#spire you unleashed the yapper in me

[crispy0nion]

hello it is now time for me to inflict YOU with the explaining lore to a new player curse. Essentially, this is an invitation to infodump about your favorite guy.

I've been hearing/reading a lot about Cayde-6 throughout the game (and Ikora made me watch his death), but who is he? What's his deal?

Oh this is fantastic. Get ready for a full essay (under the cut so I don't clog up people's dashes). I tried to link some relevant lore tabs, but still i recommend reading at least The Man They Called Cayde, or to just skim through the Cayde-6 section of the Ishtar Collective website.

Cayde-6 was the sixth Hunter Vanguard, a position widely considered to be cursed as all previous Hunter Vanguards have either died or gone MIA (Tallulah Fairwind, killed by an Ahamkara; Caliban-8, MIA; Aparajita-4, MIA; Kauko Swiftriver, went MIA and was later declared dead; Andal Brask, killed by Taniks The Scarred; Cayde-6, killed by Uldren Sov). The position is currently empty, but it is heavily implied that Crow will step up as the new Hunter Vanguard soon.

Now, let's try to go in order of events. Like all Exos, Cayde used to be a human during the Golden Age. He was a soldier, and it is likely that he had a gambling problem (a habit he retained in his Guardian life): simply put, he had a big debt hanging over his head. That's when Clovis Bray, the creator of Exos, approached him with a job offer. The reason Clovis approached him is because people like Cayde were exactly what BrayTech needed for the Exo Project: disposable and with their backs to the wall. Cayde accepted to essentially give his body to the Project in exchange for his debts to be cleared. The job offer itself was never explicited, but Cayde recounts being kidnapped and brought to Europa. This was around the time the Collapse happened.

We don't know everything that happened in his lives from 1 to 6. We know that for most of his lives before becoming a Guardian, he worked for BrayTech, first as a generic worker and later as a guard. This is where he had his first (and only, probably) interaction with Micah Abram, who at the time was a chid. Micah is a lore-only Exo Hunter, now known as Micah-10, known for her role as the 'mother-hen of Ghosts' - she protects upaired Ghosts from the Ghost Hunter, Cyrell. But why is Micah relevant to Cayde's story? Well, Cayde-6 would often mention how he used to have a son when he was human, as well as a wife. He refers to the kid as 'Ace', and to the woman as simply the Queen of Hearts. He talks about her in a TTK mission to retrieve his stash, and some of his journal entries are written as letters for his son - he also worked with Banshee-44 to craft a gun inspired by him, his Ace of Spades.

The interaction that Cayde-1 had with Micah - who, being a trans woman, was at the time a little boy - caused him to retain fragmented memories of a child in his current Guardian life. I recommend reading the lore tabs about their encounter (both Micah's POV and Cayde's POV). The following letter from Micah's POV also mentions how immediately after Cayde picked her up, he was deactivated.

So, the fragmented memories he retained from this interaction where what he based off this delusion of having a son, because yes, both his wife and son never existed, and Cayde himself admits to making them up as a coping mechanism in the last entry of his journal.

But if Micah Abram was his Ace, who was his Queen? Easy: Maya Sundaresh.

Maya Sundaresh was a Golden Age scientist who worked for the Ishtar Collective on Venus, and collaborated with Clovis on an occasion. She's also the founder of Neomuna, on Neptune. Cayde (between 2 and 6) was part of the batch of Exos who Clovis assigned to work as guards for Dr. Sundaresh during their collaboration. That's when Cayde first met her, and to say he was down bad would be an understatement. Unfortunately for him, Dr. Sundaresh was not only a psycho, but also a married lesbian. She never even acknowledged him, but still he fell in love with her. The memory of this feeling stayed with him through the resets and his death, and he contructed the memory of the Queen of Hearts over that.

As far as I know, we don't have any information regarding Cayde's death, other that he was resurrected near a cliff. After freaking out, running off the cliff and being revived again, he found on his person a journal, potentially the same one he keeps using in his Guardian life. Cayde believes his past self (specifially, Cayde-5) wrote and left this journal to guide him, to prevent him from taking the wrong path and becoming Cayde-7 - something he seemed to be absolutely against. Side note, but I find that to be an extremely interesting detail since Bungie's own signature is the number 7.

Regarding his years before becoming Vanguard, we know Cayde has been around for at least 126 years, probably more. He used to run with a group of Hunters, his 'crew': Andal Brask, Shiro-4 and Tevis Larsen. A fifth member, Lush, would also join them sometimes, being Shiro's protégé. Of these five members of the Hunter crew, Shiro is the only one currently alive. Andal was killed by Taniks before the game events, Tevis died at the hands of the Vex during TTK, and Lush lost his Ghost the first time the crew ran into Taniks, then died on a solo mission later on.

Cayde was especially close with Andal, referring to him as his best friend and brother. If you recall, Andal was also the Hunter Vanguard before Cayde; this actually is something that happened because of the Exo. Hunters have this thing called 'The Dare'; every Hunter Vanguard needs to have their own, since the Dare is what estabilishes how the next Vanguard has to be chosen. The Vanguard that came before Andal, Kauko Swiftriver, went missing for two years, later being declared dead, and his Dare was never found. For this reason, The Speaker - who created the first Dare together with Tallulah Fairwind - told the Hunters to figure it out and find a new Vanguard.

One evening, after the crew had already had their first run in with Taniks - an Eliksni mercenary, who claimed many Guardian lives - Andal and Cayde got drinking, and in the heat of the moment they made a bet, their own Dare: if one of them found and killed Taniks, the other had to step up and become Vanguard. They didn't think much of it, until Cayde actually killed Taniks first (side note: 'killed' isn't completely right. Taniks keeps coming back, and even after we killed him in the DSC raid there is a chance he is still alive). Andal, being a man of his word, became Vanguard; and Cayde wasn't happy about it, because it's a time consuming job, so Andal now spent significantly less time with the crew.

Now Taniks, after somehow escaping death, finds and kills Andal. Because of this, Cayde feels obliged to take the role of Hunter Vanguard. He also goes on a rampage, and quite violently kills Taniks again. He begins wearing Andal's cloak, and officially becomes the Hunter Vanguard we all know and love.

Cayde had always been one to constantly crack jokes and use humor to cover up all the ugly things, and Andal's death, followed some time later by Tevis's, only reinforced that. In addition to that, the job of Vanguard comes with a price: you can rarely leave the Tower. This was especially true for Cayde, considering he was both a known troublemaker and potentially in danger for filling the Hunter Vanguard position (after five consecutive deaths, anyone would get a bit paranoid), and it was something that bothered him deeply.

During the events of D1 and D2 up to Forsaken, he does... many things. Like blowing up Eris's ship in order to get the Guardian on the Dreadnaught during TTK. Overall, none of these are worth mentioning, considering this post is already very long.

What I want to talk about next are the events of Forsaken, starting from about one in-game year before the game events. The comicbook 'Cayde's Six' is a good starting point: Cayde was tasked by Petra Venj with hunting the Fallen Barons, who under the command of a corrupted Uldren Sov had been causing chaos on The Reef. His task was to find them and bring them to the Prison of Elders. To do this he assembles a small team (Suraya Hawthorne, Banshee-44, Jin, Nadiya and Petra Venj); they eventually succeed in their goal, even imprisoning the Forsaken Prince himself. Fast-forward to a year later, the events of Forsaken unfold: Uldren Sov and his Barons, now Scorn, escape the Prison of Elders, leaving behind a dead Cayde, who only died because he happened to stand in their way (it's unlikely that Uldren held any resentment as he was... very out of it, probably too much to care about anything but Mara).

This later caused the Young Wolf to go on a rampage, finding and killing all the Barons and Uldren himself (a very nice parallel to the Taniks-Andal situation). Forsaken also brought a new exotic hand cannon: the Ace of Spades, Cayde's beloved weapon. The quest to obtain this weapon, Ace in the Hole, is quite interesting: the YW has to travel across the system to find Cayde's secret stashes, that he specifically left for when he would die. These chests, other than parts to repair Ace, also contain recorded messages, each adressed to a different character. Eris, Taniks, Drifter, Petra, 'the minds behind the DSC', Hawthorne, 'any hunter who kills him' (which he speculates could be Marcus Ren), Zavala, Ikora, and the Young Wolf. Ten messages for ten meaningful people, in all senses. He left them with the intention of having these people listen to them in case they were the ones to kill him. They are very interesting, I recommend looking them up (here's Byf's video, where he also does a bit of analysis).

Many things emerge from these messages, but there's only three that i wanna talk about: Petra's, the voices's and Ikora's messages.

Petra's message is highlighted by the presence of an encrypted message Cayde asks Petra to relay to someone called 'Paladin Oran'. This 'Paladin Oran' is actually an Awoken code to indicate that the next thing he will say is a secret message. The message essentially boils down to the sentence 'It's on Enceladus'. To this day, we still don't know what is on Enceladus. The most popular theory is that Cayde thought the DSC was there, since it was only rediscovered on Europa after his death.

The message he adresses to 'the minds behind the Deep Stone Crypt' introduces us to the Long Slow Whisper, something all Exos seem to be affected by as a side-effect of, well... being an Exo. Long story short, it's the voice of the Darkness: the reason Exos hear it almost constantly is because Clovis used Clarity, a power born from Darkness, to create them. We discover much more about Exos, the LSW, Clarity and the DSC during Beyond Light.

Lastly, Ikora's message. Not much to say, other than how heart shattering it is. In most messages, Cayde still maintained his humorous personality, however this one is the only one adressed to an ally in which Cayde unmasks. He knows Ikora sees through his facade anyways, and since he's dead, he might as well be honest. Here, he admits to thinking most people dislike him; he is convinced Ikora hates him, and makes sure to specify how 'it wasn't mutual'.

Once you find all 10 caches, you unlock the Ace of Spades, and Cayde's story ends there. He says in the message adressed to the YW that every story has it's end, and this is his. He instructs us to burn his journal and move on. And that's all. At least it was until a year ago, when Bungie released the TFS Teaser Trailer, officially bringing back Cayde for this last stand against Darkness.

As we recently discovered from the Unforseen Consequences Ship's lore tab, it is very likely that he was actually brought back because of a wish Crow accidentally made to an unnamed Ahamkara (likely Riven), disguised as Mara. This means that the chances of Cayde fading away at the end of the TFS campaign are very high, but I guess we'll find out on the 4th!

This is all I got. Anyone who reached the end, feel free to add to this if you noticed I missed something.