Tumgik
#(the link contains spoilers obviously so don't click if you don't want those!!!)
sersi · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
richard newby, via the hollywood reporter, decided to just say it 🥰🔥
3K notes · View notes
thefirstknife · 2 years
Text
Many Words From Fenchurch Today, He Definitely Found Something Interesting
So, my Collector's Edition finally arrived and I read the book that came with it. Needless to say, I absolutely love everything in it.
I will however focus on one particular entry because it was put into the book specifically for me and only me, for sure.
Obviously, this post will contain spoilers for the Collector's Edition book so if you're not into that sort of thing or you haven't read it yet, then stop right here. I will put the rest under the cut so don't click on it if you don't want any spoilers. Those who have read the book already know what I'm talking about from the title of the post. Keeping it vague so it's not spoilery on its own. But if you follow the Knife Lore Analysis Universe, you will probably guess that I am talking about some clarifications in regards to this post I made.
I'll go into details over what I guessed correctly and what I missed and what I was wrong about. It'll be a long post (seriously if you click read more you will be scrolling for a while). Let's go in! SPOILERS below.
Okay so, I originally started thinking about this because of this post which made me realise that there are some old unsolved plotlines that we have yet to learn more about. Specifically about Sjur Eido in this case and even more specifically on the nature of her return. Her return is intrinsically linked with a specific event: the destruction of a Pyramid ship.
In this initial post, I based a lot of my thinking around the 1 second image of what appears to be a Pyramid scale in the Dreaming City, something we haven't seen yet, but was in the trailer during Season of the Hunt. It's more or less clear now that this bit of the trailer is either a misinterpretation of the triangle in the footage or this footage was made before Bungie decided that they won't put Pyramids in the Dreaming City (something I alluded to as a possibility in the post). There's a very minuscule chance that this will still be somehow relevant in the future, but as of now, we can put it aside. There won't be any more major events happening during this season as it has been concluded with Exorcism. It's possible for an end of season event to happen perhaps, but definitely nothing involving a mission with Pyramids.
But ever since I noticed this, it got me thinking about the Pyramid in Savathun's throne world. I started thinking about how it got there. We found out it's going to be a raid location and that it's a major piece of the environment in the throne world. I was obviously wrong about Pyramid ship destruction happening this season and have already amended my other post where I suspected this might be happening.
However, that doesn't end the problem of Sjur Eido, her dream and the Pyramid ship destruction. It prompted me to think about it more and I remembered a lore tab called Fragment from Stolen Intelligence. In my post, I accurately surmised that the vision Fenchurch experienced was very obviously a vision of a destroyed Pyramid ship or at least a damaged Pyramid ship. This of course made no clear sense when the lore was originally released (in Forsaken, in Season 6 aka Joker's Wild), but reading this in the post-Shadowkeep, post-Beyond Light era made much more sense. Therefore, I was able to put 2 and 2 together and understand that Fenchurch has clearly seen Eris and VIP #0704 destroy a Pyramid.
I also accurately concluded that VIP #0704 must be Mara due to the connection between Sjur's dream and Fenchurch's vision where Mara is clearly involved with defeating a Pyramid. There are more details in the original post I made and in the follow ups I wrote. My first addition to the post is particularly interesting for the purpose of the Collector's Edition book. I'll go into details soon.
My second addition to the original post just amended my original idea that Season of the Lost would use the extended time to give us extra missions that may involve destroying a Pyramid that ends up in the throne world. It became clear that this won't happen and it also makes more sense that the raid location is going to be set up during the Witch Queen campaign.
In one of the more recent trailers that I watched before reading the CE book, I was getting obsessed over the Pyramid again. The footage of the Pyramid shows it on fire and damaged, but not fully damaged as in the rest of the footage (which can be best be seen in my first addition to the post linked above). So the Pyramid will be in the throne world, already damaged in some way. This makes me wrong again (!) about the nature of the Pyramid's arrival to the throne world. It's highly likely that the Pyramid is already there when we arrive and damaged, but we are then roped into going inside and fighting whatever it is in there as part of the raid. After the raid is concluded, the Pyramid is seen as fully damaged. Perhaps. Very unclear for now so it's subject to change.
The CE book confirms one thing though: the vision Fenchurch had? It already happened.
CE book transcript (and source to the user responsible for the transcript, thank you very much @meatjester).
The relevant lore starts on page 22 of this document and is titled "SUBJ: FOLLOWUP ON AFFIDAVIT FOR INCID #12059" (In Fragment: "SUBJ: Affidavit regarding Incident #12059"). This is how we know, besides the actual text, that these are talking about the same thing.
The first part of Fenchurch's report is important because it summarises his previous report and also tells us about when the report in the CE book was filed: some time after Season of Arrivals ended (because he mentions the planets being eaten by Darkness). So in Y4, aka this year of Destiny:
Fenchurch (and Neville!) reporting in. I've finally been able to sit ERI-223 down for a few moments and ask her about the vision I experienced on Luna. (See my affidavit regarding #12059.) In short, I saw VIP #0704 tending to ERI-223's wounds in the wreckage of a destroyed vessel. This was prior to the discovery of the Pyramid on Luna. I now believe the wreckage was from a ship of the same type: one of the intruders that presaged the disappearance of Mars, Io, Titan and Mercury.
Fenchurch realised that the ship he saw in his vision was a Pyramid because he saw the Pyramids show up to our system. Some time after Arrivals ended, Fenchurch caught with Eris (ERI-223) to ask her about his vision. Eris was not amused by this and got very upset. However, later in the day, she called Fenchurch back and apologised. She was finally willing to talk about it. Eris tells Fenchurch that the events of the vision are real:
After an elliptical conversation regarding the emotional burden of her role as a constant harbinger of worse to come, ERI-223 confirmed that my vision had actually occurred.
It's an understatement to say that I lost my shit over this. The events that Eris describes go on for a while so I will not copy the entire thing because the post will be long anyway, but I'll definitely put lines that are relevant. I will summarise the event as clearly as possible, but the text is linked and I highly recommend checking it out yourself.
Eris tells Fenchurch that at some point after the events of Forsaken and before the events of Shadowkeep, she was in contact with Mara Sov (VIP #0704) who at that point already knew about the Pyramids approaching. This isn't surprising, as Mara had the image of the Pyramid ship on her purple hologram during visits to her Court. She's known about their return AND the exact shape they have far longer than anyone else, except maybe Elsie. Speaking of, Eris tells us that Mara has been in contact with VIP #0101 who is easily identified as Elsie. These lines specifically immediately tell us that it's Elsie:
VIP #0101, familiar with the difficulties of recursing time loops, urged #0704 to break out of the Dreaming City and move against the intruders. In #0101's past timeline or timelines (I am not convinced she has been entirely truthful about how she moves between times; would make sense for her to protect her method of transit, given the scale of betrayal she has witnessed)...
Eris goes on and explains that Mara and Elsie came up with a plan. Elsie will provide information from Rasputin (!) from the future, while Mara will provide paracausal power that Rasputin doesn't have. Eris' involvement is also explained:
VIP #0704 struck a deal with #0101: #0101 would provide data that a future Rasputin had used to track the intruder ships, and #0704 would provide the raw paracausal power that Rasputin lacked. ERI-223 was involved because #0704 had recently extracted her from Crota's abandoned throne world, and felt an emotional debt to #0704 over past service regarding the defeat of VIP #2015.
Mara saved Eris from Crota's abandoned throne world and Mara helped with the defeat of Oryx (VIP #2015), two things Eris felt immense gratitude for. I got very excited here because, as I already hinted in my first edit to the original post I made about the destruction of a Pyramid, I specifically mentioned that Rasputin is the one who has all the data about tracking and raw information on the Pyramid ships because he's the one who's fought them twice: in the Collapse and his attempt at the start of Season of Arrivals. He has also been tracking them all the way since before Season of the Worthy and has detected them entering the system during Season of Dawn where he provided information to Osiris on where to find them at the edge of the heliopause.
Apparently, Rasputin from the future was able to provide data on how to track the Pyramids and with that knowledge, Mara, Elsie and Eris were able to go beat up a Pyramid ship. It's currently unclear whether "future Rasputin" means our timeline or some alternate timeline Elsie has seen, but given that this plan happened in Y2 and Rasputin tracked the ships in Y3, this IS the "future Rasputin" to Elsie at the time. So it could easily refer to Rasputin from our current timeline.
With this information in tow, the girlboss trio also used information provided by the Nine and Failsafe (AI-COM/XBLK = Exodus Black) to do a lot of technical stuff in regards to the Pyramid cloaking system in order to find an early arrival to our system near a dwarf planet called Eris:
VIP #0704 exploited past traffic with the Nine as well as her own personal experience with the intruders' stealth capabilities to disperse an array of "synthetic aperture mass growl observatories" coordinated by AI-COM/XBLK and possibly other deep-orbit AI systems. The observatories used future technology provided by #0101 to localize an interloper ship near the dwarf planet 136199 Eris. ERI-223 was not amused by this coincidence. (I induce she was actually quite disturbed).
I'm sorry Eris about the planet with a Pyramid also being Eris. Interesting side-fact: this dwarf planet is real! It is very far away and Eris explains that the trip to reach it was very taxing to her. There was also some bickering between her and Mara, allegedly because Mara was still imbued with some of the essence she salvaged from Oryx. When they finally reached their destination, the event is not described as clearly as we might want:
ERI-223 was unwilling to precisely describe the encounter with the intruder. It did not react to their presence as they matched orbits. VIP #0704 went on EVA and at one point removed her suit, I believe, but am not certain, that #0704 either contacted or entered the intruder. Whatever happened next led to VIP #0704's death. It is unclear to me whether the intruder was at all damaged, or whether the debris field I saw on the surface of 136199 Eris was related to this encounter.
The Pyramid did not react to Eris and Mara. Mara left the ship, removed her suit and either communicated with the Pyramid or entered it. It resulted in her death. Fenchurch can't tell if the Pyramid was damaged and if the debris he saw was the result of that damage. This is important because it tells us that we still don't know if this event actually damaged the ship entirely or damaged it to the extent of damage seen in Savathun's throne world or if the two Pyramids are in any way connected.
This is fairly in line with the extremely strong paracausal energy the Pyramids have and also match similarly incredibly unclear event of Osiris meeting the Black Fleet at the edge of the system later. It appears the Pyramids have some sort of a way to warp reality or alter time because in both the case of Mara and Osiris, their excursions to the Black Fleet were deeply confusing to those nearby (Eris in case of Mara and Sagira in case of Osiris).
After Mara shrugged off her death and Eris helped her bring her back from the throne world where Mara went at the moment of death (Mara's throne world being currently invaded by Dul Incaru aka the Shattered Throne which is what SAV/INCAR means in the text), the duo apparently landed on the dwarf planet.
The two then descended to the surface of Eris to explore the wreckage there. There was an incident (it may have been an attack, or an accident caused by volatile debris or by interaction with 136199 Eris's frozen methane surface), and ERI-223 was badly wounded. Although ERI 223 has techniques to survive in hostile environments, they were disrupted and she was exposed to near-vacuum. VIP #0704 deployed a shelter and treated the wounds in what I interpolate was a moment of reconciliation and perhaps genuine tenderness between them. ERI-223 attempted to show me the scar, although I declined.
First of all oh my god, these bitches gay. But second of all, this matches the vision Fenchurch had where he sees Mara wrapping Eris' wound. It also matches Sjur's dream which tells us that Mara and "another woman" were dealing with the "great black triangle."
Fenchurch then explains that due to the extreme conditions and wounds they've suffered, they suspected they may not make it out alive and Eris therefore picked up a piece of debris (which has now been identified as a piece of a Pyramid, either from damage to it or from another source), inscribed the memories of the event to the piece, sent it to the Moon through a "Hive manifold" and made it so any lesser Hive would be compelled to bring the piece to a Guardian.
This explains why a non-hostile Hive thrall appeared in front of Fenchurch's doorstep on the Moon with a fragment of unknown debris stuck inside of it, which is how the initial lore tab in Stolen Intelligence starts. This is how Fenchurch experienced the vision.
Fenchurch, being the man, the myth, the legend he is, has many questions about this event. I'll copy his questions one by one and add my commentary.
1. "Was the presence of a debris field on the surface totally unrelated to the ship in orbit?" - Very good question. I believe it is related because the fragment Eris picked up from the surface bears resemblance to the Pyramid material and is the reason why I originally connected the vision with the Pyramid.
2. "If it was related, did VIP #0704 destroy it..." - Another good question. I am of the belief that Mara didn't destroy it fully, but that she may have caused some damage to it. Sjur had a dream where Mara splits a Pyramid in half with her bare hands, but that's a dream. It's exaggerated. Mara may have attempted to damage the ship with her paracausality, managed to damage it a little and then died. Another hypothesis is that the "debris" on the surface of the planet could've possibly been just the Pyramid sending the little Pyramid scales and pieces to the surface for its own purpose, like the Pyramids did on Mars, Io, Titan, Mercury and Europa.
3. "...and if so, why has she not shared this capability with us?" - Yet another good question. Fenchurch offers a few possibilities for why Mara hasn't shared this. His first suggestion is that she may have recognised that causing damage to the ship or even fully destroying it could've been a one-off freak accident and impossible to replicate. His second suggestion is that in order to destroy the Pyramid, one has to come into a physical contact with it, something the Pyramids have now rendered impossible. The third suggestion is that Mara's residual essence of Oryx may have disguised her in her initial approach, but that disguise is now compromised. These are all very good theories. Impossible to know which one is true until Mara or Eris tell us more.
Ikora replies to Fenchurch's message, but does not address anything about the Pyramid. She mostly focuses on talking about Mara and the issue of working with her. She also analyses Mara's reasons for being distrustful due to learning about the failed futures from Elsie. Ikora also explains that Mara has definitely began realising that she's not the essential component to win, but merely a "part of the bomb" and that she can't fight alone.
This is important because it highlights that, given Mara's understanding that she can't do this alone, she will have to share more about this event with us. What exactly happened on the dwarf planet Eris?
I am excited to know that being obsessed with the Fragment lore tab and connecting it to the Pyramid was worth it. Bungie hasn't forgotten this and they directly explained the events of that one lore tab that came out 3 years ago.
They also set up a story. A story of Mara and Eris (and Elsie) confronting a Pyramid ship and possibly damaging it, if not outright destroying it. It's incredible to go into Witch Queen knowing this because both Mara and Eris will be active characters in Witch Queen, which surely isn't a coincidence given that we will have to deal with a Pyramid ship in the expansion.
Further questions: where is the Pyramid from dwarf planet Eris? Is it still there? Has it left? Absorbed back into the Black Fleet? Discarded by them? Or perhaps stolen by someone who would very much like to strike back at the Black Fleet and present it as a trophy in her throne world? Savathun would surely be capable of stealing the damaged/defunct Pyramid ship and using it as a dramatic piece of environment in her throne world, as well as a way to further investigate the means of possible destruction of the Fleet and possibly any enemies that may lurk within.
It is possible that the raid Pyramid is the Pyramid Mara and Eris damaged. It is also possible it is not the same one. However, even if it's not the same one, the story from Fragment and CE book is vital to our understanding of what we're capable of doing against the Pyramids. No one has ever managed to damage one, let alone destroy it. Mara may have done something, but we don't have all details.
And yet! This story was in the CE book as a follow up of something from 3 years ago. It is clearly important and could very well be followed up again in the Witch Queen campaign, where both Mara and Eris will be present. And not only them, but also a setup to our impending fight against the Black Fleet, a raid within a damaged Pyramid ship in the throne world and the lead-up to the end of the Dark and Light saga.
Finally, it's a setup for what seems like a very minor plot point in comparison, but a plot point nonetheless: the return of Sjur Eido.
"I was dreaming," Sjur says, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. "I saw you on a great black triangle. You split it in two with your bare hands."
"Mm."
"And I was dead, I think." She cracks her neck with a deliciously loud pop. "Or… trapped? Like in a maze. But pretty close to figuring my way out."
The moment Mara and Eris interacted with the Pyramid, Sjur's dream was set in motion. Which loops us back to the original reason I ever started thinking about the destruction of the Pyramid ship and about Fragment and about the raid in Witch Queen. Seeing as this event has seemingly already transpired, it means that Sjur is coming. She is close to figuring her way out.
Ultimately, despite this huge chunk of information about the vision Fenchurch experienced as well as Sjur's dream, we're still missing a lot. We know that a confrontation between us and the Pyramids has already happened, though we don't know the extent of our power against them. Is the damaged Pyramid in the throne world this same Pyramid, conveniently scooped up by Savathun? Giving Savathun a way to further inspect her enemy by using a specimen that has already been wounded? Giving US a way to find out more by launching a raid inside so we can discover a way to damage and possibly even destroy more ships in the future? Or are they completely unrelated? Even if unrelated, the fact that this story was reiterated prior to Witch Queen is for sure a setup to tell us that Eris and Mara have experience with the Black Fleet that nobody else has.
We will certainly find out more in Witch Queen.
76 notes · View notes