I’ll preface this post with the fact that I understand that there isn’t all too much backing it up and it is a bit of a reach, but I’ll have you know, four arms make me particularly adept in the field of reaching. Also, the structuring and presentation isn’t the best in this post as most of this is rambling idea heavy and might be a little hard to follow in certain places, so… buckle up, it’s gonna be a rough one. As anyone who’s gone through the Oracle engine can tell you, Mara and her Court are somewhere rather strange. Anchored on the edge of a large rock formation, Mara’s Throne sticks out into open space where a nebula can be seen far off in the distance. When you first arrive there, the Name of the area shows that this place is located in Unknown Space. Mystery solved then! We can all rest easy now, know exactly where dear sweet Mara is located. Sarcasm aside, saying somewhere is located in “Unknown Space” isn’t the most illuminating description. The obvious assumption is that’s she’s held up in the Nine’s territory, but we don’t know what “Unknown Space” actually qualifies as. Unknown Space could be an actual hide region of space that the Nine have claimed dominion over, or it could just be what’s told to Guardians when their Ghost legitimately can’t figure out where they are or can’t orient themselves based off of star formations. The Guardian is granted access to the Queen’s Court through the Oracle engine, which has been said to bridge worlds, meaning that it could spit you out theoretically anywhere. But just how far away is the Court? Something that I find interesting is that even though the Oracle is capable of connecting worlds, its a one sided machine. Not so much that travel is one way, but the Oracle engine itself is only located in one place. That means one of two things, that a) the portal that you take to return to the Dreaming City is connected to the Oracle engine, or b) the portal that you take to return to the Dreaming City is capable of sending you back to the Dreaming City on its own. Now we’ve seen these portals in another place, the Gambit map Cathedral of Scars, and in this specific case, we’ve seen that these portals are short ranged, only taking you from the two side locations to the center location or from one side location to the other, which is only a couple hundred feet at most. Since the Awoken talk so highly of their Oracle, I doubt that an average Portal could do the same thing, meaning that the Portal in the Queen’s Court shouldn’t be able to send the Guardian back to the Oracle room, implying that there should be a connection between the Court’s Portal and the Oracle-produced portal, but again something seems off. The portal is… well its just a normal portal. There’s nothing indicating that its been “bridged” or has any sort of connection to the Oracle what so ever. It’s just kind of there. If it was meant to be implied that the Portal back was directly connected to the Oracle, why wouldn’t it be a white light like what the Oracle produces to send the Guardian there, visually indicating that it was the other side of the bridge? I could see them using a normal portal out of convince to not have to design an entirely different asset to represent the exit of the Queen’s Court, but there didn’t even necessarily have to be a new asset, it could just have been a free standing rift that glows white the way the Oracle’s portal does, clearly indicating there was a connection. There’s plenty of blighted rifts in the Dreaming City that have two sides, like the one in the Spine of Keres that will take you down to the Shattered Throne area, and its very clear that they’re connected because they look similar. The Oracle and the Portal back do not, and I think that’s on purpose. I think that there’s no connection between the Oracle and the Portal back at all. A big reason is that the two have no indication that they’re connected as I’ve just discussed, but another point is that the Portal back doesn’t even spit you out through the Oracle engine, it delivers you onto the platform that you present your Offering at. The portals on the gambit match work the same way, even with the two that appear to be connected, you don’t come through the actual other side, they deliver you to the space in front of the other portal, meaning that these things are more akin to Teleporters than Portals. The difference being that one is more of a tunnel with two entry points and the other sends you to specific predetermined locations, but doesn’t provide a way of return. Which would suggest that the Teleporter back to the Dreaming City would have to function on its own, separate from the Oracle. But that’s ridiculous, there’s no way a simple Teleporter could deliver the Guardian who knows how many millions or even Billions of Lightyears back to the Dreaming City form the Queen’s Court. Unless… perhaps the Queen’s Court is much more closer to home than we think. One very peculiar detail about the Queen’s Court that I’d like to point out is that the rock formation that it’s carved into is full of Amethyst Geodes, a trait is shares with several locations in the Dreaming City. Even the architecture of the Queen’s Court resembles the Dreaming City. Obviously Mara would likely want to stay somewhere that reminded her of home, so of course she’s model her Throne away from Throne like the Dreaming City, but the remaining question is how was it produced. The Dreaming City was a product of Ahamkara wishes, and I doubt Riven would’ve make any deals to build a Throne for the Queen after how she was treated. And yet, she still has this massive wall of amethyst, of which we’ve only ever seen in the Dreaming City. Conclusion? Mara Sov never left the Dreaming City. And I think this is were I start to lose people. I already know about the “I cannot stay here” quote in the Reverie Dawn set, and it’d be rather weird that Mara would go against the first words out of her new throat for whatever sentimentality that comes with something like that, but there’s a little more to it so I’ll come back to that. But first things first, Mara still remaining in the Dreaming City. What’s the point? Other than she might not have been able to escape, perhaps she wants to keep an eye on things in her City. Petra has said that she’s felt her Queen watching her, and that she likely watches the Guardians as well, but Uldren was unable to reach out to her when she was in Oryx’s Throne, suggesting that the dimensional divide is a hard barrier for the Awoken’s soul tether, or whatever the hell it is those blue apes do with their split-souls. Point is, if Mara was really in the Nine’s Unknown Space, which some have theorized to be on the other side of a Blackhole, I’d imagine that it would be hard for her to reach out to her subordinates and monitor the activities of her City. Pt 2; https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/250610243?sort=0&page=0