Destiny

Following his meeting with the Deep (which Destiny players would know better as the Darkness) and his betrayal by his sisters, Oryx somehow manages fight his way back to his throne world and the physical world. This may have been possible because, as mentioned last time, Xivu Arath described the nature of her brother just like he once described her and her sister after killing them during the war against the Ecumene.

Interestingly, Oryx says that he had to fight “the swarming corpse of Akka” the worm god who he killed to gain the power to forge his Tablets of Ruin which allowed him to contact the Deep. This is once again proof that killing a worm god is not really enough to… uh… kill it. And this fact, of course, brings us back to the worm familiar that showed the three brave sisters the way to the needle ship even though it was dead.

Once Oryx makes it back to his court he once again goes to war against his sisters. He records crippling Savathûn’s tribute so badly that she will never again be able to challenge him. Then he tricked Xivu Arath and poisoned her tribute so she too could no longer challenge him. We can only imagine that neither of these campaigns Oryx engaged in were short. These two wars may have taken hundreds or even thousands of years for Oryx to secure his position at the top of the Hive.

Following all that, Oryx found a mother to make spawn with. Who was the mother Oryx told and what happened to her? We are never told. All we learn about are their children. First, there was Crota. When Crota is born, Oryx give him his name and his first sword, but other than that, Crota has to kill his way to a position in Crota’s court. Apparently Crota did this pretty well because he becomes the Hive god that nearly defeats the City some time in the future. For now, though, Oryx explains the meaning of Crota’s name. It means “the Eater of Hope” because they both are fighting a war against the false hope that the Traveler gives to the younger races.

Oryx also tells Crota about the oath he and his sisters took against Taox but he tells Crota that the oath does not apply to him. Does Oryx really believes that after having destroyed hundreds or thousands of races that Taox has still managed to stay ahead of his Hive? That seems incredible and unbelievable, but then Oryx seems quite serious about it. Maybe we’ll meet Taox someday? I wonder what she would be like now, tens of thousands of years later… Or is she just frozen in a stasis pod somewhere?

After Crota, comes Oryx’s two daughters Ir Anûk and Ir Halak. Of Ir Anûk, Oryx says that Savathûn is so impressed with her that she cackles and rages at her brilliance. Oryx notes that Ir Anûk has declared that she will kill one of the eleven axioms that make up Hive’s ascendant places (throne worlds) and will use the power she gains to defeat Akka as he once did and become a god as he is. Does this mean that she would be able to construct Tablets of Ruin? Either way, Oryx says he may kill her to stop her or he might applaud her for her achievements.

As for Ir Halak, she developed a song so powerful that it was able to kill everyone who heard it when she sung it in Xivu Arath’s throne world. (Aside from Xivu Arath, apparently, since she is still around later.) Oryx wonders if the Hive might soon employ death songs instead of swords and boomers. Oryx then sees that she has charted the course of the Nicha Thought-ship. This is not a ship we have heard of before, but it is one that will soon be very important to both the Hive and to Humanity as well…

…all because of a race of time traveling robots known as the Vex!

Sources:
XXXVI: Eater of Hope
XXXVII: shapes: points

Previous: 19: Betrayal & Dreams of Teeth
Next: 21: The Origin of the Vex

Coming out of the Deep’s friendly monologue to Oryx, we immediately move into an odd dream sequence. This dream is told form Oryx’s point of view and takes us back to his childhood back at the Osmium Court.

In this dream, Oryx (or should we can him Aurash?) is heading to his father’s orrery when he notices his sisters are chasing after him. They are ripping up the road behind him with their swords. And the road stones they are ripping up are shaped like tablets with odd writting on them. Oryx runs from them only to be tripped and slammed to the ground by his father who asks him why he wasn’t prepared for his sisters to move against him. Oryx starts crying, wanting to know why his dad won’t help him, but all his father does is prepare to tip some strange “black sun” into his son’s throat.

Oryx sees his jaws and teeth in the reflection of the anti-glare goggles his father is wearing and, with no other choices left, begins to eat his father! All the while his father tells him what he is doing is good and majestic. When he is done, Oryx looks back and realizes that his sisters have torn up the road behind him and that he has no way to get back where he came from.

Obviously, this dream is highly symbolic, though not confusingly so. There are several parts we can identify:

• The road stones covered in writting that Oryx’s sisters are tearing up are Oryx’s Tablets of Ruin he laid down in his Throne World to allow him to approach and commune with The Deep. It’s telling that these tablets in Oryx’s dreams are held up by or overlaid on worms, much as the Hive’s power is based on the power of the worm gods.
• Could the goggles that Oryx’s father is wearing to save his vision during lighting storms and sea fire have been to preserve his “night vision” for watching Fundament’s moons? He was at or near his orrery in the dream so that makes some sense.
• I’m not aware of any direct correlation between the black sun that Oryx’s father attempts to force feed him and anything within Destiny’s universe. In this instance it would probably seem to represent poison or death.
• What Oryx does to his father, eat him in self defense, is pretty much what the worm gods and the Deep have been telling Oryx to do for tens of thousands of years now.
• One minor but interesting thing is that this dream about teeth is that it is referenced in the description of the Warlock’s Voidfang Vestments which says: “YOU WILL DREAM OF TEETH AND NOTHING ELSE – scratched behind a buckle” That’s kinda creepy. Maybe the Voidfang Vestments were made by a Guardian who survive the assault on the moon? Or by Toland the Shattered who we’ll learn a good deal about later?
• And finally, given that his father is telling him that he should be prepared for betrayal and that his father calls being eaten in self defense “majestic” we can pretty easily conclude that Oryx’s father here represents the Deep itself. It is something of a father figure to him at this point and it has been teaching him that existence is defined by ones ability to exist.

Waking up, Oryx muses that he is glad to know that the universe is a thing that run on death. He realizes that the races he and his Hive have destroyed hate him but he is, perhaps now more than ever, firmly committed to the Deep’s view that the only way to make something good that can’t be broken is to break everything else first.

But Oryx also soon realizes that he has been stranded and cut off from his flow of tribute. In fact, he says he is lost somewhere strange. I submit that Oryx has actually been killed just as dead as he previously killed his two sisters when the Hive was losing the war against the Ecumene. I think he is trapped in such a deep dark corner of his Throne World that he does not recognize it and cannot find a way out.

I think this for two reasons:

1. Soon after this, Xivu Arath writes one of her declarative missives like the one she wrote near the very beginning of the Books of Sorrow. Remember the outlaying of all the dangers of Fundament? This time, Xivu Arath notes that she once allowed Oryx to kill her and that she was resurrected only when he described her. In the very next section titled “RESURRECTION” she declares that she will now describe Oryx. Her description is neat and a bit frightening to read (go do so if you have time) but I think the important part here is that she had to make this description of her brother at all.
2. We’ll cover this more next time, but Oryx describes making his way back from this strange place he was lost in as fighting his way out of hell. By now, Oryx has been killed many many times. First by his sister during the war against the Ammonites and later several times by the forces of the Ecumene, but each time he was just thrown back into his Throne World. A place where he is generally untouchable and has a great deal of power. A place that is hardly a hell. So I think his saying that he had to fight his way out of hell is very significant.

Ultimately, trapped in this hell, Oryx decides that he can no longer sit alone at the top of his pyramid as one of three equals leading the Hive. He decides he needs children to guarantee that he alone is the most powerful at the top of the Hive.

Sources:
XXXIII: When do monsters have dreams
XXXIV: More beautiful to know
XXXV: This Love Is War
XXXVI: Eater of Hope
I: Predators

Previous: 18: Majestic Battles and Waves
Next: 20: The Eater of Hope and His Sisters

After defeating the Taishibethi, Oryx returns to his throne world and makes preparations to have his first direct meeting with the Deep. He creates a special alter for the Deep and prepares an unborn ogre for it to possess. We’ve seen unborn ogres several times in Destiny. You might know them better as Tomb Husks.

When he is ready, Oryx calls out to the deep saying:

I can see you in the sky. You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you.

This call might seem trivial, or just a fancy greeting, but at the very least Oryx’s words here are a clever call back to one of Bungie’s earliest game series. In 1996’s Marathon Infinity, we learn of a creature or creatures called W’rkncacnter. They are described like this:

In primordial space, timeless creatures
made waves. These waves created us and the
others. Waves were the battles, and the
battles were waves.

Later one or more of these W’rkncacnter attack a powerful race called the Jjaro, killing one of them. After this, a second Jjaro somehow flings these powerful ancient beings into a star where they are trapped by the intense gravity and burned by the star’s heat but somehow survive and wait to somehow be released to once again cause chaos.

Part of last game in the Marathon series, Marathon Infinity, involves jumping across timelines in an effort to prevent the W’rkncacnter from being released when a militant race tries to detonate the star they are trapped on.

It’s also worth nothing that in an even earlier Bungie game called Pathways Into Darkness you are a member of a strike force tasked with using a nuclear weapon to temporarily stun an enormous, ancient, mostly dead god-like alien long enough for the Jjaro to arrive and help remove it from the Earth. The opening to Pathways Into Darkness describes the alien and situation like so:

Sixty-four million years ago, a large extra-terrestrial object struck the Earth in what would later be called the Yucatan Peninsula, in southeastern Mexico. The dust and rock thrown up by the resulting explosion caused enormous climactic changes in the ensuing years, and many of the Earth’s species became extinct during the long winter that followed.

The object itself was buried thousands of feet below ground, its nearly two kilometer length remarkably intact. It remained there, motionless, for thousands of years before it finally began to stir- and to dream. It was a member of a race whose history began when the Milky Way was still a formless collection of dust and gas- a powerful race of immortals which had quickly grown bored of their tiny universe and nearly exterminated themselves in war.

This particular being, whose name no human throat will ever learn to pronounce, was part of the cataclysmic battle that formed Magellanic Clouds, billions of years ago. It died there, or it came as close to dying as these things can, and drifted aimlessly for millions of light years before striking the Earth.

The heat of impact liquefied the rock around it, which later cooled and encased the dead god’s huge body far below ground. As it began to dream, it wrought unintentional changes in its environment. Locked deep beneath the Earth, strange and unbelievable things faded in and out of reality. Vast caverns and landscapes bubbled to life within the rock, populated by horrible manifestations of the dead god’s dream.

There’s a few Destiny links here:

• The concept of a dead god has been brought up in Destiny before in reference to the Traveler. I believe it was Petra Venj who even mentioned that The City was hiding beneath a dead god back when she was assigned as a diplomat to The City. (Back when she very briefly set up her table on the towers back deck.)
• The first Destiny ViDoc was titled Pathways out of Darkness. Given that the thing which the Hive and worm gods call “the Deep” is what The City knows as the Darkness, we have some interesting possible parallels.
• Ultimately, we’re looking at tentative similarities between games made decades apart so we can’t draw too many conclusions, but we also may get some small amount of extra insight into the true nature of the Darkness by looking at the themes of Bungie’s past games. It does seem like Destiny’s Deep and Sky have been in conflict before… perhaps similar to the W’rkncacnter and the Jjaro?

When the Deep arrives at Oryx’s alter it possesses the Ogre he prepared for it and speaks to him. Mostly the Deep repeats the philosophy we’ve heard from the worm gods, but interestingly, it does so with a lot more… or at least different… personality. The way it talks is much more conversational that the worm gods distant and almost haughty style of speech. It even refers to Oryx as a friend at one point.

One of the interesting things that it tells Oryx is that if life is going to survive past the end of all things it will have to do so not by kindness or with a smile but by violence and sword. In time, we’ll see at least one other major power in Destiny express a desire to survive past the end of the universe.

In the end, the Deep tells Oryx that two sides pitting themselves against the other until one prevails is the way the universe figures itself out. And it says that this process is not barbaric or evil but is actually majestic. Could it be right? When viewed on on a long enough timeline, is what the Hive and Deep are doing actually beautiful and majestic, even if it causes some suffering along the way?

Sources:
XXXI battle made waves
XXXII Majestic. Majestic.
W’rkncacnter section of the Marathon.Bungie.Org Story Page
PID.Bungie.Org Transcript of the Pathways Into Darkness manual

Previous: 17: The End of an Age
Next: 19: Betrayal & Dreams of Teeth

Some 10,000 years after their defeat of the Ecumene empire, and more than 30,000 since the brave exiled sisters were betrayed and fled to the inner seas of Fundament, the Hive have finally reached what Oryx says is the edge of the Deep.

We first learned that Oryx was chasing after the Deep after he and his sisters eliminated the Qugu so many thousands of years ago. Back then it was Oryx’s astronomers who told him that he was conquering his way towards the Deep. And now he’s at its edge? Does that mean that the Deep has boundaries? Or that it is, or exists at, a physical location? Or could reaching the Deep be as much about reaching a certain power level or slaughtering enough alien races?

Regardless, there is one final obstacle between Oryx and the Deep, a powerful race called the Tai. Collectively, their people who likely control several star systems are known as the Taishibethi. Like most of the races the Hive destroyed, we only know a little about the Tai. Similar to the Dakaua and the Ecumene, they too built impressive space based megastructures. In their case we see that the Hive’s opening move is to ram the Tai’s “star-webs” and orbital (stations) with their war moons. It also seems that the Tai were a race that somehow resembled ravens, as their children as referred to as “sun ravens” and their Emperor is described as having talons and wings.

The rest of the Hive’s war against the Tai is told in time to Oryx pacing in his throne world. Over the course of ten paces we learn a little about key moments of the war. Obviously, this entire war didn’t take place over the short course of ten literal footsteps. Rather, we are seeing that Oryx’s ability to defeat even powerful races has become so routine it is not much different to him now than pacing back and forth.

The Hive’s defeat of the Tau is another one of those great if a little vague moments in the Grimoire that is fun to read and let your imagination run free. There is mention of Tai battleplates and arsenal ships. At one point, the Ascendant Hive knights Mengoor and Cra’adug (the knights you fight in the Court of Oryx who you have to lead close to each other to cancel out their invincible shield) spend a decade killing the Tai on what is referred to as the “Raven Bridge”. Is this another orbital megastructure or a Near Light Speed transit lane between star systems? Or is it a literal bridge? We just don’t know, so it can be anything we imagine!

Besides the two knights from the Court of Oryx, we also get to see Kraghoor (also known as Krughor) lead his accursed Thrall against the Tai. Kraghoor, if you recall, is the Ogre in the Court of Oryx that can only be killed by detonating Thrall near it to pop its shield. Oryx’s Warpriest, the same one we fought against in the King’s Fall raid, also makes an appearance and seems to be the member of the Hive that takes on and defeats the bulk of the Tai’s military.

After the Hive have been ravaging the Taishibethi for more than a decade, the Tai emperor returns and in a stunning show of force she attacks and apparently single handedly destroys one of the Hive’s war moons! Whatever the Tai actually are, it seems some of them were extremely powerful!

Unfortunately, Oryx is completely unfazed by the Tai Emperor Raven’s attacks. He, almost as a matter of course, pulls her into a wound in space. When she emerges from the wound, we find that she has been Taken and now serves Oryx and now assists the Hive in destroying her own people!

In their final moments (which may very well represent years, we don’t have a good sense of time here) the Tai turn to cursing the Hive. “We had a good thing. Our clothes were nice, our food was famous. With one of her feathers our Emperor could have tickled the gods,” they figuratively say to Oryx.

Oryx replies with by relating the Hive’s philosophy of the need to exist to the Tai, and in a showing of humor we’ll see from him from time to time, he wryly replies that the ability to dictate what will and will not exist is the Tai’s true god… and it is never ticklish, he tells them. And with that, the Hive’s conquest of the Taishibethi is complete.

With this final obstacle eliminated, Oryx goes into his Throne World to speak with the Deep directly. Meanwhile, his sisters make plans of their own!

Sources:
XXX: a golden amputation
XXIII: fire without fuel

Previous: 16: Oryx’s Pyramid Scheme
Next: 18: Majestic Battles and Waves

For a thousand years, Oryx and his sisters must have killed billions and maybe even trillions of thinking beings who were once members of the Ecumene. We know the numbers they slaughtered were so great two ways:

1. When the Dakaua War Council first met to address the Hive threat the Hive had only destroyed somewhere around 300 worlds, and only seventeen (17!) of those were part of the Ecumene. By the time our Guardian steals data from the World’s Grave that number has risen to “thousand of worlds” and there are not many foes left for the Hive. Or at least not many that we are told about.

2. When the Ecumene had forced the Hive to a standstill, Savathûn lamented that they would need to be killing Ecumene by the billions in order to feed their worms the destruction they hungered for. But they seem to have no more hunger pains that we know of during this 1,000 year period.

Speaking of those hunger pains, Savathûn asked about them once the last of the Ecumene were extinguished. “King Oryx, how will we feed our worms? Did you use my plan?” she asks. We don’t hear Oryx’s direct answer, but we do get to hear his announcement of a plan to end the Hive’s hunger pains once and for all.

Oryx commands that his Thrall and Acolytes are to take enough killing to feed their worms plus a little more to grow their own power. The rest of the destruction they cause is to be tithed up the chain. The Thrall will tithe to the Acolyte that commands them. The Acolytes will tithe to the Knights or Wizards that command them.

Oryx’s command to his Knights and Wizards is much the same, with one exception. They too are to take enough killing to feed their worms, and a little more to grow. But before they tithe the rest, they are expected to take another portion, as much as they dare, to use for their own purposes. They then tithe whatever is left to the Ascendant Hive that they server under. So, they are expected to forge their own paths with the catch being that if they get too far out of line or too devious then their fellow Hive will get jealous and kill them in order to take possession of the excess of destruction they are keeping for themselves.

Why do the Knights and Wizards get this exception, this command to branch out and do their own things as much as they are able? Probably, Oryx wants to make sure his Hive don’t fall into a rut of all fighting the same way. More than that, though, I think it has to do with Knights and the Wizards being the final adult form the Hive. Essentially, Thrall and Acolytes are children that have to do as they are told, but Knights and Wizards (and Kings presumably, but we never hear of any other Hive Kings) are free to achieve or squander their power and earnings as little or as much as they want. This, of course, also calls back to the the way Aurash, Sathona, and Xi Ro made their own journey of destruction from childhood to adulthood back on the seas of Fundament so long ago.

Next, the Knights and Wizards who manage to steal and hold on to enough power will become Ascendant Hive once they are able to create their own throne worlds. These Hive too are commanded to tithe upward, but they are the last link in the chain as the only ones above them are Oryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath. We also know that Ascendant Hive are still free to do their own thing, as we know of at least one, Alak-Hul (the Darkblade from the Sunless Cell Strike) who attempts to challenge Oryx for leadership of the Hive.

Finally, the three leaders of the Hive, the three royal siblings we know so well, will use the vast flow of tribute flowing up to them to feed their own worms, grow their own power, feed the Hive’s worm gods, and to study the powers of the Deep.

I think this plan, this pyramid scheme of destruction, was the plan Savathûn spoke of. There’s no real proof of this, but it feels a bit too clever for Oryx to have come up with it on his own. Either way, this is how the Hive operate from this point on. This plan is both their command structure and their supply line. Ultimately, it will be their greatest strength and, for at least one of the three murderous royal siblings, their greatest weakness… But we won’t see that second part for quite a while.

(Many of you have seen and exploited this weakness first hand, however!)

Sources:
XXVIII: King of Shapes
XXVI: star by star by star

Previous: 15: War and Trickery
Next: 17: The End of an Age

For the next hundred years, Oryx fought the combined forces of the Ecumene. Where as before he and his Hive were unable to stand against these “lords of matter and physical law,” Oryx was now able to turn the Ecumene’s own units against them. We’ve seen some pretty devious Taken enemies as Guardians, and that’s with Oryx just subverting Fallen, Hive, Vex, and Cabal. I like to imagine that a Taken Ecumene War Angel must have been a beautifully terrifying sight!

After a century of pushing back the Ecumene, Oryx’s forces overran the Ecumene Council located on something called a Fractal Wreath. We don’t know exactly what this was, but I like to imagine the Ecumen’s center of government was located on some sorts of awe inspiring megastructure hanging in space that only an empire that had bent math and physics to its whim could even hope to build. Maybe this Fractal Wreath could have looked like a cross between a Halo and one of these:

As Oryx finally reached and destroyed the Ecumene Council he also did something just as impressive and frightening: He somehow brought Xivu Arath back to life even though he had killed her in his Throne World! She arose from the destruction of the Ecumene saying to Oryx: “I am war, and you have conjured me back with war.”

For the next forty years, Oryx and Xivu Arath continued their battle against the Ecumene until they neared the Dakaua Nest. Remember, it was the Dakaua Ministry of War that first tried to rally the client races of the Ecumene against the Hive. And it was the Dakaua whose mercenary explorers discovered and revived Taox from her long twenty thousand year stasis. Wiping out the Ecumene council may have been a major victory, but if the Dakaua were the lead race of the Ecumene, nearing their Nest may have been an even more significant event. Its likely that the Dakaua knew this and put up one heck of a fight!

Maybe the Hive’s conquest of the Dakaua Nest was proceeding too slowly for Oryx’s liking or maybe he was just feeling devious one day, but for some reason Oryx contacted the Dakaua and asked for their support in killing his sister. He told the Dakaua he had become jealous of her. Oddly enough, the Dakaua agreed to help him!

It sounds a bit silly, but we have to conclude that Oryx request appeared genuine. It must have been more than him just sending a quick text message. We aren’t told exactly how he convinced the Dakaua to agree to help him, just that they were desperate enough to do so. Maybe he offered them a cease fire and actually ordered his forces to stop their advance? Or maybe he turned them away from attacking the Ecumene forces and instead had them attack his sister’s forces?

Whatever Oryx did to earn the trust of the Dakaua was apparently convincing enough that he and Xivu Arath were able to lure them into so cunning and deadly that soon the entire Dakaua race was erased from the galaxy! And again, something just as shocking happened: With the destruction of the Dakaua, Oryx was somehow able to bring his middle sister Savathûn back to life! “I am trickery, and you have conjured me back with trickery,” she told her brother. But she too had been killed in Oryx’s Throne World, so how is it possible she could be brought back? Shouldn’t both she and Xivu Arath be dead?

The best explanation I can come up with is this:

When Oryx was first killed by his sister during the war against the Ammonites the worm gods told him: “From this day forward, Auryx, you and your sisters will each survive death – so long as you aren’t killed in your own throne.”

Look carefully at the beginning of XXVI: star by star by star, the book where Auryx killed his sisters to gain Akka’s power to speak directly to the Deep. It specifically says: “Beneath a gree fire sky, in the throne-world of King Auryx, or lords embrace.” See that? Savathûn and Xivu Arath were not in their own throne, they were in their brother’s when he killed them.

At some point in the future Xivu Arath will have this to say about her death at the hands of her brother:

Once, I permitted Oryx to kill me so that he could gain the sword logic and overcome Akka our God. This left me trapped deep in my throne. But Oryx my brother made war upon the Ecumene and in that war he described me, for I too am war. Thus I was resurrected.

Many many hundreds or thousands of years later Ikora Rey will have this to say about Crota:

…is his world the apex of Hive power, or is it the youngest and most accessible of a string of netherworlds, each host to a more terrible Hive archentity?

So maybe killing an Ascendant Hive in the Ascendant Plane is not enough? Maybe they have to be killed in their specific throne world? Is this how Akka can be still alive even though Oryx killed it? Maybe it too was outside of its own throne-world? We killed both Crota and Oryx within their throne-worlds, but what about the War Priest, or Golgorth, or Oryx’s twin daughters?

In the end, what was left of the client races of the Ecumene knew the reappearance of Xivu Arath and Savathûn, along with the extinction of the Dakaua, was so unbelievably bad that they each fled into hiding only to be hunted down by Oryx and his sisters over the next thousand years. We’re told that the Hive exterminate the races of the Ecumene so completely that the only record of them at all is the Books of Sorrow… and curiously, within the mind of Taox.

Wait… Taox escaped again?!

Sources:
XXIX: Carved in Ruin
Crota, Son of Oryx
XXXV: This Love Is War

Previous: 14: Oryx – The Taken King
Next: 16: Oryx’s Pyramid Scheme

The Hive were all but beaten. Thanks to Taox’s information, the Ecumene knew exactly where to strike and exactly who to target. Before long, Auryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath could not even emerge from their throne-worlds for fear of being killed again and again. Worse, hiding and waiting was not an option, either. Each of the siblings felt the gnawing of their worms inside them. Without a supply of destruction, the bargain offered to the Hive by their worm gods so long ago would soon destroy them from within.

After much debate and despair between the three ascendant siblings who had gathered within Auryx’s throne-world, it was Auryx who came up with a solution. What they needed to defeat the Ecumene was the power of the Deep that their worms gods had long kept from them. And the only way to get it was to become far more powerful himself by claiming the power held by his sisters.

By truly killing them.

So, Auryx took up his sword and gained great power by beheading his sister Xivu Arath who willingly allowed it. He then turned and killed his sister Savathûn who at the last second had tried to trick him by pretending to give up her life willingly but who actually was intending to kill him with a dagger she had in her hand hidden behind her back.

By killing his two sisters, each of whom had participated in the deaths of billions spread across well over three hundred worlds, Auryx gained enormous power. So much so that he was able to seek out Akka,one of his worm gods, and demand the secrets he needed to call upon the deep directly. Akka refused to give him those secret, so Auryx killed it and took the secrets for himself. He forged these secrets into what he called the Tablets of Ruin then returned to his Hive and proclaimed himself to be Oryx, The Taken King since he now had the power to take life and make it his own.

Within the year, the Ecumene Crisis Council (and not the Dakaua Ministry of War? Was this bigger than just a war now?) met in an emergency session. Somehow the war that had been going so well had unexpectedly reversed itself. Where before the three leaders of the Hive had been forced into hiding, now the one they recognized as Aurash / Oryx had reemerged in possession of a staggeringly powerful new weapon. He somehow had the ability to abduct individual targets from the physical world then return them drastically changed. These “Taken” came back completely under Oryx’s control and possessed “physically illegal” abilities.

Oryx’s ability to “take” and alter individuals greatly concerned the Ecumene, and why wouldn’t it? He had found a way to do something that they, as “lords of matter and physical law,” could not even conceive of. With Oryx now able to turn their own forces against them, the Ecumene Crisis Council predicted that their civilizations would be extinct within 220 years unless some countermeasure to Oryx’s new power could be found.

The leaders of the Ecumene directed all of their client races to immediately dedicate all of their economic and technological resources to stopping Oryx, but in the end it would not be enough.

Sources:
XXVI: star by star by star
XXVII: Eat the Sky
XXVIII: King of Shapes

Previous: 13: The Amiable Ecumene
Next: 15: War and Trickery

With more than three hundred worlds in ashes behind him, Auryx should have felt mighty and powerful. Instead, he felt trapped and he felt afraid and he felt betrayed. He wasn’t sad or or ill at ease with the destruction he’d caused. This time, he called his sisters to him and cried out in grief because he’d finally proven something that had been nagging at him for some time: His worm’s hunger was growing faster than the power he could draw from it.

The more he and his sisters fed their worm with destruction the faster their worms hungered for it. Soon, Auryx admitted to his sisters, their worms would be so hungry that they would not be able to feed them even if they tried to do so with all of their considerable might! If things kept going as they had been, they and the entirety of the Hive would be consumed by the very worms that had given them so much power.

And then things got worse for the royal Hive siblings!

Far away from the Hive’s contingent of interstellar moons, the ministry of war of a race called the Dakaua came together to address a critical threat. The Dakaua, it seems, play a major leadership role in some sort of alliance of several species spread among the stars that collectively call themselves the Ecumene. (Note that ecumene means something like “the known world” in Greek.)

Over the last hundred years, and despite the efforts of the Ecumene Status Army’s perimeter fleets, seventeen of their client races had fallen to a previously unknown race calling itself the Hive. The Hive’s power had grown so great that the Dakaua were now looking at the possibility that the entire Ecumene faced extinction at the hands of the Hive. Fortunately, they had just gotten a big break.

Mercenary explorers had discovered an ancient interstellar ship fleeing from the Hive’s advance. An analysis of the ship put its construction at around 24,000 years prior… around the same time that the Ecumene had lost contact with the Ammonites in the Fundament system! It seems very possible that the Ammonites were in fact a client race of the Ecumene.

Inside this ancient ship the explorers found a member of a proto-Hive individual frozen in some sort of stasis. Once revived, she identified herself as Taox! Recall, that it was Taox who had betrayed the brave royal sisters of the Osmium Court and lead those sisters to swear an oath of revenge against her. One might even argue that she was (somewhat indirectly) responsible for the birth of the Hive and the death of hundreds of worlds…

Now though, during her debriefing, Taox provides the Ecumene with an account of the fall of the Ammonites and vitially important intel about the motives and biology of the Hive. She also tell them, who their leaders are. With this new information, the Dakaua are able to supply Ecumene forces with new orders and three high priority targets: The siblings who once called themselves Aurash, Sathona, and Xi Ro.

The Dakaua Ministry of War instructs its combined forces to target the Hive’s three leaders with “maximum theater overkill” and authorizes the use of Caedometric (possibly Light based or anti-matter based) weapons. Given what they now know, the Dakaua believe that the Hive will crumble once their leaders are destroyed. Soon, these new orders are put into action and finally, after the loss of seventeen worlds, the Ecumene seem to have the upper hand.

For Auryx and his sisters, this reversal of fortunes couldn’t have come at a worse time. Already they were reaching the limits of their power and now the Ecumene somehow knew to target them specifically. Take a moment to read just how desperate things had become:

”I am at my end,” Savathûn says. “I plot and plan. But I cannot gather enough bloodshed to feed my worm. And the harder I try, the hungrier it becomes.”

“I slaughter and kill,” Xivu Arath says, “but the harder I fight, the more my worm demands. I too am at my end.”

“The Ecumene war angels have killed me so many times,” Auryx says, “that I dare not go out into the universe, lest I need my might to protect myself. My worm chews at my soul in hunger.”

As mighty as the Hive have become, they are forced to admit that the Ecumene are more powerful than they are. At one point, Xivu Arath even calls the Ecumene “lords of matter and physical law” all but admitting defeat! Savathûn, unable to plot and plan her way past the Ecumene’s superior tactics and firepower desperately suggests that they beg the worm gods to tell them what to do!

Auryx, however, rejects the weakness of his two sisters and tells them he knows a way that they might still be able to defeat the Ecumene. What Auryx does next to his sisters, and even to one of his gods, will change his position among the Hive forever!

Sources:
XXV: Dictata ir Dakaua
XXVI: star by star by star

Previous: 12: War on Life
Next: 14: Oryx – The Taken King

After their defeat of the Ammonites, the Hive hollow out some or maybe even all of Fundament’s 52 moons turning them into giant spaceships capable of traveling to distant star systems. I wonder if this process looked anything like what Crota was doing to our moon?

For a very long time, the Hive’s fleet of moons travels through the cold dark between the stars. Interestingly, even though they are more or less immortal, the three murderous siblings still have practical concerns. At one point during the journey, Auryx openly wonders how he and his people will eat and breath, among other science facts. Fortunately his sister Savathûn tells him that he should really just relax.

She has been studying both the way the worm gods use wounds to travel and the way her brother returned after she had killed him. She has figured out not only how to travel bridge great distances with wounds but also how her and her siblings can return to their throne worlds without having to die first. Now, instead of being scattered across their moons with limited ways to communicate or share food or resources, the Hive now have the means to quickly and easily come together as a society united in the cause of challenging and destroying all those weaker than themselves.

Over the next 20,000 years, the Hive journey towards new star systems. During this time, Auryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath wage constant war against each other, each discovering and teach the others new aspects of their power and new ways to kill. They must have killed each other hundred or thousands of times over as they grew in power.

Finally, near the end of their long journey, Auryx declares to his siblings and his people that he is establishing a court called the High War. And along with this court he creates a series of rules for the Hive beneath him to learn the sword logic that has given him and his sisters such power. He also sets up a way for lower Hive to challenge him and take his position as the leader if they are able to defeat him. This is the beginning of what we will eventually know as the Court of Orxy. We’ll hear a bit more about this Court soon.

Interestingly, Savathûn also creates a court called the High Coven which likely has a similar function of teaching cunning and killing to those Hive seeking to gain the power of the sword logic. Oddly, Xivu Arath does not create a court and instead claims that her court exist anywhere there is war.

At last, the Hive have come across new species and begin destroying them just as they destroyed the Ammonites. Over the next hundred years the Hive obliterate at least (and likely many more than) 18 separate races including one called the Qugu which are said to protect four different solar systems.

Auryx finds the Qugu interesting because in some small way they are like the Hive in that they exist in symbiosis with another organism. Apparently, the Qugu evolved in such a way that even though they are now space faring, they still offer their limbs to enormous sessile (stationary) jaw-beasts. It’s actually a virus living within the Qugu that compels them to do this possibly horrific thing, but the relationship between the Qugu and the jaw-beasts seems to be mutually beneficial.

The jaw-beasts, which are treated like gods by the Qugu, reproduce through this strange, violent process and in return they produce some sort of nectar that give the Qugu brilliant visions. We aren’t told if these are visions like being drugged out or actual visions of new ideas and technologies and glimpses into the future. I kinda suspect it was the former but kinda hope it was the latter… because a violently symbolic culture driven forward by reality defying visions just seems darn cool to me.

Unfortunately for the Qugu, Savathûn liberates them from their jaw-beasts and indeed from existence. As she does so, Auryx takes the opportunity to vaporize his sister and some of her underlings to remind her to guard her flank. Normal physical death to Auryx and his sisters is, at this point, a game or teaching opportunity and not an actual threat to their wellbeing. It might not be comfortable for them to be forcibly returned to their throne worlds, but they’ve become so powerful that it is no huge setback for them anymore.

As the Hive continue destroying civilizations, Auryx muses about how he and his people are helping the universe find its final shape free of parasite civilizations that are not worthy enough or powerful enough to continue existing. At this point he has long since moved past his timidness and horror at being asked to destroy lives and species. Now, he feeds the hungry worm within him with entire worlds without so much as a second though.

Except… what would happen if he and his Hive came upon a culture that they were not able to defeat?

Sources:
XXI: an incision
XXII: The High War
XXIII: fire without fuel

Previous: 11: Rampant Speculation 1
Next: 13: The Amiable Ecumene

There are a few interesting questions I’ve put off until we could reach a good stopping point in the Hive’s timeline. A lot of little nuggets that don’t really have directly supported answers but are ripe for a little good ole fashioned Rampant Speculation. No sources this time (Calcified Fragments: Curiosity – XX: Hive if you must) as I’m trying to draw some fun possibilities from that which isn’t entirely there. Perhaps you’d care to join me? 🙂

1. The worm gods say that:

For millions of years We have been [trapped|growing] in the Deep.

Ok. So who trapped them there. Well, the Leviathan, apparently:

For millions of years the Leviathan caged us here. It is a pawn of the Sky, a philosophy of cosmic slavery.

A little later the worm gods say that

the war rages on.

Could these worms have lost a battle millions of years ago and been held prisoner ever since? And if so, why hold them prisoner instead of killing them? Could it be because killing them isn’t all that effective? Sathona’s familiar communicated with her and her father even though it is described as being dead…

2. Who were the creators / previous owners of the needle ship? They are at one point referred to as explorers, but clearly they were more than that. They didn’t just map Fundament, they dove into its core and brought back a chrysalis to a room dedicated specifically to birthing it. They seem to have succeeded but were then all slaughtered for their efforts… If they were allied with the worm gods why didn’t the worms escape millions of years ago?

I propose this: The explorers on the needle ship were deceived into retrieving a unborn worm or possibly worm larvae and were offered the same choice Aurash and her sisters were, but they rejected the worms’ offer.

I think the worms could not leave Fundament’s core on their own but rather had to spread into the three royal sisters and later their followers in order to gain enough power from directly participating in the slaughter of the races of Fundament. Only then did they finally gain enough power to tear wounds to orbit. Perhaps when the needle ship explorers refused to do this they were killed so the worms could use their ship to lead the next potential hosts to them even though it took millions of years to do so?

My guess is Sathona’s familiar was what the needle ship explorers brought back, but it killing the small number of explorers wasn’t anywhere near the number of deaths the worms needed to take direct part in to escape their prison.

3. The Osmium King and Aurash independently verified the changed orbits of Fundament’s moons. The three sisters used the needle ship’s sensors to hear the distant approach of the god wave. I think its safe to assume the moons really were rearranged and a civilization destroying wave really was on its way… but who really caused it?

The worm gods, upon reaching orbit, say:

Our organs detect a fifty-third moon in orbit of Fundament. A Traveler. Divine presence of the Sky. Now we know what arranged the syzygy.

But, the Leviathan talked of how the Sky creates safe places and when the Leviathan flees Fundament it says:

—Sisters of Aurash, open your eyes++
++Who made you monsters? Who summoned the wave?—
—Make peace. Join with me in golden renewal.++

Clearly it is referring to the worm gods as the ones who summoned the god wave. Which would mean it is saying that it was the worm gods, and not the Traveler, who rearranged the moons. Who is right here?!

I think the Leviathan is right. For two reasons:

First, it didn’t sugar coat the way the universe works when it told the sisters that struggle and death is sometimes part of living, and it also was exactly right about the worms and their motives. Looking through everything the Leviathan says I don’t think it even comes close to telling a lie. It relates unhappy truths, yes, but never a lie.

Second, the worm gods come very close to directly admitting they have the power to move planets:

From across the stars We have called life to Fundament, so that it might contend against extinction. For millennia We have awaited you… our beloved hosts.

What happened millennia ago? Aurash told his sisters he had proof that:

The plate of stone we live on, our Osmium Court, is one fragment of a rocky planet that crashed into the Fundament and broke apart. All the other nearby continents — the Helium Drinkers, the Bone Plaza, the Starcutters — came from the same world.

Perhaps the other races of the Fundament are migrants too.

If the worm gods really had the power to crash entire planets into Fundament surely they had the power to rearrange its moons. So why lie about it? Well… give it a bit and we’ll find out that the worm gods’ bargain with the three royal sisters wasn’t exactly entirely truthful either. As a brief preview, here’s what Auryx had to say when he found out the entirety of the bargain he and his sisters had agreed to:

NO

Savathûn! Xivu Arath! My siblings
We are betrayed. We will never live eternal.

I think the worm gods grant power and knowledge through bargains. They seem to know the answers to questions no one had known to ask. But I also think in the end, time and time again, their price is ultimately revealed to be too high as we’ll soon see, oh speculators mine.

Previous: 10: The Birth of the Hive
Next: 12: War on Life