Destiny 2: The Final Shape ending, explained

Destiny 2‘s The Final Shape reaches its first week, but for many it very much is the last week of a story dating back to the beginning of the franchise. From your first revive outside the Cosmodrome to facing universe-ending threats, you’ve done it all.

Now, there’s one final challenge left. Here’s how The Final Shape‘s campaign played out, and what you can expect to see next for the Destiny 2 story.

What happens at the end of The Final Shape?

A quick reminder of why you’re here in the Pale Heart: The Witness, an embodiment of Darkness, wishes to bond with the Light within the Traveler to create The Final Shape—a “calcification” of reality of sorts where entropy wins out and everything in the universe becomes frozen and ending chaos, which The Witness considers imperfection.

Uniting the Traveler and its version in Darkness, the Veil, would complete this goal and end everything, hence why you had to follow The Witness into the Pale Heart to confront and defeat it for good. You learned how to defeat The Witness in the Iconoclasm mission, then heavily weakened it in the Salvation’s Edge raid.

Now, in Excision, you’ll wipe out The Witness once and for all.

With the combined forces of Light at your back—the guardians, the Vanguard, the Eliksni House of Light, Empress Caital’s Cabal, Savathûn (for now), and many more—you breach the Monolith and take on The Witness directly. By embracing Darkness, you enter The Witness, and with a sword provided by the Light, destroy the veiled statues that represent its dissenters (those who joined the chorus of The Witness but don’t want to see The Final Shape happen).

Doing this splits The Witness down to a final being, enabling you to go for the final kill shot. Ghost says it is ready to defeat The Witness once and for all, and you channel the Light directly through Ghost to fire a beam of devastation. Combined with the 12 other Destiny 2 guardians, the power of the Light unmakes The Witness once and for all; but in doing so, your Ghost is sacrificed and you lose access to the Light.

In a moment of transcendence, you beg the Traveler to restore Ghost’s Light, but you are seemingly unanswered until Cayde-6 emerges. “What comes from the Light, returns to the Light,” he says, mentioning all is connected and that in its sacrifice, Ghost had returned to the Light—just as Cayde had when he was killed in Forsaken.

So, Cayde made his final sacrifice: He switched places with Ghost, moving on into the Light instead and channeling his light into Ghost, reviving him.

What is next for the Destiny 2 story?

Victory at last for the forces of Light, but with The Witness gone, many enemies still remain. The Taken and Scorn no longer have a leader and chaotically threaten the system, the House of Salvation and Eramis remain at large, the immortal Xivu Arath is set to return from her throne world, and what is believed to be fragments of The Witness may have escaped the Traveler and spread into the system.

One fragment appears to have landed on Nessus, triggering quakes within the moon. It’s these Vex-like anomalies we’ll investigate in Destiny‘s first episode, Echoes, starting June 11. Further episodes have already been confirmed, with the Guardian taking on the Fallen in Revenant and the Hive in Heresy before Codename: Frontiers—Destiny 2‘s next expansion—arrives in 2025.

The Traveler is also “bleeding”; paracausal energy seeps into space around the Traveler and Earth, with the new Alliance of Light enforcing a no-fly zone around the area to ensure other parties don’t interact with the energy in any way. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Alliance can keep these interested outside forces at bay.

Otherwise, for a brief moment, there was happiness in the Tower and the Last City—and the universe at large, of course. Crow got a new haircut, Zavala has recovered and although he lost Targe and his Light, he has found renewed purpose in learning to control Darkness thanks to Ikora. For those who choose not to continue the Destiny story, you couldn’t have asked for a better send-off to what has been an amazing decade.

To those people, however, I say this: Destiny is just getting started.