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Let me tell you, little thrall, the reason why the Witness revealed itself to humanity at Mare Imbrium. 

It begins, as all things do, with the Hive. You may feel some shred of questioning shed on your arm. Did your wizard not just say this was a story of the Witness? Is the Witness not older than the Hive, and strange to us? Nevertheless, you are in our tunnels. The universe is full of emerald and onyx. Peel the shed of questioning off. 

Now, Savathûn did not know of the existence of the Witness, but she suspected. It was uncouth to say that something was pulling the strings of the Hive, being as the Hive were all-eating and left nothing but themselves behind. Still, Savathûn investigated secrets and unspoken things, and thought the sword logic might be creating a throne just to harness the energy of an eternal vacancy.

Around this time, Crota’s brood took Earth’s Moon without even most of the fleet behind them, Sol’s citizenry running as low on their hoonish little spaceships as they did. 

Crota had ambition and bite and a certain blind devotion which Savathûn knew well.

After all, she had done so much good work faking it. 

Oryx was deep in the galactic center, finding treasures; Xivu Arath was in forever war with the Cabal Empire; Savathûn had been to Sol before and accompanied her brother’s brood as Crota took the Moon. And meanwhile, she had her own experiments, her own black-slab projects. Savathûn’s cunning arts untangled the DNA of the worms. It was heretical to slice those little gods apart, but she did it, and Nokris helped. Through this, she became fond of her nephew’s penchant for soul fire and pickling vats. Through this, she learned enough to ask the worm gods who their gods were.

They answered Rhulk, and the glaive with which he killed his father. 

This meeting of Rhulk and Savathûn before Crota’s brood had hardly scratched furrows in the Moon is the topic of another story. Finally, a victim higher up the chain answered My Witness. 

With this confession, that watcher turned a few of its eyes to the Hive. 

The Witness has a discerning eye for the sorts of injustices which caused both material and morale harm. So, it set its sights on Savathûn’s pet project, Earth.

The child who had once been Sathona felt the universe coiling around her in static-fuzzed black tendrils of fear as she stood on a grand tombship at L2. Nokris skulked behind her.

And so did the Witness raze the Moon, upon which had formerly crawled Crota’s nearly-newborn brood, and upon which happened to be a few Guardian fireteams. The Witness began to enact the Final Shape upon the Moon for revenge against Savathûn, who had dared to investigate it and to lie to it, as she was wont. 

Come here, little thrall. This story is a secret. Did you know that? I am a confidant of Savathûn and I must practice my stories, practice my histories. I must test them in different situations and for different people, so that I get the words just right. But the Queen of Lies suffers few truth-tellers. No, don’t scuttle away. A Guardian or a Tormentor would have gotten you eventually. It’s statistically likely. Look. That hurts. Don’t bite. There! There. 

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After the slaughter, when Eris walked alone, she yearned for the first few rooms of the Pyramid ship as if they had been good times. Golden light flickered on a black stairway. Eris moved along the corridor in a crouch, a stolen glaive under her arm. A Tormentor cut the air with the speed of its passing in the antechamber ahead. 

In truth she had been afraid in the first few rooms, too. The distance between the Earth and Moon had frightened her, every one of nearly four hundred thousand kilometers threatening. The fear didn’t last very long because she had focused solely on killing. 

Eriana had brought her fireteam to the Pyramid ship seeking revenge and glory. Toland, Hive scholar, had approached Eriana wide-eyed and oddly vulnerable, wanting to see the enemy-of-his-enemy who would not play the friend. Eris could not always tell whether he  pitied the Hive or not for having their stronghold wiped out by the Black Fleet. She knew just after that, almost as soon as she wondered about the line between Toland’s iron curiosity and his vulnerability, that she was nearly in love with him. 

Now, she felt a physical urge to hold some proof the two of them had once existed in the same space. What could she possibly touch? A bit of his sleeve, touched casually in passing? The Dread had destroyed anything like that. A piece of glimmer from his pocket? He had bought none on the mission. Nothing.

Eris hid and killed and lived in the Pyramid for three years, until she found her way out of the shifting labyrinth. Gray Moon dust flaked off her blistered, mortal hands. She looked up, trying to find the Earth. Black cliffs cut into the sky like open jaws. 

On one of the sharp outcrops crouched Savathûn. “Ready for revenge?” 

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Toland had studied the Final Shape like a linguist looking for a rune that had been chiseled away, or an astronomer looking for a black hole. Because the Shape waited, invisible, he had to study how it affected the concepts around it. What sounds it made, what light it ate. The Final Shape was implied in the philosophy he had lured out of the Hive. 

So, when Toland finally saw the Shape's outline in the Pit, what was left but to chase it down? Eriana could burn the rest of the Witness' forces. The Vanguard would know everything which transpired on the Moon, soon. Why not look at the perfect cuts, the architectural nonsense of the Caretaker’s ever-ascending tower, and let Luster take him? All would be made known in time, whatever Toland did, and yet what he did was critical, key to the turning of the Earth and the unfolding of the buds. To find answers was to be both king and pauper, to hold both rich and tattered cloaks in the same ever-seeking hands. To be eternally proven right. 

In so doing, he was remade.

He would only find out later why the Luster had destroyed only his body. (And Guren’s, but Guren had always been seeking his own immolation, or his return to the perpetual love of the Traveler.) In truth the Luster had mattered little, or the Caretaker, or Toland’s engineering of the gun in his own hands.

Toland had not architected humanity’s end, but in his new form he was doubly immortal. By paradoxical prophecy, he had forever held the seed of potentially out-living his species. For the Witness did not always choose Disciples from the last of their kind, but it had a knack for choosing endlings.

Toland’s last memory before the Witness’ laboratories got to work on him was of standing in Eriana’s clandestine apartment. The team had chosen to plan outside of the Tower, since they were breaking the Interdict and working with him. In the City he wore a hooded cloak, a common enough choice there. 

He had not wanted to leave. Eriana’s team — no. Be honest, he tells himself in a split second while gunfire and the scream of exotic particles hammer at his hearing. Eris’ team felt safer than the rest of the City altogether. They were stronger than the City, than the world, more decisive, more willful. 

Time to go, now. Time to see gold-and-black light checkerboard his vision. His armor burned. 

He had wanted to stay in that room. The mission which had brought them all together had gone on. But it mattered, even as he was remade, that he had wanted to stay. 

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Free from the Pit, inchoate with hunger and cold and loneliness, Eris Morn accepted Savathûn’s revenge as a tolerable replacement for the fulfillment of her other needs. In her cocoon as Savathûn transformed her, Eris buried her face in the soft flesh of her own arm and told herself the Vanguard would have never permitted her to go home. Not after her team had broken the Lunar Interdict. Whatever ship she stole would have been shot down. Zavala’s duty and Cayde’s brinkmanship would have out-voted any sympathy Ikora held in her heart. 

On top of this, Eris took Savathûn’s deal because, as a Guardian, she was predisposed to endure transformations to her body which came with better weapons.

On Savathûn’s hidden flagship, the newborn Hive god stepped from her cocoon. The cold floor shivered Eris’ clawed feet. Human skin reacted that way, so, she knew, she was still human. Savathûn looked down at her, clifflike, gray-green and glowing. 

Not for years had Eris Morn felt so strong. Armies would move out of her way.

In the evening of her first day, she demanded writing materials. The thrall brought her a skin journal. It looked familiar. She lost a journal which was precious to her, once. 

She wrote: 

Have I taken my fate in my own hands? Or handed it more firmly over to another?

Savathûn says she will give me revenge. Says she desires the end of the Witness for her own reasons, as I desire it now for my own reasons: the loss of my friends, my fireteam. Neither Savathûn nor I have the Earth in the forefront of our minds any more. For her, it is a piece on a game board, a blockage in the millennia-long flow of the Hive streaming through the universe. For me, it is the place which happened to contain Eriana, Toland, Sai, Omar, Vell, Wei Ning. 

I killed a room full of Dread today with my claws and my sword, to prove that I could. Their dried blood flecks my scales. 

Death still waits for me. No Ghost and no worm protect me. In the distance, the Navigator marks me on his map. But revenge erases the perspective from my story. Revenge can be all-encompassing, universal, eternal. To become an avatar is to wear a new name and disregard “I.” If Oryx is the navigator, Eris Morn is vengeance. 

So: let this pen change the universe. Let Savathûn kill the Witness with the new queen she has brought to the board. Aiat. 

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I see another one. Another created thing. My task is to kill it. Eris Morn bull-rushed out of the tunnels, weakening the foundations of an old Clovis Bray Exoscience Amalgamated/Aerochina prefab when she crashed into it with the horn spikes sprouting from her shoulders. She heaved herself up onto a vast plain. Regolith stretched to the horizon. Compared to Savathûn’s hidden, buried tombship where Eris had been living, the landscape almost crackled with dryness and cold. The gray rock was hardly more welcoming than the white stars and black void. 

Something like a Tormentor and something like a Wizard or a Warlock skulked on the lunar plane. Eris cocked her head, confused for a moment about the shape of it. Mostly black cloak, a bit of raw-red skin at wrist and chest. Its body was a map of the conflict in Sol: a face that might once have been human now three-eyed, while the Guardian-like clothing tried to protect it and the cloak-wings of a Hive Wizard sheathed it in strangeness. Reverse-jointed legs and strong arms braced against the ground. The creature was quadrupedal. Or, no. It stood in a graceful bend upward and looked almost human again.  

It stretched open a mouth full of fangs. She raised her claws and readied her magic, chanting under her breath. 

Gold-and-black turrets sprouted out of nothing around the creature. Eris rushed forward before they could fire. She splayed claws against its shoulder and gripped its left hand with hers, catching it off balance in the middle of that graceful bend.

She planned to open its chest or neck up to her teeth. Instead, it tottered and fell under her. Regolith scraped under its back talons. Thing must not know its own balance flashed faster than words in the back of her head before Eris learned her error. Eyes prickling with dust, she rolled over its back as it slid underneath her and let her momentum drop her. The Luster fired behind them. 

Her spines scraped against the beast’s blood-red shoulder. The Earth above her wavered. Golden missiles spun in erratic paths. 

Eris drew her knees in, hauled herself to her feet, and flung her leg over the beast’s ribs. It started to weave a web of cutting green Darkness, but she whispered a last trigger syllable. A green shield flared around them both, stopped the Dark throw before it could proc, and broke the golden coils. If she had been a Guardian she would have had a gun, would have fired full into the thing’s face now. 

Instead she aimed her claws again for the flashing impressions of detail she could see: plasticky, synthetic muscle meeting in a runnel down the center of the thing’s chest, bare now that the cloak-wings were spread; the mouth, not as fanged as she had thought, or just now changed; three familiar eyes.

“Eris?” It spoke in Toland’s voice. 

When she stopped her claws against its lipless mouth she could see new details. His black hair was dotted with inch-long horns.

How? 

She had once watched his thin, flat shoulders as he wrote in his journal in Eriana’s apartment. 

Light, she had missed him.

Light, she had lived for years without the feeling of warmth and light she felt with him. 

“You look like a Hive,” Toland muttered. If he had been one, the tone would been one of reverent supplication. 

Eris sat back, the shield still burning above her. “Toland … ?” 

They spoke. She sat within the shield, astride him, and asked him what he had done. He told her of his hope and of his capture and of the beauty of his failure. She dismissed the last part, wondering whether he regretted his loss or found it artistic. 

“Why?” She said after they had explained the time they had spent apart to each other. 

“Cryptarch Adonna,” said Toland through sutured-in fangs. “She taught me the beauty of an engram is in its shell as much as in the information stored inside. All I want now is to explore that beauty.”

“She was a heretic to the Light,” said Eris.

“And what are you?” 

“I am one of the Hive’s pantheon now,” Eris said, disinterested in taking his words as an accusation of hypocrisy. Yes, she had changed. Yes, she would one day get her revenge and destroy the Witness. To return to the Tower (if it still stood), to try to be good among what remained of the Guardians, would not be the most straightforward way to do that now. “The power it brings is … maddening. Or makes me sane,” she said. “You. … “ She leaned back to look at him. “I will not let you stop me.” 

“I do not wish to stop you.” 

“Your master does,” Eris said. “Will you defy it?”

“For you? Of course.” He conjured a tiny, intricate web of Darkness and knit the outline of a Warlock bond around the top of her thigh. The weave dissipated harmlessly in the wake of his fingers, so that the bond was already broken by the time he had traced from one side to the other. 

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One of Toland’s first acts as a Disciple was to kill the worm Xita. Because Eris had Savathûn’s erratic trust and Toland had the aspect of a Dread, Savathûn’s throne world opened to them easily. They retook the strange hallways of the Pyramid which was rotting into the swamp so slowly that the universe itself would die before all of the stone crumbled.

Where he had failed alone, Eris guided him to victory. She listened as he told her of the symbols there and the gold fire. She listened as he told her the keeper of the Pyramid had left it unattended, distracted as the other Disciple was by other schemes. She killed and cursed and trapped her enemies in fields of soulfire. Progress was slow, since the Caretaker and the Dread lurked there. But a Disciple and a former human with the ontological role of an Osmium sister could kill those forces where two lone Guardians would not have been able.

Three Guardians, perhaps, or six, because in one amber cube Eris and Toland found what had become of Omar, too, and wielded it.

Sometimes they flew and leapt and crawled, and the warmth of their bodies against the alien stone was the only reminder of Earth. Eris found that she did not think of herself as Savathûn’s any more. Not with Toland reminding her of their fireteam, its jokes and curiosity, its mockery and loyalty, its determination to do what no one else would do.

And so in the Pyramid with its open front door and absent enforcer she saw the symbols and spoke the words. Her footsteps made patting sounds on the hard floor. Killing energy spiraled a hairsbreadth from her chitin. She had never imagined her mind could be so quiet. Never imagined the world could be so imminent, so bright, and that even her near-deaths could not even touch the edge of that brightness.

Only rarely did she read the symbols as omens, and then as good ones.

How this story ends: Light. Kill. Witness.

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“They are plain,” Toland said, staring between crenelations at the Dread. 

“I believe their plan is to overwhelm us,” said Eris, mishearing, and then — “Luster.”

The golden streak inscribed its channel on the wall. Toland glanced between the Grim flapping into existence around him, the glow flowing in its channel toward the plate, and the Weaver crouched with a rifle behind a pillar. She hadn’t heard him right, but it didn’t matter. He would simply say it again — fire and turn and put his foot on the plate as it glowed, and say “They are plain, underwhelming, unbeautiful. I do not want to give myself to the Witness, dearest Eris.” 

“Nor to the Hive?” Green magic flared as Eris fought. She killed a dozen in a blow, in one claw-stroke, and locked the plate. The beast in the arena roared. 

“No ascendance is worth abducting me from life. What an unfamiliar thought.”

It took months, to approach the Witness. It took allies, trying over and over with different teams, Eris fighting not to lose herself in her memories of losing her fireteam and living alone in the Pyramid, or in her tithes and her bond to the Hive queen. Instead she knew a fight in which she grew strength to strength, open, knowing her allies saw each other as the pinnacle of their forms and trusted them accordingly.

But the Witness was still strong and strange.