#io lore

[coldshrugs]

then vs. now: io laithe

@scionshtola tagged me and i had a blast digging through my screenshots to find the oldest ones 💗

august 2019

lighter ear tips/highlights and a more saturated blue hair color. trying hard to make glasses a thing. no freckles yet. and i was probably so pleased to make her smile in gpose when that was totally new.

december 2024

love of my life!!! besides the darker hair and black highlights, i've had a blast customizing io into a truer version of herself. and i've learned more about gpose over the years so i'm able to take shots i'm proud of!! same little smile tho :> it suits her!

i'll tag forward: @lilas @oschonseleven @hylfystt @birues and anyone else who wants to join in!! i would love to see!

(estinio edition below 🤡)

december 2022

first attempts at gposing with them. the careful vanilla positioning just for a slight hand touch.............

august & december 2024

two of my all-time faves!!!! they're in love!!!

[coldshrugs]

it's this for io:

If your WoL could have handed off their role as Warrior of Light/Darkness to someone else would they have?

[math-memes]

[scarapanna]

Craaazy rough WIP for y'all since I haven't animated in a while sjfjsnfnd <- aka. the usual 3 months new AU content gap

I'll make sure to polish up everything as per usual for the final product, though I ain't gonna lie I always prefer my stuff looking a tad bit rough

[inkyself]

Hello international tennisblr, are you familiar with Lollo’s blasphemy game? It is unmatched.

(Translation under the cut)

Video by musettismo_estremo on instagram

During a press conference Lorenzo was asked about the new Pope and whether or not he would like to meet him. Now, for context, Lorenzo is from Tuscany, an italian region affectionately known for their unmatched capacity to craft elaborate ways to swear by way of accosting the name of god with various and peculiar animals and creative adjectives. So: blasphemy or ‘bestemmie’. When the interviewer asks him about meeting the Pope, understandably, he laughs a little and then says:

<< It’s not easy not to voice [your disappointment on court], with a blasphemy or other things. I think lately I have improved a lot, it’s not something I am proud of >>

Slowed down part of the video where he says:

<<I have improved a lot>>

Soon after said press conference, he proceeded to deliver an iconic blasphemy on court where he attentively spelled the words in favour of camera, with the customary 🤌italian gestures🤌 to spice it up.

Segue a video montage of his best porconi tirati (blasphemies delivered) at Roland Garros 2025 with the words “Said improvements” overlaid and a song which basically says “ops I did it again” in italian.

The comment by picci74 says: “He improved in the sense that now you can understand it even better”

[coldshrugs]

okay that's adorable 🥰

io has gone through the ringer with shipping and me trying to figure out who's right for her. i've put her through several denial ships trying to avoid my usual, predictable type :')

so estinien has been one of my favorite characters for a long time, and i always pictured he and io as two people annoyed to be thrown together but quickly become the type of ride or die friends who don't need words to communicate, but they like talking to each other so the words come anyway. that friendship headcanon endured for years!

anyway, a few things happened in quick succession that got me thinking about how i'd make them work, accompanied by many "but estinio isn't real lmao" in DMs. but it just felt too right! so things clicked for me post-endwalker, but i can't say they weren't circling it before that.

for io, her feelings gradually ramp up over the course of endwalker, building from "happy to have my friend around" to "okay. temporary crush, this is fine" (around the room scene) to "i need him like water" (just before heading to the last zone). i'm sorry, i needed her to pine about it!

fellow wol x npc shippers- If applicable, what was the "oh" moment for you and your oc falling for their love interest? Was yours seperate from your WoL's?

[unshallow-feelings]

Do you think she saw?

Was she cheering seeing her son so full of life passionately pouring his heart out with an unknown melody? Did she feel some relief knowing that in this moment her son was safe?

Do you think his mother saw the resignation in his face in R6? Did she cry once more seeing how the aliens and the stage jaded and abused her child? Did she cheer when she saw what Ivan did knowing her son would live to see another day?

Was she devastated seeing her son's final performance? He looked so tired. I wonder what horrors her mind conjured in that moment about what her son had to endure.

Did she watch as his body hit the floor?

Did she even have any tears left to cry? Or was she at peace knowing that at least her son wouldn't be at the mercy of the stage any longer?

[bloomingskullz]

Io isn’t a bad person, theyre just a very angry one, and i will die on this hill.

The only times we’ve seen Io do “bad” things is when they were fueled by angry and hatred. Burning around the bird capital after they thought they got betrayed again. Attacking Percy to get out. Wanting to take down the very people who tortured them for centuries.

Every time we see Ios true personality, the Io not fueled by revenge, they are anything but a bad person.

They willingly stay more isolated so their friend, who was also imprisoned and mistreated, doesn’t get dragged into their mess. Ios willing to work with and help Percy and everyone after proof of why they also hate the council. Messing around and playing tag at the race/obstacle course.

Ios a trusting person to a fault and we know that by THEYVE BEEN TRICKED BY PEOPLE OFFERING “HELP” MULTIPLE TIMES. They want to trust people but time and time again it’s been proven to backfire on them.

They’ve referred to themself having a “bleeding heart”. That wouldn’t be a character trait of theirs still if they were truly a bad person and not a hurt one. As soon as someone gains Ios trust, proves they won’t betray Io, the mask drops and they’re not angry or aggressive with them.

Io may think of themself as a bad person but that doesn’t make it true. Hurt people hurt people after all.

[pikkissis]

Little Peony!

With a little doodle of momma and daughter airplanes...

God Bless!

Bonus!

Double God Bless!

[cloned-eyes]

Lore Post

crying cuz i made ghoul hate her

[coldshrugs]

crawling out of blender covered in blood: ...pants

[ask-orchidthemew]

JUPITER: Well you see--

GANYMEDE: Allow ME to explain! We mythics are legendary pokemon that have undergone a mythic quest, absorbing energy from other legendaries, mythics and passively through the universe in order to have enough power to fulfill our alignments! Every mythic has an alignment, a task that has us influencing the whole universe & ensuring its continued prosperity. But having such immense power can lead to the wrong ilk seeking to use it for personal gain. There has been an extreme instance of this happening, a very, very long time ago. Thus, there are mythics such as I to keep everything in order~ My alignment is "justice", so it's my job to keep new mythics in line.

IO: i do dreams... night dreams... daydreams... hopes and wishes... its pretty chill

JUPITER: As for me, I deal in paradoxes, unstable tears in reality. I am the seamstress sewing them up! Thus, the mew is my responsibility.

[telestoapologist]

Positivity time! What are y’all’s top fav Destiny locations? My three go-to’s are

Titan

Riis Reborn, Europa

Neptune/Neomuna

edit: oh! it appears a lot of people are missing the tags! y'all are more than welcome to add more than three if you'd like 💖 i just put three to keep it simple and not make the post too big!

[prince--esque]

Io my beloved....Io come baaaaack....pleeeeeeease..

[scarapanna]

[WIP] Deterioration

Sometimes self-isolating with barely any proper outside contact can get to your head.

Hiya everyone!!!

I'm back to animating and just finished the rough draft for this project I've started last week!!!

Genuinely dunno what's up with the animatic craze this year, but I'm having a blast so far/silly

[[Incredibly ooc side note over here, in the ask timeline Nilla is about a month into ""isolation"" with Shadow Milk]]

[thefirstknife]

What are the Tones?

Whomst've asked me this. You're fuelling my unending obsession, thank you.

I posted about the tones before! Most of it is listed in this post! But I'd like to add some stuff now that it's been some time since then.

The tones are noises made by the spires on Mercury (Lighthouses). Whenever someone dies, the spires emit a tone. They basically react to death in various ways, depending on how the death happens; there's different tones to dying to Light as well as different tones to a perma-death. This is peculiar because nobody could hear them except Brother Vance.

He made Trials of Osiris to study them (because it's an endless source of Guardians dying over and over). Mara knew about his research (Trials was accessed in the Reef in D1) and warned him to stop because it's dangerous. It's unclear why. Osiris did the same years later. As a matter of fact, Osiris was super dramatic about it:

"What I have discovered…" "…is dangerous enough to destroy every man, woman, and child in existence. You're meddling with forces outside your grasp," Osiris reprimanded.

The tones are interesting because they're still largely unexplained. Mara implied that they symbolise Guardians being attuned to Darkness and being able to wield it, which is true, but Osiris' reaction implies something more. And it has to be more, because Osiris detected the same tones as coming from the anomalies of the missing planets and from the Pyramids. Long post under:

In my previous post I also connected that to the fact that egregore seems to be emitting some sort of sound/frequency attuned to the same thing: anomalies, Pyramids and, obviously, to the source of it all (the Witness). So there's some sort of frequency in Darkness that is audible and comes from all places connected to the Darkness network (and that network manifests physically as egregore). And in this case, anomalies and Pyramids (and ships infested with egregore like Glykon and Leviathan) are fine; it makes sense that they link to the Witness!

But spires on Mercury? Why them? My bestie made a post recently after we went unhinged (again) because the same lore book that deals with the tones also makes a really strong implication that the Vex were deliberately led to Mercury by the Pyramid Fleet in the Collapse. There, the Vex drained Mercury of Light, hollowed out the planet and used its materials to make the spires (and the Infinite Forest, a simulation engine) and then they waited for the Pyramids to return. Which they did, in Arrivals.

To make things more complex, after Titan came back, it was confirmed that the Witness did not take the planets randomly. There was a purpose to each one being stolen. Mars was taken to search through our Golden Age and Collapse database in order to find where the Veil may have been hidden. This could've been just a random coincidence, but then Titan came back and we learned that the Witness wanted Ahsa dead because Ahsa not only knows the origins of the Witness, but also how to get through the portal (and who knows if she has any other potential powers to helps us get in there or help us otherwise).

Io is unclear, but there are many options; it may have been taken for the Pyramidion and Vex stuff which Asher got ahead of. It may have been taken to study the Tree of Silver Wings (the Witness had another seed it gave Calus in Lightfall), or it may have been taken to study the Traveler's past or the Light in general or maybe something else. The point is, there are options that we can understand.

But Mercury? Zero clue. The only thing that may have been of interest is the Infinite Forest, but Vance sealed it so if the Witness took Mercury for that and couldn't get into the Forest, then Mercury would've been useless and probably released sooner unless the Witness is just keeping it out of spite or thought that maybe it would be able to find a way inside. And of course... there's the spires and the tones. Mercury is somehow linked to Darkness and the Witness, it has to be, and we have no clue what the Witness wants with it.

Not only that, but there's another curious thing about Mercury, or rather, the anomaly of it. It was mentioned in Duality dungeon, by Calus. When Calus tried talking to the Witness on the Glykon, the Witness eventually responded and it told Calus to come to the anomaly of Mercury:

Through the Crown of Sorrow, the Voice in the Darkness called out to me, beckoning me to the absence of Mercury. At first, I feared the Leviathan would not survive the journey, as the Glykon had been rent asunder by a similar journey. By my Leviathan, it is strong. Its heart beats anew, and as it pierced the veil of creation... the Voice greeted me. There were such sights to behold.

So when Calus disappeared off the Glykon, he went back to the Leviathan and bolted straight for the Mercury anomaly in which he was able to communicate with the Witness. Why Mercury? Glykon went into the Mars anomaly. Why couldn't the Witness speak to Calus in there? Or in any of the other anomalies? Why specifically Mercury? This is driving me insane.

But if Mercury is somehow connected to the Darkness network through the spires, is it possible that it serves as some sort of a communications hub? Maybe that's why the Witness is still keeping it? And it still is! We can see it in Root of Nightmares, in the Witness' room. Titan is still obviously there as well because it came out before Titan returned, but Mercury and Io are still trapped. This is also confirmed by the tiny excerpt we can see from the TFS Collector's Edition which I talked about in here.

Or the reason for Mercury is something completely different. We have no clue why Mercury was taken and what's going on there and why the Witness called Calus there and why the tones happened and why are they the same tones that can also be heard from anomalies and Pyramids.

To fuel me even more, they decided to drop two lore pieces in Season of the Deep that relate to Mercury and the tones tangentially. I know literally everyone and their grandma thinks that Targeted Redaction is just there to be funny (and so did I at first), but I genuinely can't accept that as being just a joke. The gist of it is that Osiris has no clue who Vance is and that is, to put it simply, impossible.

Obviously Osiris did not like the Cult and they were annoying to him, but he knew Vance. He spoke to him only once, but Vance is the one who told him to "plant the seed," a message that Mara gave him years before. This literally sets up the entire Season of Arrivals. Not only that, but Vance told Osiris about the tones and Osiris was deeply troubled about them. He's the one who continued the research and went around the solar system after planets disappeared, investigating anomalies and discovering that they emit the same tones. He mentions Vance, by name, twice in Immolant:

"Do you hear that?" Osiris asks, turning to Sagira. He turns the ship's scanning array toward the anomaly. "Like the tones Vance described. From the spires, and then the Pyramids. It was coming from the anomaly that replaced Io as well."

"We could use the Crucible right now. Your trials. This will be very helpful. You mean to stay, yes?" "I will. Long enough to show you how to implement the simulation; but tonight, I must disembark," Osiris says. "So soon?" Osiris tenses his jaw in forced silence. He twiddles with code. "I'm worried about what Vance found."

At the same time, Osiris also sends us the seasonal artifact from Hunt, Fang of Xivu Arath. In it, he mentions:

The zealots that followed me to Mercury have proved themselves useful… twice now, actually. They possessed an artifact in their stores: a Hive fang.

The zealots being useful "twice" refers to Vance telling him about the seed and having this artifact kept safely in the Lighthouse (technically, it's three times: in Curse of Osiris, Vance told us where to find the machine to bring Sagira back and it was being kept by the Cult, but it's unclear if we told Osiris the details). Osiris, again, specifically mentions Vance when he recounts where he got it from, in Immolant:

Sagira had chided him for storming the Lighthouse and ransacking Vance's possessions. "They're my relics," he said to silence her protests.

I know Osiris has been through a lot, but his memories are completely and perfectly intact... Except for Vance. That's bizarre to me, given that there's several important points that tie them together, like planting the seed on Io (something he wouldn't have known to do without Vance relaying Mara's message) and research of the tones, something that Osiris spent a lot of time doing and was explicitly worried about; so worried, in fact, that he was willing to part ways with Saint just to continue that research.

In my old post I also mentioned how Osiris even went to Ana to tell her to ask Rasputin if he heard any tones in the Collapse, but Rasputin wasn't up yet. And when Rasputin was finally up, we had much bigger problems to deal with so I assumed that Osiris never asked because the priority was to find what's on Neptune. But now I think that Osiris didn't ask because he doesn't remember. Because the memory of Vance and tones and whatever they mean was deliberately removed from him while Savathun had him imprisoned. Or, perhaps, the Nezarec tea messed with it. After all, Darkness is memory.

This would obviously imply that the tones are something so important and dangerous that Savathun (or someone else) wanted Osiris' knowledge of it removed so that maybe she could have leverage or to know something we don't or perhaps for some other purpose by some other actor. This was such a big point that the entirety of Immolant part 1 is almost exclusively dedicated to Osiris inquiring into the tones.

Another possibility is also that Osiris' memory of Vance was messed with because of Io and the seed and Tree (and then as a consequence, obviously, he would also forget about the tones).

There's also a possibility that Savathun is literally right now messing with me and she did it for no reason at all just to generate imbaru or mess with Osiris or maybe she even wanted to do one nice thing for him and remove the memory of the weird Cult and the tones aren't important at all.

But I don't know. The fact that they're the same thing that the whole Darkness network uses and that ultimately leads to the Witness seems like something that should be important. However, I don't think Mercury will return before TFS, especially since TFS CE has Eido writing about how Mercury is still in the Witness' grasp. But, consider also that we don't know the timeline of when Eido's writing is set. It has to be set after Ahsa's reveal about the Witness' origins, but before TFS. We don't have enough information to tell more. There's also Vex shenanigans to consider, something that will certainly be a plot point post-TFS and Mercury is a prime location for that.

Either way, there's something going on here, added also with the second lore tab release in Season of the Deep that tangentially ties to Mercury, which is Unexpected Resurgence. In it, Shayura is approached by Sister Faora, an incredibly niche character who was leading the Cult of Osiris before Vance. She's shown still wearing the insignia of the Cult. We never learned why she stopped leading them and why Vance took over; she just kinda disappears from the lore book (Trials and Tribulations, the one about the tones). But apparently she's in the City and she's still wearing the Cult robes and she's back in the story... for some reason??

It honestly feels like some sort of a setup for something in the future, something that might deal with Mercury's return. I need to stress just how small she is as a character: she only actually appears in three lore tabs before Unexpected Resurgence, all in the same lore book. The rest of her stuff is just flavour text on the Kairos Function armour pieces from Curse of Osiris. That's it. Why return her in Season of the Deep? Mind boggling.

This whole thing about the tones and Mercury consumes me every day and night. The fact that Deep mentioned Vance in a way easily dismissed as a joke (but also, note the name of the weapon: targeted redaction) as well as Faora coming back is just too wild to me to be a random throwback or a just a joke. Not when it's beyond clear that Osiris should remember Vance, the Cult, the tones and the rest of it. It's even unclear at this point if he remembers that he planted the seed on Io.

So what are the tones? What are they indeed. They're music from the spires of Mercury that reacts to death and uses the same frequency as the entire Darkness network with the Witness at the top. What is their purpose and what is the purpose of Mercury and why did the Witness take it and what is this plotline and when will it be resolved? Summary: