The year may be almost out, but a new Destiny 2 season is starting up again. Destiny 2: Season of the Seraph takes players...

Destiny 2's latest season, Season of the Seraph, has officially begun this week and as usual, it has come with a hefty patch....

Note: This article goes deep into spoilers for the story campaign of Destiny 2's The Witch Queen expansion, as well as the Season of the Risen's story. If you haven't finished the campaign, you might want to wrap that up before reading further. Check out our Witch Queen campaign story explainer if you have lingering questions.

Things are getting complicated out there in the throne world. The story of Destiny 2's latest expansion, The Witch Queen, sent players into the realm of the Hive god Savathun to find out how one of the game's greatest villains managed to gain a power previously reserved only for players. What we learned there shook up a lot of the established rules of the Destiny world--and it's shifting the paradigm of the game's story in some profound ways, raising serious questions about the nature of good and evil and where we, the players, fall on that spectrum.

There are two big twists in The Witch Queen that really cast doubt on things we thought we knew about how the Destiny universe works. First, the campaign starts with Savathun, a god-like alien who's been around for eons and has participated in murdering and conquering whole civilizations throughout that time, gaining the Light. That power was previously reserved for humanity; it's what gives players their superpowers within the game, and many characters treat it with a religious reverence, as they do the Traveler, the giant floating robot from which the Light is derived. Guardians, the wielders of Light, believe the power is inherently good, and that its wielders are chosen by the Traveler for some inherent qualities of good. Light-wielders can be bad people, that's long established, but the supposition is that the Traveler, by way of the Ghosts, gives the Light to specific people and not others for a reason.

So the supposition is that Savathun, a genocidal monster at the head of a race of genocidal monsters whose ideology worships death, must have stolen the Light through some magical chicanery. We discover about halfway through the campaign, however, that Savathun didn't steal the Light--she received it the same way we all do. Given past beliefs about the Light and the Traveler, the immediate conclusion is that, despite her past, the Traveler chose Savathun to receive the Light.

That's a seriously messed up thing in the world of Destiny 2, upending a whole lot of suppositions characters have been making about their powers, their roles in the universe, and the giant mechanical god they worship. If we accept that the Traveler is a benevolent, omnipotent entity, then its choice to give Savathun the Light couldn't be some kind of mistake. But the Hive are perhaps our single greatest enemy and responsible for the deaths of billions. So are we wrong about the Traveler, or are we wrong about the Hive? And are we wrong about ourselves?

If you think about it, isn't the Hive's God of Cunning already dead?

It's that last question that The Witch Queen low-key asks players, with an element of the story that is somewhat understated but which has been developing over the course of the last four seasons. The story of The Witch Queen takes us through a battle with Savathun that sees us finally battling the Lightbearer Hive god to stop her from doing a ritual that will bind the Traveler within her throne world. The belief is that, if Savathun is successful, she'll capture the Traveler and the power of the Light for herself and no one else, cutting off humanity from the power it needs to defend itself. So we go to battle against Savathun, eventually defeating and killing her. There are caveats to that situation (namely, that she's not permanently dead yet), but the reality is that the story ends with us killing Savathun.

Except, did we actually just kill Savathun?

The other big twist of The Witch Queen is that, because Savathun gained control of the Light the same way as all other Guardians, she has a similar experience to all other Guardians. Only people who die can be resurrected as Guardians--Ghosts essentially imbue corpses with the Light and bring them back from the dead. But when this happens, the person being resurrected loses all memory of their past life.

This was a huge theme of the last year with the introduction of Crow, a new character in Destiny 2. Crow is the resurrected, Guardian version of Uldren Sov, a character from Destiny 1 and the story campaign of the Destiny 2 expansion Forsaken. Uldren was a villain in Forsaken; he fell victim to some intricate manipulations (that ultimately were the work of Savathun, in fact), and murdered Cayde-6, a character close to players who'd been part of the game for years. Forsaken is about players hunting down Cayde's killer and exacting revenge on him: We were the ones who served Uldren his death warrant.

Crow is not Uldren, however, and this is a key distinction. Though Crow and Uldren share a body, Crow didn't remember being Uldren (at least, not until Savathun started messing with him, but that's extraneous to the point here), and the same is true of other Guardians with their past lives. They're effectively different people after resurrection than before they died, as Crow demonstrated through the last year of seasonal content. He's not the Uldren we faced down and murdered, he's someone new.

A lot of the last few seasons has been spent on establishing Crow as someone new, separate from Uldren.

Bungie spent more than a year establishing Crow as an independent entity from Uldren, and it has been a huge arc for the story. And something the story has suggested but not yet explored is that the same thing is true of Savathun. Resurrected as a Guardian, the Hive god isn't a Hive god anymore. She was someone new, and in fact, the story campaign of The Witch Queen hinges on the fact that Savathun can't remember her past life. And while a big part of the story is about how Savathun set up a series of manipulations for us and her resurrected self to execute a plan, we're still not clear on who, exactly, the person we fought and killed actually was. And, really, if everyone resurrected in the Light deserves a second chance--in fact, it's standing Vanguard dogma that Guardians should not try to learn about their past identities, and no one is to hold a past life against those who are resurrected--aren't we guilty of straight-up murder, in some respect?

The Witch Queen quickly introduces a ton of nuance to Destiny 2 that raises a whole lot of red flags about our part in the world and the war we're curr ently fighting. We know from background lore and elements of the story that the Ghosts who help the Hive are the same little robots who follow us around, healing our wounds and reviving our dead bodies when we fall off a cliff or get punched in the face by a huge alien robot. We're currently engaged in destroying those Ghosts, along with their Hive Guardian companions, and treating them as traitors. But for the most part, we've invaded their neighborhood in the throne world. The lore also suggests these Ghosts are serving the Hive not because of coercion or persuasion, but because of a moral judgment. They think the Hive deserve their compassion, and that's why many have joined Savathun's Lucent Brood. These Ghosts chose their side, sure, if you look at this as purely war. But we never tried talking with any of these Hive folks, did we?

Then there's Fynch, a Hive Ghost defector who helps us in the throne world, who questions Ghost's assertion that all Hive Ghosts deserve death. Fynch switched sides to help us, so does he also fall into that category? We're made to ponder where the line should be drawn in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The Season of the Risen makes it clearer that the Lucent Hive are not (all) potentially blameless. In the seasonal missions, we see Hive Guardians making their way to Earth, where they ambush human Guardians and steal their Light as part of a grander scheme we don't yet understand. Granted, you could make the argument that this is exactly what we're doing to them in the throne world, but at least we're fighting in defense of our territory and people.

Capturing the Hive and pillaging their minds sounds a lot like torture--something the Hive has done to humans and Guardians, sure. But does that make it okay to do it to them?

It seemed more straightforward, at least, until we got the seasonal story rolling. Here, we see the Vanguard essentially going forward with torture. The new PsiOps Battlegrounds activity dispatches players to capture Hive Guardians, who are then shoved into big glass tubes, where their minds can be invaded by our new allies in the Cabal. As is explained in the new Psisorium location in the H.E.L.M., each of the Hive combatants captured is held in a sort of limbo, where they feel no pain, but in which they are neither living nor dead. Crow is already voicing a lot of concerns about this whole practice because it sounds an awful lot like torture. At the very least, we seem to be lobotomizing these Hive.

And yeah, the Hive as a race are a genocidal, conquering death cult who have killed countless people, including humans. But again, we have to consider that the Traveler gave them the Light. If we consider the Light to be a moral judgment about us, an affirmation of our righteousness, then isn't the same thing true about the Hive? Beyond just the ins and outs of the Destiny 2 universe, is it okay to torture another life form, psychically or otherwise? Are we selling our souls for victory over the Hive?

Destiny 2 has had us thinking about questions like this, and the actions we take part in, since the Forsaken campaign at least. With The Witch Queen, however, things are getting turned way up. This is no longer a story of light versus dark, and even just a couple weeks into the new expansion and its seasonal stories, it seems a big theme of this year might be reconciling with our own capacity to do evil--and to justify it.

The Scorn are still a threat to Guardians in Destiny 2. In Savathun's queendom, the Scorn are after a source of Light inside the Wellspring--which distributes Light across the Throne World, and Guardians need to protect the Light from the Scorn’s ruinous plans with the Darkness entity. Although this activity deals with the Scorn, an earlier image from Bungie showed players attacking the Hive. Right now, it's unclear if this activity will change in later weeks or at higher difficulty levels.

The Wellspring: Defend is the new six-player, matchmade activity in the Court of Thorns area of Savathun’s Throne World--the recommended Power level is 1510. Players can access it after completing The Witch Queen campaign and additional objectives.

An Exotic quest, called Of Queens and Worms, will direct players to speak to Mara Sov at the Enclave. After meeting with Mara, play through the Birthplace of the Vile strike and visit Fynch. Fynch will give you The Spring of Power quest to complete the Wellspring activity--Of Queens and Worms branches into another quest at this point.

Charge the Wellspring

Charging and defending the Wellspring

First, players need to charge the Wellspring at the center until the number reaches 100. It’s kind of like those public events where Guardians need to stand on platforms to charge it up. It doesn’t hurt to move around the map a bit, but staying at the center is the best spot since there will be multiple waves of Scorn spawning everywhere. Melee weapons and medium-ranged weapons do well in this activity. Also, players can use rally banners before each encounter--there are three encounters total.

Destroy the Pyramid Spikes

Clearing the Cruxes and the Pyramid Spikes in the Wellspring activity

After charging up the Wellspring, push forward and activate the next area. Here, players will need to shoot the Pyramid Spikes to destroy the Cruxes and defeat Scorn. The Pyramid Spikes won't always show up immediately next to the Cruxes--shoot Scorn and wait till you can see the Spikes. Pyramid Spikes were introduced to players in the campaign--they are black and gold, floating crystal-like objects.

Five Cruxes are floating in the area, and each has multiple Spikes to destroy. The Scorn will spawn right in front and around the Cruxes--beware of the Scorn Walker at the center. Keep in mind that players need to destroy the Pyramid Spikes completely. Sometimes the Spikes are slightly visible and leave a faint golden glow--that means they didn't get fully destroyed. Shoot at them again if this happens.

Defeat Vezuul, Lightflayer

Destroying the Pyramid Spikes to defeat Vezuul, Lightflayer

Now it’s time for the boss fight. Activating this area spawns Scorn enemies along with Vezuul, Lightflayer. After dealing some damage, Vezuul will retreat onto the bridge below. There are three phases on the bridge where players will need to defeat the Scorn and destroy the Spikes to remove Vezuul’s shield and deal damage. The first Crux has two Spikes, the next has four Spikes, and the last Crux has six Spikes that need to get taken down.

The Wellspring: Defend rewards and ranks

Players get rewards from a chest at the end of the activity, which gives the Tarnation grenade launcher, other weapons, and Veritas Armor pieces that Bungie showed off in the Witch Queen trailers. However, players solely get variant rolls of items they have already unlocked through Fynch. For example, if a player only unlocks the leg armor in the Rank Rewards category, the Wellspring activity will give you another roll of that leg armor. Increasing the Throne World Rank will allow players to unlock more armor pieces and weapons, and players can head into Wellspring for desired rolls on their gear. To play the Wellspring at higher difficulties, players will need to reach Rank 18 with Fynch.

Season of the Risen started along with The Witch Queen expansion and brings weekly challenges and a new PsiOps Battlegrounds activity.

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Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it's story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what's going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what's drawing our attention across the solar system.

It has been quite the month in Destiny 2. Over the past few weeks, Bungie has dropped a ludicrous amount of information on players about The Witch Queen, ranging from new details regarding the story campaign and weapon crafting system to a closer look at Void 3.0. There's a huge amount of detail to take in, building a runway for the launch of the expansion in just a few days.

Honestly, it's been too much to contend with. Between our early look at The Witch Queen and Savathun's throne world, all the details about weapon crafting, the changes coming to Gambit and the Void subclasses, it's a lot to keep straight.

All that stuff is fun, sure, but the thing that's been baking my noodle is the lore. The Season of the Lost has finally concluded, leaving a few hanging threads (and blowing out the fan theory I liked that a blown Ahamkara wish was going to be Savathun's road to the Light). And we've been getting a bunch of looks at the upcoming expansion, in trailers, a vidoc, social media posts, and the Witch Queen Collector's Edition. It's creepy and excellent and I've been thinking about it too much.

So, let's talk about the story ahead of The Witch Queen real quick--emphasis on quick, because honestly, there's too much to hit here and we're rapidly running out of time. We got word from Fenchurch, we learned new stuff about Ikora and the Ahamkara, and we found out that there might be some traitorous Ghosts out there.

Welcome, o honored guest

This week, we got the last bit of story from the Season of the Lost, illustrating how we're going from Savathun hiding in a big crystal to Savathun wielding the Light next week. The short answer is: Savathun did a magic thing, though what that entails I don't really understand. In any event, Mara Sov failed to kill the Hive god of cunning, despite that being her plan for something like six months while preparing the ritual we saw during this week's "Exorcism" mission.

This suggests Savathun had an inside track on Mara's plan--either she guessed she'd be a target a long time ago (which, to be fair, is kind of obvious) and never intended to make herself vulnerable, or she gleaned that information at some point through her various means and made preparations. While the first possibility seems like the most likely, the second one is the more interesting of the two. After all, we've seen the weird things Savathun can do to people with Savathun's Song, the strange chant that (apparently) gives her some light mind-control powers. Did she use it to spy on Mara and get one step ahead of her impending assassination?

By the way, if you haven't played through Exorcism at this point, you should hopefully be able to do so. The mission launched with some bugs but Bungie has made some alterations that should make it easier to complete now. Just don't skip the cutscene.

"Exorcism" gave us the setup for The Witch Queen, and we've been seeing a whole lot of potential clues pop up in all the other info Bungie has spread around, including in its vidoc, launch trailer, and hands-off preview opportunity. That last one gave us a sense of what to expect with Savathun's throne world and the new story campaign that Bungie is bringing to the game with the expansion.

If you haven't watched it, I'd definitely suggest checking out the vidoc, which gives a pretty complete look at what's coming in the expansion. It also contains a lot of footage from cutscenes and the expansion at large, which in turn gives us a bunch of hints. We dug around and pulled out 26 things you might have missed from the Witch Queen vidoc and another 17 you might have missed in the launch trailer. There's a lot of weird stuff being teased!

Some of the coolest items, though, are the ones that maintain the Lovecraftian horror vibe The Witch Queen is throwing off. In the launch trailer, we see what looks like a vision, experienced by Ikora Rey, of the Hive's origins on their home planet of Fundament. Even that, though, is tinged with hints at deception. And then there's that glimpse of the Traveler, undamaged, in the sky. Seriously, it feels like the Traveler is working with Savathun. I know I keep saying this. It's real.

That shot of the Traveler, and the markings you can see on it (which are usually obscured by the giant chunks missing from the Traveler in the present), play into the continued hints that Destiny 2 is going into some f ascinating alchemical and spiritual territory. Check out Saniya Ahmed's look at the way alchemy seems to be a big part of The Witch Queen, and then speculate to yourself what it all means long-term.

Word from Fenchurch

In slightly more concrete story territory, I've been spending time catching up with the Witch Queen Collector's Edition, which is, as usual, pretty excellent. Bungie does a great job with its CEs, including a lot of fun items and also a fair share of secrets and puzzles for the community to uncover. Like, what is bungie.net/Circles, a URL hidden in the CE's documents? Who knows! But it's cool.

A little more straightforward is what's in the book contained in the CE, which is meant to represent a dossier for the Hidden, Ikora Rey's network of Guardian spies. The book is a series of reports and missives annotated by Ikora that give a look into her character, and it's all really informative of what's going on with a person who the game has largely held at arm's length. Ikora is not nearly as cool, collected, and meditative as she appears to be.

The lore book talks about Ikora's run-ins with the Ahamkara, the Destiny universe's frightening, shape-shifting dragons that are basically trickster gods running monkey's paw scams. Back before the era we play the game in, Guardians took part in something called the Great Hunt to eliminate all the Ahamkara, Ikora included. She nearly got killed by one Ahamkara as it tricked her into making a wish, only to be saved by the legendary Guardian Wei Ning, and defeated another Ahamkara by, essentially, wishing to be someone who could not be tempted by wishes. There's a big implication that meditative, even-tempered Ikora exists because that's who she needed to be to survive the Great Hunt.

In the journal, Ikora is extremely worried nobody likes her, because if nobody likes Ikora, nobody will trust her, and if nobody trusts her, they're not going to follow her as she tries to lead them against the growing threat of the Darkness. It's a fun problem to hint at, drawing us closer to the Warlock Vanguard than we've ever been, while also making it clear what massive repercussions something like Ikora's likeability factor can be for the Destiny 2 story at large. I really think we're going to get into Ikora's head a lot more in the coming year--she's clearly the central figure of The Witch Queen's story, as Elsie Bray was central to Beyond Light. We're getting some character development because of that, and I'm expecting a lot more.

The journal also includes a few other fun tidbits I mean to dig into deeper in articles in the next few days. One is that there's a whole group of Ghosts who kind of function as conscientious objectors--they haven't found their Guardians, and they like to hang around talking about whether they ever will. There's a suggestion in the report about those Ghosts that they might be purposely avoiding finding Guardians. And since we know the Hive wind up with Ghosts in The Witch Queen, we get a very real implication that maybe those Hive Ghosts chose to switch sides. The report discusses how the Ghosts are fascinated by the Books of Sorrow, the Hive creation myth, and how they think the Hive are a victim class manipulated by their worms. Maybe it's not the Traveler that betrays humanity, but the Ghosts who don't agree with them.

There are some other things worth mentioning, but my favorite is a report from Fenchurch Eververse--yeah, that Fenchurch. There aren't a ton of lore entries about the guy, but we know that when the Guardian isn't sourcing antiquities and oddities for the Eververse Store out in the field, he's working as one of Ikora's Hidden. Back during the Season of the Drifter in 2019, a report from Fenchurch served as a particularly weird lore entry with some strange implications. In it, he had a dream about Eris, woke up to find a Hive thrall standing over him acting strangely, and killed it to discover a chunk of black material that, when touched, gave him another vision of Eris. For years, that lore entry alluded to some weirdness, but we never fully understood it.

The Collector's Edition contains another report from Fenchurch that, finally, explains that earlier report. It answers some questions, like the identity of the other person in the original vision (it's Mara Sov, actually), and raises others. It also gives a hint of what Mara's role might be in the story of The Witch Queen and beyond. It's all very fascinating.

The hours between us and The Witch Queen are dwindling, but there's still more to unpack, like the Vanguard-like Hive transmissions Bungie is sharing on its Instagram, or the two days in which Savathun apparently took over the Destiny Twitter account. Expect a lot more to talk about next week; hopefully there will be enough time to write this column. In the meantime, feel free to share the strange, interesting, or mysterious story hints that are baking your noodles in the comments below.

The collector's editions for Destiny 2 expansions include a lot of the usual stuff, like statues and stickers, but the most interesting items included are always their physical lore books. The book inside The Witch Queen Collector's Edition doesn't hit quite as hard as the journal included in the Beyond Light CE (which details how Clovis Bray was almost mind-controlled by the Vex), but it does feature a bunch of interesting tidbits about Ikora Rey, the Darkness, and the Hidden. It also gives us something we've been waiting for: word from Fenchurch.

The lore book in The Witch Queen CE sets the stage for the story of the expansion, though one fascinating entry in particular fits nicely in with the story we've seen unfold in the Season of the Lost. That season was all about Mara Sov, the Awoken queen, who has been missing in action since all the way back during the Forsaken expansion. Mara has been around, though, even if we didn't know the full details of her exploits. In fact, the CE lore book tells us that in the period between Forsaken and the Shadowkeep expansion, she was hanging out with Eris Morn. She might also have destroyed one of the Darkness' Pyramid ships.

Within the Witch Queen CE lore book is a report from Fenchurch Everis, who most players will know from a voice line delivered by Tower cosmetics merchant Tess Everis at the Eververse kiosk: "No word from Fenchurch today. He must have found something interesting." Canonically, Fenchurch is the guy who finds all the weird artifacts Tess sells in the Eververse Store, but he also has a story role with the Vanguard, serving as one of the Hidden, Ikora's secret group of Guardian spies. The entry in the Witch Queen CE is one of his reports to Ikora, which actually completely explains another of his previous reports--one that was among the spookiest recent lore entries in the game.

That lore entry is called "Fragment," and it appeared way back during the Season of the Drifter in 2019. In it, Fenchurch submits a report about a day when he was patrolling on the moon with some other Guardians, before he suddenly was overwhelmed by a splitting headache. He went to lie down, but instead instantly fell asleep and had a strange dream. The lore entry mentions specific people in the dream, but Fenchurch uses Hidden codes that obscured who the main participants are. One is definitely Eris, but the other--VIP #0704--was unknown until now.

In his dream, Fenchurch saw Eris and tried to catch up to her in a crowd, but couldn't. He woke up a few moments later to find a Hive thrall standing there, looking at him and not moving. Fenchurch blasted the thrall and found a weird piece of black material, the fragment the entry is named for, sticking out of its chest. Fenchurch's Ghost, Neville, tried to scan the fragment but had a hard time doing so. Eventually, Fenchurch touched it with his hand and had a sudden vision.

The vision showed Eris and VIP #0704 together in a field of black debris, apparently that of a destroyed ship, with #0704 dressing a big gash in Eris' thigh. Before the vision ended, Eris turned and said something to Fenchurch in Russian, which roughly translates to "pathetic" in English. (We never do find out what this Russian part is all about.)

Eris was missing for a long time between The Taken King expansion and her return in Shadowkeep.

The CE lore entry has Fenchurch offering a new report on the vision, the weird thrall, and the black item he found stuck in its chest, after talking to Eris and convincing her to tell him what the hell was going on. Eris explains that Fenchurch's vision was an event that actually happened, and that she sent the thrall to find a Guardian in order to make a report in case she and VIP #0704 died doing whatever they were doing.

There's a whole lot more to the situation we learn from the new report, though. First and foremost, we can pick up that VIP #0704 is, in fact, Mara Sov.

Fenchurch reports what Eris tells him: Between the Forsaken expansion and the Shadowkeep expansion, Mara consulted VIP #0101 (who we soon figure out is Elsie Bray, the Exo Stranger) about the approaching Pyramid ships. (As an aside, assigning #0101 to Elsie has to be a Terminator joke: T-101 was the designation for Arnold Schwarzennegger's killer robot in a movie about time-traveling robots, and Elsie is a time-traveling robot.) We saw during Forsaken that Mara was aware of the Darkness' Black Fleet before just about anybody else--she's been making plans to deal with it since the original Destiny.

Using a combination of Elsie's future tech from other timelines and some time traveler insights, as well as the Warmind artificial intelligence Rasputin and the AI Failsafe from the Exodus Black, Mara was able to pinpoint one of the Pyramid ships within the solar system long before the rest of the ships showed up during the Season of Arrivals, and before the one on the moon was discovered in Shadowkeep. This one was in orbit around a dwarf planet called 136199 Eris, a body that exists in the solar system (in the real world as well as the game) but which is pretty distant. Together, Mara and Eris made for 136199 Eris to see what the deal was with the Pyramid ship.

The Pyramid ship on the moon was there before the rest of the Black Fleet arrived in the Season of Arrivals, and apparently it wasn't the only one.

What happened next isn't super clear. Apparently, after discovering the ship, the pair moved closer to investigate. Fenchurch doesn't know exactly what happened after that. Apparently, Mara left the ship to get closer to the Pyramid, and then even abandoned her spacesuit--which sounds very similar to the origin story for Mara described in the lore book Marasenna. Fenchurch isn't sure, but he believes Mara either interacted with or even entered the Pyramid ship; he also doesn't know if Mara was able to affect the Pyramid at all, or if the debris field he saw in his vision was actually the result of Mara destroying the Pyramid ship. What he does know, however, is that whatever happened caused Mara to die.

Death isn't the end for Mara, however. Like Hive gods Savathun, Oryx, and Xivu Arath, Mara has managed to use the power of the Dreaming City and her Techeun witches to create a "throne world" on the Ascendant Plane--in fact, if you've ventured into the Shattered Throne dungeon in the Dreaming City, you've seen it. A person or entity with a throne world can be killed in the material world, but they survive in the Ascendant Plane, which essentially renders them immortal. That's why, during the Taken King expansion, Guardians had to kill Oryx in his throne world in the King's Fall raid--if they didn't, Oryx wouldn't stay dead.

The throne world is how Mara survived her apparent death during The Taken King, when the Awoken fleet attacked and disabled Oryx's Dreadnaught. And she survived her death here, too, by zapping back to her throne world. At this point, though, Savathun and her daughter, Dul Incaru, had taken up residence there, as we see in the Shattered Throne dungeon. Eris used her weird Hive powers to pull Mara back from the throne world, but to do that, the two of them had to fight Dul Incaru and Savathun.

Fenchurch says that Eris and Mara made it through that battle and wound up on the surface of 136199 Eris. However, the fight was a hard one, and Eris was injured--when Fenchurch saw Mara treating Eris' wound amid the debris on a frozen planet, this is why. We still don't know what all that debris actually is, though.

Mara sacrificed herself against Oryx during the Battle of Saturn, but thanks to her throne world, she can't die.

Before this, the relationship between Mara and Eris, who worked for the Awoken queen for years, was a strained one, presumably because of the trauma Mara suffered during the battle with Oryx in The Taken King and her death afterward. Mara sacrificed a lot for Eris' plan to take down Oryx, including a huge number of the Awoken people, and in the end, her brother, Uldren Sov. But after the fight with Dul Incaru and Savathun, and faced with the prospect they might die, Mara and Eris managed to reconcile. That point is important for a couple reasons: First, Mara and Eris are both a big part of the story of The Witch Queen; and second--according to Elsie Bray in the dark timeline she seeks to prevent--Eris is eventually corrupted by the Darkness and becomes a bigger threat than even Savathun. The Dark Future lore book says that in that timeline, Eris eventually helps the Darkness defeat the Traveler and the Light, and is even responsible for Mara's death.

Back on the dwarf planet, Eris was worried she might not survive the ordeal; though she's a former Guardian, she has no Ghost, and is therefore mortal. Fenchurch says that Eris used some Hive magic to zap a report onto a piece of the black metal in the debris field and then transported it to the moon, along with the compulsion for a "lesser Hive" to bring that report to the nearest Guardian, which is how the thrall came to Fenchurch and the reason he saw the vision.

The report ends with Fenchurch frustrated that Eris' explanation of the vision he saw leaves even more questions, specifically about what Mara did to the Pyramid ship in orbit around 136199 Eris. Was she able to destroy it, and if so, how? Can she do it again, and if not, why not?

In her response, Ikora notes that, like Savathun, Mara is moving pieces around a chessboard and she keeps secrets for a greater purpose. She also suggests that Mara might be trying to come to terms with the fact that she won't be able to control events as much as she wants.

Mara squared off with Savathun and was beaten in the Season of the Lost, but the two queens are still locked in a battle of wits.

"I believe Mara has begun to consider that she may not be the prime executor of her own endgame," Ikora writes to Fenchurch. "She may be just one component of the bomb--the payload or timing device. At the end of her own journey, she is necessary but not sufficient. She can no longer fight alone."

It seems Mara has a big role in the story to come, as we saw set up in Forsaken and lately in the Season of the Lost. Destiny 2's story lately has been pushing the idea that the way to defeat the threat of the Darkness is through alliances, and this lore entry gives a sense that we'll need to continue to strengthen our relationship with Mara Sov. It also hints at more of what Mara might have up her sleeve--she's seen a whole lot of things we have no idea about, and I have a feeling we're going to see her take on the Darkness directly before too long.

Destiny 2 was always a story-heavy game, with an expansive backstory and deep lore, but often the tales told in-game were thinner than those hinted at in grimoire cards and weapon flavor text. That has changed drastically in the last few years, with Destiny 2's focus on worldbuilding and storytelling with its seasonal content increasing to a dramatic and exciting degree. In the year-plus since the release of the Beyond Light expansion, we've seen the best, most interesting storytelling Destiny 2 has ever offered--but that means that a whole lot has happened in the last 14 months.

If you've missed that story, either because you haven't played extensively through the four seasons since Beyond Light's launch or because you lapsed with the game because of decisions to vault content or sunset certain weapons, you might feel a little lost. New characters have popped up along the way, villains have executed carefully laid plans, and internal conflicts among mainstays of the Destiny universe are at an all-time high. There's a lot to know about leading into The Witch Queen expansion releasing on February 22.

Below, you'll find an extensive rundown of Destiny 2's story beats from Beyond Light and, well, beyond. From Clovis Bray's exploits on Europa, to the introduction of The Crow, to the diplomatic talks with the Cabal and the nascent alliance with the Fallen, there's a whole lot of ground to cover. Here's everything that has happened since Destiny 2 last expansion to get you ready for The Witch Queen.

As a note: We're going to assume you're pretty familiar with Destiny 2's story up until Beyond Light. If you need even more of a catch-up, check out our even longer Destiny story summary, going all the way back to Destiny 1.

Beyond Light

A whole lot changes in the Beyond Light campaign. After the Darkness's arrival and the disappearance of Mars, Mercury, Titan, and Io in the Season of Arrivals, Guardians are summoned to Europa by a distress signal. There, we encounter Variks of House Judgment--a Fallen who was formerly a servant of Queen Mara Sov of the Reef but has been missing since the events of Forsaken. He was being hunted by other Fallen, but thanks to our intervention, Variks escapes death at the hands of people we soon discover were his former comrades.

We get a sense here of what Variks has been up to for two years. Back in Forsaken, he helped a Fallen leader named Eramis escape the Prison of Elders. He'd come to believe that Eramis held the key to leading the Fallen to freedom and salvation in the solar system, and threw in his lot with her. That prison break also allowed Uldren Sov and the Scorn Barrons to escape way back in Forsaken--so in no small way, Variks, a former ally of Guardians and the Awoken, was responsible for the death of Cayde-6 and made the curse on the Dreaming City possible.

Eramis was a powerful and charismatic leader, but when she started using Stasis, her goals became less about safety and more about conquest.

Eramis and her group previously tried to gather Golden Age technology to aid their cause--they were behind the attack on the Tower Vault in the Zero Hour mission, which Guardians foiled with the help of Mithrax, a Fallen captain who has become something of an ally to humanity. (More on Mithrax later). After that, she led her group of Fallen to Europa, where the band created a new settlement for the Fallen to live.

However, after establishing the city of Riis-Reborn, named after the home planet of the Fallen (or, as they call themselves, the Eliksni), Eramis and her allies make a series of discoveries driven by the arrival of the Darkness in the solar system. They uncover the research facilities of Golden Age industrialist Clovis Bray. That's the guy whose facilities are scattered around the solar system, including on Mars, and it was Bray's company that created the Warmind Rasputin, along with a whole lot of other things. Bray and his scientists also set up facilities on the moon to study the pyramid ship there, which we uncovered in the Shadowkeep expansion.

After his research on the moon (which, not so coincidentally, drove Bray's research team out of their minds), Bray's discoveries drew him to Europa. There, he uncovered something he called Clarity Control: a giant Darkness statue hidden under the ice, very similar to the one seen in the pyramid ship beneath the Shadowkeep on the moon and in the Black Garden at the end of the Garden of Salvation raid. The main difference between the statues was that Clarity Control is huge, and apparently extremely powerful.

Clarity Control is, seemingly, a conduit straight to the intelligence behind the force that is the Darkness, as well as a source of an "anti-entropy" field (this, it appears, is whatever the Darkness energy actually is, a similar physics-defying force to the Traveler's Light). Bray began researching Clarity Control and built an entire colony around it, called Eventide. Thanks to the arrival of the Black Fleet in the solar system and what was left in those research facilities, Eramis discovers artifacts called Splinters of Darkness that allow her to control Darkness energy, now known as Stasis. Essentially, she gains superpowers that give her command of ice and cold. She names herself Kell of her band of Fallen, the newly formed House Salvation, and plans to use Stasis not to free the Fallen, but to create a new empire. The power seemingly corrupts Eramis and her council of advisoers. Variks, seeing the leader he once believed in falling to the dark side, flees and calls the Guardians for aid. Once again, he betrays his leaders, but tells us he did so for the good of his people.

Variks might not seem especially trustworthy after everything that's happened in the last few years, but he does seem to have the Fallen's best interests at heart.

Despite lingering animosity between the Vanguard and Variks for his role in Cayde's death, Guardians join him on Europa against the growing threat of Eramis and her Stasis powers. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Guardians' usual Light abilities might not be enough to stop the Kell of House Salvation. The player Guardian escapes Eramis and her abilities, soon after meeting up with a band of characters who have been researching the Darkness on behalf of humanity--Eris Morn, the Drifter, and the Exo Stranger from way back in Destiny 1. The group explains that they believe the only way to defeat the Darkness and the Black Fleet is by using the enemy's own power against it, and so you set out under the Stranger's guidance to gain Stasis powers yourself.

The power proves to be incredibly useful in fighting Eramis and her forces, but the Vanguard, and Zavala in particular, are not happy about the idea of Guardians wielding Darkness powers. After all, there are more than a few stories of Guardians who were corrupted by their quests for forbidden power, and all became devastatingly dangerous.

Guardians slowly take down Eramis's advisers one by one, while also aiding Variks as he guides Eliskni refugees out of Riis-Reborn so they can escape the fighting. Eventually, the Guardians defeat Eramis herself, although it seems the Darkness turns against her when she proves too weak to stand against the Traveler's warriors. Of course, the whole situation has the feel of a manipulation by the intelligence behind the Darkness, in an effort to seduce Guardians to its side with the power of Stasis.

The Deep Stone Crypt

With Eramis out of the picture, the Vanguard goes on to mop up the last of her followers, and you work closely with the Exo Stranger to uncover Clovis Bray's secrets. The Stranger reveals her real identity: Elsie Bray, granddaughter of Clovis and sister to Ana Bray, the Guardian who you formerly worked with on Mars before it disappeared in the Season of Arrivals. Elsie helps you to further expand your Stasis powers, while also asking your assistance in uncovering what Clovis was up to on Europa.

Beyond Light is as much about uncovering the secrets of the Exos, Clovis Bray, and the Stranger as it is about the Darkness.

And Clovis was up to quite a bit, as it turns out. His research on Europa included the Darkness, but it had a specific goal in mind: the creation of the Exos, one of Destiny's three character races. Exos are robots into whom human minds have been transferred--they're people, but without living bodies. The Bray family suffered from a congenital disease that caused them to slowly deteriorate, and toward the end of his life, Clovis was obsessed with staving off his own death by transferring his consciousness into an Exo. With what he learned about the Darkness--as well as the guidance (or manipulations) of the intelligent "entity" behind it--he was able to finally crack the code of putting human minds into Exo bodies. His Exo research program was located in a Europan facility called the Deep Stone Crypt.

The Deep Stone Crypt is also the site of Beyond Light's raid; a team of Guardians are sent there to stop Eramis's last remaining lieutenant, Atraks, from using its technology to create an army of Fallen Exos. It turns out that at least two Exos have already been created using the facility: Atraks herself, and Taniks, a Fallen mercenary you've been hunting (and killing, though he never seems to stay dead) since all the way back in Destiny 1. As you invade the Crypt, you fight Atraks and Taniks in its attached orbital facility, which Clovis created partially as insurance. He knew Clarity Control, his conduit to the Darkness that made the Exo program possible, could potentially be manipulating him, and the orbital facility served as both a research station and a giant nuclear bomb he could drop on the Crypt if things got out of control. Taniks attempts to drop the facility on Europa, destroying the entire moon, during the raid. The Guardians eventually stop him, saving Europa and the DSC, and putting a final end to the threat of Eramis and the Fallen Exos.

There's a lot more to the story of the Brays, however. Your raid on the DSC isn't the first time Elsie tried to shut down the Exo program. She did the same back during the Golden Age, not long after she was first transferred into an Exo body herself in order to save her from the Bray line's degenerative disease. The magic bullet that Clovis discovered to make the Exo program work was, it turned out, the Vex. Clarity Control imparted the wisdom he needed to build a portal to a Vex colony, and Clovis and his researchers opened it to capture Vex constructs and use them in horrific human experiments as they perfected Exo bodies. Elsie tried to stop Clovis's experiments and seal the portal to the Vex by dropping the orbital facility on the DSC--but she failed, and Clovis killed her.

When Clovis Bray transferred himself into his Exo body, his memories were wiped. Faced with the choice of who he wanted to be, the newborn Exo fought to save the people of Eventide and became Banshee-44.

But while one version of Elsie was killed, thanks to the Exo creation process, a copy of her mind remained. Clovis rebooted Elsie in a new body without the memories of her death or betrayal. In fact, wiping memories is a key part of the answer to getting human minds to accept Exo bodies; regular memory wipes are essential to keep the hardware and software in sync. (That's why Exos all have a number after their names; it refers to the number of times that Exo has been rebooted with a mind wipe, which makes each iteration a slightly different person.)

Just as Clovis was finally about to transfer himself into an Exo, the Vex used the portal he'd opened to invade Europa, just as Elsie had feared. When Clovis awoke in his new Exo body, he didn't recall the arrogant, self-centered man he had been, and with the threat of the Vex bearing down on the Braytech researchers and colonists, he joined the fight. With this new Exo's help, the Vex were repelled and the people living on Europa were saved. The Exo abandoned the identity of Clovis Bray and the villainous man he had been, instead taking on a new identity: Banshee. Yup, the Tower's gunsmith was formerly Clovis Bray himself. In fact, Banshee's full name is Banshee-44, a testament to his ferocity and resolve in battle. He went through those 44 iterations during his war with the Vex, falling and rebooting again and again, and the degradation those reboots have had on his mind is why the character has always been so forgetful when players have interacted with him in the Tower. A copy of the original Clovis's mind still exists, though, in the form of the artificial intelligence that runs Deep Stone Crypt. It's still there, preserved in the facilities beneath the Europan surface.

The Dark Timeline

We learn one last thing during the battles on Europa to secure the Deep Stone Crypt and stop Eramis. During our time with Elsie, she reveals why she had appeared in Destiny 1 and guided player Guardians to the Black Garden. Elsie, it turns out, is a time traveler, seemingly using some combination of Bray and Vex technology from the Golden Age to leap between timelines. When she appeared in Destiny 1 and interacted with players, she did so to alter the course of history. Sending players to destroy the Heart of the Black Garden apparently turned the course of events away from devastation. When she appears on Europa to guide Guardians in using Stasis, Elsie is messing with the timeline yet again.

In the other timelines Elsie has seen, the Darkness eventually corrupted many of the Guardians in the solar system, turning them against one another. That corruption found Eris Morn, turning her into a threat worse than even the Hive gods, Savathun and Xivu Arath. The Vanguard was destroyed, Guardians were killed, and eventually, the Darkness won. Most importantly, thoug h, in the futures Elsie had seen, Ana Bray was also corrupted. Elsie has killed the dark version of her sister many times; her interference in the timeline is, first and foremost, about saving Ana.

The Bray family relationship is an important part of Elsie's attempts to fix the timeline.

Convincing Guardians to understand and use the Darkness, Elsie believes, could be the thing that saves humanity. The idea is that guidance in using Stasis against the Darkness can protect Guardians from being seduced by it; in the futures when Guardians have discovered the power on their own or been lured to it by the Darkness, they've inevitably fallen. Elsie also reveals her identity to Ana for the first time in our current timeline, hoping that her presence as a positive force in Ana's life will help prevent her from turning to the Darkness.

Importantly, though, we've now entered a present that Elsie has never experienced before, because she has altered the flow of events through her interference, and she doesn't know how things will play out. Her big gamble has been to encourage Guardians to use the power of Stasis as a weapon, and that puts her at odds with some characters, including Zavala. And though it has mostly been an undercurrent element of the story this year, appearing mostly in lore text, Stasis has corrupted some Guardians along the way. The threat of the Darkness taking hold of Guardians remains.

The Season of the Hunt

While the crisis on Europa was unfolding, other threats were appearing in the solar system. After the Season of Arrivals, exiled Guardian Osiris traveled the solar system, gathering information about the places where Mars, Io, Mercury, and Titan had once been. During his investigations, he is attacked by the High Celebrant, a powerful minion of Xivu Arath, the Hive god of war and sister of Oryx.

Osiris sends a message to the Vanguard warning of Xivu Arath and imparting that the High Celebrant has killed his Ghost, Sagira. Seeking vengeance, Osiris goes after the High Celebrant with the goal of killing it, but with no Ghost to resurrect him, the Warlock is vulnerable to dying one final time. In response, player Guardians speed to the moon to rescue Osiris, but we arrive just in time to see him saved by a "freelance" Lightbearer who calls himself The Crow.

The Crow, we quickly discover, is a resurrected Guardian who had once been Uldren Sov, Cayde-6's murderer and brother to Awoken Queen Mara Sov. Uldren was also the man we, the players, executed during the Forsaken expansion in revenge for Cayde. However, Guardians don't remember their past lives after they've been resurrected--but with Uldren's face, a confused Crow repeatedly found himself attacked by Guardians enraged at seeing the killer of Cayde-6. Eventually, Crow was taken in by the Spider, the crime lord in residence on the Taken Shore, and employed as an enforcer. But the Spider isn't especially benevolent: He places explosives inside the shell of Crow's Ghost, essentially turning him into a slave. If Crow ever does something Spider doesn't like, the crime lord will kill Crow's Ghost, severing him from the Light and making him mortal.

In the Crow's early life as a Guardian, he was hounded by other Lightbearers who thought they'd found the hated Uldren Sov.

Spider agrees to allow Crow to help the Guardians and Osiris deal with the threat of Xivu Arath, which is spreading through a portion of the solar system. When the Darkness arrived in the season before Beyond Light, Savathun attempted to interfere with the signals it sent to Eris Morn and the other Guardians. Failing in her attempt to keep us from interacting with the Darkness, Savathun went into hiding. That gave Xivu Arath an opening to consolidate her own power. She dispatches Hive totems called Cryptoliths across the Tangled Shore, the Dreaming City, and the moon. The powerful artifacts corrupt the minds of nearby creatures, turning them into an army called the Wrathborn. Under Osiris's guidance and with Crow's help, we set out to hunt the Wrathborn and destroy them, with the ultimate goal of tracking down and killing the High Celebrant.

Though we and Spider both know Crow's original identity, that information is withheld from Crow himself, as is our role in Uldren's death. But Crow is not Uldren, and while we hide our connection to him, we soon become friends as we work to hunt down the Wrathborn. It is ultimately Crow's plan, as well as his willingness to risk himself, that allows us to trap and destroy the High Celebrant and avenge Sagira.

Along the way, Crow begins experiencing strange dreams, much like those players had during the Red War, which seem to be direct messages from the Traveler. They lead him, and us, to the EDZ on Earth in a mission called Harbinger, where we battle Hive and Taken enemies attacking a Shard of the Traveler. It seems that Crow's connection to the Traveler is a powerful one, and that's likely going to come up again in the future.

The defeat of the Wrathborn means that, for once, the Spider owes us something. We use our leverage with the crime boss to buy Crow's freedom. Osiris takes care of him, finding a mask Crow can wear that hides his identity. When Zavala calls on Osiris for help with a growing diplomatic issue, Crow accompanies him and finds a place in the Last City--while hiding his former identity as Uldren Sov.

The Season of the Chosen

Xivu Arath isn't just attacking our solar system. The Hive god of war sacked the Cabal homeworld, forcing the empire to flee to the Sol system.

Xivu Arath isn't just at work in our solar system, making trouble with her Wrathborn. While we were messing around on Europa, the Hive god of war tried to deal a deathblow to the Cabal on their home planet, Torobotl. The Cabal there resisted the Hive as best they could, but ultimately, the planet was lost. The remaining Cabal fled the planet, led by Empress Caiatl, the daughter of the exiled Calus and successor to Dominus Ghaul, the leader of the Cabal's Red Legion from back in vanilla Destiny 2.

Things are desperate for Caiatl, so she brings the last of the Cabal empire to join up with the remnants of the Red Legion. She's also seeking other allies: Guardians. That's a hard sell for people like Commander Zavala, given a long history of animosity with the Cabal and the devastation of the Red War. Diplomatic tension increases when Cabal culture demands that Caiatl suggest Guardians join the empire and become subservient to her. An alliance against the Hive between the Vanguard and the Cabal would mean Zavala kneeling before Caiatl and surrendering to her leadership. As one might expect, that's a big "no sale" from the Vanguard commander.

Zavala is n't happy about the idea of another major leader growing a war machine in the solar system, though. Together with Osiris, Lord Saladin, and Crow, he looks to disrupt Caiatl's plans of gathering a war council from the Cabal in the solar system. As part of ancient tradition, Caiatl institutes a ritual called the Proving Grounds, where Cabal warriors can battle to prove themselves worthy of serving on her war council. But with the right Cabal artifacts, tradition dictates that anyone can take part in these rituals--so the Vanguard starts dispatching Guardians to fight in the rituals and mess up Caiatl's plans and kill her champions.

Even while it's interfering with Caiatl's plans, the Vanguard is open to talks of some kind of peace accord with the Cabal, but Crow starts to suspect that a plot is afoot against Zavala. Osiris thinks Crow's worries are overblown, but Crow starts following Zavala without his knowledge, though keeping his distance--Osiris and Ikora have hidden from Zavala the fact that Crow used to be Uldren. Despite Osiris's doubts, Crow turns out to be right: Cabal Psions try to assassinate Zavala in the Last City, but Crow is there to stop it. Zavala catches sight of him during the assassination attempt, and while he doesn't realize the person he saw was Crow, he does get the impression that he saw Uldren before the other man disappeared. Crow learns more about the Psions' plans to assassinate Zavala, including their use of a miniaturized version of Ghaul's Traveler net, which they're going to use to disable Zavala's Ghost and sever his connection to the Light.

Zavala finally learned Crow's former identity after the young Guardian saved the Vanguard commander from an assassination attempt.

The second assassination attempt goes down at a meeting with Caiatl, but Crow again steps in to stop it. This time, Crow's mask slips, revealing his true identity to Zavala. Instead of reacting harshly against Uldren, the man who killed his friend Cayde, Zavala responds to the situation by offering Crow his hand in friendship.

At the same time, Caiatl maintains that she had nothing to do with the Psions' attempts on Zavala's life (and in fact, the Psions are members of the Cabal who were formerly slaves but are now gaining power as an individual faction). Caiatl executes the Psions responsible and Zavala manages to maintain tenuous diplomacy with the Cabal going forward. There are no outright hostilities between the two groups, but they're not quite allies, either.

As for Crow, Zavala isn't happy that he was deceived by people close to him, but he decides to keep the freelance Lightbearer close--and that Crow should continue to hide his identity from the public.

Eventually, the crew of the Glykon was killed by the things they experimented on.

Presage: A Glimpse of the Future

While the Vanguard executes its plans to disrupt the Cabal, a strange discovery is made. A Guardian distress call leads to the discovery of a Cabal ship called the Glykon floating derelict in space, and Osiris dispatches us to check it out. Logs discovered on the ship reveal that it was captained by Katabasis, a Guardian who worked for the exiled Calus. The Glykon's mission was to try to commune with the "entity," the intelligence seemingly behind the Darkness (which essentially seems to be the Darkness version of the Traveler, although we know nothing about it yet). To do that, Calus ordered his soldiers to capture Scorn--former Fallen who were resurrected through the power of the Darkness--and tried to use their Darkness-addled minds in combination with the Crown of Sorrow to make contact with the Entity.

The Crown of Sorrow is an artifact with its own history with the Darkness. Calus discovered the item some time ago and hoped it would give him the power to control the Hive, but he suspected a trap and refused to wear the crown himself. Instead, he used the Leviathan to genetically engineer a soldier named Gahlran expressly to use the Crown of Sorrow. As it turned out, Calus was right to be cautious: The Crown was created by Savathun, and she hoped to use it to gain control of the Cabal emperor. Instead, the crown corrupted Gahlran and he took over a portion of the Leviathan with the Hive Calus kept there. All that served as backstory for the now-vaulted Crown of Sorrow raid, in which Guardians killed Gahlran, leaving the artifact in Calus's possession. In Presage, we see how he tried to experiment with it.

Aboard the Glykon, the result of using the crown on the Scorn became pretty horrific. Osiris analyzes the Glykon's data logs as you explore it, and is later joined in the attempt by Caiatl, who insists on observing your investigation into the ship because she's searching for the whereabouts of Calus, her father. The pair learn that, after failed attempts to make contact with the Darkness, the Glykon flew into the anomaly left when Mars disappeared. That allowed Calus, finally, to connect with the Entity--before he vanished as well. Trapped in the anomaly, the Glykon and its crew underwent strange changes, losing their grips on reality, and the ship seemed to rearrange itself in impossible ways. Eventually, the Scorn went mad, overran the ship, and killed everyone. Katabasis's Ghost was corrupted by the dark power, and you eventually find the Guardian himself dead on the bridge of the ship, covered in strange vines that seem to grow from (or feed on) Darkness.

What are these weird plants and what did they do this this Guardian?

What happened to Calus is unknown, and the information gleaned from the Glykon suggests that the emperor did manage to commune with the Entity, although it's unclear to what end. After the ship is fully investigated, Osiris suggests the Crown of Sorrow be returned to the Tower for Vanguard study, although there's a fair amount of pushback against that idea because of worries about Savathun's potential influence exerted through the artifact. At this point, the ultimate fate of the Crown of Sorrow is unknown.

The Season of the Splicer

While diplomatic relations of a type are at least open between the Vanguard and the Cabal, another threat moves against the Last City soon after the failed assassination attempt against Zavala. The Vex, using some sort of simulation technology, manage to blanket the Last City in an endless night. Though the mechanics of that Endless Night are a little unclear, its effects are immediate--the perpetual darkness drains the city's power and helps to spread sickness.

At the same time, the Vanguard receives a distress signal from Europa through Variks. The Eliksni refugees who left Eramis's ranks have come under attack by Vex. Guardians, al ong with Ikora Rey, are dispatched to help, escorting the Eliksni and their leader, Mithrax, back to the Last City.

Mithrax is a Fallen captain who appeared in a mission way back at the beginning of Destiny 2. He leads you on a chase through the old facilities of Titan, and when you come to the end of that chase, you find him locked in battle against a Hive Knight. If you shoot the knight but let the captain live, he is surprised, seemingly thanks you, and disappears. (You can kill the Mithrax or both enemies instead, but that's the non-canon conclusion to the mission.) Your mercy changed Mithrax's mind about humanity and the Fallen's situation, and he later helps the Vanguard, most notably aiding Guardians against Eramis's crew when they tried to steal Outbreak Perfected. He also traveled with a fireteam of Guardians for a time, before he started a new Eliksni house to protect those who do not wish to fight: the House of Light.

The internal politics of the Tower were at the forefront of the Season of the Splicer, and it was great.

As well as being a new Kell (the Eliksni word for leader or king), Mithrax is also a sacred splicer, resurrecting ancient Eliksni practices for communing with machines. He believes he can help you hack into the Vex network and end the Endless Night--that's why the Vex are trying to kill him in the first place. So Mithrax joins the Vanguard and, with his help, you work to hack and enter the Vex network to uncover how the Endless Night was created and put a stop to it.

Not everyone is excited about this Eliksni alliance, however. Many of the people living in the city see them as enemies who have terrorized humanity for centuries, and now, suddenly, humans are forced to share space with the Eliksni and live beside them. Some are welcoming--Ikora sees the benefits of the alliance and Crow, who spent time living with the Eliksni on the Tangled Shore, sees them as friends--but others are unwilling to look beyond the past.

The loudest voice among those who don't trust the Eliksni is Lakshmi-2, the leader of the Future War Cult. The FWC is one of three factions that represent the civilian population of the Last City, and along with the Vanguard, serve to govern it. The faction's whole deal is using strange technology to look into the future and preparing for the conflicts that await there. Lakshmi sees several futures this way and believes that the Eliksni will turn on the humans. She wants to stop them, but she also believes she can use this situation to her advantage to gain political power.

While Mithrax and the Vanguard make moves to try to stop the Vex, Lakshmi uses radio broadcasts to drum up civil unrest and hatred of the Eliksni among the people. She also gathers the other factions, New Monarchy and Dead Orbit, with the plan of attempting to overthrow Zavala and the Vanguard, seeing them as having abandoned their duties by bringing the Eliksni inside the city walls. She tries to gain the support of Osiris and Saint-14, the latter of which went on a famous one-man crusade against the Fallen. But Saint-14's mind is changed when Mithrax tells him that, among his people, "The Saint" is considered a legendary monster, much like the Fallen are to humanity. That softens Saint's heart, and as he spends more time with the Eliksni, he becomes a friend to Mithrax and an ally to the House of Light.

Mithrax and Saint-14 defended the Eliksni refugees together, despite the fact that Saint's campaign against the Fallen had turned him to a monster of legend in their eyes.

Things are made worse as Lakshmi continues her anti-Eliksni propaganda, which results in vandalism and attacks against the Eliksni. Just as the unrest seems like it could get out of control, though, Mithrax, Ikora, Osiris, and the Guardian discover that the force behind the Vex's attack on the Last City is Quria, Blade Transform--a Vex mind Taken by Oryx some time in the distant past. Oryx gifted Quria to Savathun, so we discover that it's the Hive god of deceit who is truly behind the Endless Night, and who is using the Vex as pawns to execute that attack. With Mithrax's help, you're able to track down Quria in the Vex network. Osiris suggests that capturing Quria might be a good idea, but in the end, the Vanguard decides it's better to destroy the mind, and by killing it, you stop the Endless Night.

Still, Quria is not the only enemy you still have to face. Lakshmi tries to execute her coup plans and opens a Vex gate in the Eliksni quarter of the City, allowing the robot aliens to stream in and attack. She claims Osiris helps her, but Lakshmi is killed during the attack and Osiris disappears. Meanwhile, Saint, Ikora, and the Guardians manage to defeat the Vex and save the Eliksni refugees, solidifying the alliance between the Vanguard and House Light.

The Season of the Lost

Immediately after the Vex incursion is stopped, however, you're called to the Dreaming City. At long last, after years away, Queen Mara Sov has returned. As you arrive, she is meeting with Osiris--who suddenly reveals that he was, in fact, Savathun in some kind of shape-shifted disguise. You haven't been interacting with Osiris at all since Beyond Light, in fact. Since the moment Crow saved the Warlock on the moon, the person you've been confiding in was the Hive god of deception.

Savathun encases herself in some kind of huge magic crystal, and claims that she wants the help of the Guardians and Mara Sov to destroy the parasitic worm within her. The worms are the source of the Hive's dark powers, but they also demand constant feeding, which is why the Hive never stop murdering, conquering, and growing their strength. Savathun wants to break that cycle, and she claims that she has been working with you, in the guise of Osiris, to aid you so that you might help her gain her freedom. She makes a bargain with the Vanguard: She'll reveal the location of the real Osiris in return for our help. Stricken by the revelation that Osiris was really Savathun, Saint-14, the Warlock's partner, begins to search the solar system for the missing Guardian.

Savathun essentially turns herself in and is encased in a crystal, but that doesn't stop her from continuing to sew dissension.

Mara agrees to help Savathun destroy her worm, although this too is a ruse. The real plan for Mara is to kill the worm, and then put an end to Savathun, too--destroying the worm will sever Savathun's connection to the Darkness and make her vulnerable. Savathun has been a major threat for years in Destiny 2--it was Savathun who used Riven (with the help of Quria) to curse the Dreaming City, locking it into a three-week tim eloop. Mara also blames the Hive god for Uldren's death, since Savathun and Riven together used him to gain access to the Dreaming City in the first place.

But to get rid of Savathun's worm in the first place, Mara needs the help of her Techeuns, a group of powerful Awoken witches. The Techeuns were scattered throughout the Ascendant Realm when they ventured there to help Mara, who had been hiding out in the strange dimension after her death at the hands of Oryx. Dying and resurrecting on the Ascendant Plane was all part of Mara's elaborate plan, but she didn't anticipate the wrinkle of Xivu Arath when the queen finally was ready to come out of hiding. The Techeuns found Mara and managed to save her from the Ascendant Plane, bringing her back to our world, but they were lost in the attempt and some were even Taken. So the Vanguard decides to send Guardians to help Mara rescue the Techeuns, which is done by reawakening pathways through the Ascendant Realm called "leylines." Each time leylines are restored, however, Xivu Arath gains more pathways to attack the Dreaming City, and it quickly becomes apparent that she has consolidated all the forces of Darkness into her army to do so: the Hive, the Taken, and the Scorn.

At the same time, Savathun seems to be running a game of her own. In wanting to destroy her worm and escape her covenant from it, she's turned against the Darkness--that's why she was trying to stop Guardians from receiving its signals back in the Season of Arrivals. Turning against her former patrons, the worm gods, has made Savathun an enemy to Xivu Arath, and the Hive god of war is hunting her sister. Hiding out as Osiris, manipulating the Guardians, and moving pawns around the board all year are actions in service of Savathun's greater plan.

She discusses the situation with you at a number of intervals, explaining that there is much you don't know about what is happening, and a much larger threat looming just out of sight--presumably the Entity Calus tried to contact. Savathun claims that she is a friend and was acting in humanity's interests when impersonating Osiris. That last point is particularly difficult for Crow, who did consider Osiris a friend and is struggling with his feelings about Savathun. What's more, Crow knows there's much that everyone is keeping from him, especially Mara Sov, who doesn't reveal that Crow used to be her brother Uldren. Eventually, it's Savathun who reveals Crow's past to him, restoring his memories. Haunted by who he was and what he did as Uldren, Crow leaves the Dreaming City and requests a new assignment. Ikora sends him to act as a liaison with Caiatl and introduces him to Mithrax's old fireteam, providing him a new potential role with the Vanguard. It's an open question of how Crow might react to Mara's plans for Savathun--and Mara, it appears, has plans for Crow as well, hoping to gain his loyalty and control him the way she did her brother.

The Season of the Lost shows how the two queens--Mara Sov and Savathun--are both trying to use their cunning for their unknown agendas.

That brings us to now. Currently, the Techeuns have been gathered, but they cannot work their magic to destroy Savathun's worm until the leylines are in cosmic alignment. In the meantime, Mara has silenced Savathun, who waits within her crystal. The time of the alignment draws near, however. The plans of the Vanguard, Mara Sov, and Savathun are all coming to fruition at the same time, and while we have some idea of what's coming in The Witch Queen on February 22, nobody knows exactly how we'll get there.

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Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it's story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what's going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what's drawing our attention across the solar system.

One of my favorite things about Destiny 2 is when unforeseen weirdness coalesces in just the right way to create a moment--something you had to be there to experience. Lately, we've had one of those, as the nuances of how Dares of Eternity works has thrown new players into an unwinnable activity where they get repeatedly stomped, much to the chagrin of Xur and disapproval of the Starhorse.

It's an unlucky confluence of how Dares works. Your first time in the game after the launch of Dares of Eternity, you're automatically thrown into a match. The mode has a slightly higher Power requirement than 1100, the current starting Power level, which is just enough to make enemies unmanageable for green Guardians. Dares also includes Champions, which you can't defeat without mods unlocked through the seasonal artifact. Thus, Xur goes from being an amiable-if-bewildered Steve Harvey type, to a demonic Richard Dawson, and Dares stops being a Destiny version of Press Your Luck and becomes something more like The Running Man.

As Destiny community manager dmg04 noted on Twitter, however, all hope has not been lost. Veteran Guardians have been delving into the game show hell that's trapping New Lights by equipping low-Power gear and rescuing the players being tormented there. And that's the best solution to the problem that currently exists, with Bungie encouraging players to go help until a fix can be instituted sometime in the future. There's even going to be an emblem honoring the heroism of those community members helping out the blueberries (as well as commemorating the blueberries whose first steps in Destiny were a crucible [ahem] of demented, impossible equine whims).

These little in-game moments don't happen super often but, for me, when they do, they make the game feel special. Sure, it was super annoying to play the Crucible during the time of Lord of Wolves, when the Exotic shotgun-meets-pulse rifle was ludicrously powerful, and it was extremely tough to compete with anything else. But it was also kind of hilarious, if I'm being honest, and it's fascinating to see these instances when just about everyone in the Destiny community seizes on a particular idea or a specific opportunity. Sometimes Bungie creates these moments with elements like the Corridors of Time. And sometimes, they happen by accident. Either way, they help make the game feel like something more than just a game.

At this point, it sounds like there are so many Destiny 2 players dropping their Power levels down to help stranded New Lights that there aren't really that many stranded New Lights left. The way the Destiny community comes together on things like this is pretty cool, and something I love about playing this game over a long period is being able to reminisce about moments like this. Remember when Xur tried to trap all the new players in a black hole? That sure was funny.

Apropos of nothing: Go buy the "Too Cool Dance" emote in the Eververse store. It's evil Peter Parker's hilarious dance from Spider-Man 3, and it's essentially free this week--it's available for Bright Dust and costs the same amount that Bungie gives for the week as part of the 30th Anniversary celebration. Treat yourself.

Destiny 2's Best Year

With the close of 2021, GameSpot spent a whole lot of time looking at the past 12 months to assess the games we'd played, calling out the best of the year and highlighting our favorites. And now that that's out of the way, I've been doing the same thing with Destiny over the last few days. I've been saying for a while that each year since the release of Forsaken, the game has seen significant improvement, and I think 2021 was Bungie's best to date.

I tried to quantify some of those thoughts in another piece, where I zeroed in on one aspect that I think is indicative of the changes Destiny 2 has gone through this year that have seriously improved it: Crow. In a big way, Crow functions as a thematic protagonist for the story seasons following Beyond Light. He provides an outsider perspective on Destiny at large, and his backstory as Uldren Sov provides a thematic underpinning to everything that has happened. Crow is both a former enemy and someone who doesn't see enemies in every alien--unlike those of us who have been playing the game for years. His perspective has freshened up a lot of storylines and shaken up a lot of characters.

I won't rehash too much of what I already said about Crow. Some discussions I've had since publishing that article have pointed out, I think rightly, that despite the fact that I called him Destiny's protagonist in that piece, he's not everyone's main character. I meant that more as a way to explain his function in the story--Crow is providing a through-line to seasons that would normally be somewhat segregated from one another. Destiny has a pretty diverse cast of characters at this point, and to the people who relate to those character s, Crow can feel like the sort of default male video game protagonist-type character. So when I say he's the "main character" of Destiny right now, I mostly mean that his perspective is being used to challenge the game's norms, thanks to his backstory, and not that he's "better" or "more important" than the characters we already have years-long relationships with.

In fact, I'd say that while Crow's moments were great in 2021, the best story told this year was that of Mithrax, Saint-14, Osiris, and Lakshmi-2 in the Season of the Splicer. The political machinery of the Tower, the re-evaluation of Saint's relationship to the Eliksni, the tension between Saint and Osiris, the struggle of Mithrax to protect his people as a group of vulnerable refugees among ostensible enemies--it was all excellent, and added a huge degree of depth to traditional Destiny ideas. Crow was barely a part of that, and it's true that you can think of each season as having its own protagonist. What I think Crow is indicative of is Bungie's attempts to make each of those episodes part of a larger whole, not just happening near each other. And that has improved the game significantly in my mind.

The entire seasonal approach, I think, has been greatly enhanced in 2021, such that it stands apart from other Destiny years. Even though we haven't had an expansion for a bit since The Witch Queen was delayed, 2021 still did a great job of providing content at what felt like a solid, but not irritating, cadence. I know some players will take issue with that viewpoint, but I'd hazard that the vast majority of Destiny players--even die-hards--benefit from small bursts of weekly content or seasonal content, rather than bigger drops, on the whole. I've said before that I loved turning in each week for a TV show-like burst of Destiny 2, where I wasn't required to sink hours into the game at any given time. There's enough to engage without being buried. As an adult with other obligations, I found that flow to be excellent.

I liked each of the seasons this year and thought all of them had something good to offer. The seasonal activities feel like improvements and refinements over past years, and a lot of the frustrations that grew out of things like forge ignitions or warsat launches have been ironed out. It's all just generally more fun and less annoying. The Shattered Realm and Expunge missions deserve special shoutouts, I think, as well--mixing six-player activities with these slightly slower, more thoughtful levels mixes up the weekly routine in a way that keeps things repeatable, while feeling a lot less repetitious. It's a great approach.

Finally, I want to mention my favorite thing this year: Presage. A phenomenal story mission with tons of secrets, I played Presage over and over and over again to uncover everything it had to offer. It's a particularly excellent mission because it taps into different aspects of the Destiny story and world, pulling on different emotions. I'd love to see more horror-leaning missions in Destiny 2 and I think Presage is an excellent proof-of-concept in that regard. We saw this year just how well Destiny 2 can juggle different genres of experience within its framework--I'd say that Dares and Grasp of Avarice are the best comedy Bungie has brought to the game, for instance, and that's another high-water mark of "not the usual Destiny" to go with Presage. The variety is exciting, and I hope Destiny 2 takes more steps in different, creative directions.

Destiny 2 is in a great place as we head toward The Witch Queen. The game continues to improve with each passing year. From what I've heard from Bungie about its approach to the new expansion's campaign, for instance, I'm pretty excited about what the future holds. The game has hit a particularly excellent stride, and it seems very likely that it'll gain more momentum with the launch of The Witch Queen and beyond.

As always, feel free to drop your own feelings in the comments if you want to argue with my rosy take on Destiny 2, or if you'd like to call out anything you liked about the game in particular this year (like transmog--man, so much fashion). If there's something you'd like to see in future instances of this column, you can drop those in the comments as well.

Roie Dann and Ronnie KosloffThe Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190401, IsraelFind this paper interesting or want to discuss?...

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