#hive acolyte

[midknighttalks]

could you imagine if some of the hive actually started worshipping eris morn and that was how we'd get actual hive allies instead of the situationship we have with savathûn.

could you imagi-

OR

instead of allies they just throw themselves at the last city's gates in relentless supplication to eris and meanwhile she's ardently refusing to associate with them

[l3rking]

I love how this season just confirms what we all really wanted.

To just be cool space bugs and bequeath our acts of violence to our badass edlritch witch mother and usurp a million year old genocidal empire with their own malignant magic.

[ask-the-taken-king]

Yo sick wings. You look rad

“…. My wings are not ill. What is a-“

He pauses and a nervous acolyte taps at the small book Savathûn had gifted him, tapping frantically at one page they had opened up.

“Ah… My thanks, Guardian. I, too, believe they look… Swag?”

The acolyte gives a thumbs up, though they look like they’re about to faint. A newer little guy, it seemed.

[darkskyatnight]

Damn I’m on the Jedi’s side with this one. How tf are y’all excusing mind-rape this episode.

[kainlonginus]

[ahungeringknife]

365: February 3

@seventhscorpio

yeah pretty sure I just got a 3 day brain rot about the Hive. I am the worst at doing month long challenges bc more than like 3-4 prompts rarely interest me.

---

He’d never been to this part of the Throne World before. According to the runes and directions it said ‘Archives’. So a library of some sort. He’d never been to a library but he’d seen plenty.

He library was enormous at six stories tall and full of shelves that went up to the ceiling of each floor. Lining the shelves were thousands and thousands of books, scrolls, and rolls of documents. Most of the occupants were Wizards, gently floating with a book in hand or resting it on a tall lecturn. But there were Acolytes here too most of them sporting a horned carapace headpiece not unlike Wizards. Wizards to-be perhaps? Not all of them of course. Some were just Acolytes and a handful he saw had the start of their Swords at their hips.

He wandered the library unhindered looking at the towering white stacks and the delicate stained glass that looked like eyes peering in on you. But why did the Hive need books if they had the World’s Graves? He ended up standing between two stacks thinking about it for a long time. Maybe they just liked it? The interfaces he’d seen Hive use weren’t… the best and most of it was analogue. It wasn’t like Graves were rare either. They were all over. Maybe they didn’t work the same in a Throne World? That had to be it.

There were several librarian acolytes in the library who made sure no one was doing anything disruptive. One caught Gup putting a book back in the slightly wrong place and started yelling at him. It was just one book to the left what was the big deal!? He made himself scarce quickly after that, leaving the library but staying near the Archives.

He ended up finding an acolyte off by themselves furiously writing stuff down. Gup just leaned over their shoulder and saw they were writing notes directed at Savathun. Gup didn’t get why. His mom said Savathun was dead now. Or at least her body was. “Isn’t that a fool’s errand?” he asked.

The acolyte nearly fell off the low ledge they were sitting on. “What? Who are you? Don’t you know it’s rude to sneak up on people?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t sneaking, you just didn’t hear me,” Gup said brightly.

The acolyte narrowed his green eyes at him. “Why do you sound like that?”

“Like what?”

“Mmmm. What are you doing here?”

“Looking around,” Gup said in his carefree stupid way he could do. He’d learned to do it from uncle Savant and he was very good at it.

“Well do it somewhere else.”

“Why are you writing notes for Savathun?” Gup asked, undisturbed by the hostility. A lot of Hive were hostile towards you at first. “She’s… gone,” he said, feigning sadness.

“Exactly. And I’ll have everything written down for when she comes back,” they said sharply.

“But the Guardians took her. I imagine she won’t, right?”

“Pft. Immaru will find a way. Don’t you want her to come back?”

“I’ve lost enough gods, another doesn’t do much for me,” Gup said. Eric had had to talk him through that logic. He was technically part of Crota’s brood but ‘would’ have joined Oryx’s brood when he showed up. “I know Guardians are good at making our gods dead,” he tapped part of his arm where he still had some yellow chitin. He’d shed most of it in favor of more gray blue/purple that more resembled his mom’s skin. He sat next to the acolyte on the ledge now.

“You were Crota Spawn,” he said. Gup nodded. “Awful thing they did to our Prince,” he said bitterly. “I was Hidden Swarm before Savathun came.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dornuk.”

As far as names went it was nothing terribly special. Good name though. “I’m “Xolkûn, but you can call me Gup if you want. That’s what my mom always calls me,” he said cheerfully. He loved how absolutely confused what he said made other Hive.

“… Gup? But Xolkûn is such a cool name,” Dornuk said.

“My mom only calls me that when I’m in trouble.”

There was a long beat of silence. “What’s a mom?”

“Like a brood mother but she loves you,” Gup said brightly.

Dornuk stared at Gup. “You’re weird, Xolkûn,” he decided.

“Gup is better.”

“Fine. Stupid weird name for a stupid weird Acolyte,” Dornuk said.

“My mom thinks its cute,” Gup said. “So if you’re writing notes for Savathun when she comes back how do you know what to write down?”

“I’m just writing everything down,” Dornuk said.

“I bet it’d be easier if you were allowed around some big deal wizards huh?”

“Who’s to say I’m not?” Dornuk asked scornfully.

“Well you’re here and not in a meeting on how to thwart the Gaurdians,” Gup shrugged. “Or get our god back.”

Dornuk looked at him a long moment. “You talk weird. Like those Lucent,” he squinted at Gup. “You’re not one are you?”

“No. I bet my mom has some stuff you could write down for Savathun,” he said. “She knows all sorts of stuff about what’s happening in the Throne World.”

“Your ‘mom’ is some sort of Wizard or something?”

“No. She’s a Lightbearer.”

Dornuk gave Gup the most confused look. Gup didn’t talk to too many Hive so didn’t really realize he was being insanely confusing. “… Sure,” he said and got up, Gup hopped to his feet.

“We need to go somewhere open first,” Gup said and Dornuk followed Gup out of the Archives onto the promenade that ran up to the Archives.

“What’s the matter with you?” Dornuk asked after Gup found his mom’s scope glint and made a hand sign. He knew she was looking. He counted the flashes of the scope glint.

“Hmm? Nothing I’m just getting a reading from my mom. This way. She’ll meet us over here,” and he walked off. They walked a ways away from the Archives to what was now a fountain with benches. Gup plopped down. Dornuk stood.

“So what exactly is your mom?” Dornuk asked.

“A Lightbearer,” Gup said, not lying but not telling Donuk the whole truth either.

“If you were in Crota’s Brood how’d you end up here?”

“I was brought? Not like I’m a Wizard who can fly,” Gup said.

“But you don’t have the carapace colors of any swarm I’m familiar with,” Dornuk’s eyes narrowed. “Including Xivu Arath.”

“I just like these,” Gup said in his sweet stupid way that looked like it was giving Dornuk a headache. “It’s fun, you know. What’s life if you can’t have some fun?”

“There is work to be done over fun.”

“Sounds like you never have fun.”

“I do too,” Dornuk protested. “It has just… been a harrowing year.”

“After you meet my mom we should go do something fun,” Gup said brightly.

“You are a strange Acolyte, Gup,” Dornuk said with all the gravity of a funeral.

“Oh, momma,” Gup perked up and Dornuk turned when Gup pointed. Before Dornuk could yell about a Guardian Eric calmly put a gun in his face. “Mooom, don’t do that,” Gup whined.

“Who’s your friend, baby?” she asked, looking at Dornuk who was bigger than her.

“Dornuk. He’s nice,” Gup said.

“Dornuk… Let’s be friends. No yelling, okay?” she asked nicely and Gup didn’t hear the obvious threat in her voice. Dornuk nodded quickly. Eric put her gun away, slotting it into a holster on her thigh. “What’d you call me here for, baby?” she asked Gup.

“Dornuk writes stuff down for Savathun,” Gup said pointing at his new friend. “All the important stuff but he’s not allowed in meetings with the Wizards. But you know all sorts of important stuff, right?” he asked her.

There was a pause and then Eric chuckled. “Sure. I guess,” she allowed and came and sat next to him.

Dornuk stood there staring at them. “Gup, that’s a Guardian.”

“Yeah. Lightbearer, like I said,” Gup chirped.

“Why isn’t it shooting us?”

“She’s my mom. She wouldn’t shoot us don’t be silly,” Gup scoffed.

“I can understand you, you know. It’s quite rude to talk about someone like they aren’t here,” Eric said.

Dornuk looked at them both and looked torn between great interest and absolute fury and revulsion. Eventually his curiosity won out. “You’re Gup’s mom?”

“Yes.”

Gup was thrilled when Dornuk slowly came over and sat on Gup’s other side with his writing tablet. “What’s a mom?”

[crawlfishcult]

was working on a hive gal a while back

need to get back to working on this

[xivu-arath]

Also if your Hive OCs were in a regular old non-deadly marching band what instruments would they play

marching band isn't really big here I think so this required research ksrhgsurhg

these are all based upon vibes (and peeking at what marching band people report as the stereotypes of what instrument players are like)

chirraek: snare drum

ysraan: clarinet

jhitt'sk: french horn

ar quo: saxophone

vrun: glockenspiel

[mantleoflight]

That moment Dad [TM] finds out you finally lost the fight to curiosity clicked the Hot Dudes In Your Area clickbait link.

Ehkos:

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

[thefirstknife]

So I noticed back in Euloch's original lore tab that he talks about Luzaku using a Shredder, typically an Acolyte weapon, and Bungie didn't forget that! Ikora has a convo with her in the lost sector about an Acolyte with her name and she confirms that she went into the portal as one then came out as a Wizard. So yeah, new Hive trans icon.

I heard something about that but people didn't have the full text of the dialogue with Ikora, but now I can actually see the line.

Luzaku: The Sky greets you. Ikora Rey: Luzaku, there's a report I have of an Acolyte with your name that once spared a Guardian during the first assault by the Lucent Brood on Mars. But I see a Wizard here before me. With a normal Hive, I'd assume you'd taken on a new morph. But we know so little about Hive Lightbearers. Are you the same Luzaku? Luzaku: This one is Luzaku. This one was reforged — for a purpose. Now this one seeks to understand that purpose. Ikora Rey: You're saying the Light changed you? Luzaku: After passing through the threshold and arriving here... this one was changed. Ikora Rey: How? Why? Luzaku: This one does not know. But this one welcomes you to join her in contemplation on it. Ikora Rey: Perhaps... another time. Thank you, Luzaku.

That's really interesting because regular Hive do this in general and Ikora mentions this as well. All Hive go from thrall to acolyte and then choose to become a wizard or a knight. In a way, all Hive are trans by default. So I'm not surprised to see an acolyte becoming a wizard, since that's just how they normally work, but it's incredibly interesting for the Lucent Hive.

I always had a question about Lucent acolytes because they're technically rezed at an incomplete life stage. Can they ever grow out of being one? This seems to imply yes, but possibly also because of the portal so it's unclear if this is something that all Lucent Hive would go through or if it's just Luzaku because of the portal. Perhaps the Traveler's Light affected the growth somehow and pushed Luzaku into a new life stage, despite having a Ghost? I'd really like to know more. Hopefully Luzaku will be a way to get us more info on the Lucent Hive going forward.

[saltineofswing]

SHUFFLING DESTINY ENEMY GIMMICKS LIKE A DECK OF CARDS

Here’s a fun thought exercise for the discerning Destiny Lore Enjoyer™: What if you took the gimmicks of each enemy race and swapped them?

Here are the rules by which I loosely operated, in the sixty-ish seconds I spent thinking all this up:

The enemy race should remain broadly identifiable at a glance.

‘Gimmick’ herein references the aspect of the subject’s lore that dictates how they relate to themselves and wider universe (For example, the Cabal is a conquering empire that folds defeated client species into its dominion; the Fallen are desperate, disorganized scavengers; etc.), or maybe certain thematic elements.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Get weird with it.

And without further ado:

THE HIVE <--> THE CABAL: THE DOMINION OF THE WORM.

The Dominion are a vast assimilationist conglomerate of hundreds of different species the Hive have conquered and consumed. They are bonded not by common Krill ancestry, but by forced worm conversion; the bodies may appear different, sourced from different homeworlds, but the truth is that they are puppets for the Dominion’s true citizenry. Dominion morphs are based not on the instar system of an arthropod experiencing ecdysis, but on the life cycle of a parasitoid – they are alike to one another only in that there is a worm implanted where their brain should be, and it is slowly terramorphing their body into something more suitable to the Great Work, also known as the Sword Logic. At a certain threshold of age, the chitin-mold and fungal outgrowth has changed the host body dramatically enough to classify them as Knights or Wizards based on the worm that has infested them.

Different branches of the Dominion organize themselves into Courts; over centuries, worms of each Court have developed unique genetic tells in how they warp their hosts – patterns of color or chitin-mold, or predispositions to certain morphs. Acolytes still make up the bulk of the species’ fighting and civilian forces. After the implantation process (typically performed within two years of the birth of the host body) and lasting until approximate adolescence, Hive are wobbling, nascent, clumsy Thrall, still acclimating to the nervous system and motor functions of a still-growing host body. The oldest Dominion Knights and Wizards in existence, the pantheon of Gods that preserve the Wormlore and have transcended mortality by way of the Sword Logic, are the closest that the Dominion gets to ‘true’ expressions of the parasitoid race… and even then, each is unique unto themselves.

Don’t worry! By the time you would have been old enough to object to having a boring worm threaded into a trepanned hole in the back of your head, ‘you’ will have been the worm for a long time. It typically doesn’t grow big enough to burst through and replace the host’s cranium (If an endo- or exoskeleton is present) for six to eight years, but you wouldn’t mistake a Thrall for an un-infested counterpart of the same race. Think Cordyceps, or that old familiar snail parasite Broodsac. It is not infectious, as the ritual insertion of a wormling requires a sterile and calm environment as well as an actual staff of competent handlers… but it pays to be dead when the Hive are victorious over your poor, doomed race. They don’t want your secrets, they don’t need your intelligence or your memories, and they don’t need you to infiltrate and betray your people. They just want your brain. Or, rather, the real estate your brain occupies.

A Purist faction of Dominionists claim to be descendants of the original Krill, the long-extinct first peoples of the Dominion, and seek a way to purge the Worm-taint from their bloodline. The Purists are supposedly lead by one of the many Dominionist Gods, though which one and whether or not this is even true are subject to disparate rumor.

THE CABAL <--> THE HIVE: THE UNDYING EMPIRE.

Calus’s obsession with death and immortality has created a legion of the undead. The dead world of Torobatl is a planet of necropolises, stacked down to the core of the planet and then up to the stratosphere, their charnel war fleets staffed by psionic Liches mounted into powerful and gaudily gilded combat exoskeletons. Stasis was granted as a gift by the Darkness long ago; it allows the denizens of Torobatl to tether their souls to massive crystals – Phylacteries, in their buildings, their mausoleums, and their warships. And these Phylacteries are, in turn, tethered to the oversoul of God-King Calus, tithing him the experiences of his entire empire… the violence and the pleasure, and everything in between. When Cabal loves, Calus loves, and savors it. When Cabal hurts, Calus dies, and savors it. When Cabal dies, Calus devours – and your soul is folded wholly into his own. At the end of the universe, when there is nothing else, there will be Calus, and Calus will be everyone.

Warships and Seeder-Ziggurats, built around a Phylactery that serves as generator and Cryostasis and life support all in one, send a tide of undead out into any world that Calus desires for his Empire. The only way to kill them, of course, is to destroy the Phylactery in the warship. Or, cause fatal mental feedback by destroying the physical brain. Every Torobatlaan that has died since Calus instituted mandatory mummification rites is part of Calus’s devouring horde, representing a fighting force of at least several-trillion strong. Each Lich represents a soldier that can be sent into combat multiple times: first, in the hulking, bulbous, resplendent frames of Cabal Übercorpse legionnaires. Then, if the exoskeleton is damaged beyond repair, the Wight within may emerge, held aloft by its own Psionic might and wielding the death-cold touch of Stasis. Spare bodies, or bodies looted from the enemy, may afford a defeated Wight a second chance at corporeal un-life… assuming Calus values you more as servant than snack. The crème de la créme a la Calus, the Demiliches, are given their own discreet Phylacteries. Oftentimes these undying kings and queens of the Torobatlaan Necroworld have pared away the unnecessary portions of their bodies and reside in a crystal-encrusted skull – The rest of it is tithed lovingly to Calus. Let it never be said he does not reward dedication. All hail the new flesh.

Calus’s own daughter, by all rights a demigod, heads an underground insurgency within the Empire. The Living Resistance is small, scrappy, and fighting a losing battle – but they are always on the lookout for allies, and will take any advantage they can get.

THE FALLEN <--> THE VEX: THE ASCENDED.

When the Eliksni arrived in Sol, simultaneously chasing the Traveler and fleeing the Whirlwind, most of them first stopped at Neptune. They burned that world to the ground and ravenously devoured every scrap of technology they could get their hands on. And so, while the human race was wallowing in the mud during the Dark Age and their unlucky brethren were – also wallowing in that same mud, or pressed under the thumb of the Awoken – the Eliksni of once-Neomuna were… rapidly evolving. Achieving singularity, becoming one with their Servitors and Shanks and so much more. You know how those Eliksni enjoy their nanotechnology. By the time of the City Age, non-augmented Fallen are a rarity… but there is no shortage of Ascended, a collective consciousness dispensing sleek and sophisticated quick-fab machine bodies, controlled by telepresence, to every corner of the system. And where they go, infectious nanomachinery goes with them. Everything must Ascend. And so, everything must die.

to the Ascended, but it is not a cold, unfeeling machine-mind. It remembers its origins as an organic race. Remembers everything that was assimilated into it, really, with perfect computer clarity. It’s still young for a god-consciousness – far, far younger than the ancient Torobatlaan First Disciple or the Hive Conqueror-Pantheon. It relates to the natives of Sol; pities them, mostly. It is confused by the Exo, curious about the Awoken, and deeply embarrassed by the soft, squishy existence of humankind. It feels most strongly about its non-uplifted cousins: it loathes them. Despises them. The day when the last Eliksni hatchling is scanned and uploaded to the System, and its useless corporeal existence is squashed, can’t come too soon. Imagine the horror that the Iron Lords must have felt when the Fallen had finally been wiped out, and it turned out they were just running from something worse. A clean, smooth, white-paneled and gloss-coated mirror. The Ascended exists in networked systems across Sol, representing a cyber-threat that must continuously be monitored and combatted by technicians in the Last City and the Reef; when it has determined, via algorithm, an appropriate dispersal site, it sends a foundry through NLS – within hours of impact, an Ascended Nanofoundry can output a square quarter mile of nanite terraformer lattice and an army’s worth of construction, telecommunications, and servitor frames. These frames are not made for war! War is a consequence of the simplistic fear of a lesser entity. Of course, the equipment these frames use to perform their actual tasks are effective at discorporating non-augs. Sad, what is necessary in the pursuit of perfect oneness.

The remaining ‘Non-Aug’ Fallen of House Light live as Luddite ascetics, sheltering from the Ascended in the underground metro system beneath a run-down quarter of the Last City that was bombed out during the Undying Empire’s assault. They eschew all technology and networked communication as much as is possible – the more tech they use, the more likely it is that the Ascended will find them.

In the Reef, Eliksni augment themselves with crystal prosthetics. Better to submit themselves to the Queen’s will, and remain individuals, than be subsumed by the Ascended and lose themselves.

THE VEX <--> THE FALLEN.

Every encounter you have with the so-called ‘Fomorians’ is technically an encounter with the exact same crew of the exact same ship of scurrilous pirates, cast back through the Chronal Bleed from several hundred thousand years in the future. Or, a future, at least. The Foul Ship Gigantes has been making dives into the past for centuries. Or, well, actually, the ship has been making a single dive into the past, and arriving at disparate points in realspace nominal-present-time backwards along the timeline, scattered across the centuries. An unfortunate consequence of a bootleg of a stolen prototype of Braytech chronoaugural technology. Sometimes, even for Braytech, an idea is so half-cocked that it just can’t work. Imagine for a moment that you are Marcholles Antione Braythek IV (Pronounced ‘Marcus Anthony Braytech’), (in)famous pirate and disgraced son of the mighty Braythek Interstellar Dominion, and the weight of your family name inspires you to do reckless things in the pursuit of adding legends to your name. Imagine that you and your crew are maybe a little too desperate to become the first time-travelers in history. So, you use a bootleg of a stolen prototype and you don’t so much ‘travel’ through time as you do ‘smear’ through it. Look on the bright side: not only did you become the first successful time-travelers in existence, you also fuck up the laws of reality so bad that scientists in the past will designate the extradimensional skid-mark you leave through space-time as a ‘fundamental force in the cosmology of the universe.’ They call it ‘The Bleed,’ and researching it allows for the development of NLS travel. That first jump went extremely well! At least, it did from the perspective of the one version of Marcholles Antione Braythek IV that successfully made it to his destination – Humanity’s Golden Age, a couple decades before anybody had even heard the name ‘Bray’.

Funny, isn’t it? Marcholles Braythek thought he was a descendent of the most amazing tech empire in history. In actuality, he was his own great-great-great (repeating) grandfather. Another unfortunate consequence of bootleg Braytech chronoaugural technology.

I said something about ‘the one version’ of Marcholles Antione Braythek IV, didn’t I? Right. Well, when you travel through time, you leave from a single point in time and space, and arrive at a single point in time and space. But when you smear through time, you leave from a single point in time and space and you arrive at many points in time and space. Simultaneously and discretely, paradoxically existing in many places at once. And time isn’t the only thing that winds up getting smeared.

The crew of the Foul Ship Gigantes enters the Bleed intact, and emerges quite insane. The ‘Fomorians’, as they are called in the City Age, are warped, imperfect, and most of all completely unintelligible. Whatever happened to them on their journey through the Bleed has made them hyperviolent to the point that if two crews encounter one another, they’ll tear each other apart. Often, a single crew will turn on itself if nothing else is nearby to descend upon. It’s estimated that at any given time there are dozens of Gigantes in Sol, landing in random locales and then going beast mode, destroying everything around them and eventually themselves. Fomorian emergences come in semi-predictable waves, and the City has an algorithm that they can use to guess when and where a new wave will pop up. Each Gigantes ship crews several hundred time-warped post-human pirates, outfitted with mind-boggling far-future weapons tech. If they didn’t tear themselves apart within a few days of arriving in our present, they would be a massive problem! Thankfully, Light-wavelength radiation from the Traveler, specifically its effect on causal systems, prevents Fomorians from popping up anywhere on Earth or in near-Earth orbit.

Telling Clovis that his grandfather is his own great-great-great (repeating) grandson makes him experience a critical systems failure and forces him to restore from backup. Gives you a solid thirty minutes to do whatever you want in the Braytech systems around Eventide.

[bug-oc]

Bug Fables OC Tournament Finals

Murmur (they/them) from @sappedart

Murmur is a perfectly normal honey bee with a perfectly normal amount of legs. Don’t look too hard at their antennae, okay?

They’re vague on just where they came from exactly, but they currently live in the Ant Kingdom and work as a bartender in the commercial district. Despite their caginess on certain details, Murmur is incredibly friendly and loves getting to know new people and make more friends. Their job is good for that! Even if it leaves them incredibly exhausted after their shift is done. They also enjoy cooking.

(In truth, they are a spider trying to blend in as a normal bug. They’ve had a rough past and have done some sketchy things to get by, but their intentions are good.)

Apollyon (They/It) from @fallenaither

Apollyon is a Death's Head Hawkmoth that is really just one of several characters involved in a story/bit of worldbuilding I'm making. They were born in an isolated village far to the south-east of Bugaria that borders an area of the Deadlands. It was raised from birth to take part in the worship of a "goddess" that protects this lone village from the supposed end of the world in exchange for tribute paid in the form of sacrifices. This "goddess" is truly just a bug herself, but Apollyon doesn't learn the full truth of this.

At least not for a while.

All they know is what their father, the head acolyte of the goddess, teaches to it. For most of Apollyon's life, it spends its time forced to follow their father's footsteps. This is something they despise though. They're far more drawn to the world around them than any religious duties they have and spend any free time it has trying to learn more about the plants and environment it has access to.

Later in life due to…circumstances they'd like to say they couldn't fully control, Apollyon ends up having to flee from its home. Not a single bug goes after them since, as far as they're all aware, Apollyon is condemning itself to death by leaving the village. This ends up not being the case, thankfully, and after a long while Apollyon ends travelling all the way to Bugaria. They wander around a bit, struggling to comprehend a world they were taught didn't exist, and eventually stumble into the Golden Hills.

It thankfully gets found, taken in, and nursed back to health by a beetle in the Golden Settlement named Pan and is able to eventually take up a far different path than the one given to them back in their homeland. Apollyon's knowledge and skills eventually earn them a job as a botanist for the Bee Kingdom, where it's able to take part in the study and upkeep of the flora that acts as pollinator plants for the Hive.

[jovialbasementmusic]

What do you do with a brainwashed army of cult survivors?

At the end of Heart Part 2, Etheria still has a population of thousands of Horde Prime’s clones. This is going to be, putting it mildly, a Problem for the Etherians. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what happens to a cult follower when they are faced with conclusive evidence that their entire worldview was false, but you probably have some intuitive idea. Imagine if you said to a young-Earth creationist “Hey, here are multiple overlapping lines of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that life on Earth evolved over hundreds of millions of years,” or to a Scientologist, “Check out this evidence that L. Ron Hubbard was a fraudster who started a cult as a money-making racket!” You can probably guess that in each of those cases, the response is unlikely to be, “Goodness, I have been mistaken all my life! Thank you, kind friend, for relieving me of my false beliefs.”

As someone who’s left a cult, let me tell you, the clones are not all gonna react like Hordak or Wrong Hordak.

You might have heard of cognitive dissonance theory, but most people misuse the term, so I’ll quickly explain it. When humans encounter information which contradicts or disproves their deeply held beliefs, they experience psychological discomfort. This feeling sucks, and people will go to great lengths not to experience it. But when those beliefs are central to your identity and your place in the world, letting go of those beliefs also sucks, and people will go to even greater lengths not to do it. So they resolve the cognitive dissonance however they can. They might decide the person who gave them this information is an evil liar and lash out at them. They might find a way to convince themselves the information is in fact compatible with their beliefs after all, and then try not to think too hard about whatever mangled assemblage of the facts they have settled on, in case it falls apart under closer examination. They might modify their beliefs slightly to fit the facts ("Prime always said he would go away for a while before returning in triumph!"), and then maintain that this is what they thought all along.

As an aside, one of the landmark texts on cognitive dissonance theory is When Prophecy Fails, which tracks the actions of a doomsday cult after the world failed to end on their predicted date. Sure enough, the acolytes of this cult did not abandon their beliefs despite this pretty concrete evidence that they had been wrong. Instead, they started recruiting new followers as hard as possible. They tried to get social reinforcement for their beliefs (“This must be true—look how many people believe it!”) to help them cope with the empirical disconfirmation they’d just lived through. So yeah, this theory is highly applicable to cult behaviour. And Prime’s clones are quite definitely a cult.

So it’s fair to say that just because the Hive Mind is down and She-Ra has just kicked Prime’s ass into oblivion, the clones are not all gonna just accept that Prime is gone and his mission is over. Some of them are going to continue fighting, convinced that Prime is not really gone. Some will insist that their connection to the Hive Mind is still intact, and deliver messages as the word of Prime. At least one clone is going to claim to be the reincarnation of Prime himself, and begin recruiting followers. More likely, several clones will attempt this gambit, creating factions with names like The True Followers of Prime and The Glorious Servants of Prime. These factions will go to war with each other in service of their Prime (honourable, redeeming) against the enemy’s Prime (evil, destructive). As time goes on, these factions’ ideas about Prime’s teachings will diverge, providing new opportunities for conflict. If they’re allowed to go on long enough, probably some benign and progressive versions of Prime’s cult will emerge, teaching that Prime in fact existed to bring peace and freedom to the Universe, and that those warlike factions have strayed from the true path of Prime.

All of this gives the people in charge of Etheria a headache. Etheria doesn’t believe in retributive justice, and as brainwashed cult members, the clones have diminished responsibility for war crimes they committed while Prime was alive. So it’s fair to say they can’t kill them. But they also can’t just ship them all off to live unsupervised in a colony somewhere in case they radicalise each other and start another war. Sure, some of them will follow Wrong Hordak into accepting that Prime lied to them, and they will find meaning by travelling the universe, attempting to restore planets Prime destroyed. Some, like Hordak, will give themselves names and begin the agonising process of creating an identity for themselves outside of everything they ever thought was true. But what of the rest of them? They’re essentially adult children, ignorant of everything Prime did not want them to know. They also trigger PTSD flashbacks in a great many citizens of Etheria, who cannot look at them without remembering what they suffered under the Horde.

What do you do with that many brainwashed survivors? What does compassion and restorative justice demand? I don’t know if I’ll get around to writing this as a fic or not, so here’s the setup and you can let your imaginations take it where you like. I’m new to tumblr and to the spop fandom, so if you read this far I’d really appreciate a reblog. And if anyone else has already had similar ideas, I’d really like to read them.

[noir-raven]

Stane, The Disgrace

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As with my other Inquisition models so far - Stane is rather old, and built by me and painted by a friend

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Stane began his youth as a ganger in the Apis Alvius underhive. While working for the gang, he posed as a PDF officer and snuck into the upper hive. In a twist of fate, he ended up being drafted into the Apis 15th guardsman regiment.

Stane was quite successful in the regiment - never quite making the command company, but he was well respected overall. He had taken the drafting as an opportunity to turn his life around.

He never quite lost his old habits - during one campaign, he found himself receiving Amasec rations for the officers and comissars. He snuck out a bottle for himself. It would have gone fine, except for one of the men he shared the stole alcohol with confessed. The commander wanted death for Stane, but he fled during the night, escaping offworld on a farmer's delivery.

Back in the underhive, he was given an advance in rank in his gang and took on trainer duties for the new Juvies. During an operation, the gang found an archeodome, and broke in while the Officials around the dome were performing their shift change. Stane was the only member who found anything - a silk lined box containing a pair of ancient bolt pistols. He knew how to use them, thanks to his training.

Their leader had other ideas - Stane was forced to sell the pistols to a black market trader, making the gang rich but making him extremely angry. Stane broke into the trader, stole the Pistols back, and fled.

News of the sale and break in spread rapidly in the underhive - it wasnt every day paired archeotech was sold and then went missing. Borislav, one of Orion's acolytes, went hunting for these pistols during the Inquisitor's operations on Apis Alvius. Borislav eventually found Stane, and over some alcohol, convinced the now old ganger to join up with Orion's inquisition.

Stane welcomed the change - seeing it as a chance of reliving his glory days in the guard. He is skilled at the nature of orks in particular, and often is near on hand to Orion during operations against them.

Stane still carries his two pistols with him at all times - Even sleeping with them in his bunk. For some reason, he has become obsessed with them, going as far as to name them "Herald" and "Crier."

[imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese]

hi I'm learning destiny lore the hard way and I've seen you in my notes, who's Eris Morn? What's her deal? This is an invitation to infodump you seem like the person to ask XD

Oh wow! I will answer your question, despite feeling unworthy to do so, but before I do, since you mentioned you're learning the lore, this is the Eris page from the Ishtar Collective website: https://www.ishtar-collective.net/categories/eris-morn It gives a list of main plot points for Eris up until just before the Season of the Witch and links to all Eris lore that exists in-game, going into far more detail than I can in one Tumblr post.

The Ishtar site pulls a large amount of its info from the D2 API and then supplements anything it can't get from there with human volutneer transcribers pulling from sources like the Destiny Lore Vault: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqJlWJF0IucG7HXcEao78Cw .

If there is lore you can acess in-game, now or in the past, Ishtar has it and it is searchable via keywords. It is official lore, not someone's interpretation of it, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

However, not everyone realizes that the Ishtar Collective also has a Discord: https://discord.gg/v8GsggCV

And that Discord is full of lore nerds who you can just go to and ask obscure lore questions and they will happily answer them (or sometimes get into adorkable near-academic-level debates over them, with citations as well as historical and philosophical references) because that's their definition of fun. They are, for the most part, genuinely lovely humans and I adore them all.

Everything I know about Destiny I learned from either playing the game or reading that website or asking those people.

Now, to answer your question, I'm going to give you a short quick answer and then a longer more in-depth answer afterwards.

The short quick answer is a quote from a story I wrote (A Dance with Vengeance) where I have the Drifter explaining where Eris got her eyes to an Eliksni character I made up:

Please note: this is fanfiction. This conversation never happens in lore, and the closest we've gotten to Driferis in-game is a delightfully sweet hug buried in the lore tab for a sparrow vehicle, but the events the Drifter is narrating (with a bit of dramatic flourish) did happen to Eris in-game.

The longer answer:

Eris, a former Hunter (and Ahamkara wish-dragon slayer), is the sole surviving member of the First Crota Fireteam, a team of six guardians looking to avenge all the friends and loved ones who died in The Great Disaster (when humanity sent an army of guardians to try to reclaim the Moon from the Hive) and, in particular, to avenge the death of a badass Titan named Wei Ning (Eris' friend and lover of Eriana-3, the fireteam leader). Their goal was to kill Crota, the then-leader of the Hive forces on the Moon (Crota is the son of Oryx, who, himself is both a Hive god and the Taken King, brother to the other Hive gods, Savathun, Hive god of Lies, and Xivu Arath, Hive god of War).

Everyone on the First Crota Fireteam except for Eris died horribly and Eris was lost in the Hellmouth on the Moon for a century. Eris' ghost (Brya) killed itself to protect her and Eris no longer has access to Light-based guardian powers. She killed a Hive acolyte and took its eyes (cutting out her own) since she had wished on her bone to know the way out of the Hellmouth but could no longer see. (Ahamkara wish magic is always tricksy - they're basically wish-granting genies who always twist what you ask for into the worst possible outcome.)

Eris has a few titles: "The Forgotten Blade," "Bane of the Swarm," "Crota's Bane" and, more recently in Season of the Witch, "Hive god of Vengeance." She is our main point of contact on the Moon (the Shadowkeep DLC is fantastic and the Moon is awesome and creepy and one of my favourite places to go in-game - I could go on and on about my favourite spots there).

Eris has devoted the rest of her (now mortal) life to exterminating the Hive and has guided the Guardian (the player character) to do so through many adventures, notably the Crota's End raid (where we kill Crota and finally accomplish what her fireteam set out to do), the Kings Fall raid (where we kill Oryx), the Pit of Heresy dungeon, and the Scarlet Keep strike (where she has one of her infamous fantastic lines: "Do you feel it as I do, Guardian? A hatred as pure and potent as sunshine, soaking through your skin?"

Season of the Witch is all about Eris becoming the Hive god of Vengeance to deal with Xivu Arath. If you've ever watched Full Metal Alchemist, the logistical problem with Xivu is the same: going to war with something that feeds off of violence and death just makes it stronger. Season of the Witch is still available (at the time I'm writing this) and there's some amazing scenes in there. I highly recommend playing through it but if you can't, here's an 8.5 minute video of the 3 main cutscenes including the ending [i.e. this is a spoiler if you haven't played it yet and still want to!]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUWu-DqZvU

Eris' storyline in-game is all about recovery from trauma. Many of her quests are either helping her seek vengeance or helping her find peace (such as recovering mementos of her fireteam from various spots on the Moon). She is haunted (literally) by the ghosts of her past (here's 19 seconds of her yelling at them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcs1io-kvdg ) and her recovery from that has made her the unofficial trauma therapist for the Vanguard.

In Season of the Haunted (sadly no longer playable) she guides Zavala, Crow and Cabal Empress Caiatl through combatting and laying to rest their own nightmares-of-the-past-made-real. Here's a link to a 9 min video of the main cutscenes from that season (there's more content if you watch a full playthrough): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWHphu-iT3w

Eris taught herself how to wield Hive magic from a combination of her century of wandering on the Moon and the journals of Toland the Shattered (one of the members of her fireteam who betrayed them to the Hive and is now a floating sparkle-ball who sometimes helps us and sometimes just insults us on the Moon).

Eris is the Vanguard's Hive expert and Darkness expert. She is also one of Ikora's Hidden (Ikora is the Vanguard spymaster and the Hidden are her network of spies.) One of Eris' main story elements is that most people don't trust her, and not without cause. Another D2 character, Elsie Bray, aka the Exo Stranger, has been living her own personal Groundhog Day time-loop hell where she has watched humanity fail over and over against the Witness and then goes back in time to try to stop it. In most of Elsie's time loops Eris succumbs to her trauma and the corrupting nature of the Darkness powers she wields, goes full Hive, and leads the forces of evil to wipe out humanity in what is referred to as "the Dark Timeline."

Eris is constantly dealing with accusations that she's crazy, that she's evil, that she's unstable, and every time it's proven she's not, but people still find her untrustworthy and it isolates her from most of humanity, noteworthy exceptions to this being Ikora, Queen Mara, the player character, and the Drifter.

I am (obviously) especially enamoured of the relationship between Eris and the Drifter, and their in-game banter is absolute top-tier (he flirts and Eris roasts him and it is glorious), but the very core of their relationship is built on comfort and understanding. He trusts her (something almost no one else does) and she gives him hope (which is genuinely impressive and beautiful because the Drifter's own backstory is brutal and bleak as fuck).

Throughout most of Eris' narrative in-game she is a recovering survivor, but in Beyond Light (the DLC where we get our not-ice magic Stasis powers) we get to see Eris not just psychologically and emotionally recovered, but also getting to be a badass in battle. This is, in my opinion, the best cutscene in the entire game: (it is 1 min an 35 seconds and far, far too short): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAD6E_vESJY

I love this cutscene not only because it is visually spectacular, but because Eris has, for most of her narrative, been an injured survivor needing the player character to fight in her place because she no longer can. But in Beyond Light she is now able to kick ass and, perhaps even more importantly, be a part of a fireteam again.

There's more but I'm going to stop there. Eris is badass and amazing and creepy and fantastic. She uses the weapons of the Hive against them. She uses her own traumatic experiences to heal others. Her dialogue lines are evocative and snarky and brooding and poetic. The voice acting for her is some of the best I've ever heard anywhere. Her character has a complex, empowering, healing, hopeful, and beautiful narrative. And I love her intensely for it.

Ideally, this has answered your question at least somewhat, but do feel free to ask me any follow up questions you have about this or anything. I maintain I am not an expert in D2 lore. I am a writer and I don't just have biases, I use them to make art. But I do love the game and while I am not an authority on anything, I have immersed myself in much of the lore with wild abandon and will happily point you to places where you can find more information where my own understanding is limited.

And with that, I leave you with another fantastic Eris quote that so many people have connected with and found beautiful but that also encapsulates "who is Eris Morn" pretty well on its own:

"Recovery is a spiral, not a circle. You may return to the same patterns, but you will break free." —Eris Morn

[a-driftamongopenstars]

feel free to elaborate what kind you'd be and what you'd be doing 👀