I'm not sure if anyone's heard this theory before, but I think the traveller IS the black garden. If you click the links that go to the early sketches of the traveller it looks like the black garden is inside the traveller. http://imgur.com/a/0dELh There are also grimoire cards that reinforce this: [i]"I am Pujari. These are the visions I have had of the Black Garden. The Traveler moved across the face of the iron world. It opened the earth and stitched shut the sky. It made life possible. In these things there is always symmetry. Do you understand? This is not the beginning but it is the reason. The Garden grows in both directions. It grows into tomorrow and yesterday. The red flowers bloom forever. There are gardeners now. They came into the garden in vessels of bronze and they move through the groves in rivers of thought. This is the vision I had when I leapt from the Shores of Time and let myself sink: I walked beneath the blossoms. The light came from ahead and the shadows of the flowers were words. They said things but I will not write them here. At the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life. The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me. But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt. When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn-cut in my left hand and it has not healed since. "[/i] It says we were made by dead power and if you look at the precision damage area on a vex it could be light. This could mean that the same thing that brought guardians back from the dead is the same thing keeping the vex alive. This is why there is no story; we just do as we are told like the vex [i]"The knife had a million blades. And you were giant, powerful and swift. But the knife pinned you. Cut your godly flesh away. Very little was left, you are sure, because you feel insignificant now. The hard slick heart of your soul: That is what remains. A body small as a river stone, and just as simple. You picture yourself as a piece of indigestible grit, a nameless nothing hiding among other nameless stones. Perhaps you glitter like a gem, yes. Pride makes you hope so. If only you could see yourself. But you have no eyes. Not the dimmest sense survives. What lives is memory, and what slim portion of these thoughts can you trust? The knife stole much more than your body. "[/i] Notice how it says "The hard slick heart of your soul". Just like the heart we kill in the black garden mission. [i]"Beyond the towering Meridian Bay gate lies the Black Garden, adrift in time and space. And within the Garden dwell the Vex of the Sol Divisive, frozen in rapture. We have precious little insight into the Divisive's behavior. They seem central to Vex actions in the solar system: the Garden is clearly a place of enormous power. Legends and scant field reports all indicate that the Divisive Vex behave religiously. Why would a hyperintelligent, time-spanning thought mesh exhibit religious behavior? The answer seems as obvious as it is chilling: if the Vex found worship and devotion more effective than any other behavior, they would adopt worship. Whatever the Vex found - or made - in the Garden, it transcends even their power. "[/i] The vex seem to behave religiously towards the garden, just as we are to the traveller. They are both very powerful and at the end of the black garden mission it says you're back on Mars which is where the traveller is discovered in the opening cutscene. Now I've just got my own theories. Vex are known for making bases in celestial bodies; maybe this is to mimic their God which is the traveller. The ghosts are also from the black garden and they were 'made' by the traveller. Overall, I think they're is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the traveller is the black garden