Destiny

Auryx was dead. Murdered by his sister Savathûn along with all the members of the Ammonite Satellite Congress…

Except, he wasn’t dead!

Instead of being no more, he finds himself, minus his physical body, inside what the worm gods described to him as a cyst universe created by his own might. A “Throne World” they called it. All three royal siblings, the worm gods told him, now had this power to survive death… as long as they were not killed in their own Throne World.

From his new found Throne World, Auryx watched as his sisters pressed their advantage against the (now leaderless?) Ammonites. Their strategy of digging into the available moons and breeding their armies back to strength seem to have worked.

At some point, as the battle turned in favor of Savathûn and Xivu Arath, the Leviathan emerged from Fundament’s depths and made for the safety of what was left of the Ammonites’ fleets. We aren’t told why it decided to break cover. Was it no longer safe? Was it trying to protect the Ammonites? We just don’t know.

The worm gods continue to poke and prod at Auryx in every way they can in the hopes of getting him to return to the fight. They again try and contrast their plain, honest “truths” against the Leviathan’s harsh realities. They point out that Taox was not killed alongside Auryx and the Ammonite’s Satellite Congress and is still out there somewhere. And, of course, they point out that Auryx is in effect immortal now thanks to their power. Unfortunately for the Ammonites, the worms’ constant manipulations and gifts (of immortality and dark magic) end up convincing Auryx to make peace with his sisters and rejoin the battle.

The Ammonite’s fleets that once danced circles around Xivu Arath warriors and warships were now burdened with defending their remaining moons and the Leviathan. Soon, Chroma-Admiral Rafriit, the Ammonites’ greatest military leader, is killed and not long after that their forces are completely defeated and Savathûn is busy poisoning the seas of their homemoon. And that’s the last we hear of the Ammonites…

Ever.

In the aftermath, the worms feed upon the corpse of the Leviathan and we also find out that the Traveler fled the Fundament system rather than, say, sacrificing itself. Curious that.

Under the worms’ direction, Auryx and his sisters hollow out some or all of Fundament’s 52 moons into giant ships capable of journeying to new stars. Here we also see Auryx’s followers take on the name “the Hive” and we get a glimpse at how they organize themselves:

A mother Wizard gets fertility from a mate, or from herself. From the Wizard the spawn, from the spawn our Thrall, from the survivors our Acolytes who contend. If they contend well, their worm is fed, and from the well fed worm come Knights and Wizards and Princes.

Interesting that little to nothing is mentioned about being curious or clever anymore. If anything, all the hive and their worm gods are focused on now is strenght and destruction. As happens, this will become more important soon.

And, with the destruction of the Ammonites and the exodus of the Hive, we’ve reached our first major end in Destiny’s backstory. We learned the tragic tale of three smart, talented royal sisters of a very short lived race trapped on the inner seas of a gas giant who were forced into exile and then corrupted into monsters by strange, powerful worm gods. We saw Aurash, Sathona and Xi Ro, become the xenocidial Auryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath, the three leaders of what we now know for sure is the Hive.

The worst part? The end of the Ammonites’ civilization is just the beginning of the devastation the Hive will wreck on the galaxy!

Sources:
XVII: The Weakness Verse
XVIII: Leviathan Rises
XIX: Crusaders
XX: Hive

Previous: 9: Auryx’s Sadness
Next: 11: Rampant Speculation 1

Auryx had done it! He had managed to get himself, his sisters, and a large number of his people off of their inhospitable, unforgiving world. They had traded the Stormjoys, and burning seas, and lightning storms, and the ever enveloping pitch black they’d been forced to live in for the serene beauty of space. As a navigator and astronomer, one would think Auryx would be ecstatic, but he was anything but.

Instead, Auryx knew he was only where he was because he had lead a war that started with the slaughter of people from his own country. A war that had expanded across continents and across races and had laid waste to everything he had ever know. And then there were the worms… his gods. Not only had they urged and insisted upon the war. Not only were they now demanding he and his sisters attack the Ammonites who lived on Fundament’s moons. All the while the philosophy they espoused time and time again went against almost everything he believed…

Over and over the worms tried to explain how the Sky built civilizations and safe places, but those rules and right actions that prevented war and lead to harmony were, in reality, a great lie. How life was nothing more than a wasteful engine that burns up energy and produces rot and decay. And that the only rule that actually is right and good is that the worth of a thing can be determined only by that thing’s ability to exist and go on existing at the expense of everything and everyone else around it.

Is it any surprise, then, that Auryx now shirked away from war with the Ammonites? After all, he was the royal sibling who had hesitated to swear an oath of revenge against Taox. He was the sibling who had, at times, sat frozen in fear in the cabin of his ship as his sisters sailed away from their overthrown kingdom. And he was the one who needed his sisters to read him stories in new languages to keep his mind off of everything that had happened in the years since their exile.

Without Auryx’s leadership and strength, his people were driven back by the Ammonites and were forced to burrow deep into some of Fundament’s moons in order to survive. Even though his sisters were doing their best, they were slowly losing their new war all while their brother remained detached and, at times, catatonic because of everything he had done.

Then something new happened. As his sisters spread and grew their forces among the interiors Fundament’s moons, the Ammonites began deploying paracausal weapons. That is, they began using weapons that did not make sense with regards to the ordinary flow of time or rules of physics. It probably means they began using weapons based on the concepts of Light, since the worms tell Auryx that these new weapons were given to the Ammonites by the Traveler.

Auryx in his curiosity and his need to explore and understand is drawn back by the novelty of these new weapons deployed first by the Ammonites and then by his sisters as the worm gods teach them to arm themselves in a similar fashion. But he is also forced by the hunger of his worm as it begins to eat away at him. His pact with his gods was, after all, that he either explore and understand or be consumed…

But then, two completely unexpected things occurred:

1. Auryx betrays his sisters and meets with the Ammonites on neutral ground to try to broker a peace between them and his people.
2. Savathûn, always one step ahead, somehow manages to breach the Ammonite’s defenses and strike at the peace conference.

By the time the dust settles and Savathûn’s forces make their escape, both the Ammonite Satellite Congress and her own beloved brother are very very intentionally dead!

Sources:
III: The Oath
IV: Syzygy
VI: Sisters
XIII: Into the Sky
XIV: 52 and One
XV: Born As Prey
XVI: The Sword Logic
XVII: The Weakness Verse

Previous: 8: The Conquest of Fundament
Next: 10: The Birth of the Hive

With the help of the worm gods, Auryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath load their deep diving needle ship with worm larvae and return to their Osmium Court. They begin to offer the worms’ larvae to any and all of their kind who will accept it. Those that refuse are killed or forced to flee!

With the new might of worm-enhanced followers, the royal siblings lead an army against Taox. They push her invading Helium Drinkers, and any of their own people who refused the worm larvae, out of the Osmium Court and surrounding territories. They don’t manage to kill Taox, but after more than three years in exile they have finally retaken their home.

At this point, it seems that Auryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath probably slowed or stopped their conquest, but their new gods are not content with this. They insist that Taox, and the Leviathan, and all the forces of the Sky will still oppose them, and that the only way to be truly free of suffering and injustice is to defeat their enemies. And so, the war continues and soon Taox and her forces are driven all the way back to Kaharn Atoll.

We know from a bit of conversation back when the sisters were repairing the needle ship that Kaharn Atoll is probably some sort of cross-species port or trade destination. This is a place that the vengeful siblings used to regard warmly. For instance, Sathona used to buy Aurash stories written in other races’ languages and read them to her. It was something that they both enjoyed and found relaxing… but now Kaharn is a place where their sworn enemy has begun rallying all the races of Fundament against them.

Meanwhile, the Leviathan and whatever contacts it has within Fundament’s races begin destroying any kind of ship or rocket or spacecraft that might be able to help the worms and their newfound hosts leave the gas giant. This effort is successful enough that the worms come up with a new plan. They tell the vengeful siblings to attack and slaughter everyone at Kaharn! By doing so, they will gain the power to cut wounds in the fabric of space that will let them achieve orbit. They instruct Xivu Arath to lead the attack, saying:

Reality is a fine flesh, oh general ours. Let us feast of it.

Again, we see the “oh ______ mine” type phrasing, this time coming directly from the worm gods. This will be important later…

Very few of the holdouts at Kaharn survive the battle. We are never told how large a port Kaharn is, but we can imagine that it was not a small place since some five hundred races interacted there. Perhaps thousands or millions, military and civilian alike, were slaughtered in the battle. Those that do somehow manage to survive flee into orbit, but the worm gods are true to their word and help the murderous siblings build ships and use their ever growing powers to cut their way into orbit.

We see Hive Tombships use this type of travel all the time in Destiny, but this is the first time it was ever used, it seems.

Once in orbit, the worms spot Taox, and the few survivors of Kaharn, fleeing into the welcoming arms of the Ammonites, a highly advanced spacefaring race of cephalopods that live among the oceans of Fundament’s fifty-two moons. They also spot a fifty-third moon, a Traveler, which they say is a divine presence of the Sky!

Sources:
X: Immortals
XI: Conquerors
XII: Out of the Deep
XIII: Into the Sky
XIV: 52 and One

Previous: 7: The Go[o]d Worms
Next: 9: Auryx’s Sadness

After leaving the Leviathan behind, Aurash, Sathona, and Xi Ro finally complete their journey towards Fundament’s core. They had done some pretty crazy things over the past few years. Exploring wrecks, eating food from the sea, sailing into stormy waters… and all while in exile and on the run for their lives. But what Aurash does next, almost certainly at the behest of Sathona’s familiar, is downright insane.

Aurash exits the needle ship! Deep within the crushing pressure and ferocious heat of the innermost core of a gas giant! But she is not crushed or vaporized. Instead she is somehow protected. And very quickly her protector comes into view. A giant jawed winged worm approaches past her. It speaks to her calling itself Yul and points out how powerful it is and how it is the only thing keeping her from harm. It then introduces her to more of its kind: Eir, Xol, Ur, and Akka. It must have been quite the sight for Aurash to see these giant creatures surviving in the harshest climate imaginable.

Yul explains that itself and the others have been trapped in the Deep of Fundament for millions of years and that they have been calling life to Fundament in order for it to evolve into suitable hosts that will allows the worms to escape. It tells Aurash that the Leviathan and the forces of the Sky are arrayed against her and her sisters, and that it was the Sky who rearranged Fundaments moon and caused the approaching God-Wave because they were afraid of the potential of Aurash’s race.

Fortunately for Aurash and her sisters, the worms want to help them in the struggles. Yul offers them a deal. If they ingest some of the worms’ newborn larva they will gain eternal life and enough power to right anything they find wrong with the world. There is one catch, Yul explains, but it seems to be a very minor one. From now on, each of the sisters will have to follow their true nature or their inner worm will consume them. And, as they grow in power, their inner worms will grow ever more hungry.

All the sisters of the Osmium Court every wanted to do was explore and seek knowledge, or strength, or cunning. Now, all they have to do is keeping doing what they would have done anyway in exchange for great power and eternal life? It seems like such a simple choice to the three brave exiled sisters! So simple, apparently, that none of them think to ask what Yul might have meant by calling life to Fundament or what their inner worms would actually hunger for.

Recall, that at some point, long ago, the homeworld of the short lived three-eyed race crashed into Fundament. Did the worms somehow bring it there? How could they have done that if they were trapped? And wouldn’t that have caused millions or billions of deaths? Unfortunately, instead of asking these questions, Aurash and her sisters take the deal offered by Yul and the other worms.

It’s at this point that each of the sisters finally well and truly makes the transition to adulthood. Aurash takes on the king morph just like his father. He renames himself Auryx which we learn means Long Thought. Similarly, Sathona at long last transitions from her childhood state to that of a mother and renames herself Savathûn and Xi Ro becomes a powerful knight and renames herself Xivu Arath.

From here on out, the worms take on the role of gods to the three siblings. And their first instructions to Auryx and his two sisters are to, essentially, plunge all of Fundament into a holy war!

Sources:
IX: The Bargin
X: Immortals
XI: Conquerors

Previous: 6: The Cryptic Leviathan
Next: 8: The Conquest of Fundament

We aren’t told how long the three brave sisters’ initial dive towards the core of Fundament took, but given that it is a gas giant, we can probably assume that it took days or weeks. During that time, they passed through several layers far beneath their suspended ocean. They encountered vast creatures swimming through the increasingly solid layers of gas and liquid metal. Xi Ro even took some delight in piercing down through a few anemone-like creatures that reminded her of stormjoys from their surface.

They dove and dove until they broke through a layer of metal somewhere deep near Fundament’s core. Here, the needle ship could hear and detect everything. From the slow grinding of the drifting continents, to acid rains that could kill with little warning, to the struggles of creatures as large as cities far far away. It also detected the distant groans and distortions caused by Fundament’s moons lifting up a vast section of Fundament’s inner ocean. Here, perhaps for the first time, Sathona and Xi Ro finally had their own proof that Aurash’s God-Wave was real.

But there was something else down with them. A giant Leviathan that we are told was as large as all the continents they’d known in their childhood before their exile. This massive thing must have been spectacular. We’re told, for instance, that it is propelled by giant fins cracklings with lightning and energy. This Leviathan finds the sisters’ small needle ship and sends powerful bursts of microwave energy booming against its hull… not to attack them but instead to speak to them.

What follows is a conversation between the Leviathan and the three sisters that is split into three parts:

• In the first part, the Leviathan tells them that they live on the edge of a war between the Deep and the Sky. The Sky builds safe places for life to thrive in, it tells them. And it names Fundament, a place of refuge for trillions, as one of those places that the Sky treasures. But Aurash protests this. She argues that Fundament is no safe place to be treasured. It’s a place of darkness and fatal lightning storms and fiery seas and monsters that hunt her kind from the clouds above. She urges her sisters to continue deeper with her, where she is sure they can discover some greater power to avenge and protect them.
• Next, the Leviathan asks them what has called them down into the Deep. It tells them that it has been watching their race’s struggle to survive for eons and that their survival and advancement even in such harsh conditions were its proof against despair. It also begins to explain the philosophy of the Deep, but its words are cryptic and hard to understand. It calls the short lived three-eyed krill people its hope, but is telling them that their short lives and hard struggles are right and good…Xi Ro, of course, protests this. She declares that she will not accept a world where her people’s lives are short and desperate, or a world where a betrayer like Taox can win. She says that she will change the world by killing anything that get in her way.
• Finally, the Leviathan tries its best to warn the three sisters away from the path that they seem to be on. It admits that yes, the way of the Sky is often harder, but that even though there is suffering and hardship along the way, the Sky is constantly working to build new life and progress towards a gentle world. The Deep, it says, only embraces death. And that if they side with it they will become world killers and will live lives of death and devastation.Sathona protests this. After years of keeping her father’s familiar hidden, she now shows it to her sisters. She tells them how this plain honest worm speaks to her in easy to understand words and that it was the thing that helped her come up with all of her great ideas of the past few years, including helping her find the needle ship.

She then pits the Leviathan and its cryptic ideas against the worm’s plainly stated whispers of hope. Then, Sathona utters what may very well be one of the most frightening and far reaching phrases in all of Destiny. Almost certainly at the urging of her familiar, she says:

Let us dive, oh sisters mine.

We’ll see this type of phrase several more time and will come back to its vast importance a bit later. For now, the three brave exiled sisters start their final dive towards Fundament’s core and the creatures that have been calling to them for the better parts of their lives…

Sources:
VII: The Dive
VIII: Leviathan

Previous: 5: The Ancient Needle
Next: 7: The Go[o]d Worms

After an exhilarating year exploring Fundament’s seas, the three brave exiled sisters found the most extraordinary thing adrift in the turbulent waters of the Shvubi Malestrom: A long, slender, gray colored ship that was obviously built by a species with skills and technology far beyond that of the Osmium Court.

Sathona’s dead familiar whispers to her that it has been here since long before her people arrived on Fundament millions of years ago.

A small debate broke out among the sisters. Xi Ro, true to her nature, spoke up for immediate revenge. She wanted to tow the ship back to the multi-species trade center at Kaharn Atoll and use the money it would sell for to hire an army large enough to retake their homeland.

Aurash disagreed. Ever the explorer, she wanted to open the ship up and see what was inside. Sathona, who of course already knew what was inside since her father’s dead familiar had told her, sided with Aurash. With the votes two to one, the three sisters entered the alien ship.

Much of the Needle Ship’s interior is left to our imaginations. The only real physical description of it we get is that it had glistening halls. We do, however, learn some troubling things about the ship:

• This was not a starship, but was instead a ship meant to dive deep down through the gaseous and liquid layers of Fundament, all the way to the gas giant’s core.
• The ship had a room for growing flesh of some kind. We are told there are “flesh fans” so perhaps this was a series of vats stirring and cultivating some kind of biological growth? Regardless of what exactly this flesh growing room looked like, we also learn that it had gone unused for so long that the flesh had mummified.
• Finally, we learn of the ship’s birthing chamber. Somehow, either through studying logs and records, or perhaps through Sathona’s familiar the three sisters learned that the needle ship’s crew had gone deep into the center of Fundament and brought back some sort of chrysalis. And, with the birthing room’s advanced suite of surgical equipment, they had cut through and pealed back the layers of the thing they had recovered until it emerged… and killed them all! What was left of their corpses still sat on the birthing room’s floors!

For the next two years, Aurash, Xi Ro, and Sathona worked to repair the needle ship and to understand what it was meant for and how to operate it. They were five years old by the time they finally finished. Half of their short lifespan was already spent and by now they’d lived more of their lives in exile than they had as heirs to their father’s throne.

Once again, the three sisters had to decide what to do with the needle ship and what to do with the remainder of their lives. Retaking their home might still have been possible, but Aurash still could not shake free of the idea that their strange new ship might hold the key stopping the God-Wave that would soon destroy everything and everyone.

Xi Ro, who had done the bulk of the work to clear the needle ship’s birthing chamber of what remained of its crew, warned against the idea. Whatever had killed the crew had been found beneath Fundament’s inner metallic layers. Going there themselves would only serve to get them killed as well.

Sathona, who had again spent time alone listening to her familiar’s helpful whispers in secret, once again sided with Aurash. The only way they would be able to fulfill their oaths now, she argued, was to use the ship for its intended purpose and dive deep towards Fundament’s core.

And so, together, the three brave sisters dove their needle ship towards the innermost depths of Fundament…just as the things waiting for them in the dark, hot, crushing spaces below had planned…

Sources:
V: Needle and Worm
VI: Sisters

Previous: 4: Familiar Ideas
Next: 6: The Cryptic Leviathan

Some weeks before her father was overthrown, and she and her two sisters escaped into exile, Aurash, the eldest of the three heirs to the Osmium Court, was sent on an expedition by her father, the king, to a distant site called the Tungsten Monoliths.

The Osmium King had certainly been acting strangely of late, pouring over ancient texts and locking himself in the royal orrery, a room-sized mechanical model of Fundament and its moons. Sometimes he would emerge and quietly wander the halls of his palace talking only to his familiar, a dead white worm from deep beneath the sea that he’d encased in glass. Other times, he would emerge to rant and rave about the orbits of the moons to anyone and everyone who would listen.

His argument amounted to the idea that Fundament’s moons had been shifted out of their natural orbits. That now their paths would cross near each other and their combined gravities would tug on a section of Fundament’s vast inner ocean. As the moons continued along their new paths they would separate, and the massive bulge they had created would be released resulting in a “God-Wave” that would sweep over all the continents spread across the gas giant’s sea. All the civilizations of Fundament, amounting to trillions of lives, would be destroyed.

Some, like Taox, thought the king had gone mad. She arranged his overthrow for just that reason. But Aurash must have still believed her father. Though we are not told exactly what the Tungsten Monoliths were, we can guess they were located at a place of meeting, or a place of learning, or a place of science, since it was there that Aurash somehow confirmed her father’s theories about the moons and the God-Wave. Before she returned from her trip she sent her sister Sathona a message to tell their father that he had been right!

For several months following their exile, Aurash, Sathona, and Xi Ro sailed and explored far from home. It would seem likely that Aurash, the sailor and navigator, would have been leading her younger siblings, but oddly, more and more often it was Sathona’s crazy ideas that saw the three sisters through their troubles. She would hide herself away from the other two insisting that she needed to be alone to think and would come back with insane, risky plans that worked time and time again.

Curiously, she never told her sisters that one of the last things she did as she fled with them into exile was steal their father’s familiar right out of his hands…

In her journal at sea, Aurash wrote that it seemed like Sathona manufactured good luck by sheer force of will. That is probably why after a year in exile, Aurash and Xi Ro followed their sister’s crazy advice and sailed blindly into a violent maelstrom.

Except, Sathona wasn’t crazy and wasn’t blind. Somehow, she knew what they would find inside!

Sources:
Calcified Fragments: Curiosity
II: The Hateful Verse
III: The Oath
IV: Syzygy
V: Needle and Worm
(Yes… I just referenced most everything up to this point… what of it?)

Previous: 3: The Hesitant Oath
Next: 5: The Ancient Needle

Shortly after the three sisters escaped their overthrown kingdom, but long before they found something incredible in a far away maelstrom, Aurash suggested that each of them take an oath in response to what had happened to them. They each, in turn, stabbed themselves through a fleshy part of their left hands with their knifes and carved a short, blood-soaked line down the sides of the mast of Aurash’s ship as they swore their oaths. The damage to their hands would not be debilitating or permanent, but it would be painful and it would leave a lasting reminder in the form of a scar.

Xi Ro, the up and coming warrior who was the youngest of the three royal sisters, swore to take back the Osmium Court and kill their former instructor Taxo who betrayed them and their kingdom.

Sathona, the clever thinker, pledged to become a mother and breed her spawn on the corpse of the king of the Helium Drinker mercenaries who Taxo had conspired with.

And Aurash, the sailor and explorer and who was oldest of the sisters… hesitated. It wasn’t until her sisters provided her their help that she was was able to stab her hand and swear her oath. But why? After all, it was Aurash who told her sisters they should all take oaths in the first place. And they hadn’t needed her help. It seems unlikely that Aurash feared the physical pain of making the oath, so what then? Let’s read her oath together and find out:

I am Aurash, first daughter of the dead king. I will chase my father’s last screamed warning. I will know what changed the motion of our moons. If the end of the world is coming, I will understand why.

On my center eye I swear it. I will understand.

There are two things here:

While Xi Ro and Sathona’s oaths are both centered on revenge, Aurash’s is not. I think, unlike her sisters, she isn’t one to turn so quickly to violence.
Though perhaps not as prone to violence as her two sisters, Aurash also seems far more concerned with something other than revenge. A large part of her oath talks about their father’s last warning which was about the motions of Fundament’s moons. A warning that Aurash claims is somehow linked to the end of the world?!

What is this? What is going on?

It turns out that the Osmium King might not have been as mad and as senile as he had seemed. Turns out, there was something he discovered and shared with his oldest daughter shortly before his death… something that would ultimately spur Aurash and her brave exiled sisters to become three of the worst monsters the galaxy had ever seen!

Sources:
III: The Oath

Previous: 2: The Brave Exiled Sisters
Next: 4: Familiar Ideas

The king of the Osmium Court, one of the nations of the short lived, three-eyed creatures adrift on the seas of Fundament, was old. He was senile. He was dying. His three daughters, Xi Ro a warrior, Sathona a leader and thinker, and Aurash an explorer, were skilled in their own fields, but it would have been difficult for any one of them to assume the throne.

Their teacher, the sterile mother Taox certainly thought this, which is why she made a deal with the Helium Drinkers, a nearby warlike nation of their own species, to overthrow the sickly king and kill his heirs.

Fortunately, the three sisters managed to escape. Xi Ro distracted the attackers with the bright glowing “bait stars” that her combat skills had previously allowed her to cut from the tentacles of the predators that inhabited the clouds above. Sathona’s tricks and cleverness allowed the sisters to evade their enemies, flee their home, and reach their nation’s coast. And once there, Aurash’s exceptional sailing skills allowed them to escape their enemies by fleeing their home and country on her personal sailing ship.

For over a year, a good tenth of their lives, the three sisters sailed away from home. They sailed passed many dozen foreign continents. They lived off the sea, catching and eating creatures they’d never seen before. They encountered and escaped powerful monsters through skilled sailing and risky maneuvers.

And they explored.
And they explored.
And they explored.

And what these brave seafaring sisters found out in the vast ocean in the heart of a powerful maelstrom would not only change their fates, it would change the fates of thousands of races and hundreds of trillions of lives spread across the spiral arms of our galaxy.

Sources:
II: The Hateful Verse
IV: Syzygy

Previous: 1: Fundament
Next: 3: The Hesitant Oath