SPOILER ALERT. CURRENT STORY LINE MATERIAL SHARED WITHIN I'm wondering if you've considered a few things an(if not) what your take on them are. Before I start, let me say the biggest tool they have to hiding the truth is it is never clear what is just a metaphor and what is litteral? Ghost fragment, traveler 3: "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" From this gather that the Traveler is physically and metaphorically not whole. Either the floating Traveler is the Body (more likely I feel) or the soul. If it is the body, are you the soul? There seems to be much symbolism here to suggest that. Even without this, the Traveler was once whole and has a clear enemy (will come back to that later) made of a large number of many small blades. (thus the imigary of many knives, like schapels, cutting into the body to remove a part of the soul). What about the stranger, her gun is easily explained after she warps away in the direction of TA-DA-DA-DAAA!!! the Traveler. While the Speaker may be the Traveler's voice, the stranger may be it's hidden dagger in the dark. So advanced gun is potentially just mode traveler tech (another card makes it clear it had many many many more secrets and tech to share with us. Ok, so here are the two that made me want to post at all: Legend: The black garden 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. "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" The Traveler first came to Mars, not earth, as we see in the opening vid. And THE TRAVELER was the one who terraformed it. Also, in the opening vid, they had a gun. I suggest they came to mars specifically to look into the Traveler and what it was doing. Their gear seems MUCH lighter than what we currently have. I propose they knew it was terraforming, and were checking it out. There is so much more here, but I am running out of time before I have to go (as well as getting embaresed from all my sure spelling mistakes. Grammer trolls, I know a fail, don't waste your time.) I don't even have time to share the others I've read Summery: I think the Traveler was made by an infinate power, a "Queen" who built a tower. Her people climed the tower to learn of the stars. And the Traveler was made stronger than any other. There were two more queens. One of them made laws that were equal and good. Potentially carried out by smaller traveler like creations. Then the third queen. She built a large army, and she conqured. I propose that Queen of the tower sent the tower (Traveler) away before it could be conqured. The Traveler ran, and found man. For whatever reason saw hope in man, but knew darkness would come and conqure. So it first went to mars, terraformed it and provided an amazingly strong gaurdiner (possibly something that traveled with the Traveler). AND MADE THE VEX. Explaining their great power of simulating. The puropose of the vex was to act as protectors when darkness eventually came, filled with small shards of the light of the traveler that would grow over time. Then the traveler moved to man and worked towards prepareing them. Skip lots of little things cuz time Darkness came, and corrrupted the vex, they swung from pure light guardians to it's enemy. But the darkness (the large army) and it's take over of the vex had an unexpected effect. The went from such brilliant light to such great darkness, coupled with the slightest shimmer of light still working on them from deep inside, they became the darkness that swollows the dark. The black hole in the army of darkness, and potentially part of the only reason the darkness did not gain a 100% vicotry. A darkness so deep it attacked the rest of the darkness' forces. In a great move of startegy, the traveler allowed the vex to wreck havoc on darkness and, knowing if any more vex left the black garden, took it from mars and threw it into the waves of time, to keep the vex contained as much as possible. With the darkness' forces greatly crushed they made one final push on the traveler. In their attack the tore away it's flesh. Maybe the flesh of it's body, or the flesh of it's soul. At this time one of two things happened. The traveler realized what would happen and split body and soul willingly to strike the shattering blow to darkness. Or another side effect of I'll thought out actions. Stab enough knives into a stone tower enough times and it will crumble, on top of you. I have soooo much more but I have to go. Let me know what you think and we'll keep working on this. Edit: a friend and I were talking. We've agreed that the stranger is not a minion of the traveler, but rather the queen of laws. She is neither light nor dark. She has rules that she lives by. And seems to be working with the traveler (the enemy if my enemy is my friend). So she works with the traveler, but is an agent of the Queen of laws instead.

Good theory dude. Me rikey. Anyone think in 10years time on ps6 or xbox3 the final level is gonna be an epic raid event scheduled for a set time where they be sending every guardian back in time to fight back the darkness n prevent the collapse of humanity and the golden age?? I doubt it... but it would epic.

Very nice. I think the whole networking / sim hub things does play a part. From what I've witnessed, I feel The Fallen are really the primary behind this (Fallen from What? From Grace, with the traveler?) The Fallen invaded the Shrine of Oryx and send of them big dogs, why? And they bring a Servitor with them, which means they plan to tap into whatever it is down there. There's 3 major "machines" down in that temple... The shrine that you destroy, which "maybe was connected to their god... or whatever it is" ("it's still out there".. perhaps the darkness?).... The shard, which is suppressing the traveler somehow.... and The Sword, which has slain so many guardians it leaves a trail of their light behind... My guess would be they wanted to harvest the power of the shrine... and/or access the shard to do something to the traveler.. or maybe figure out how it connects... They also invade Venus, probably looking for a way to connect to the Vex network... probably looking for a way to tap the black garden (maybe thats what the Hives shrine is connected to?) The fallen are like the only race in the game where you can find evidence of them on Every planet... they're there fighting the other forces and/or their glyphs are there, painted on objects... They're searching for SSSSOMETHING.... so while the Vex are an important key.. I think The Fallen can't be neglected... The Cabal just seem like Fodder, to me... lol.... kind of like The Krogan in M.E.

All i can say that the game is about timetravel and the warmind traveld back in time to try and save humanity (yes we are extinct) hence the black garden is the darkness and when you step into the gate to enter the black garden you travel forwards in time and the Ghost can't pinpoint where you are " we are on no map in any given space and time" and when you defeat the darkness you brake the loop you are trapped inside. And then the Ghost says "we're on Mars!". So the whole destiny timeline is about Timetravel. The exos are problably the only ones left in the old world. Hence the Stranger that keeps traveling back and forth in time. And her weapon is so advanced that it can only be from the future. Comment your thoughts below :D SS out

Totally makes everything make sense omg I am freaking out. I knew something this crazy was behind everything, but I didn't have those grimoire cards to make sense of everything. The black garden was a place on Mars in the GENESIS REALITY. I am betting the Gate's allow Vex and even Guardians (as done by you in the story) to break through one of the infinities of simulated realties to be simulated and made real in the Ultimate reality.

I decided to head back to the ship and other early mission on Earth and all I can make out (it's very jumbled) from Rasputin is: "Earth - Warning - Warning - Storm - Earth - Away - Away" There are words in between but they are just too difficult to translate as the voice goes in and out. That said, it's fairly obvious to me that Rasputin is either sending a distress signal or it's a loop from the initial invasion to warn ships to steer clear of Earth. I also want to point out that I am leaning toward your theory on the time/space continuum with the Vex. It really explains a lot in terms of how so many warring factions are all settled into one specific solar system. I have another theory to add to it. It is fairly obvious that the Fallen and the Hive are similar in just about every way. It's almost like (Mass Effect nod incoming) a subgroup of the Fallen were indoctrinated and thus became the Hive.

Fun read, and pretty cool theory. The only issue that comes up then is, if we're in the Matrix, then what's our motivation? We're not really alive; so we can't escape. Maybe we recognize that the Vex are using the simulations as tools to control whatever the true reality is. In that case we would want to act as a hard drive frying death virus and destroy all the simulations, sacrificing ourselves to stop the Vex.

Seeing as the Vex use time travel and time travel is hinted at quite a bit in the game (eg. the Stranger's Rifle), I believe Time Travel will feature in future Destiny instalments. Think about it. Rather than have the Collapse and defeat of The Traveller described boringly to us in long exposition, we could see it. We could fight in the biggest battle. We could see what ploughed through the Wall in Old Russia. We could see our own characters die!