*Long Post, tl;dr in Pt2* Resurrection. The cornerstone of what defines a Risen and what enables the Guardians to be so tenacious in battle. Allowing them to take complete atomic annihilation in stride and shrug off orbital strikes like a bad headache. A total ‘Get killed, Walk it off’ sort of deal. Such an immaculate and fantastic power, and yet how it actually works is still a mystery. We know the basics, that a Ghost will eventually come across a corpse that still has a spark of Light left in it, the Ghosts stimulates that spark, establishes a sort of metaphysical bond with them, and a Lightbearer is born faster than a dreg is docked. Clueless about their life before their first death and with enough paracausal power embedded into their physicality to forge their own empires. And that’s the part that’s always caught my attention; the blank slate that comes along with revival. ​ There’s no apparent reason as to why Guardians are brought back without memories of themselves. One of the most common explanations is that this was purposefully included in the revival process, intended to make the Guardians more compliant in being the Traveler’s shield. There’s also the idea that the Ghosts themselves have taken to redacting their Guardians memory to better guide them towards protecting the Traveler. I personally never put much stock into this, mainly because the first couple generations of Guardians did just about everything but protect the Traveler. Risen didn’t start acting like soldiers of the Light until after the Iron Lord reformation period, implying that there isn’t a connection between conformity and lack of memories. That still doesn’t explain the cause of Guardian necromantic induced amnesia. And since that’s the main point of this post, obviously I have a few things to say on the subject. ​ This is a bit of a long winded string of thoughts, but it’ll come back around soon enough. This all starts with one minor detail about Guardian revival that doesn’t quite fit in with everything else, which is the fact that Guardians can be clinically depressed. We know this because the Daito product Immortalia exists, a sort of super antidepressant meant to help cope with the existential dread of being a Guardian. Susceptibility to mortal ailments isn’t anything new with Guardians though. Radiation poisoning, starvation, hypothermia, possibly tetanus along with assumably every other infection, basically anything physical that can ail a mortal can also ail a Guardian. ​ I say this detail doesn’t fit in because there’s a stark difference between a Guardian’s physical problems and their mental problems, being that physical problems are completely gone on revival. A Guardian’s issues with their mind, however, persist post resurrection, which shouldn’t happen. Mental problems still have physical factors causing it, such as a chemical imbalance in the brain. Meaning any sort of mental issue should, in theory, be wiped away in the case of total neurological destruction, in which the Ghost replaces the Guardians entire brain/head. Yet that’s clearly not the case since if a Guardian was feeling a little down, all they’d need to do is atomize their scull and start from square one, Immortalia not needed. ​ In fact, taking this line of logic one step further, not only should a Guardian’s mental problems be balanced out upon destruction of their entire brain, all their memories should be wiped away as well, as if it was their first time being brought back from the dead. Exo memory units might be able to be resynthesized , but when actual living grey matter is destroyed, new neuron cells wouldn’t retain the same information that the old one did. But they obviously do for Guardians, which means one of two things is happening. 1. A Ghost is capable of hand tailoring their Guardian’s complete neurological matrix from scratch in an instant every revive, or 2. A Guardian’s Mental Profile isn’t held within their physical brain. Since option two seems functionally more efficient than option one, and since option one would imply that the processing power of a single Ghost is on the same level as the Warmind, I’d say the latter is the more likely of the options. ​ However, if that’s the case, where would a Guardian’s profile be stored? The Ghost, of course. Think of how Oryx saw an Aurash contained within Quria, except the Ghost isn’t simulating their Guardian. Rather, their Guardian would be a sort of AI they craft within themselves based on perimeters they retrieve from the dead that still possess a spark. They take that AI, synthesize/restore a body for it, and inject it within that body’s brain. Since a Guardian and their Ghost share a neural link, the Ghost would have a constant feed of everything the Guardian experiences. If the Guardian dies, the feed ends, but picks back up once they’re in another body, hence why Guardians usually describe death as being asleep or a sudden passage of time. Ghosts would get a sort of ‘spawn templet’ from the corps’ spark to make their Guardian’s body, allowing them to more or less copy and paste their Guardian’s form each time their body gets annihilated. ​ That’s the technical side of this, but why have this complication? Why not just have Light be the magic macguffin in revival? Because we’ve seen actual necromancy in this universe. Its messy and repulsive, like the Scorn, or comes with strings attached, like with Xol. Nothing like how free the Guardians are able to come back. With this line of thought, the Guardian technically never dies, their avatars are just destroyed while their conciseness is held by the Ghost. There is the possibility that Light is simply powerful enough to resurrect on it’s own, and that mechanically, a Ghost just needs to stimulate a Spark and they come back. However, why then are Ghosts unable to be brought back from the dead? They have Light just like the Risen, so functionally its not much different. Because you can put the puppet back together countless times, but damage to the hand is permanent. ​ Not to imply that Guardians are being controlled by their Ghosts. The idea is that a Guardian is more or less a mental projection handled/catered to by the Ghost. This projection is injected into a synthesized clone body, which would be like attaching strings to a puppet, but technically, when a Guardian dies, both the Guardian and the Ghost Intelligences would be located in the Ghost’s Drone body (somewhat like the “Other Half” myth). And when the Guardian is revived, that intelligence is moved back into it’s avatar. This could be why Ghosts will typically stand by their Guardian through thick and thin, even if they’re some one like Dredgen Yor or the Shadow of Earth. Because they’re confined to the same shell, so its either work to reform them or just float around forever knowing you messed up your Guardian’s development as they sleep blissfully inside you. Pt2- https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/253205867?sort=0&page=0