After discovering that Destiny 2‘s Black Armory expansion did in fact, have a story, I thought it might be a good idea to unearth other stories buried in Destiny that are equally good, but hidden away in lore tabs or Grimoire cards. Destiny has always done an adept job of keeping its rather quite good story almost entirely out of the game itself, but it is there, if you know where to look.
Rather than come up with the list myself, I enlisted the talents of my favorite Destiny loremaster, MyNameisByf. What you see here are his specific picks for what he believes are the ten best stories in Destiny lore, and his opinion carries a lot of weight. I had not read through all of these myself yet, but have now and have learned a lot. There are both Ishtar links for you to read them yourself, and Byf videos when applicable. I hope you enjoy our joint project and by joint I mean Byf pretty much did everything and I’m just publishing. Here we go:
1. Marasenna: The Creation of the Awoken
This is the story of the birth of the Awoken, as told with Mara Sov as the main character. It follows the initial cosmic disaster that spawned them, the paradise homeworld they got in the bargain, Mara’s ascent to queen and why they left to return to Sol. Long, and fascinating.
Excerpt:
A point of pure white shines in the cosmic distance. Not just visible luminance—her suit decomposes the spectrum—but light in the radio bands, in microwave, keening ultraviolet, a spike of gamma, a total and all-embracing radiation. It sings. It chatters. It speaks in a voice older than suns. She feels that she could Fourier the voice for a century and never decompose it into its parts. It is awesome and appalling and piercingly true. Mara understands how those who die in radiation accidents must feel: A single flash of invisible power sears away all possible futures except one. She feels her soul itself has been ionized, blasted into a higher energy state.
2. The Books of Sorrow: The History of the Hive
A truly massive tale that tells the story of the birth of the Hive along with the roles of Oryx, Crota and the other siblings that were forever changed by well…you’ll just have to read. It’s a long, often confusing tale, but well worth the effort to get through.
Excerpt:
I will go on forever. I will understand everything. There is only one path and that is the path that you make. But you can make more than one path.
Break your cell’s bars. Make a new shape, make the shape from its path, find your cell’s bars, break out of the bars, find a shape, make the shape from its path, eat the light, eat the path.
If I fail, let me be wormfood.
Byf’s video you should watch (1 of 3):
3. The Ishtar Collective: The Vex Menace
This is not one long tale, but a series of pieces of lore netted together to form a cohesive whole about the Ishtar Collective, and what they discovered about the Vex, their simulations and the Black Garden. This also covers the creation of the Future War Cult, as the tales are intertwined.
Read here at Ishtar and also here.
Excerpt:
We are starting to believe that time is home to the Vex, and somewhere in those unmappable voids dwell their undying minds.
Byf’s video you should watch:
4. The Forsaken Prince: Uldren’s Tale
Why is Uldren such a huge asshat? Well, there’s a lot more to his blue face and emo hair than meets the eye as you’ll discover in this lengthy Forsaken-era tale about his history and involvement in current events. And this is particularly relevant now that he’s you know, not dead anymore.
Excerpt:
So he’s done everything to Guardians he can think of—shot them up, shot them down, sent them on doomed quests, dunked their Ghosts in intolerably stinky selenophenol, drilled holes to bury their obnoxious patrol beacons inside solid rock, tricked them into disassembling mighty weapons.
But every time he gets into a gunfight, he wonders what it must be like to do this without any sheer raving terror.
5. The Great Ahamkara Hunt
This one is told through the lore entries of all the raid gear instead of an actual book. Here we hear both from Riven and from the Guardians on the original Great Hunt. We also get a scene of Shaxx almost hooking up with Mara, which sadly, does not come to pass.
Excerpt:
The Guardians brought this on themselves. The bargains they made, and the power and knowledge they gained was equivalent to the chaos wrought on this system by whispers. The Queen was glad to help them clean the mess if it meant Riven would be the last living Ahamkara. Power is useful. Unique power more so.
6. Calus: The Golden Space Rhino
Why exactly are we roaming around a giant golden space fish? The gear of the Leviathan raid contains a lot of lore explaining who Calus is, what he wants and his relationship to Ghaul.
Read here at Ishtar.
Excerpt:
I have come to admire how you rally against the impossible. It’s not your continual success that amuses me—your Light assures victory—it’s your refusal to kneel. You fight and you die without a second thought. For what? Personal glory? Wealth? The wretched denizens of your refugee city?
You have made bitter foes of races older, nobler, and worthier than you.
Byf’s video you should watch (1 of 2):
7. Ancient Apocalypse: The Drifter
The Drifter’s tale will likely be expanded dramatically once he gets his own DLC and season, but there is a ton of interesting stuff already in the game about his character that should make you excited to see his true, full story revealed. He’s fascinating, and terrifying.
Excerpt:
Nine creatures that Guardians would know as Primevals stepped onto the sand of the Emerald Coast, out of place, impossible, massive, and wrong.
The Cabal let out a guttural cry. An approximation of fear.Tracers raked the air as they fired everything they had against the suddenly-emerging Taken. Explosions rocked the shoreline as the Cabal ship joined in the assault. Pillars of flame erupted into the sky. The Primevals didn’t seem to notice, marching forward through the bullets and the fire towards the enemies of their master, who hadn’t moved from where he stood.
The Drifter’s smile was all teeth.
Byf’s video you should watch:
8. The Tale of Saint-14
He’s the greatest Titan of all time (sorry Zavala) and now he’s dead. Well maybe. Well, maybe not. That remains to be seen, even if we do think we’ve seen his corpse. You’ve worn his helmet and held his shotgun, but there’s more about the man to learn.
Excerpt:
I mourn that I will never reach the heights you have. To me, you represent everything a Guardian can become. Yours is a thriving City. So different from mine. My whole fourteenth life I fought to make my City yours. I never finished.
All I have left is this weapon. The Cryptarchs say you crafted it yourself, built it out of scraps and Light and sheer will, inside the Infinite Forge. I’ll make sure it finds its way back to you. When you gave it to me, I swore I would make it my duty to follow your example.I’m still trying.
Byf’s video you should watch:
9. The Vault of Glass
Man, where to even start with Destiny’s most famous location? The Vault of Glass contains endless mysteries and as a result, endless lore entries to learn all its secrets. Well, maybe not all of them. There’s a rumor, a rumbling that we could be heading back…
Excerpt:
We might guess that the Vex confluxes represent the extension of this network across space and time. Perhaps the Vex use closed timelike curves to solve unfathomable computations. Or the Vex may seek to transcend a physical substrate, and move their thoughts directly into the fundament of the universe.
If physics is a set of rules that the cosmos uses to calculate itself, perhaps the Vex seek to worm their way into these calculations: to become a law of reality, inseparable from existence. A virus in the system. Perhaps Atheon was the centerpiece of this project, a command nexus that unified efforts across time.
Byf’s video you should watch:
10. Cayde Remembers The Darkness
Here’s a piece of lore buried so deep its not even in the Grimoire. Rather, it came from the Collector’s Edition of the Taken King in Cayde’s journal, so Byf had to extract it from that. Though the “Darkness” has been reshaped in the Destiny 2 era, this is important and fascinating all the same. No excerpts here, just Byf’s video explaining things. The relevant part about the Darkness is at around 14:30, but the whole video is worth watching.
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