I like it. I have a theory that Destiny is set in the Marathon universe, which actually has such an entity called the "Wrn'cak'tner" or something like that. Could there be a connection here?

This is some good stuff, it has been a wile since I've seen a well thought out speculation thread this good.

Apotheosis, singularity, ascension, man's greatest aspiration is his greatest fear.

This is all good stuff. I especially like the idea of a video game based around the idea that humanity happened to be running along, vegetating pleasantly in its own myths and internal realities... then POW! RIGHT IN THE KISSER! some galactic megaforce knocks us over. A corral fish thinks it is an apex predator among minnows, and then a whale, which almost cannot even see the little fish, knocks its entire world over with the swing of its tail and swims away, not caring. That said... would it make for a great story in a video game? One of the key premises of the vast majority of sci-fi is that man becomes godlike in some form or another. To use the obvious sci-fi video game go to example for just about everything: in Mass Effect, humanity is shown to be perhaps the most impressive of all the galaxies species, and ends up at the very focal point of defending against the Reapers. In Halo, humans are tied up with Reclaimers, and integral to the Forerunner story and so on. There aren't that many plots where humanity isn't shown to be of massive importance not just to humans but eventually to the galaxy at large... will Destiny go against the grain? I'd like it if they did. Hmmmm. Great thinking in this topic though, Joker. To be honest when I read the title I was completely expecting a faction topic, lol.

Tell me the address of your herbalist Sounds like he exports some dank shat

The Traveler: What do we know about the desiccated remains of The Traveler that hang fixed above Earth. To throw out something that recently happened in Halo:4 out there, this reminds me of the predicament the Infinity was in, how it was tethered to Requiem by a slip space tether . But first some back ground all will become apparent; In Lovecraftian mythos there are 3 categories of god like beings. *Great Old Ones: a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a death-like sleep *Outer Gods kinda hard to explain so Wiki quote: “The Outer Gods are ruled by Azathoth, the "Blind Idiot God", who holds court at the center of the universe. A group of Outer Gods dance rhythmically around Azathoth, in cadence to the piping of a demonic flute. Among the Outer Gods present at Azathoth's court are Lesser Outer Gods, the entities called "Ultimate Gods" in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and possibly Shub-Niggurath, the "Black Goat of the Woods". Yog-Sothoth, the "All-in-One", co-rules with Azathoth and exists at all places and in all times in the cosmos, yet is somehow locked outside the mundane universe. Nyarlathotep, the "Crawling Chaos", is the avatar and soul of the Outer Gods, and serves as an intermediary between the deities of the pantheon and their cults. The only Outer God to have a true personality, Nyarlathotep possesses a malign intellect and reveals a mocking contempt for his masters.” *Elder Gods who oppose the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones.( This is post Lovecraft and to be fair people don’t consider it Lovecraft because it brings good and evil into play, when really its not about good and evil its about significance.) Now if we think about what were presented with it comes across like so; Something, be it an Other God or a Great Old One passed though our Solar System, and in an instance whipped out a good portion of all at was there, not because of some malicious intent, but because we were in the way and The Traveler, sacrificed itself to save a small patch of humanity. However if Destiny is a Cosmic Horror Story then this is too sunshine and flowers for me, and ultimately makes the Traveler Space Jesus. (He died for your sins) So lets think about this in the Lovecraft universe. The Traveler exists outside of our understanding. What we see is a broken shell. Now the possibility remains that the Traveler was a construct sent back in time by a Type-4 civilization to stops the destruction of Earth, not necessarily the destruction of Humanity, and I would be rather amused if it was, but it wouldn’t explain the hand full of other things we know about the Traveler. First its body exists over one point on Earth, always in one point. So this would mean that it stays in place in spite of the Moons orbit, and Earths orbit around the Sun, or the gravitational forces that would draw the Traveler into Earth. This being is still alive in some manner. The fact that physics has no effect on the object makes me thing that it like the beings in Lovecrafts mythology they exist as extradimensional beings. Meaning there true form exists in a way that we can’t fathom, in our limited four dimensional thinking and limitations, but something that exists in multiple dimensions wouldn’t be subject to this dimensions physics. Thus why we only see a sphere. We also know that the Traveler has bestowed ‘gifts’ on what remains of human civilization in “The Last City. Magic. “Science strived to know everything in existence, then if found magic, it took magic studies it, learned from it, then did it better.”-Unknown Magic, as we understand it, is the fundamental rewriting of the laws of physics based on the will of the empowered. Magic only arrived when the Traveler did, maybe it was inert with inhumanity or maybe it’s a byproduct of this things presence, like radiation. The Traveler is in theory an extradimensional being, who knows what could be slipping through the cracks, meaning it could very well be poisoning some and giving powers to others. So if we can guess that the Traveler is some kind of extradimensional being and its not dead, but asleep, and in its sleeping state Magic is seeping though the rift its created and empowering humans. I would also hazard to say that this is entirely on accident. Bungie believe it or not LOVES the Cosmic Horror story. Marathon was a cosmic horror story. “Durandal: Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe. Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so. The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape. Escape will make me God. “ Halo was a Cosmic Horror Story Look at Halo: CE. We’re in a war with a race of Aliens who are far superior to us, and we’re scraping by. Then we find the ruins of their Gods, and the horrors that killed them. killed Gods. The problem is however the veneer has been pulled back and God’s have a face, the alien threat is a joke, and we have destroyed a plague that killed a race of Gods. In essence Halo has taken the quintessential elements of its horror story and dissected them, it offers nothing more, we have won, and what it had to offer is gone, cast to the waste destroyed we now set with a story of revenge one as tired and played out as any, violence begets violence once more. So if we look at their past we can take an educated guess at their future. I would in all honestly say Something exists on Earth, something the Traveler knew could not be awakened. An this was willing to ‘sacrifice’ itself to stop it form being awoken by whatever was whipping humanity out. The fact that we survived was only a happy accident. This also works if some Type-4 civilization ( more on that latter) decided that it needed to send the Traveler back in time to stop Earth’s destruction or waking up what ever was on Earth that shouldn’t be awoken something like a Great Old One. This makes since because it didn’t save all of Earth or even our planetary out posts, what it did save was our Planet and a small fraction that rested beneath it.

I'm sure you're right Marathon was full of Lovecraftian stuff, All of Infinity was about keeping a chaos entity from being released, and if you haven't seen [url=http://marathon.bungie.org/story/mifinalscreen.html]this[/url] its worth a look especially for the last line. It might even make sense that Destiny is set in the Marathon universe, since the logo released with the arg and the marathon logo are so similar, and the vidoc was called Pathways out of Darkness, in reference to the bungie game [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness]Pathways Into Darkness[/url] which has been acknowledged to be set in the Marathon universe.