Destiny 2’s narrative is stronger than ever as the battle between Light and Dark barrels toward its culmination in The Final Shape and Lightfall expansions. Guardians are set to explore the hidden city of Neomuna in less than a month for Lightfall, facing down the newly appointed Disciple of the Witness Calus in a war for control. But to get here, Bungie’s narrative team had to lay a lot of groundwork over the year of The Witch Queen.
Over the course of The Witch Queen’s campaign and four seasons, players were privy to a plethora of revelations surrounding both our allies and our enemies. Alliances made with the Eliksni of the House of Light and Empress Caiatl’s Cabal during Beyond Light remained crucial in the battles faced, and we were given the opportunity to explore the backstories and philosophies of many previously unexplored Human allies as well.
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It’s hard to condense everything that happened in the lore over the year, but if you’re getting back into Destiny 2 with Lightfall or diving in for the very first time, we’ve narrowed it down to eight of the most memorable moments that defined the year of The Witch Queen. It’s the perfect refresher course before the narrative threads pick up once more in the Lightfall campaign and we see where these foundations take our Guardian next.
The eight most memorable story moments in Destiny 2 during the year of The Witch Queen
The Traveler appears to gift the Light to the Hive (The Witch Queen)
The inciting incident that began our Guardian’s campaign against Savathun is perhaps the most impactful when it comes to how we and our allies now understand the Light and the will of the silent God that hangs over the Last City.
In Season of the Lost’s final mission, Savathun managed to escape from the crystal prison that Mara Sov built for her. With the worm of the Hive God of deception successfully excised by the Awoken, the wounds from her escape ended up proving fatal. Yet in her final moments, she turned to the Last City and the Traveler, bargaining with her final breaths to suggest the long and storied history between her, the Hive and the Traveler shouldn’t end here.
She kneels, offering herself as a supplicant to the Light now that she’s free from the worm that tied her to Darkness, and her charming words do the trick. A Ghost, who would come to be known as Immaru, finds Savathun’s body on the cliff face and resurrects her as a Lightbearer.
Immaru is one of the oldest Ghosts. He resents humanity and how the Guardians have squandered the Light, revealing to us that not all Ghosts are as loyal to the Traveler’s original intent as we thought. Many other Ghosts follow him as well, reviving Hive Wizards, Knights and Acolytes that serve as Savathun’s Lucent Brood.
With the Vanguard’s faith in their moral code already fractured by the events of Beyond Light, where Guardians began to wield the Darkness, their fiercest enemy in the Hive being granted the Light shatters what little was left. Zavala and Ikora realize that they can no longer act as representatives of the Traveler, only as protectors of humanity and its allies.
The Witness, the voice in the darkness, is finally revealed (The Witch Queen)
While the Guardian was able to defeat Savathun, their victory was not a cause to celebrate. Savathun had attempted to seal the Traveler away with her in her Throne World, and as she confessed, she believed she was doing it as an act of protection. A mysterious entity, The Witness, was coming.
In the final cutscene of The Witch Queen campaign, The Witness was revealed for the first time. Unlike anything we’ve faced before, it appears to be made up of hundreds of voices, each represented by a shrouded face billowing out from the top of its collar. According to The Witness, the game “is over.” Frustrated by the Traveler’s antics and confident it has no more pieces to play, it finally sets into motion its plan to fully drown our solar system in Darkness.
Its campaign had already begun years ago during the Season of Arrivals, where multiple planets and moons, such as Mars and Io, mysteriously vanished following Eris Morn’s limited contact with The Witness through the Tree of Silver Wings. The Witness was also responsible for the power of Stasis being gifted to Eramis and the Eliksni in the House of Salvation, setting into motion the events that would lead to the Guardian, too, embracing the dark power.
The Witness may not be the Darkness itself, but it is more than likely equivalent in power and omniscience as the Traveler and the ultimate adversary for The Final Shape.
Lord Saladin joins Empress Caiatl’s Imperial Cabal (Season of the Risen)
Beyond Savathun’s Throne World, the newly Lucent Hive had plans in the physical planes as well. In Season of the Risen, The Guardian was tasked with assisting Saladin, Crow and Empress Caiatl to find out what exactly they were planning. This involved using Caiatl’s Psions to enter the minds of these Hive Lightbearers, severing their connection to Savathun and trying to pry information about their plans from their very thoughts.
Crow took issue with this plan. It was ultimately a form of torture in his eyes, no matter how deserved or necessary it may be. In an act of defiance, he tried to shut down the Psisorium—the location where one of Caiatl’s most loyal Psions was linked to the minds of the captured Hive—and accidentally killed the Psion in the process when the connection was roughly severed. With humanity’s alliance with Caiatl’s Cabal already fragile, such an act could not go unpunished.
Caiatl demanded blood for blood, an eye for an eye, but before Crow could accept the punishment, Saladin put himself in Crow’s place. If all Caiatl wanted was a life for a life, he told her to take his instead. Caiatl would accept this term, but his life would not be forfeited through death. Instead, Saladin was brought under the wing of the Cabal, serving the rest of his days as a part of her war council.
It was an unexpected but amicable end to what could have become a dire political situation, and Saladin has risen through the ranks within the Cabal since then, proving to be a crucial voice in Caiatl’s ear to better support the relationship between humanity and its new Cabal allies.
Commander Zavala is forced to face his old traumas and grief (Season of the Haunted)
In Season of the Haunted, Calus’s ship—The Leviathan—returned in orbit around the Moon. Phantoms of past friends and foes emerged en masse, suggesting a connection between it and the Pyramid lying beneath the Moon’s surface. These phantoms forced many characters to face their past and move on from it in a season of healing guided by Eris Morn, who had already been forced into such growth during the events of Shadowkeep.
Most notable of all was Commander Zavala, who was haunted by the ghost of his late wife, Safiyah. As we would learn in a heartbreaking seasonal cutscene, Zavala had once had a relationship with this mortal human woman during the time before the Last City.
The two had even adopted a child found in the wreckage of a raided caravan. Their happiness did not last. An Eliksni raid on their house led to the death of their son, an event that Zavala held himself responsible for and never truly recovered from.
He begged for Safiyah’s forgiveness, but she believed there was nothing to forgive. Eris forced Zavala to confront this burden he imposed on himself, this forgiveness he demanded, and to understand it is not a burden he should carry alone. He had friends and family to support him, and he could heal when he accepted that Safiyah and his son would not wish him to endlessly mourn for what was lost, instead facing the future with pride.
Eramis is not the villain she first appeared to be (Season of Plunder)
In Season of Plunder, The Witness broke Eramis free from the icy prison she had been left in by the conclusion of Beyond Light. She was given an opportunity to redeem herself as one of its Disciples by hunting down ancient relics scattered throughout the system—each a piece of an ancient Disciple called Nezarec.
Despite being the primary antagonist of the season, battling us at every turn, Season of Plunder put a harsh spotlight on the complexities of her motivations and how not everything was as it seemed. Eido, the optimistic daughter of our Eliksni ally Misraaks, routinely tried to convince her to join the House of Light and come to the Last City. Her efforts did not change Eramis’s allegiances, but it was revealed in a lorebook that the Shipstealer knew the House of Light and Eido was the future for the Eliksni. She simply believed she didn’t deserve a part in that future anymore.
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This didn’t stop her from having fleeting moments of temporary allegiance to us, though. When the Lucent Hive joined the chase for the relics, it was Eramis that saved Eido from dying to a squad of them before the Guardian and Misraaks could arrive.
Then, during the Season of the Seraph, she continued to stay in contact with us, struggling to hide her bitterness and anger as The Witness turned her Eliksni forces into Scorn. In one radio conversation, even Mara Sov attempts to get through to Eramis and bring her over to the Light, pointing out how the two of them are alike in their past regrets and their long lives.
As of now, Eramis continues to serve The Witness. However, it’s hard to see her as a villain considering her actions in the past two seasons. There is conflict within her that could manifest into a major allegiance shift during Lightfall.
Osiris wakes from his coma with the power of the Darkness in tea form (Season of Plunder)
The majority of Season of Plunder was concerned with themes of legacy, generational divides and building hopeful futures from the ashes of bad pasts. What many didn’t expect, then, was the conclusion that the story was building to. After defeating Eramis and accruing all of Nezarec’s relics with Misraaks, Plunder’s ending instead turned its focus onto Osiris.
After his possession by Savathun throughout Beyond Light, the Osiris that was left behind in Season of the Lost was a shadow of a man. With his Ghost dead and left weak and frail in a coma, all his lover Saint-14 was able to do was sit by his side and hope that one day he would awaken again. Nezarec’s relics would prove to be the key in the hands of Misraaks. Using his Splicer abilities, he converted the resonant power within those remains of an ancient Disciple of Darkness into a consumable elixir.
As we learned in The Witch Queen campaign, Darkness is a cosmic power obsessed with memory. While being empowered by the Light makes new Lightbearers forget their past, the Darkness could re-awaken old memories in some form—theoretically.
Fortunately for Saint-14 and Osiris, it did the trick. Osiris’s consciousness rushed back to the surface and he re-awakened in his body once more, embracing and kissing Saint in a touching cutscene that served as the conclusion to the season.
The Warmind, Rasputin, is finally brought back online to face the oncoming threats (Season of the Seraph)
A story thread hidden under the surface since the Season of Arrivals has concerned the fate of Rasputin. A Golden Age Warmind we first made contact with in the Warmind expansion thanks to Ana Bray, he was disabled by the Black Fleet when the Darkness arrived in the solar system. Ana was able to save fragments of him, but he was in a state of disrepair that made it impossible to bring the powerful AI back online.
A scattering of lore entries throughout the years showed that Ana was working tirelessly to figure out the technology and planning needed to realize Rasputin’s return, but it wouldn’t be until Season of the Seraph that this labor bore any fruit.
The awakened Osiris guided Ana to seek counsel from her grandfather, Clovis Bray, who assisted her with implementing the final touches on a custom Exo chassis she’d been constructing. With the Warmind now set up with a proper potential home, the Guardian was tasked with setting out across various destinations to recover different subminds of Rasputin—each located in a hidden Seraph bunker.
Combining these fragments allowed Ana to rebuild Rasputin, who was then granted the newfound ability to speak and think again, able to aid the Vanguard and humanity in the wars to come once more. With Xivu Arath, the Hive God of War, right on Earth’s doorstep and attempting to obtain Rasputin’s Warsat network for herself, the assistance of the Golden Age’s most powerful military mind is already crucial to our continued survival.
Calus becomes a new Disciple of The Witness (Season of the Haunted)
Calus has been a mysterious absence in the narrative for many years. The disgraced ex-Emperor of the Cabal was a consistent presence in the Guardian’s life for much of early Destiny 2, but when the Black Fleet arrived, he vanished, and few clues were left as to where he had gone to if he was even still alive.
We had a breadcrumb trail to follow, from the Presage Exotic mission last year to the Vox Obscura Exotic mission of the current expansion cycle, but it wasn’t until Season of the Haunted that Calus truly returned. In tow with his Leviathan, we discovered that his connection had become far deeper with the voice in the darkness—The Witness. After our bountiful working relationship in Season of Opulence, Calus tried to convince the Guardian to join him in his new journey toward ascension with Darkness, but we refused that offer.
While the Guardian, working with his daughter Caiatl, was able to put a stop to his plans on the Moon, we were unable to stop the ascension that he spoke of. When Lightfall launches on Feb. 28, Calus will be the newly anointed Disciple of the Witness we face in the streets of Neomuna as he acts out The Witness’s bidding.
Published: Feb 12, 2023 01:06 pm