I wrote this in the comments of this [url=https://youtu.be/5LH-RN99Oe4]YouTube video on the disappearance of Sjur Eido.[/url] Watch the video for context. From Xûr's dialogue over the years, it's apparent that he is an entity comprised of the particles/DNA of [i]many[/i] beings, all forced into one body. I believe Sjur Eido to be one of many of these. Xûr came from the dust and took Sjur Eido into himself, and continued to take as needed as time went on. Xûr refers to "himself" as "us", and speaks of the following: "I think the cells of this body are dying." "Some of the cells in this body began on this world, how strange to return." "I feel a great many consciousnesses impinging on mine, and all of them so small and lonely." "An end will come. We will be there." (Xûr knows it will live forever, as long as it keeps taking bodies) "But it was the Nine who gave us purpose, and it was the Nine who keep us whole." “What happens when every cell is dead?” "Bodies come and go but the cells remember. And if they forget, the Nine remember it for us." “Your cells can be more than cells.” (they can be Xûr.. lol) "We came up from the dust, and burrowed into flesh for warmth, and became... something new." (Sjur Eido's flesh, to be exact) These quotes are especially important in terms of this theory, especially the one talking about coming up from the dust and burrowing into flesh to become something new. The dust, Xûr, is a body snatcher, and it keeps the particles, DNA and memories from previous bodies. Mara Sov said that she didn't believe Sjur Eido had been murdered, as she hands the strange coin the search party found on her body to Orin. Then she sent Orin and Gol to a sublunar cavern where they find Xûr. "Forgive them," Xûr says. "Who?" Orin asks, and to answer, Xûr reaches into his robe. Thinking he's about to attack, Orin strikes him with her hammer, breaking his spine. In the process, a tarnished silver capped jar slips from his fingers and bounces away into the dark. Orin takes the jar of dust and opens it and pours it into her palm. "Dust returns, it ever returns" Xûr says. She looks up, and he is already gone. She doesn't realize it's the ashes of her mother. How did Xûr come to possess this artifact of her distant past? She lost it when Risen (guardians) killed her in confusion. Xûr is an amalgamation of some of those guardians, that is why. Why is Xûr asking Orin to "forgive them"? Forgive the Nine? For what? The context here is that they're searching for the killer of Sjur Eido. That Mara Sov believes it was not murder. So it stands to reason that somehow, an agent of the Nine (because the Nine cannot do anything directly themselves) most likely Xûr himself killed Sjur Eido, but in a way that can't be considered murder. What way could that be? Well, it would be a way in which Sjur Eido still exists, because she wasn't murdered, but is also no longer in her own body. She continues to exist within Xûr himself. Perhaps Xûr does this as a way to gather information, or a way to rebuild himself. I've no idea. But the pieces seem to point to the Nine and Xûr having brought an end to Sjur Eido. The Emissary claims Xûr is a prototype. I believe that the Ennead (The Nine/The Firstborn Awoken) are working on a technology for creating physical bodies because they're, for a reason I haven't yet found, unable to leave the flux-tube like human Awoken left the Distributary, by using the living cells of other beings to create new bodies that their consciousness can then be placed inside of, or bodies that they can control from within the flux-tube. Xûr claims he came from the dust (like the dust in the jar in the story about Sjur Eido). Cryptarch Lavinia Garcia Umr Tawil's lore book succinctly named "Dust" mentions, "She sees an almost human curiosity, but stretched over the rack of an alien shape, a provisional superstructure cobbled together to make a manlike form, ever on the verge of failure. 'Planets,' it says. 'My motions, in large part, depend upon their configuration.'" "Much of dust was once cells," Xûr says, and coughs loudly. "This dust was once of the Nine. It commingled. It was forever changed." That harsh, percussive cough again. "Dust to dust. One dust to another. The Nine are the flesh of dust." The distinction in this quote is important. I don't think the dust was supposed to "commingle". I think it was their way of questing out from the flux-tube as individuals, but they, for some reason, become mixed up when they do. The Nine have differing views on how to interact with the outside world, some not quite so benevolent as the others. So, when the dust was mixed and then from it Xûr was created, it means that all of the Nine have equal parts control over Xûr, and it just so happens that the benevolent of the Nine have a majority of that control. When Xûr says his will is not his own, that he is of the Nine, that he means he IS literally OF the Nine. He's been made of the cells (dust) of The Ennead, possessing parts of their very being, but as such a failed prototype, he is constantly deteriorating and needing to refresh his DNA. I think Xûr can be broken down into particles and transported across interdimensional spacetime to any place or time in the galaxy, depending on planetary body alignments. But every time he does, he loses part of himself. The Nine apparently are consciousnesses that race through spacetime, "The Firstborn Awoken" that came from leviathans that swam in the pits of Titan or Europa. They are not of humanity, and the distinction of being Firstborn is important. I can imagine this might be why Xûr presents as a humanoid with tentacles. It's human and leviathan DNA mixed together. The first [i]human[/i] Awoken came from passengers of the Yang Liwei. The ship refused to take a side when the Darkness attacked the Traveler (I think this is important, because the Awoken are apparently beings created from power of both Dark and Light). During the initial sparring between the two acausal entities, the ship was at the centerpiece of a kugelblitz, a black hole-like anomaly in space time that sucked it and all its inhabitants into a newborn pocket universe. The Yang Liwei's 891 crewmembers and 40,000 passengers were annihilated and lost their physical forms, becoming beings of pure potential. Mara Sov, a low-ranking crewmember, was the first person to enter the kugelblitz just before the ship. She reassembled her own disembodied conscience, manipulated the Distributary's physical laws to shape it into an earthly paradise of a planet and created a new body for herself. These entities existed in a plane where time moved differently, like a dream state, so they were able to evolve their consciousnesses beyond that of any mere mortal. Because Mara Sov went in first, before anyone else, the seconds that it would have taken the rest of the ship to enter the black hole, meant she was likely inside for thousands of years, long enough to figure things out a bit (this happened in the lore. When Mara Sov created the Dreaming City, she did so in a pocket dimension, and made time move at a different rate as to gain more of it) Together with the ship's captain Alis Li, who awakened the same way, Mara Sov induced other disembodied humans from the Yang Liwei to awaken as well and reincarnate into new blue-skinned, star-eyed bodies, having only vague memories about their past. So, it stands to reason that the Ennead (The Nine) were Awoken in a similar way before humans were and existed in a similar dreamlike state, so they were able to evolve for billions of years as their consciousnesses raced along the Jupiter-Io flux-tube. I believe they created Xûr from the dust, and his consciousness is created from parts of the memories left in their very DNA, and the DNA of bodies that he's taken since to keep himself from falling apart. And his location is determined by where the Nine are in the Jupiter-Io flux-tube, where the flux-tube is in relation to Io and Jupiter, and where Io and Jupiter are in relation to the rest of the solar system. We know that Xûr is deteriorating, and that he's forced to take on the bodies of other beings in order to refresh himself, hence where Sjur Eido ended up. Xûr is a body snatcher, or at least a DNA snatcher, a prototype made by the Nine as a means to test their ability to create physical bodies and walk amongst us mere lowly immortals. From the lorebook Dust: "Lavinia reads this again, horrified and fascinated. Something on the far side of the gate is learning to assemble atoms, molecules, even haphazard life... something from a world of darkness and dust, probing its way into our structured existence, trying to cobble together a message, an emissary, a body..." This isn't Xûr being created on the other side of the gates, because he was already in our universe before this happened. But remember that Xûr is a prototype, and to have a prototype means you plan on creating more refined versions. I think the Nine are creating agents and emissaries from their dust and sending them through to our realm, and that Xûr is the proto-agent that came before them. To be clear, I don't think Xûr is killing people, but I do believe he's taking their DNA as a means to create and/or maintain a body from the dust that the Nine sent out into our universe from theirs.