#destiny 2: curse of osiris

[thefirstknife]

Some lore tabs that killed me dead and I'll never recover from them. Seasonal gauntlets are about Zavala realising and coming to terms with the fact that he is mortal and has mortal pains. Also, finally, the full confirmation that Guardians resume aging when they lose their Light:

He moved his chair back and considered his knee. What had he done to hurt it? He had not exercised yet, he had not gone on his usual patrol… he had done nothing. Why would a knee hurt from doing nothing? The riddle dissolved. He was starting to age.

But also:

He allows a hand to rest on his aching knee. To venerate it. He feels it solid under his palm. It is his, it is real, it is both portentous and precious. He is aging. He will age. An absurd and joyous thought warms in his chest: how fortunate, to have lived long enough to grow old. How invaluable, to make the space between himself and the horizon matter. How much time is left? And is it best spent with his knees under a desk?

Genuinely crying over this. How fortunate to live long enough to grow old. Man. Also at the end he asks for a break for one week and Ikora offers him two weeks.

The next one just... I have no words. It has to be read in full. It's about Saint going through it, having memories of his past and also dealing with the guilt with what's happening to Mithrax. Truly every sentence in this one is a gutpunch all the way to the end. Excerpts:

The hum of activity was overpowering yet reassuring to Saint-14 as he stopped to watch an older Eliksni expertly weave fabric on a well-worn loom. The woven symbols were unique and unfamiliar to the Exo, but he watched in awe as an iridescent glow emerged within the vibrant cerulean cloth. Fit for a Kell, Saint mused to himself— Breath caught in his throat; hands shook— Flashes of memory echoed in his mind. All he could feel in this moment… was shame.

Saint remembering his crimes against the Eliksni and feeling shame.

He hurried past the weaver and through the crowd, landing squarely in front of a tea stand, a sample placed in his hand before he could open his mouth to refuse. He looked down. The opaque liquid steamed in his cup, pungent and medicinal. Like distilled Darkness, Saint realized— Breath caught in his throat; hands shook— Flashes of memory filled his sight. All he could feel in this moment… was sadness.

Tea reminded him of all the stuff with Osiris and he is not processing it well. I say excerpts but I have to put the rest entirely because like. Okay.

Saint placed his favorite keepsake, a small stuffed bear, on the Kell's throne. Gently, he adjusted the lavender ribbon at its neck; the crisp satin sat in stark contrast to the bear's hazy black eyes, to its slightly worn ear and well-loved fur. A gift, once a comfort to a child of the City. A gift, once a comfort to Saint in the face of loss, in the face of— Breath caught in his throat; hands shook— Flashes of memory swelled in his heart. Osiris. His strong laugh. His deep, soulful eyes. The warmth of his smile. Of his touch. Memories of comfort, but all he could feel in this moment… was guilt. Intense and overwhelming, like daggers cutting through him, sharpness bleeding through sweetness. Saint breathed deeply and stared at the medical equipment around the empty throne before him. "The cost of my joy," Saint whispered, and he wept.

He has a teddy bear. He once gave it to a child, but someone returned it to him when he was grieving about Osiris, to comfort him, and he'd kept it. And he put it on Mithrax's throne because he feels guilt that Mithrax is suffering because he helped him and Osiris.

I'm ending it all.

[vulshokbersrker]

View the beauty of Mercury before the Vex turned it into a machine. Step into the Infinite Forest to see Mercury's past. A Garden world when the Traveler was terraforming the planet.

[flowers-of-io]

@hiseumingo's Ikora Week day 2: Memorable Moments / Wisdom

After Panoptes is destroyed, after the timeline is saved, Ikora and Osiris stand face to face on the sands of Mercury.

She has played this moment in her head hundreds of times. Curse her wandering mind, perhaps, or her bleeding heart; never once has it done her well to overthink, and there is nothing she has thought about more than the freeze-frame of Osiris on the steps of his jumpship, fifty-seven years, four months and twenty-two days ago.

There were countless fantasies she's had of their reunion. In some, she was angry; in others she was sad and apologetic, and in others yet it was Osiris who would come back cowering and repentant. These last ones were the least believable, Ikora knew. But they still felt more real than the alternative--the unthinkability of Never, the emptiness of his hangar bay and a severed threat with no closure.

The mind is a little like the Infinite Forest, she thinks idly. Making up possibilities. It is so easy to get lost in there.

She braves Osiris' appraising look, notes the twitch of his cheek and the slight pull of his eyebrows. To know one is to see them for what they really are, Pujari said to her once. She could read Osiris' expression faultlessly from all the way across the room.

"You've grown," he says in that gruff, annoying, familiar voice.

Ikora takes a shaky breath and what falls out of her mouth is a clumsy "You're still just as old."

Osiris meets her eyes, and laughs. It is a sharp, loud bark--and then he keeps on laughing, heartily and brightly, and the spell is broken and Ikora thinks--as she starts laughing too, tears prickling under her eyelids, she thinks--that this is the one single version of this moment she has never imagined.

[pohutukosplay]

Pōhutukaryl Cosplay as Sagira: original human design Destiny 2

photoshoot with Have Camera Will Snap Wellington Cosplay Photo Fest Princess Bay Beach, Taputeranga Marine Reserve, Te Whanganui-a-Tara February 6 2024

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[tsukikoarya]

a little crossover between FFXIV and Destiny. It isn't finished and wont be in a long time.

[ahamkara-apologist]

yeah cayde is/was SUPER depressed. dude just kept losing people and even at the very end of it all he lost the one who was there with him the whole way. though the fact that he has tripmine grenades and a travelers chosen-ified ace of spades makes me hope sundance is back... and if she's back, maybe sagira? bungie? please? torment us with her presence while Osiris is kept from seeing her because he has to protect everyone

Yeah that's what I thought, he went to acceptance way too quickly in his last stand to NOT be depressed- or at least very very tired of continuing on like this. Something that I think people forget about his final stand is that its clear he wanted to go out on his own terms and that I don't think he would have wanted to live without Sundance. It would have been living hell for him- better to get Uldren to shoot him and just be done with it

I rlly hope that Sagira comes back just to at least tell us to tell Osiris that she loves him, but seeing how Cayde is directly imbued with light, I'm not sure anymore 😭 why need a ghost when you can get Light directly from the source, after all? I'm hoping that I'm wrong but it wouldn't surprise me if Sagira gets forgotten about or not prioritized with Bungie's two favorite Special Bois (Crow and Cayde) occupying so much space in the narrative

[l3rking]

Destiny 2 // Mercury

[aerista]

in other news, i fucking miss sagira

[knotical-cosmo]

I don't like how strikes are integrated into the campaigns as of recently.

They break my immersion as I am cruising through the missions at my own pace then suddenly, WHAM! I am waiting in a queue for two other random players for a strike, and then when we are done they just disappear.

Ironically I think curse of Osiris and warmind did better in this regard as you can play through each campaign at your own pace without having to stop and wait in a strike queue.

I know these expansions were criticized for recycling campaign levels into strikes but now we just have strikes in the campaigns and I feel like no one is saying anything about it.

[thefirstknife]

What are the Tones?

Whomst've asked me this. You're fuelling my unending obsession, thank you.

I posted about the tones before! Most of it is listed in this post! But I'd like to add some stuff now that it's been some time since then.

The tones are noises made by the spires on Mercury (Lighthouses). Whenever someone dies, the spires emit a tone. They basically react to death in various ways, depending on how the death happens; there's different tones to dying to Light as well as different tones to a perma-death. This is peculiar because nobody could hear them except Brother Vance.

He made Trials of Osiris to study them (because it's an endless source of Guardians dying over and over). Mara knew about his research (Trials was accessed in the Reef in D1) and warned him to stop because it's dangerous. It's unclear why. Osiris did the same years later. As a matter of fact, Osiris was super dramatic about it:

"What I have discovered…" "…is dangerous enough to destroy every man, woman, and child in existence. You're meddling with forces outside your grasp," Osiris reprimanded.

The tones are interesting because they're still largely unexplained. Mara implied that they symbolise Guardians being attuned to Darkness and being able to wield it, which is true, but Osiris' reaction implies something more. And it has to be more, because Osiris detected the same tones as coming from the anomalies of the missing planets and from the Pyramids. Long post under:

In my previous post I also connected that to the fact that egregore seems to be emitting some sort of sound/frequency attuned to the same thing: anomalies, Pyramids and, obviously, to the source of it all (the Witness). So there's some sort of frequency in Darkness that is audible and comes from all places connected to the Darkness network (and that network manifests physically as egregore). And in this case, anomalies and Pyramids (and ships infested with egregore like Glykon and Leviathan) are fine; it makes sense that they link to the Witness!

But spires on Mercury? Why them? My bestie made a post recently after we went unhinged (again) because the same lore book that deals with the tones also makes a really strong implication that the Vex were deliberately led to Mercury by the Pyramid Fleet in the Collapse. There, the Vex drained Mercury of Light, hollowed out the planet and used its materials to make the spires (and the Infinite Forest, a simulation engine) and then they waited for the Pyramids to return. Which they did, in Arrivals.

To make things more complex, after Titan came back, it was confirmed that the Witness did not take the planets randomly. There was a purpose to each one being stolen. Mars was taken to search through our Golden Age and Collapse database in order to find where the Veil may have been hidden. This could've been just a random coincidence, but then Titan came back and we learned that the Witness wanted Ahsa dead because Ahsa not only knows the origins of the Witness, but also how to get through the portal (and who knows if she has any other potential powers to helps us get in there or help us otherwise).

Io is unclear, but there are many options; it may have been taken for the Pyramidion and Vex stuff which Asher got ahead of. It may have been taken to study the Tree of Silver Wings (the Witness had another seed it gave Calus in Lightfall), or it may have been taken to study the Traveler's past or the Light in general or maybe something else. The point is, there are options that we can understand.

But Mercury? Zero clue. The only thing that may have been of interest is the Infinite Forest, but Vance sealed it so if the Witness took Mercury for that and couldn't get into the Forest, then Mercury would've been useless and probably released sooner unless the Witness is just keeping it out of spite or thought that maybe it would be able to find a way inside. And of course... there's the spires and the tones. Mercury is somehow linked to Darkness and the Witness, it has to be, and we have no clue what the Witness wants with it.

Not only that, but there's another curious thing about Mercury, or rather, the anomaly of it. It was mentioned in Duality dungeon, by Calus. When Calus tried talking to the Witness on the Glykon, the Witness eventually responded and it told Calus to come to the anomaly of Mercury:

Through the Crown of Sorrow, the Voice in the Darkness called out to me, beckoning me to the absence of Mercury. At first, I feared the Leviathan would not survive the journey, as the Glykon had been rent asunder by a similar journey. By my Leviathan, it is strong. Its heart beats anew, and as it pierced the veil of creation... the Voice greeted me. There were such sights to behold.

So when Calus disappeared off the Glykon, he went back to the Leviathan and bolted straight for the Mercury anomaly in which he was able to communicate with the Witness. Why Mercury? Glykon went into the Mars anomaly. Why couldn't the Witness speak to Calus in there? Or in any of the other anomalies? Why specifically Mercury? This is driving me insane.

But if Mercury is somehow connected to the Darkness network through the spires, is it possible that it serves as some sort of a communications hub? Maybe that's why the Witness is still keeping it? And it still is! We can see it in Root of Nightmares, in the Witness' room. Titan is still obviously there as well because it came out before Titan returned, but Mercury and Io are still trapped. This is also confirmed by the tiny excerpt we can see from the TFS Collector's Edition which I talked about in here.

Or the reason for Mercury is something completely different. We have no clue why Mercury was taken and what's going on there and why the Witness called Calus there and why the tones happened and why are they the same tones that can also be heard from anomalies and Pyramids.

To fuel me even more, they decided to drop two lore pieces in Season of the Deep that relate to Mercury and the tones tangentially. I know literally everyone and their grandma thinks that Targeted Redaction is just there to be funny (and so did I at first), but I genuinely can't accept that as being just a joke. The gist of it is that Osiris has no clue who Vance is and that is, to put it simply, impossible.

Obviously Osiris did not like the Cult and they were annoying to him, but he knew Vance. He spoke to him only once, but Vance is the one who told him to "plant the seed," a message that Mara gave him years before. This literally sets up the entire Season of Arrivals. Not only that, but Vance told Osiris about the tones and Osiris was deeply troubled about them. He's the one who continued the research and went around the solar system after planets disappeared, investigating anomalies and discovering that they emit the same tones. He mentions Vance, by name, twice in Immolant:

"Do you hear that?" Osiris asks, turning to Sagira. He turns the ship's scanning array toward the anomaly. "Like the tones Vance described. From the spires, and then the Pyramids. It was coming from the anomaly that replaced Io as well."

"We could use the Crucible right now. Your trials. This will be very helpful. You mean to stay, yes?" "I will. Long enough to show you how to implement the simulation; but tonight, I must disembark," Osiris says. "So soon?" Osiris tenses his jaw in forced silence. He twiddles with code. "I'm worried about what Vance found."

At the same time, Osiris also sends us the seasonal artifact from Hunt, Fang of Xivu Arath. In it, he mentions:

The zealots that followed me to Mercury have proved themselves useful… twice now, actually. They possessed an artifact in their stores: a Hive fang.

The zealots being useful "twice" refers to Vance telling him about the seed and having this artifact kept safely in the Lighthouse (technically, it's three times: in Curse of Osiris, Vance told us where to find the machine to bring Sagira back and it was being kept by the Cult, but it's unclear if we told Osiris the details). Osiris, again, specifically mentions Vance when he recounts where he got it from, in Immolant:

Sagira had chided him for storming the Lighthouse and ransacking Vance's possessions. "They're my relics," he said to silence her protests.

I know Osiris has been through a lot, but his memories are completely and perfectly intact... Except for Vance. That's bizarre to me, given that there's several important points that tie them together, like planting the seed on Io (something he wouldn't have known to do without Vance relaying Mara's message) and research of the tones, something that Osiris spent a lot of time doing and was explicitly worried about; so worried, in fact, that he was willing to part ways with Saint just to continue that research.

In my old post I also mentioned how Osiris even went to Ana to tell her to ask Rasputin if he heard any tones in the Collapse, but Rasputin wasn't up yet. And when Rasputin was finally up, we had much bigger problems to deal with so I assumed that Osiris never asked because the priority was to find what's on Neptune. But now I think that Osiris didn't ask because he doesn't remember. Because the memory of Vance and tones and whatever they mean was deliberately removed from him while Savathun had him imprisoned. Or, perhaps, the Nezarec tea messed with it. After all, Darkness is memory.

This would obviously imply that the tones are something so important and dangerous that Savathun (or someone else) wanted Osiris' knowledge of it removed so that maybe she could have leverage or to know something we don't or perhaps for some other purpose by some other actor. This was such a big point that the entirety of Immolant part 1 is almost exclusively dedicated to Osiris inquiring into the tones.

Another possibility is also that Osiris' memory of Vance was messed with because of Io and the seed and Tree (and then as a consequence, obviously, he would also forget about the tones).

There's also a possibility that Savathun is literally right now messing with me and she did it for no reason at all just to generate imbaru or mess with Osiris or maybe she even wanted to do one nice thing for him and remove the memory of the weird Cult and the tones aren't important at all.

But I don't know. The fact that they're the same thing that the whole Darkness network uses and that ultimately leads to the Witness seems like something that should be important. However, I don't think Mercury will return before TFS, especially since TFS CE has Eido writing about how Mercury is still in the Witness' grasp. But, consider also that we don't know the timeline of when Eido's writing is set. It has to be set after Ahsa's reveal about the Witness' origins, but before TFS. We don't have enough information to tell more. There's also Vex shenanigans to consider, something that will certainly be a plot point post-TFS and Mercury is a prime location for that.

Either way, there's something going on here, added also with the second lore tab release in Season of the Deep that tangentially ties to Mercury, which is Unexpected Resurgence. In it, Shayura is approached by Sister Faora, an incredibly niche character who was leading the Cult of Osiris before Vance. She's shown still wearing the insignia of the Cult. We never learned why she stopped leading them and why Vance took over; she just kinda disappears from the lore book (Trials and Tribulations, the one about the tones). But apparently she's in the City and she's still wearing the Cult robes and she's back in the story... for some reason??

It honestly feels like some sort of a setup for something in the future, something that might deal with Mercury's return. I need to stress just how small she is as a character: she only actually appears in three lore tabs before Unexpected Resurgence, all in the same lore book. The rest of her stuff is just flavour text on the Kairos Function armour pieces from Curse of Osiris. That's it. Why return her in Season of the Deep? Mind boggling.

This whole thing about the tones and Mercury consumes me every day and night. The fact that Deep mentioned Vance in a way easily dismissed as a joke (but also, note the name of the weapon: targeted redaction) as well as Faora coming back is just too wild to me to be a random throwback or a just a joke. Not when it's beyond clear that Osiris should remember Vance, the Cult, the tones and the rest of it. It's even unclear at this point if he remembers that he planted the seed on Io.

So what are the tones? What are they indeed. They're music from the spires of Mercury that reacts to death and uses the same frequency as the entire Darkness network with the Witness at the top. What is their purpose and what is the purpose of Mercury and why did the Witness take it and what is this plotline and when will it be resolved? Summary:

[archivists-trove]

Final Rest - Deep within the infinite forest.

[brontios-helm]

Destiny 2: And The Universe Watches Us With Envious Eyes

[pohutukosplay]

Pōhutukaryl Cosplay as Sagira: original human design Destiny 2

photoshoot with Have Camera Will Snap Wellington Cosplay Photo Fest Princess Bay Beach, Taputeranga Marine Reserve, Te Whanganui-a-Tara February 6 2024

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