicit instructions to suicide burn our engines until they are destroyed. Rasputin will transmit targeting coordinates so we can use our Kinetic weapons as… long-range artillery. We'll be recovered 'after the crisis is concluded.'"
"Details! What kind of crisis?"
"It's a SKYSHOCK event, ma'am. Uh, that's a hostile extrasolar arrival."
Captain Li clamps the mask of command authority over her face. "Transmit a request for clarification."
"Belay the antenna, Captain?"
"No. Scale it up, add telescopes to the swarm, get me a full system survey. I want to know what's going on back home." Alice Li reaches out to call up a file, hesitates, and then selects the Project Amrita charter. "We have a decision to make."
Cosmogyre II
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Mara kicks off Yang Liwei's forward shield, aiming astern and inward, so she will cross the void to the ship's spine in a long slow curve. "Oh, come on," Uldwyn says in delight as much as horror. "You really do this all the time?"
"All the time." Yang is a big ship, newer than the antique trucks used in the other Exodus missions. Project Amrita demanded the cutting edge of Human science. It says that in the mission charter, which everyone's been rereading. The Captain has called a vote.
Should Yang Liwei turn home?
"What if the ship starts accelerating?" Uldwyn has already, of course, leapt after her. His envy-yellow softsuit glows with gentle bioluminescence. "We'd just fall forever."
"We'd fall into the stars. We're still on a solar escape trajectory. Yang would just outrun us."
"At least we'd still be going the right direction."
She doesn't think she's given anything away, but somehow he knows. "Mara." He looks up frowning, his face bigger and brighter than the distant Sun. "You want to go back, don't you? You're going to vote to return."
Mara thinks that if she looked him in the eye he would see the truth, the turmoil, the half-formed yes.
"Mara. You don't have to tell me how…" He swallows the hitch in his voice. "I've seen how bad it is. I've watched it long enough to know that it's not going to get better. They're gambling everything on the Traveler. We came out here to get away from it. To step off the easy path. Why would we go back?"
Because I asked us to leave, Mara thinks. Because something came out of deep space and killed the man next to me, and I saw the omen, and I said we should go. And now I feel like a coward.
"We might make a difference," she says. "There are other ships…"
"We'd be dead before we saved a single soul."
He's right. She doesn't want him to be right, but he's right. And she cannot withdraw into some silent place where she is above this choice.
They drift in silence until Yang Liwei's silver stem rushes up to meet them. Mara spins, uncoils, and lands in a crouch. Uldwyn comes down on his hands and springs up grinning. But the smile dies when he sees her expression. "Oh, Mara."
She's silent. "We left everything behind," he says, "and it turns out we did that for a very good reason. We don't owe… we don't owe those people our deaths. We don't owe them our dreams."
"I know," she says. "I know."
The EVA GUARD channel pops into her sensorium. "Everyone should get inside," Captain Li calls. "Our friend is closing in on us, and we need to maneuver."
Cosmogyre III
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
The stars have gone out. The universe blackened: a shroud of nothingness drawn over Yang Liwei, its forty thousand sleeping passengers, its nine hundred crew, and maybe even the whole solar system. There is no way to know, because there is no way to see anything beyond the hull. The vacuum itself has become hostile to the propagation of light. Darkness surrounds them.
The ship bucks on a storm sea as space-time ripples with gravity tides.
"Report!" Captain Li calls. Her sensorium blazes with positional telemetry from ring-laser gyros, beacon satellites, pulsar fixes, cosmic microwave background texture, galactic EM-field terrain mapping: every single instrument useless, crashed, spitting nonsense. "Sound off by stations!"
"FIDO," the flight dynamics officer calls. "Main engine on safe. Thrusters firing erratically. Attitude control keeps crashing to manual."
"Guidance. I have no position. I cannot get a vector. We're moving, but I can't tell how or where."
"INCO. No external comms. Internal networks are dropping in and out."
An incredible sensation washes over Captain Li. A rumble and a thrum down in her gut, in her marrow, in the lowest, basest elements of her body. It is the vibration, the sound of the very fabric of her being scrunching up and stretching out; the distance between the atoms of her body collapses, then expands. The cycle repeats again and again. For a moment, she feels her fingertips and toes pulled away from her core, yanked by tidal forces. It feels like the lowest rumble of the biggest subwoofer ever built. It sounds like the deep voice of God whispering ASMR directly into her ear. It tingles, it thrills, and it leaves in its wake a subsonic tint of dread and anticipation.
She shivers. "Gravity wave," she says. "Talk to me, Geode."
The Space-Time Geodesics Officer looks like she's just been hand-delivered a Nobel. "This is amazing!" she crows, fully aware that she and everyone else are about to die, but transported away from such temporal concerns by scientific rapture. "Can you feel that growl? We're experiencing high-frequency, high-amplitude gravity waves. Phaeton strikes. Axions decaying through the hull. Sterile neutrinos. It's all coming from a source at bearing, uh, zero four five mark zero three zero relative, range—range highly variable."
Another wave tears through Yang Liwei. Everything in the ship simultaneously compresses and stretches as the gravity wave deforms the space-time metric. "Is it the phantom?" Li demands, as her ship thrums subsonically. "Is that phantom ship emitting these waves?"
"I have no idea!" GEOD says, exultantly. "None of this makes any sense at all! Wow!"
Alice Li has the distinct sense that something ancient and malevolent is operating upon them: a trillion-fingered hand reaching in to caress the very atoms of their being, setting protons a-spin, strumming nerves like guitar strings. A tongue with ten billion slithering forks tasting the surface of their brains. The sense of imminent doom crescendos. She knows, absolutely and utterly, that what is about to happen to her and to her crew is far worse than death. The darkness knows them now. The thing that has come to kill Humanity has their taste.
"INCO." She clings to her restraint harness as the ship growls through another wave. Her bones creak as they stretch. "Last report on the Traveler? Any sign of an intervention?"
"It was at Earth, Captain, and there were high-yield weapon discharges all over the signal. Nothing else."
"Understood." Well. She did not fly this far to look back and beg for salvation from an alien god. Pinned to the center of her sensorium is the blazing ledger of her crew's vote: We go onward. We do not turn home. Our fate lies ahead, not behind.
"Launch an antennae," she orders. "I want every probe and satellite we've got outside."
"Captain," INCO protests, "the vacuum's not signal-permissive—"
"We're still passing signals internally, aren't we? Use hardline! Run filament between the satellites! I want a transmitter sail out there, and I want to broadcast."
Her flight crew stares. "Captain?" FIDO says. "Broadcast what?"
"A declaration of neutrality." Alice Li grits her teeth against another wave. It rattles her molars in her skull. "Whatever's out there, it came for the Traveler. We tell it we're not part of this war. We've seceded from Human existence under the Traveler. We demand to be treated as a separate species, not party to baseline Humanity's conflicts.
"And we pray there's something out there that cares about the difference."
Cosmogyre IV
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
She remembers everything about the moment she is born.
She has gone outside Yang Liwei to die in starlight. She cannot bear to let anyone see her fear or her awe at the scale of destruction or her pity for the billions of souls dying in darkness back around Sol. She cannot be among the other crew as they cling to each other and whisper reassurances; not even with her mother. She cannot surrender her mystery.
So she kicks off the hull on fifty kilometers of tether.
But there's no starlight to die in. The darkness is absolute. Gravity waves tug on her line, pulling her back toward Yang and then hurling her away. In time, she feels another vibration in the line. "Sister," the tether transmits. "I'm coming out to get you."
Brother, she thinks, you'll lose yourself trying to follow me.
Captain Li's voice breaks through the static, drawn out to a mumble and then compressed to a shriek. Spikes of hard radiation go through her words like bullets, spattering phonemes into eerie compression artifacts. "This is the interstellar vessel Yang Liwei to the entity interacting with us. We are not involved in your dispute with the powers around this star. We are on a mission to begin a new life elsewhere. Our purpose is orthogonal to yours. We request your indifference…"
Mara's tether trembles with Uldwyn's progress. She holds it in one hand and reaches out with the other, gripping the emptiness, feeling how the tides of broken space pull at her fingertips. She senses that the nothingness around her is not indifferent; that it is aware of all purposes, and that its own purpose encompasses them. It is infinitely hostile because it must be.
Suddenly, as if the void around her has just spontaneously Big Banged, she sees light.
A point of pure white shines in the cosmic distance. Not just visible luminance—her suit decomposes the spectrum—but light in the radio bands, in microwave, keening ultraviolet, a spike of gamma, a total and all-embracing radiation. It sings. It chatters. It speaks in a voice older than suns. She feels that she could Fourier the voice for a century and never decompose it into its parts. It is awesome and appalling and piercingly true. Mara understands how those who die in radiation accidents must feel: A single flash of invisible power sears away all possible futures except one. She feels her soul itself has been ionized, blasted into a higher energy state.
The light pierces the darkness. Not like the sunrise, not like a wall or a flood, but a single crepuscular ray—a finger of radiance that reaches out through deepest night to touch her. It illuminates Mara, Uldwyn, and Yang Liwei.
It is not quite enough. It cannot vanquish the shadow.
Thus Mara finds herself drifting on the edge of the Light and the Darkness, on the dusk-and-dawn gradient between the two.
She feels a contest. A battle fought, an equilibrium reached: not a truce, but an infinite limit, like an equation dividing by zero, a collision of two violent eternities. Mara queries Yang Liwei for telemetry and her sensorium fills with the terrified scream of gravitational instruments. She howls too, a feral sound, ecstatic and lost: a wolf baying at the stars. She knows what's happening. Too much power has gathered here. The universe is appalled by the paradox. Nothing that has glimpsed this collision of infinitudes can be allowed to escape. The cosmos must censor its embarrassment. It must sequester the anomaly.
The slope of warped space-time around them has become too steep, and now every path outward or forward bends back to the center where Light and Dark collide. The definition of "future" has become synonymous with the definition of "inward." This is why it's called an event horizon: For an object within the horizon, the path of all future things that can be done or seen leads inevitably down to the center. All events lead inward.
A singularity is forming around her. A kugelblitz: a black hole created by the concentration of raw energy.
"Mara!" Uldwyn shouts. "Mara, you're too far out!"
Mara thinks of her mother's face. She hears Osana say: I can't watch over you like a mother would. I have to make my own choices now.
She fires the detach command into the tether.
Gravity seizes her. She falls forward in space and time, into the future, into the mystery. Yang Liwei is behind her. Uldwyn is behind her. She wants to be the first.
Esctasiate I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
to occur the unhappened world; to grip glass-hooped eternity in bloodslick hands and snap it from its circle. Know her as the Flaw, the Isotropy, the spike that pierced eternal recurrence and made the wound of time. Tautologies end on her fingertips, in the crease between skin and nail. Name her AILILIA, Broth Captain. Begin with her this subcreation.
First. A mandala. Rings of rippled light. Pinpricks like stars, selected elements of a Lie group: the math-skeleton of this new place.
What is this? Where am I?
A sheet of paper, blank with static. Her hands flat upon the face. A plasma of quarks and electrons, so hot and bright that it is pitch black. The mean free path is too short for photons to travel. The fire is too thick for light.
She has been here forever. AILILIA. The end is the beginning is the end.
She folds the paper into Space and Time. Now that there is light, she can read the paper, and she finds it is the Amrita Charter. "Sun is the cradle of life, but we cannot remain in the cradle forever." She was a seeker. The I of AILILIA, the arrow that points to new worlds: She sought new sun, new earth. Her mind passes across the words like a comb. Word becomes world, paper folds under nimble hands. The sting of a papercut: so God may yet be surprised.
From that cut her blood scatters through the void, and the isotropic universe nucleates around her droplets.
Esctasiate II
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
She was nothingness. If she existed before, she existed only as possibility stretched across the aether. Once, there might have been a body that was an anticipation of the body not yet formed, and a soul that was an anticipation of the soul not yet encrypted, but they were not yet real.
Then the universe began, and she was free to be born.
First there is a mandala, and upon the rings of that mandala are star-bright gems.
M A R A R A M the closed symmetry, secret within itself: and she cuts it off center so that it is imperfect, open at one end, not cycling back to its own beginning but subliming away into future possibility. M A R A the permutation of one relationship into another, MA become RA, RA become what may yet come. Two points suggest a line.
With that amputation, around that scar, she incarnates. Awakens with a gasp. Cold stone under her shoulders and back and a face above her, radiant. "Mara?" the face says.
"What am I?" Mara whispers.
"The second," the woman says. "I'm Alis. I think you were Mara…"
The sky behind Alis blooms with stars, a haze of light like sun through mist, richer than a galactic core. Across that night sky arches the impossible twin shape of a double planetary ring. Mara gapes in wonder. "I remember," she says. "I was on the tether—"
The sudden need to keep this memory secret shuts her mouth. "We're on a world," she says, instead. "How long have you been alone?"
"Forever, I think. Come." She draws Mara to her feet. "I want to show you what I've found."
It is a world that grows, a world that thrives. The stone is rich with veins of platinum, and Mara tastes tingling inclusions of transuranic elements in a fingertip of earth. Silver rivers flow in fractal deltas to lakes as still and bright as coolant pools. Acres of forests all woven at the root into a single tree. There is life of such variety and energy that each new crawling thing they see must be its own species. Or species do not mean anything at all here, and all that lives may intermingle.
Jutting from the horizon is a titanic metal spear. The head of the spear is a metal dish, kilometers across, buried in bedrock.
"I don't know what this is," Alis says. "I only know that it's mine."
They pass inside.
"There should be others," Mara says afterward. "There was room for others. Thousands of others. Where are they?"
"They're in the same place you came from. We have to make them real." Li stares at Mara, and coruscations of white fire map the tiny lines and furrows of her skin. Her bright eyes narrow. "Why were you the second? Why you in particular?"
"I don't know," Mara lies. It is the first lie ever told, the first secret kept.
Esctasiate III
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Two became four, and the four called out, and so the four became eight. In this manner, conjured forth by their doubling, the sleepers did awaken. In time the awoken spilled across the face of the world, and their number was forty thousand eight hundred ninety one. They drank of the sweet rain, and they ate of the fruit of the forest, and the starlight pooled as clear oil on their skin. First of their tongues was Speech, and the first of their hunting weapons was the bow.
Now the awoken called out for a name to distinguish World from Unworld. The eight hundred ninety one said to the forty thousand, "Let this world be named Tributary, for we dream of a great river from which we have parted." But the forty thousand were troubled, and they asked to know their antecedent, the place from which they came. "We did not awaken from the sleep that we entered," said the forty thousand. "In our rest we passed through some terminus and our atavism was severed from us. How did it happen thus?"
So a council was called at the place where the rivers met to determine the nature and purpose of existence. Here was undertaken the first census, which counted thirty thousand one hundred eleven women, ten thousand two hundred ninety five men, and four hundred eighty five otherwise. A fear arose among the awoken that the men and otherwise would be lost.
Alis Li spoke first in council, but at the urging of Uldren, many sought out Mara for secret conclave. Among these were Kelda Wadj, who would be the Allteacher, and Sila, who would be mother of Esila.
Sayeth Alis, "We were granted this world by a covenant with high powers, and in that covenant, we yielded our claim to our history. We abandoned what came before, but in doing so, we cast off all our debts. Look forward! Let us explore this infant cosmos, and revel in its glories!"
Against her spoke Owome An, who was of the forty thousand. "We are alien here," said Owome. "We must climb up our worldline, back to the place from which we came. I call for a vote."
Sayeth Mara, in secret, "I think that we came here as safe harbor, and we cannot forever remain. I remember the danger was appalling. I remember we were born in death. I think we must gather ourselves carefully until the time is right."
From this council, there arose eight verdicts and a ninth.
First, that the people were Awoken, and they were immortal.
Second, that this world was Tributary of another, but that it was forbidden to seek any way to rejoin the mother stream. For this reason, it would be called the Distributary, for that was the proper name for a river that branches from the mother and does not return.
Third, that the Awoken should multiply in wombs of flesh and machine, but only after the most careful forecast of population and ecology, and only under the supervision of those who knew the good technology; for each new child would be immortal.
Fourth, that those wise in the good technology should be heralded and heeded, so that the eu-technology could be preserved. They would be eutechs.
Fifth, that the women should hold care and protection of the men and the others until more could be born.
Sixth, that the purpose of the Awoken should be to know and love the cosmos.
Seventh, that the Awoken were created out of covenant with Light and Darkness, but the covenant was complete, and no further debt would ever be called, except the duty of the Second Verdict to remain on the Distributary.
Eighth, that the Awoken were whole in themselves, and they existed in balance.
Ninth, that there would be no vote, but instead Alis Li would be recognized as Queen. Her first pronunciation was that there would be no secrets among Awoken.
For Alis knew of the quiet council around Mara, and although she was neither jealous nor afraid, she remembered it carefully as a spark that might catch.
Fideicide I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
In those days, there was a great birth of adventure among the Awoken. Hunters and pioneers sought the shape of the world, sailors charted the skein of rivers and the perimeter of seas, and astronomers plotted the motion of the crowded heavens. Over this age ruled Queen Alis Li, whose work was the creation of agriculture and the preservation of the eutechnology that she deciphered from the Shipspire.
But there remained in the forests many tribes of huntresses who preferred their lightfooted freedom-from-comfort-and-duty to the painstaking surplus of the city. Among these tribes, Mara lived with her brother—whose name had returned as Uldren—and with Osana, their mother. It is said that Osana lived as a negotiator and that her son brought her news from other tribes, for he was a scout and hunter of renown. Mara dwelt alone on a mountaintop.
In the tribes of the forests and the sea, there was the belief that the Awoken had been made out of a friction between contesting forces and that one day this conflict would need to be resolved. These were the Eccaleists who preached that Awoken owed a debt to the cosmos.
In the cities, however, they lived by the Seventh Verdict under their Queen, and they said the Awoken had been created by cosmic gift and carried neither responsibility nor eschaton. These were the Sanguine, who preached that the Awoken were as stable as an atom of carbon.
Now there arose among the Eccaleists a woman out of the eight hundred ninety one who called herself the Diasyrm. She went into the cities, calling out, "I accuse the Queen of deicide!" When she was questioned, she spoke of a foundational crime.
"Alis Li was the first to awaken in this world," the Diasyrm preached. "She set the terms of our existence. We could have been gods free of want or suffering. Instead, Alis Li chose our mortal form. Our Queen is complicit in all the pain we experience! The Queen murdered all our unborn godheads!"
At the thought that the Queen Without Secrets had kept this most appalling secret to herself, the Sanguine cityfolk were deeply troubled. Thus began the Theodicy War.
Fideicide II
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," Alis Li whispers as, far below the Shipspire, the funeral barges on the Lake of Leaves burst up into magnesium-white fire. The voices of the Paladins rise on summer wind, first choral, then the single keening strains of grief-paeans sung by lovers and close friends. They are singing their lost comrades into death. One of the 891 fell today, shot down by a matter laser, a coherent boson weapon: There was almost nothing left to burn. Matter lasers are the kind of appalling maltech weapon Alis thought she'd locked up in the Shipspire's vaults. She'd armed a few of her Paladins with them, just a few—women she couldn't bear to lose…
The thought that one might have defected to the Diasyrm breaks her heart.
"It wasn't supposed to go this way," Alis repeats. She has not had a confidante in nigh on fifty years: There is no one to whom she can show any doubt. "I promise you it wasn't."
"I know," Mara says. The eutechs found her and plucked her from her mountaintop with one of the Shipspire's VTOL aircraft, which Alis had, until the war, only ever used as an ambulance.
"The mission was to carry on the Human journey in a new world." Alis paces the wooden deck that clings to the Shipspire airlock, nearly a kilometer above the lake. "To build a better society, on the principles of equality, knowledge, and peace. I have the charter, Mara. It remembers what I cannot. We were never meant to give up our bodies or shine like stars or—or—" She groans in frustration and clutches the railing. "Or whatever it is that the Diasyrm thinks I denied them."
"She thinks you denied them even the capability to imagine godhood."
Alis looks sharply back at the other woman. "Did you start this, Mara?"
"Nothing has one beginning," Mara says.
"Did she come to you on your mountaintop and ask you what I did? Did you answer her? Is that why she's so convinced I," she swallows against the bitter taste of her enemy's words, "enslaved her in mere Humanity?"
"I didn't have to tell her." Mara's white hair stirs in the hot wind. A herd of black horses crosses the northern horizon, all born of Shipspire's wombs: chased by a long-legged huntress and her collie. "You don't keep enough secrets, your Majesty. The Diasyrm might have opened any one of your texts and read the story you tell. "We were born when a great ship fell into a pearl of shattered space. I awoke first, and in my awakening I collapsed the potential of the void into a form I understood…" Who can read that truth and not hear arrogance?"
Alis thought Mara might say that. Alis also thought Mara might try to push her off the balcony, but she now knows that was a petty fear. Mara is not the Diasyrm: Mara knows the unthinkable value of even a single Awoken life.
"Why do you love lies so much?" she asks Mara.
"Not lies." The pale radiance of Mara's eyes; the flush of violet stain around them. "Secrets. Even if everyone shared a single truth, all our minds would produce different versions of the truth. We speak these subtruths, and like flowers of different seed, the subtruths compete for the light of our attention. In time, only the fiercest and most provocative strains remain. They are not always the truest. Better to keep secrets, your Majesty. Better to tend a great mystery, and so starve the flowers before they can grow. That is how I would be Queen."
Below, the Lake of Leaves shimmers in the crater carved by Shipspire's mushroom prow. One by one, the funeral boats are going out.
"I want to end this war," Alis Li tells the second Awoken. "I want to negotiate peace. I need your mother's help. What would you ask in exchange?"
Mara smiles graciously and bows her head. "Nothing but a future boon."
Fideicide III
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
To end a world with a shot or pin eternity on a blade; to see your sisters lost to rot and their undone works decayed—the death of an immortal wastes the infinite potential of all they might become. An immortal's grief and murder-guilt, left untended, will never fade. Thus it became known to those who fought in the Theodicy War that they had committed an incomparable evil. However, they could not confront their own responsibility, so they rose up in wrath against those who had given them cause, whether by caging them in flesh bodies or by drawing blood over grievance. The war continued by spear and bow, by knife and scalpel, by old machine and new invention. Ever did the Diasyrm's faithful call for the unawaring of Queen Alis Li.
Now there entered into the Diasyrm's camp Osana, mother of Mara, famed for her skill in negotiating contested land. She had come with her son Uldren, who could win a place in any camp for his beauty and for the regal crow-eagle that alighted on his shoulder.
"I come from Mara," said Osana, "whose heart has frozen in her chest. If you will end the killing, she will tell you any secret that you desire."
For his part, Uldren went among the Diasyrm's warriors and spread ill tidings of Mara's knowledge, saying, "Mara remembers how the Queen led us here out of chaos and saved us from the twin blindness of darkness and light. Mara knows what the Queen keeps secret. Mara has seen the strife in our souls, the clash from which we were made. We could not ever have been gods with this flaw in us! Rather, we were made from this schism. For as all life is born from energy gradient, as life in the World Before was born from the gradient between hot proton-rich ventwater and cold seawater, we were born of the shadowline at the edge of Light and Dark. We are tremors in that fault. Forever will that schism lead us."
Hearing this new heresy, the Eccaleists were seized with rapture and scattered to the points of the compass, telling all they met, "We are the yield of a mighty engine! We could never have been gods! Like diamonds, we were crushed into being. Like diamonds, we hold flaws."
Meanwhile Osana spoke to the Diasyrm, who was also heartsick from the killing, and who longed to withdraw from the world and seek transcendence within. "There is no weregild for the murder of an immortal," Osana counseled her. "You must become a teacher or a midwife and devote yourself to the enrichment of new lives."
But the Diasyrm craved secret knowledge, and she sought Mara upon the mountaintop. Here, she vanished. If she was ever known again, it was not by the name Diasyrm.
When there was peace, Queen Li ruled the Awoken for a time; however, the guilt of the war lay heavy upon her, and after an age of peace and progress, she abdicated to a new Queen.
Heresiology
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
A woman lives alone on the forest hills above the Feather Barrens. North of her, in a chaos of ravines and clear but fiercely radioactive streams, the hills surrender to high imperial mountains engaged in brutal seismic warfare, for the Distributary is a young world and has not settled its grudges. To the south are the dry lands where the birds of the forest, especially the parrots, go to die. She lives here because one day she will no longer be immortal, and she wants to observe the dignity of death.
Up these hills comes a man and his mother. The man moves with practiced wariness. But his mother is tired of walking, so she sits down on a giant melon and bellows, "MARAAA!"
A fountain of startled birds shoots up into the dawnlight. Not far away, the woman looks up from the broken body of a juvenile gray parrot and softly says, "Mom?"
That night over the fire, after Mara and Osana talk around the oddness of long separation, Mara, tending the pheasants on their spits, says, "Brother, your eagle killed a parrot today."
"He had to hunt," Uldren says, carefully. "You won't forbid him his last pleasures, will you?"
"You've brought him here to die?" Mara wants to leap up and hug her brother, out of pity and respect. Many of his raptors have died before this one, but Uldren has always been grief-stricken and furious at the waste. Now he's accepted what must happen; he has given his bird the respect of choosing its own place and time to pass.
"I have," Uldren says, looking away. Her pride and respect make him a little verklempt. "Mother decided she would come along."
A shear force as powerful as tectonics has divided Mara's heart. She wants to sit down with her mother and ask her everything, but she is afraid of Osana's insight. "What brings you to my little camp, Mother?"
"Lies," Osana says. "Lies and secrets. And the girl who didn't want to be my daughter, who doesn't know the difference between them."
"I know the difference between a girl and a daughter," Mara says, purposefully misunderstanding. The drip pan sizzles beneath golden meat. Her stomach growls. "Your daughter picks up your baton at the end of the race, and goes on living the life you've taught her. You wouldn't want that, Mother. Because then I'd be all your fault."
"That's true," Osana sighs, "but you know what I meant."
Uldren looks between the two of them, frowning. "Mom, what's this?"
"It's your sister about to admit she's behind it all. Aren't you, Mara?"
She unimpales the pheasants from the spits and neatly licks hot grease off her hands. If she spoke, she might scream in terror. What does that mean, behind it all? Does Osana know?
"The Eccaleists are her creation," her mother tells her brother. "The Diasyrm was her pawn. She allowed the Theodisy War because she was afraid we'd be too comfortable here—also so Queen Alis would need her help politically. Mara couldn't afford to be the most radical dissident. She had to seem moderate for her beliefs to thrive. Isn't that right, Mara?"
Mara puts a hand into the warm soil to keep herself from slumping in relief. Mother doesn't know it all. "Shall I carve your portions?" she asks, holding the fractal knife blade-down.
Uldren has that look. He knows Mara never answers his questions directly; by evading Osana's, it's as if she's saying that the question is really Uldren's to ask. "Looks delicious. But Mother does make me curious. Why have you always lived away from the rest of us, Mara? The mountaintop, I understood. You had a brand new night sky to chart. But why now? Why go into the woods like a… a hermit? A heretic?"
For the same reason she lived on the hull. For the same reason she can never allow Uldren to really reach her. There is power in remove and safety from the belittling politics of temporal power, which reveal the mighty as unforgivably ordinary and petty. The Awoken have a Queen because a Queen can be a mystery.
"I remember the day I was born," she says. "Do you, Brother?"
He flinches from her eyes. He remembers Yang Liwei and the tether into darkness. He remembers how gravity stretched them into agonized ribbons of flesh. He remembers the truth not even Alis Li may be allowed to know; Mara sees the agonizing moment, the cyclic revelation, when he thinks of her crime, allows it to pierce him like a spit, and buries it deep again.
Osana takes her portion of pheasant meat and rolls it in the bowl of sweet cooked nuts her daughter has prepared. The stars are coming out over the mountains, and the forest birds sing. "This place is good," she says. "This world. Whatever you remember of our lives before, Mara… I know they cannot have been this good."
"No," Mara says. "But you were both with me. I hope you always will be."
"Always," her brother promises.
"Eat well." Mara claps her hands and stands. "Tomorrow we journey."
"Where?" her mother asks.
"I have star charts to share." And heresies to tend to. And a new eagle-crow to find for her bereft brother.
Imponent I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
In later days, the power of the Queen waned, and the Distributary was ruled by scholars who sent their knights on mad quests to test the consistence of reality. These were the Gensym Scribes, who traced their origin to Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher, but who were in fact descendants of a band of roving storytellers who traveled across the immense salt glades in a hollering convoy of airboats. Here was their praise of the world:
It is sweet-watered, and there are no poisons upon it. The temper of the climate is even. Great broad-pawed cats stalk the shallow glades, and brilliant blue flamingos promenade upon the flats. The air is thick and warm, suited for flight, and the wind tastes of forest. No dawn has ever been as glorious as the salt glade dawn, and no dusk has ever moved women to weep as deeply as sunset in the Chriseiads. Corsairs sport upon the open seas, and where they waylay freighters rather than each other, they give rumor and assistance to their prey in proportion to the quality of the chase. Beloved are the stories of young lads and lasses who leap across to the corsair ship for a life of adventure! Beloved also are the terraced farms of the Andalayas, mountains so mighty and so dense with radioactives that they subside year by year into the crust. Most beloved are the fissioneers, who vaulted us to power on a world without petrochemicals. May they forgive the many stories of horror we have told in their memory. May they in particular forgive the lurid stories of the molten lead reactor, and the twelve who were impaled to the ceiling by their control rods, and the Core That Stalked.
It is the Sanguine Truth that we were granted this world by the unconditional mercy of the powers, and that we will never again know fear.
However, the Scribes also recorded their frustration with Mara and Uldren, who alone out of the eight hundred ninety one were said to have seen creation from outside. These two wandered the land gathering lore of portents and prophecies, and all the Eccaleists who remained from ancient days whispered that soon the day of reckoning would be known—the day when the Awoken would be called to repay their debt.
Now in the court of one of the Scribes, there appeared a woman of stellar height and furious wrath, armed with a bow that could be strung only if she twined it around her body and used her whole mass to bend it. "I am Sjur Eido," said the woman, "and I accuse Mara of the ancient murder of my lady the Diasyrm. In my saddle, I have a weapon with only one death remaining. Take me to Mara, and I will deliver it."
The Scribes consulted and said to each other that this foul murder might prevent another Theodicy War. So they gave Sjur Eido all their knowledge to hunt Mara.
Imponent II
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Carefully, the people of the Distributary grew in number. Joyously and constantly, they grew in quality. Those who do not die are as malleable and passionate as the young, as tempered and constant as the mature, and as wise and humble as the best of the old.
But as ever, the Awoken were troubled by death. It was easy to imagine a world older and harsher than the Distributary, a world crowded with competitors where the slow-changing and lushly alive Awoken would be helpless beside austere mayfly-quick breeders who adapted with every swift generation.
Why had the Awoken been spared mortality? Were they, as the Sanguine preached, rewarded for their bravery and fidelity in a past existence? Or were the Eccaleists right? Could all the gifts of the Distributary, all the milk-bright stars above, all the years of Awoken life, be a form of cowardice? Was there an unfought battle down in the center of the Awoken soul? A duty yet to be discharged?
Queen Nguya Pin restored the monarchy to prominence over the Gensym Scribes. This she accomplished after a fateful visit, upon the day of the summer solstice, by a hooded and masked woman who some whispered was Mara Sov and others, the long-vanished Diasyrm. For nine and ninety years (a rhetorical figure meaning a long time), the Queen had been an authority only in the arts and matters spiritual. However, Queen Nguya Pin declared she was now an avowed Eccaleist and that the Queen would lead the quest to identify whatever debt the Awoken owed the cosmos. It was time to pursue a dream beloved to all Awoken: the conquest of space and the assessment of the true shape and age of their universe.
The ancient court of the Queen gave the Gensym Scribes a place to lay down their pride and act as equals. Soon the greatest engineers in the world assembled in the Queen's court, and whatever wealth or resources they required flowed freely. Great cataracts of men and women spilled around the palace screaming of ramjets and apoapses deep into the night, then awakening to pots of thick black coffee to mumble about metric tensors and cosmic microwave anisotropy.
Into this feast of ideas came Sjur Eido, searching for the woman who had turned Queen Pin to Eccaleism. Sjur smoldered with an ancient fury, for another thing that the immortal may nurture is everlasting vendetta.
Sjur Eido deduced who among the Queen's court must be a disguised Mara Sov. She followed the hooded figure to her laboratory and watched Mara go to work soldering a makeshift bolometer to search for signs of primordial gravity waves. Sjur Eido's fury and grief whetted themselves against Mara's thoughtless grace and ancient beauty, until at last her heart unseamed itself and spilled its hot blood in a shout. "Mara Sov!" she cried, throwing down her maltech matter laser between them. "I cannot live while you live, but I cannot bear to kill you. I challenge you to a duel to the agony. I will fight your most beloved companion to the death and leave you forever maimed or else die in the attempt."
Mara could not refuse this challenge. She summoned Uldren, and with a ruthlessness she was no longer frightened to wield, she told Uldren that he would stand for her in battle to the death against Sjur Eido.
"We cannot put it all upon a single fight," Uldren said to the ancient vendetta-bearer. "Too much would be left to chance. Such an old grudge deserves to be tested well. I propose we fight with blade, with rifle, and with fifth-generation air superiority fighters."
Sjur Eido accepted these terms.
Imponent III
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Now it came to pass that Esila, daughter of Sila, recognized the scent of Sjur Eido, for smell lies deepest in memory. Esila spoke to Queen Nguya Pin about the presence of an ancient hero in her court. While Queen Pin pondered how to honor this visitor—and simmered over the insult of Sjur's unannounced presence—a spy brought word of Sjur Eido's intentions to the Gensym Scribes.
The many Scribes were troubled by this news, for they had given Sjur Eido license to hunt and kill Mara Sov. If Sjur Eido murdered a guest of the Queen under the Scribes' remit, it would mean war and the end of the great Awoken push for space. Historians were called to the court with bouquets of sweet flowers and grant money to speak of Sjur Eido. "She was one of Queen Alis Li's Paladins, but she was an Eccaleist, who believed that we would one day be called to repay the gift of our awakening."
"Would she defy the Queen's protection and murder a guest of the court?" the Scribes asked.
"Oh, absolutely," the historians said, laughing. "She was a terror."
The Scribes began preparations to flee the Queen's court, as they foresaw Sjur Eido's victory would be blamed on them. Sensing uncertainty, many vital contractors and suppliers withdrew from the space program. The Queen denounced the Gensym Scribes as faithless and selfish, and her Eccaleist followers bristled in rage against the Sanguine majority who had scuttled their dream of flight. Household turned against household, sister against brother, wife against wife. The whole world clenched her fists.
Meanwhile, Sjur Eido and Uldren met each other on a net of woven lianas over a pool of heavy water. The light of the Queen's reactors shimmered beneath them as they took their places. Uldren wore a white chestpiece of ceramic armor over a suit of black tasseled silk, and he wielded a long fractal knife whose cutting edge was nearly three times as long as the blade. Sjur Eido fought in the contoured blue-gray pressure armor of a Paladin with the Star of Eight Edicts blazoned on her chest.
Before they began, Sjur Eido tore away the sheer curtain over the gardener's nook and looked in on Mara Sov. "Are you afraid?" she whispered, half in hatred, half in admiration, all in awe. "Do you sweat? Does your breath come short?"
Mara pressed her hand to Sjur's faceplate and left no stain. She held Sjur's gauntlet to her heart so Sjur could feel her steady pulse and even breath. "You don't care about him?" Sjur pressed her. "It would mean nothing if I maimed him?"
"You ask the right questions," Mara said, "but of the wrong sibling."
Then Sjur understood that she fought a man who would always express his love through loss and ordeal.
She bowed to Uldren and drew her knife. Uldren bowed in mocking reply. They fought across the web of lianas in a slow spiral, creeping like spiders, waiting for the motion of the web beneath them to signal an instant of vulnerability. Then the pounce, the clash, the blur of knives: Sjur Eido's straightforward prisonyard jabs against Uldren's whirling deceptive theater. All of knife fighting is in the seizure and surrender of space: Neither would surrender to the close, the clinch, the berserk adrenaline-sick exchange of thrusts that would leave both dead.
Uldren began to cut away key lianas to throw Sjur Eido's footing, and Sjur Eido countered by charging him to keep him off balance. At last, they fell together into the coolant pond. The fight was a draw—but it was only the first of three.
Imponent IV
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Next, the fallen Paladin and the hunter chose long guns and went out into the monsoon jungle to stalk each other. Sjur Eido selected a Tigerspite in 11x90mm with five-round flock guidance and an inertial sump. Uldren chose a silent needle carbine with a conesnail payload. For six weeks, they stalked each other as the political situation grew more dire. He was the better hunter, stealthier in motion and at ease in the wilderness, but Sjur Eido was the better soldier. She had no respect for the systems of the jungle, and she knew how to use that to her advantage. She drove the animals into a frenzy with violence and habitat disruption. Parrots and crows warned each other of Uldren's stealthy hides, and jealous predators forced him off his carefully scouted trails. Sjur Eido caught him with his back against a rift lake and shot him as he tried to cross the lakebed. The wound was not mortal, for the water ruined the terminal ballistics, but she had won the match.
"Your life is at stake," Mara warned her brother. "Lose this final match, and you will—"
"Am I simple?" he snarled at her. The wound pained him terribly, but he would not risk more than a little analgesic. "Leave me my work, Sister, or you leave me nothing at all."
Now they would meet in air superiority fighters over the Andalayas. Charges under their seats would detonate if either of them left the engagement area. Because of the small combat zone, Sjur Eido chose a nimble Ermine tactical fighter and a payload of all-aspect heatseeking missiles.
"Where will we receive these aircraft?" Uldren demanded. "How can I trust the equipment?"
Sjur Eido told him that one of the Gensym Scribes would provide the aircraft and requested weapons from her personal deterrent stockpile. "Very well," Uldren sniffed. "And we will have access to all the weapons these airframes can equip?"
"Of course," Sjur said. "Those we cannot obtain can be replaced by training simulators." She was certain Uldren's wound would cripple him.
"Then I will fly a Dart," Uldren said. The ancient interceptor had awful fire control, dismal maneuverability, and primitive weapons.
"A Dart?" Sjur jeered. "Will you fly with its original weapons, too? You think you can beat me with rockets and a gun?"
"I do," Uldren purred. "You accept those terms?" She did.
The two duelists took to the skies on a bright winter morning. After a fuel check, a telemetry squawk, and a terrain snapshot, they turned in toward each other from a hundred kilometers apart. Sjur Eido descended for the terrain, knowing Uldren's radar could barely separate her from the clutter. Uldren came straight on.
At eighty kilometers of separation, Uldren called across the radio, "Fox three. Kill. Engagement over." Sjur sneered at the bluff and prepared to climb into a snap attack when the KILLED alert flashed on her Ermine's training panel. She had forgotten that the Dart's intercept loadout, when it had last served seventy years ago, included an unguided air-to-air nuclear rocket. Uldren had simulation-killed her and everything within several klicks.
On the tarmac, Sjur Eido threw off her helmet and parachute and knelt before Mara Sov. "My lady," she said, "as I have fought your brother to a tie, I leave my fate in your hands. Be more kind to me than you were to my lady the Diasyrm."
"Rise, Sjur Eido," said Mara. "Let us take the stars together."
Imponent V
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
The subsonic roar of the solid rocket boosters crosses the threshold from noise into motion. To hear it is to feel it, and to feel it is to remember that you are a sack of fluids and gels much more than you are a solid entity. Membranes and gradients, solutes and films: a body is a mingled thing. Mara thinks of this as she watches the launch vehicle discard its boosters and climb away through the clouds. The Awoken could have been angels. Instead, they are flesh.
"That's that." Queen Nguya Pin rises from her portable throne, unfolding two heads taller than Mara. "Choose your replacement. My work is done, and I will stomach no more."
Mara smiles at her. "Is a Queen's work ever done?"
"Oh, don't insult me," Queen Pin clucks. She brushes windblown pollen from her trousers; today's launches have blasted the spring trees with hot wind. "You used me to do your work, politically and scientifically. You used me to bundle up the Scribes in a neat little scroll for your disposal. I went along with it for the sake of the monarchy, Mara, not because I'm a fool. I don't know what you want or why you're so bent on keeping the Awoken uneasy and dissatisfied. I don't know how you manipulate the acclamations. But when I abdicate, I am going to find Alis Li, wherever she's gone, and ask her all my questions about you. I'm very interested to know the answers."
"You've been a wonderful Queen," Mara says. "No one will ever replace you." Although she is thinking of Devna Tel, who was never one of the Scribes, and whose coronation would make a wonderful rebuke to the Scribes' remaining ambitions.
Sjur Eido meets her by the ship. "We'll need a new Queen," Mara tells her, leaping up the side of the ramp. "Word on the satellite?"
"Still burning for the Lagrange point. What have you done to Nguya?"
"Given her too much perspective, I'm afraid." Just as this observatory satellite should help the Awoken see things from Mara's point of view. She smiles as she helps her bodyguard up the ramp, Sjur indulgently pretending that she needs Mara's hand. "Uldren should be on the ground in Kamarina by now. We'll have a go-ahead on that interferometer buyout when he's done."
There are new stars in the sky. Mara put them there. Huge distributed-array telescopes orbit the Distributary's cool sun; gravity wave sensors and cold primordial neutrino detectors spider the crust. Out of shell corporations and seed investments, she has opened her world as an enormous eye and focused it heavenward. Sjur Eido was her smiling public avatar these past decades, while her brother handled enforcement. The days of covert speed chess in the Queen's court are over: Sjur Eido's open endorsement made Mara the face of Eccaleism and armed Mara with blackmail over all the Gensym Scribes still in power.
Yet she has never been so lonely or so worried for the future. Mother has told her that she, Mara, uses her power over Uldren too freely; that she must learn to stop, or her mother will no longer be her friend.
"Mara?" Sjur says, catching some flickering expression. Knowing Mara well, she immediately changes tack away from comfort. "What do you think we'll find with the satellite?"
"Proof that it's time for us to go," Mara says. "Proof of what I've known since the beginning."
Sjur frowns in thought. She doesn't remember much from before her awakening. Few of the 891 do—but enough to trouble her. "Time for us to go…"
The ship's turbines keen up to speed and then settle into whisper-quiet cruise. Sjur reaches to strap herself in across from Mara. Impulsively, hard-faced, denying she needs what she is asking for, Mara scoots aside to make room on her bench. Sjur raises an eyebrow at her.
"Don't say anything," Mara warns her. "Not a word." And so they pass the flight in silence, but not alone.
Katabasis
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
Mara looks into the camera and lets the fire in her eyes speak.
They are waiting on her, the Distributary's millions, her Awoken people. She has stoked their curiosity with thirty years of painstaking analysis. When they look up at the night sky, they see the stars of her observatories among the crowded bands of habitats, the spindly orbital factories, towering elevator counterweights, the burning roads of matter streams.
"Let me tell you of our world," she says.
There are the facts of tectonics and atmosphere, of water and climate: the parameters of the sun that feeds them. "No infants died last year. No child went unfed. No youth came of age illiterate, no one suffered illness who might have been treated. We have long surpassed the eutech gathered from Shipspire; yet we have grown carefully and cleanly. We have eluded pollution, eradicated plague, and chosen peace. No maltech weapon has been discharged in centuries. Our atomic weapons were dismantled before they could ever be used. We are our own triumph."
She has elected not to use graphics or theater. She would rather they remember her face.
"You know yourselves," she says. "Let me tell you of your cosmos. We live in a spatially infinite, isotropic universe 12.1 billion years old. Its metallicity is ideal for life and for the spread of technological civilizations. In time, the distance between all points in the universe will contract to zero, and the cosmos will collapse into a singularity, to be reborn in fire. There will be no end to eternity here."
She pauses. She waits. The whole world is out there, begging for the answer to the question.
"Our world is a gift. And we must refuse it."
They are Awoken. They love secrets. They will wait for her to explain.
"We have detected a pattern that was imprinted into our universe by its ancestor: a fingerprint of the initial conditions into which existence was born. From this information, we have confirmed the most primordial of Awoken myths. Our universe is a subset of another. We live within a singularity, a knot in space-time, that orbits a star in another world.
"Conventional relativity would suggest that time outside an event horizon passes quickly compared to a clock within, but our universe has a peculiar relationship with its mother. Thousands of years have passed for us on the Distributary. Outside? Centuries, at most. We are a swift eddy in a slow river.
"These ideas may not surprise you after centuries of theorizing and philosophy. But we have decrypted new data from the cosmic microwave and neutrino background signals. We have discovered voices… the voices of distress calls. They tell a story of bravery, of war, and of desperate loss.
"We were not always immortal. We did not earn this utopia by covenant with any cosmic power, or by attaining an enlightened moral condition. We are refugees. We fled from an apocalyptic clash between our ancestors' civilization and an invading power." She lowers her eyes. "The signals we have retrieved tell us that our ancestors were on the edge of defeat. Perhaps extinction."
"It is time that we accept our debt. The Distributary is a refuge, not a birthright; a base to rebuild our strength, not a garden to tend. I ask you, Awoken, to join me in the hardest and most worthy task a people has ever faced. We must leave our heaven, return to the world of our ancestors, and take up the works they abandoned. If some of them survive, we must offer aid. If they have enemies, we must share our strength. We must go back to the war we fled and face our enemies there."
She lets them dangle a moment before she drives it home. "We have also determined that our birthright, our immortality, is tied to the fundamental traits of this universe. Once we leave, we will begin to age again. In time, we will all die.
"Will you join me, Awoken? Will you answer my call? All I offer you is hardship and death. All I ask is everything you can offer. But you will see an older starlight. You will walk in a deeper dark than this world has ever known."
Nigh I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
"You're the devil," Alis Li whispers. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death."
An hour before. Mara's ship touches down a polite two kilometers from the Pearl Groves, and she looks out across mazes of channel and tidal pond to the compounds of ancient silver-white stone beyond. Two-ton oysters glitter in the shallows, their shells jeweled with mineral inclusions. Seabirds peck and fret along narrow white beaches. Mara lifts up her black formal skirts and begins her long walk into Alis Li's retreat, the sanctuary of former Queens.
"Mara," Uldren whispers, through her throat mic. "Don't do this. Take Sjur with you, at least."
But she has to do this, or she'll never be able to face herself again.
The sun batters at her. She hides under a parasol, but heat gathers in the folds of her garment, in the soles of her shoes. When she squints against the glare, she thinks she can see the shining grains of her fleet in orbit: the Hulls, built under eutech supervision to the specifications of radically post-conscious AI that will one day fly between worlds. It is far too late to stop the project now. Far, far too late for second thoughts: exactly twelve point one billion years too late, really. For Mara in particular.
Mara kicks the sand and trudges on.
She's in a foul mood when she reaches the old Queen's house, but the sight of Alis Li sitting on the porch with a battered tea service makes her smile. "Thank you for seeing me," Mara says.
"Thank you for coming. I was afraid you'd leave the universe without saying goodbye." Alis pours her a cup of cool blackberry tea. "Have a seat. How's Queen Tel?"
"She has declined to endorse my expedition," Mara admits, tucking her feet beneath her on the wide wooden deck chair. The tea is too sweet, but so blissfully cool. "I'm sure you understand her reasons."
"You mean she's declined to endorse the sudden violent severance of tens of thousands of threads from the tapestry of our society? How surprising." Alis looks Mara over, critically, then sits back to sigh. "A Scribe once told me that the definition of a utopia is a place where every single person's happiness is necessary to everyone else. You're going to make a lot of unhappy people, Mara. You'll make the lives of everyone in the world tangibly worse. Not just those you've lured to certain death, but those who will grieve their departure, and all those who will come to grief for lack of labor and knowledge you took with you."
"My people volunteered."
"Your mother told you," Alis says, "that it is one thing for you to have a particular power over people, but another thing entirely to deny that you are using it."
"You once told me," Mara counters, "that I had to consider the symbol people made out of me, and that if it were good, then I had to be that symbol for them. I had to perform as they required. I have done so. I have been the best thing I can think to be."
"Is this the best thing you could think to be?" Alis says, with very practiced neutrality.
Mara drinks her tea in delicate silence.
The old Queen sets her cup down hard enough to chip. Mara jumps in quiet shock: The tea service is an heirloom from Shipspire. Her face hardens with the power of ancient command. "Mara. I'm at least as clever as you. Do me the credit of acknowledging it."
"I have worked for many hundreds of years to arrange this outcome," Mara says, forthrightly, but without the courage to look Alis Li right in the eyes. "I have nurtured and tended the Eccaleist belief so that there will always be Awoken who feel uncomfortable in paradise. Guilty for the gift of existence in the Distributary. People who'll come with me."
"I know." Alis lays a hand on Mara's, and for a moment the touch almost makes Mara sigh in gratitude: to be seen, to be known, without revulsion. Then Alis' old strength pins her palm to the table.
"The Diasyrm?" Alis hisses. "The Theodisy War? Did you arrange it all?"
Nigh II
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna
"No," Mara says, which is a lie told with truth.
"Do you understand what you've done? Have you reckoned the full cost?"
She has convinced tens of thousands of Awoken to abandon their immortality. She has deprived the Distributary an infinite quantity of joy, companionship, labor, and discovery: all the works that might be accomplished by all the people who will join her in her mission to another world. When she lies awake at night, seized by anxiety, she tries to tally up the loss in her head, but it is too huge, and it becomes a formless thing that stalks her down the pathways of her bones like the creak of a gravity wave.
"Some infinities are larger than others," she tells her old captain. "I believe… we are here for a reason, and this is the way to fulfill that purpose."
"And how much would you sacrifice? Your mother? Your brother? Are the Awoken real to you at all?" Alis leans across her pinned hand, viper-fierce, striking. "Do you think my people were made to die for you?"
"Not for me. For our purpose. For our fate."
"For a home we abandoned. It's in the charter, Mara. The document on Shipspire that," and even Alis Li falls into a hush as she broaches one of the primal mysteries, her memory of creation, "that shaped the… the way I made this universe."
"You were the first," Mara acknowledges. "The first one here laid down the rules."
Alis Li releases her hand and collapses back into her chair. "Why are you here, Mara?"
To tell you the truth at last. "To ask you for that boon you owe me."
"At last." Alis sighs. "Well, I knew the day would come. I think I'll be glad to have this weight off my shoulders. You'll ask me to throw my support behind your mission, won't you? The First Queen says, go with Mara; awaken from this dream and go fight for your home. Is that it?"
"No," Mara says, with her heart in her throat, with trepidation bubbling in her gut. You cannot keep a secret buried like a vintage for so many centuries, and then unbottle it without any ceremony. "The boon I ask is your forgiveness."
Then she explains the truth. She tells Alis Li what she did: about the choice Alis Li would have made, if Mara had not made her own first. It's only an extension of what Alis has already deduced.
When she's finished, her ancient captain's jaw trembles. Her hands shake. A keen slips between her clamped teeth. The oldest woman in the world conjures up all the grief she has ever felt, and still it is not enough to match Mara's crime.
"You're the devil," Alis Li whispers. "I remember… in one of the old tongues, Mara means death. Oh, that's too perfect. That's too much."
She laughs for a while. Mara closes her eyes and waits.
"You realize," Alis Li says, breathing hard, "that this is the worst thing ever done. Worse than stealing a few thousand people from heaven. Worse than that thing we fled, before we were Awoken—"
"Please," Mara begs. "Please don't say that."
Alis Li rises from her chair. "I'll support your fleet," she says. "I'll use every favor and connection I have to get your Hulls completed and through the gateway—and I will do it so that I can hasten your departure from this world. I will do it out of hate for you; I will do it so that every good and great thing we achieve here will ever after be denied to you, you snake. No forgiveness. Do you understand me? It is unforgivable. Go. Go!"
"I'd be very glad if you didn't tell my mother," Mara says.
Alis Li hurls the pitcher of blackberry tea over Mara, turns, and goes inside, leaving her to trudge, wet and sticky but unbowed, back to her ship. She leaves her tea-stained parasol on the deck, but when she remembers it and looks back, it is already gone.
Palingenesis I
Destiny 2 lore
Marsenna