It has been a while since I posted in this part of the forum, partly because the browser I normally use wouldn't let me log-in to my account for reasons unknown. -------------------------------------------- The Monument of Triumph, where do I begin? I wish it wasn't the final update, because everything we got feels like it would have righted the ship and kept the game alive, if the higher-ups at Sony and Bungie weren't idiots. The Distortions are a wonderful addition to locations, and it's clear they were intended to be part of the Shattered Cycle because of all the DEO-based lore and weapons that come with them. I wish we could have gone to Old Chicago, because it is all but certain there was a piece of III still alive in the labyrinth underneath the city, because the DEO came into contact with III some time after Lodi and Nella Davis were abducted. There is so much lore to go over and give my thoughts on, I'd be here for a long time, so I want to discuss something that isn't directly related to the lore in Monument of Triumph, but something that has bugged me whenever my thoughts turn back to it. Something which, when I checked back on it just now, has crystallized into what is possibly the one thread the devs did not give us more info on in the Final Update. ------------------------------------------------------ The biggest secret and revelation in Monument of Triumph has to be our first meeting with the Winnower, albeit indirectly through Lodi. Being a suitable Emissary for the Nine, Lodi has now proven to be suited to channeling the Winnower itself, which has many lore implications in itself. NOTE: That it happened is a delight for me, since I'd theorized and thought about scenarios where exactly that happened later on in the story. Through Lodi, the Winnower make its all to clear where everything was going, backed up by the [url=https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/seer-shell]Seer Shell[/url] from the Monuments: the Nine wanted us to one day fight the Winnower and "to kill the | idea" that existence must end with a final victor. That we will not see that idea come to fruition is nothing short of agonizing. That, one day, we could have had a final fight with the Winnower's final champion, "a showdown at the end of time", where we have to disprove the idea once and for all. As to who the Champion of Darkness could be, Monument of Triumph left us several possibilities. The biggest and clearest one is the Vex, since they were the original winners of the "Flower Game" before the Gardener and Winnower added paracausality to "the game", to the universe. But this isn't about the Vex. It is about Oryx, who is currently dead. In [url=https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-wager]The Wager[/url], the Winnower makes clear its views on the deceased: [i]"And from that self-evident truth, you must raise your eyes to the ultimate revelation: those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all. Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all. That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it?"[/i] If you die, you are worth as much to the Winnower as something that never existed, was never real to begin with. If you die, then you did not deserve to exist. That is the nature of the Sword Logic. But the Winnower refers to Oryx as such in the previous lore entry from The Unveiling, Patternfall, in a passage about the Vex's origins: [i]"In all their transformations, they retained that kernel of ultimate self-sufficiency that had made them victors in the flower game. But they are not incontrovertibly destined to rule this cosmos. They were made before Light and Darkness, but the rules are different now, and even this pattern must adapt. They are not all mine, [u][b]not in the way that admirers such as my man Oryx are mine[/b][/u]: utterly devoted to the practice of my principle."[/i] We killed Oryx back in the Taken King. By all rights, by the Winnower's own logic, he did not deserve existence because he died, he failed to continue existing. Yet in the bold, the Winnower itself doesn't just call him "my man", but says that Oryx is his in the present tense. Not the past. Again, he is supposed to be dead. Yet he keeps coming back up again and again. We found his body crash-landed and sunken into the depths of Titan in the "Ghosts of the Deep" dungeon. His body has no mind, but his body is still growing, still contains concentrations of Taken energy, and his Worm is conspicuously missing from it. In the "Sundered Doctrine" dungeon, after completing the questline, we found Oryx's Chisel in the depths of Rhulk's pyramid. In "Heresy", we re-assembled Willbreaker and used it to shatter the Echo of Navigation, an "echo" of Oryx from when he first became the Taken King. To me, you don't introduce all of that and not have something come of it. Perhaps Oryx still lives in some manner, and the Winnower is the only one aware of it. ---------------------------------- Perhaps I am reaching. Perhaps I am looking for one last thread to sew into the tapestry of what could have been the future of Destiny's story, and looking for where that thread connects with others and what story could have been woven from it. The rest of the family is busy in Monument of Triumph. Toland has helped Xivu Arath reclaim her Throne World through the Dreadnaught, and she's set on rebuilding it through war. Savathun has learned from Bael and VI that Taox is alive inside the Vex Network, building up strength in a simulated version of Fundament. On that last point, it instantly clicked for me when and how Taox might have entered the Vex Network. In [url=https://www.ishtar-collective.net/cards/xliii-end-of-failed-timeline]XLIII: End of Failed Timeline[/url], Quria retrieve information about Oryx and his siblings from the Ecumene gate to feed into its simulation of Aurash. To quote: "[i]Quria samples the [u][b]Taox intelligence[/b][/u] retrieved from the Ecumene gate."[/i] In short, when Auryx became Oryx, the Taken King, and turned the tide against the Ecumene, Taox chose to flee into the Vex Network. However it happened, she has lasted into the present on a simulated version of Fundament. Which means that at least one of the Hive God siblings, whose journey began out of desire for vengeance against Taox, now knows where her target is. If a possibility existed for Oryx's return....What a story that would have been, and who better to be the Winnower's champion if Oryx did return.