The Destiny franchise has gone through its fair share of ups and downs time and again, but one of the things that has stayed reasonably high-quality throughout its lifetime is the background lore. Not the in-game story and narrative, mind, as that’s been unintentionally hilarious at times. Bungie’s writers, however, have always had some big ideas and the know-how necessary to execute them, and that’s precisely what this article aims to shine a light on.
Right off the bat, it’s important to note that there’s such a wealth of deep lore available for Destiny that it’s virtually impossible to summarize all of it here. For those who are ready and willing to delve into the franchise’s finest writing, we recommend perusing the wonderful Ishtar Collective website. This community-led site contains just about all the Destiny writing that’s been released in an official capacity. As such, it’s going to act as our go-to source for the purposes of this featurette, too!
What makes Destiny’s lore so interesting?
The sheer longevity of Destiny as a franchise means it has played host to a wealth of solid writing over the years, but this practice goes back way further than many players might imagine. Though Bungie may have cut its mainstream teeth on the relatively grounded Halo franchise, Marathon is where it all really began properly. Marathon, you see, is ridiculously weird at times.
Bungie’s writing has, historically, rhymed with itself. Many of the metaphysical narrative beats that were explored in Marathon have been repeated in Destiny, too. To keep things at least somewhat grounded, we’re not going to go into the narrative black holes that are Marathon Infinity‘s ending screen and the infamous (and allegedly fan-made) !lettinggo video. It’s good to be aware of these things, though, because they paint a delightfully deep and engaging story, even if they are unofficial and/or mostly irrelevant to Destiny‘s main narrative.
#10: The true story of Praedyth
Destiny‘s Vault of Glass is more than just the game’s first piece of raid content. Positively loaded with secrets that kept some members of the community entertained for years on end, the Vault of Glass also comes with a surprisingly deep selection of narrative threads that we will, invariably, return to as this article goes on. A notable highlight to begin with lies in the fate of Praedyth, a Warlock that was a part of the very first fireteam to attempt breaching the Vault.
Praedyth is dead, as it were. Destiny players may recall finding his corpse as part of one of the game’s missions, with the remainder of his fireteam either turned into Light artifacts (to be used in the Vault of Glass raid) or outright wiped from history by the Vault Gorgons. Yet, the curious bit about tangling with Vex is that they’re a wild card, and an old piece of Shadowkeep-era lore has suggested that Praedyth isn’t done just yet, after all. Time gets weird when the Vex get a hold of you, and weirder still when you throw a winking wish-dragon into the mix. We’re not saying that Bungie will ever do anything with Praedyth again, but boy would it be neat if it did.
#9: “It’s on Enceladus”
Of all the lore featured in this article, this one is the likeliest to have been retconned out of relevance. For the longest time before Beyond Light came out, there was the implication that Enceladus would be the key snowed-in location in Destiny. This comes from a particular Forsaken-era mission, where the late Cayde-6 gave out a series of messages to the Guardian looking for his stash.
The message intended for the Awoken Petra Venj contained a hidden code phrase, which was translated to “It’s on Enceladus.” One of the more popular theories was that Cayde was talking about the Deep Stone Crypt, but the DSC ended up being on Europa, instead. The thing is, though, that Bungie definitely had some official artwork of Enceladus, as shown in the image featured above (Enceladus is a moon of Saturn, after all), and its visual style overlaps with what we ended up getting with Europa.
Now, the really notable bit is that the location of the Deep Stone Crypt wouldn’t have been particularly relevant to Petra Venj in the first place, meaning that Bungie could end up pulling on this narrative thread sometime in the future. Will it, though?
#8: What were the Ahamkara doing on Venus?
Fans of Lovecraftian writing will adore this bit of obscure lore, as it reeks of otherworldy horrors. According to the transcription that comes with the Mask of the Great Hunt, the Ahamkara (or the wish-dragons) were doing something strange and disturbing to Venus itself. In fact, the whole situation was so scary that even the indomitable Eris Morn, the Hive God in the making, got spooked by the prospect of it.
Ahamkara from all over Sol ended up coming to Venus at some point to do… something. It’s unclear what, exactly, was taking place, but Morn’s report implies temporal anomalies at the very least. Not only did present Guardians disagree on what it was that the Ahamkara were doing, but one of them ended up outright killing themselves upon witnessing the process. The situation was dire enough that their Ghost had to hide from them, which has its own set of uncomfortable implications to delve through.
This incident is what led to the Great Hunt, and the supposed extermination of all known Ahamkara. Except, as shown with Praedyth, it’s entirely possible that this was the creatures’ intention all along.
#7: Why Crota died, lore-wise
Crota’s death is, lore-wise, one of the finest examples of chaos theory ever conceived. The thing about the Guardians’ raid successes is that they’re often driven by sheer luck, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Crota, Son of Oryx. Also known as the “Light-Destroyer,” Crota was the cause of The Great Disaster: the Guardians’ failed assault on Luna, where thousands of them permanently fell to Hive blades. The story of why the Great Disaster ground to a halt is what we’re interested in, though.
It all started when a lowly knight of Oryx got into an argument with a knight of Xivu Arath, according to the Dust lore book. Neither of the two could kill the other due to being equal in strength, so they decided to throw themselves off a bridge to seal the deal. This, in turn, meant that the knights’ commanding champions on both sides of the argument lost large chunks of tribute, leading to one of Crota’s lieutenants getting killed off by a Xivu Arath worshipper. Due to this, Crota lost many temples and territories to Xivu Arath, and decided to wrap up his slaughter of the Guardian forces to go to sleep in his Oversoul, to recover lost strength.
This Oversoul was, of course, instrumental during the End of Crota raid, as the creature likely would’ve been unbeatable had it been attacked at full strength.
#6: Mysterious structures on Venus
In the earlier Destiny lore, Venus was a veritable hotspot of strange and mysterious activity. The wish-dragons’ ritual was certainly strange and disturbing, yes, but it gets way weirder than that, believe it or not. More obscure, too, as the only reason anyone’s really thought about the pieces of lore mentioned in this entry is thanks to Reddit user LettuceDifferent5104.
In their post from two years back, LettuceDifferent5104 outlines a strange concrete building that keeps popping up in some of Destiny‘s disparate lore entries. From the looks of it, there was a non-human, non-Vex artifact found before the Golden Age: a diamond-laden holo-projector that may or may not have some paracausal properties. Weird stuff, yeah? But… maybe not as weird as you’d think, because the whole facility does sound suspiciously similar to Awoken tech, does it not?
We hope Bungie will circle back to this thread sometime down the line, because alien (potentially Awoken!) tech from before the Golden Age would be a heck of a thing for the Destiny universe.
#5: The Last Days of Kraken Mare
The Kraken Mare lore books are one of the most infamous examples of unfinished writing in Destiny 2. For the lore-minded players, at least. Penned by none other than Seth Dickinson, the version of Kraken Mare that got released was a fascinating look into the mysterious Collapse, as well as a suggestion as to what the Guardians may end up facing in the near and far future. The story works as-is, certainly, but the reason it’s infamous is that Dickinson himself confirmed that Bungie only ended up using a third of the full story, leaving it on a huge cliffhanger that was never resolved.
Though Dickinson has since deleted his Reddit account, he has confirmed that Kraken Mare was intended to be heftier at first: “It was supposed to be Titan content back in Forsaken but there wasn’t enough time during crunch to get it all localized and hooked up. Even the chapters available in Shadowkeep are only about a third of the whole thing,” he said.
Not a huge deal on its own, necessarily, but the bit that irks some players is that the released bits of Kraken Mare outright confirm that one of its scientists knew something so important that the Warmind Rasputin deemed it reasonable to doom the entire colony just to keep this knowledge hidden away. According to Dickinson, “[the reveal is] in the other two-thirds of Last Days on Kraken Mare which Bungie hasn’t released. I dunno if that’s ever happening.”
#4: The Guardian’s death
A lot has happened in Destiny 2 over the past couple of years. So much, in fact, that it’s all too easy to forget that we’ve already seen our actual in-game player character canonically die. It wasn’t even a tucked-away bit of lore that most people could miss, mind: we literally visited our characters’ gravesites as part of the Season of Dawn’s final sequence.
While we did end up saving Saint-14 over the course of the season, Bungie never provided any sort of explanation as to how the Guardian died. The obvious expectation is that this is something that’ll be explored as part of the Final Shape DLC, but that’s not a given. The whole sequence ended up being a footnote to the grander events taking place at the time, and it remains to be seen what comes of it, if anything.
#3: The concept of the Garden at the beginning of existence
Circling back to Bungie’s Marathon and its ridiculously deep narrative beats, the legacy of the weird shooter wasn’t left in the dust as Destiny 2 continued its progression toward the reveal of the Witness. More specifically, we get some curious parallels between the Shadowkeep-era Unveiling lore book and an obscure piece of Marathon lore.
A whole series of motifs are repeated between the two entries, written years apart:
- a garden outside of reality
- a duality/clash between two all-powerful entities
- an immense tree being torn apart
This is just a surface-level reading, of course, but it’s curious indeed. Even more so, when comparing the same Marathon source with an even older Destiny lore entry. Bungie’s writers have absolutely been pulling their inspiration from the same sources all along. Though it’s unlikely these similarities between the old Marathon and Destiny will end up being realized in the new Marathon, they’re still lovely to think about.
Oh, and remember: the Garden of Salvation’s grand finale takes place in the middle of a ridiculously large tree stump. Something to consider, perhaps?
#2: The experiments at Cocytus Gate
Destiny 2 hasn’t discussed the Nine in quite a while now, but when it does, we do hope that Bungie ends up using the opportunity to explore the mysterious Cocytus space station. Something’s been off about this place since the days of the Golden Age, but things really took a weird turn after Crota captured it.
While under the control of Crota, the Hive used Cocytus to commune with entities from other dimensions, with one of these interactions leading to the creation of the Necrochasm Exotic. Hive ended up abandoning the place after a series of heavy losses (including the death of Crota), with the place eventually falling into the hands of Dead Orbit. The Dead Orbit sent expedition after expedition into the Cocytus gates, only for the people to return insane, but that’s not even the most interesting bit.
After Dead Orbit explorers fell victim to Cocytus itself and the Awoken Corsairs, Awoken themselves began to take note of Cocytus. Their conclusion? The station has been overtaken by the Nine, who are using the Cocytus’ strange interdimensional portals to breed artificial life.
#1: The Concordat and Lysander
Finally, there’s the Concordat and its mysterious leader, Lysander, to take into account. After all the interdimensional horrors and strange metaphysical happenstances discussed in this article, it may appear strange to circle back to regular old human politics for the grand finale, but Lysander surely deserves the mention.
Basically, the Concordat was a faction of rogue Guardians that attempted to outright overthrow the civilian government of Consensus and the Speaker, as well as the Vanguard itself. This bloody coup was halted at the PvP map of Bannerfall by the New Monarchy, and the faction was banned from the Tower for its actions. Towards the end of Destiny, there were implications that Lysander might return, possibly even as a leader of a human enemy faction, but this never ended up taking place.
After the Light and Dark saga wraps up in The Final Shape, it’d be nice if Bungie took the opportunity for humanity to look inward and focus back on the more local politics of the Tower. Whether that ends up happening or not, and whether the Concordat ever ends up being relevant, though, is anyone’s guess.
Published: Oct 5, 2023 09:46 am