The Ballad of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor
Is Shin Malphur a hero or a villain?
by Jazzy — 2019.09.05
Since the inception of Destiny, we have been pushed forward by our desire to reclaim the greatness of our lost Golden Age — a lost Eden where everything was better, purer.
However, over time our view of this idyllic period has become tainted. We have begun to see that the Golden Age is not as idealistic as we had first imagined, and that just like today it was filled with sinners, wrongdoing, misplaced trust, foolishness and wild ambitions.
Those legendary times still influence the present, now more than ever, with the coming of the new season and the DLC “Beyond Light”.
We will venture into the lore, meeting with Cayde-6 to unveil his last secret, following the steps of Clovis Bray… looking for answers to old questions: what is an Exo? Where is the Deep Stone Crypt? Who is the mind behind it all?
The house of Bray
The events we will dig into are deeply rooted in the Golden Age. There is one name that is repeated again and again throughout this period – a man, a company and a philosophy that stands out in all the legends: Clovis Bray.
He was the founder of the eponymous company that had numerous branches such as Braytech Industries and financed a lot more initiatives, and has known rivalries against other organizations, such as the Ishtar Collective. This mega-corporation has the imprinting of the cyberpunk entities of similar stature in its identity. It was a totalitarian economic colossus, which encompassed almost every field of human knowledge and production, and played a role in a huge proportion of the research and the discoveries made during the Golden Age. It capitalized on its near-monopoly, exploiting its position many times and crossing various moral boundaries in the process.
Clovis Bray ran the business with his family, mainly his grandchildren: Anastasia Bray (revived as a Guardian we know as Ana); Elisabeth “Elsie” Bray; Wilhelmina “Willa” Bray (who helped in creating the Engram and SIVA technology) and Alton Bray. Their father, and son to Clovis, was Clovis II.
The Clovis Bray corporation was single-handedly responsible for (or directly involved in) most of the major technological breakthroughs in the Golden Age: Rasputin and the Warmind Project; SIVA; Engrams; interstellar communication; Project Exodus; solar system colonization, and many others.
Among these, we have one of the most noticeable and interesting: the Exo Project.
Surviving the human spoils: the Exominds
“Exo” is short for “Exomind”. The project seems to be born as a response to an unknown threat – some theories point to the Vex, as they were contemporary to the Golden Age, but the real purpose is unknown.
Built for a long-forgotten struggle, Exos are self-aware war machines so advanced that nothing short of a Ghost can understand their inner functions. They remain ciphers, even to themselves: their origins and purpose lost to time.
The scope of the project was to create an artificial body frame to host a human mind. It is a complicated neural transfer routine, which discards the human body of the host in the process, and it’s permanent. As for the nature of the project most of the human subjects were motivated by tragic, personal situations or forced into it by the company to cover their debts or through offering a pardon for their crimes. It is not known if these matters factored in, but the process was not flawless. There were some inherent problems in separating a human mind from its original body, which caused a phenomenon called DER (Dissociative Exomind Rejection) to emerge. It is known that our complex intelligence and conscience are deeply tied to our sensorial and cognitive systems, which are mainly developed through our bodies. When a human mind is transferred into an Exo frame, it could cause a reject – in the same way our body can reject transplanted parts, such as organs. When a mind is rejecting its body, though, a psychological collapse happens, causing the mind to fragment irreparably, similar to Dissociative Identity Disorder in humans. The result, in the case of the Exos, is the death of the subject.
Early experiments in Exo science managed to encode the Human consciousness into a form that could be processed digitally. At the time, we believed that was the big hurdle to overcome in the creation of the Exo. Little did we know that the real challenge would be the phenomenon known as Dissociative Exomind Rejection.
To deal with these issues, the Exo Project team adopted some fixes. The infamous reboot routine was one of them, involving a complete deletion of the memories of the human mind during the transfer. This proved to help the mind to detach from the previous body and identify itself with the new, artificial one, successfully creating a blank slate template. The reboot can be used several times for effectiveness: the number after the name of an Exo is the number of times that they were rebooted (Saint-14, for example, must have been rebooted 14 times). Although a very inhuman process, this is also dangerous in the long run: it has been estimated that rebooting causes damage to the short-term memory, blocking new memories from forming effectively, and therefore not safe to do over 20 times. This can be easily seen on subjects such as Banshee-44 – whose high number in his name suggests he was rebooted way too many times, making his memory very volatile.
A second method to avoid DER is to create a way to bond the mind and the new body together, and it involves bodily functions – humanism features. Eating, drinking, having sex and others – these are all functions that Exos have, primarily instincts, which are not necessary for the survival of an artificial construct. If an Exo doesn’t eat or drink, they will not die, but these features are important to avoid dissociation from the body.
However, there is a third method, which is not spoken nor heard of. It seems a dirty secret, something challenging morality in an already borderline field. In some way, it is the opposite of the first one: creating memories – fake memories, to be precise.
—so there you have it, Ace, that’s why I did what I did. I had no choice, really. It was that or the great beyond. Just know your dad did what he had to do if I ever wanted to see you and your mother again. You probably won’t recognize me, since I’ll be, well, a robot and all, but I’ll find you, I promise—
—from the journals of Cayde-6
Image by SiLeNtWaLkEr based on artwork by Bungie.
The story of Cayde-6 and his beloved son Ace may sound familiar and add layers of tragedy and depth to a light-hearted character like Cayde, other than confirming what we know about being selected for the Exo program. He read about his previous life in a journal he found with him when he woke up as a Guardian. He seems to know that these memories could be fake – there is not a sure way to tell – but he chooses to hang to them anyway. Fake memories could be an effective solution to avoid dissociation between body and mind – to give a meaning to an end, a purpose to live as an Exo. Cayde seems to have been selected for the program because he owed a huge amount of money for damaging Bray properties, so he sacrifices himself to protect his family. But… what if this is just too perfect? A noble sacrifice, full of regrets maybe, nonetheless needed to preserve the future of his loved ones – a powerful psychological drive. Cayde suspects this and has thought about it many times: “The kid. The woman. I do not know them. They are not real. But I wish I did. And I wish they were.” This is because, as an Exo, he is also a machine and can corroborate the material he found about his past with memory flashes – glimpses of a life that the Traveler could not erase when making him a Guardian, because embedded in a technology the Ghost cannot entirely grasp (we will get back to this later). Ironically, the only Guardians that can have flashbacks about who they really were are the Exos, whose memories are probably fabricated.
But the flashes… Like daydreams, they promised something more. Something other than suffering and war. So I clung to them. And I built my truth. And it made me a better man.
Some would dispute that fact. Some would say, “A good man who lies to himself is good only because he hides from the truth.” But I disagree. I think, in this world, you need to find what is best in you and cling to it. That’s all I did. I found what moved me, and I fought for it.”
Without Ace, and without my Queen to listen to me, to hear me, to see me… there’s no telling who I would’ve become.”
— Bad Beat
A terrible doubt arises: what is worse? Cayde losing his humanity and family because of one single mistake, or his family not existing at all, ultimately making his sacrifice void? This is a variant of the cartesian cogito ergo sum problem, a question humans love to not answer: do the memories make the man, or the man makes the memories?
While Cayde seems to have an answer for that, we cannot help thinking about the coldness of putting a human being in this chilling impasse in the first place.
The way that the Exos were conceived bears some resemblance to the way that the Clovis Bray company was run: ruthlessly, with ambition and few moral obstacles. This resembles a similar setting, the one in the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and the movie based on it, “Blade Runner”, with the Tyrell company creating human simulacra (the replicants), giving them limited time to live and fake memories of other people to carry on. And we can surely rely on comparing Clovis Bray with Eldon Tyrell on many common points.
In this regard, the sad story of Cayde isn’t just _his _sad story. It’s the bleak narrative of all the Exos.
—Here’s the truth, Ace. I don’t remember you. Found your name in a journal I had on me when my Ghost rezzed me. I guess I used to write to you? And I kept doing it. Even though you’re long dead, if you ever really existed. Just like having someone to write to, I guess. So there you have it. Now, you’ll never guess what happened today, Ace—
—from the journals of Cayde-6
The Exo Dream
Even though the Exo Project was developed in Freehold, on Mars (where Clovis Bray headquarters are mainly located), the place where Exos were assembled is called the Deep Stone Crypt.
The first instances of this name came through the Grimoire. All the Exos, it seems, have a recurrent dream. They march toward a Tower, through peaceful means or fighting an army.
You can ask others about Deep Stone and they’ll tell you about the army. They might confess one truth, which is this: we have to kill the army to get to the tower. Usually this starts bare-handed, and somewhere along the way you take a weapon.
Ask again and if they’re buzzed they might also admit that most of us don’t make it to the Tower, except once or twice.
None of them will tell you that the army is made of everyone we meet. The people we work with and the people we see in the street and the people we tell about our dreams. We kill them all. I think because we were made to kill and this is the part of us that thinks about nothing else.
Often I kill people I don’t know, but like most of us I think I knew them once, in the time before one reset or another, when my mind was younger and less terribly scarred.
So that is how we go back to the Deep Stone Crypt, where we were born.
This recollection is disturbing and it sounds like someone implanted a recurring, fabricated memory inside the subroutine of all the Exos’ minds. We will come back to this later, but the mention of the Crypt in this context helps us to identify it as the main complex where the Exos are born and a powerful symbolic force through their psyche.
In the recent lore tied to Felwinter and his Lie (which is a beautifully told, must-read narrative), we discovered that Rasputin has (or at least he had) access to this complex, and that he used it to create the SIDDHARTHA GOLEM.
What the Crypt really is
For years The location of this place and its nature were major speculations. There is a consensus that the Crypt is the place where the Exos are born, confirmed from various sources – flavor text, Grimoire, generic lore – but there could be more behind this.
A flavor text in a Titan mark from in Destiny 1 quoted:
A badge illustrating the infamous subroutine which seeded the first Exo consciousness.
The mention of the “infamous subroutine” that was implemented or that generated the first Exo consciousness put an interesting note on the name of the place itself. Deep Stone Crypt is a weird name for a location – more of a code name, maybe, for something else. Could the Crypt be also the name of the routine that was used to tie the human mind to the body of the Exo frames? Or maybe, the code that embeds the Dream sequence? Knowing the habits of Clovis Bray to name things through cultural references, this could be wordplay.
The symbol on the mark is identified with the crypt itself:
The image of an ancient tower (or a stylized one) is present, as well as a setting sun – both close reminders of the Exo Dream and not of a real, advanced complex of frame mass production. The whole Crypt matter could be a symbolic one (oneiric, heraldic), with some connection in reality. It is difficult to separate the liminal elements from the actual physical ones, to follow the breadcrumbs to a formal solution, but when it comes down to the lore, symbols and reality are often both existing on the same narrative plan. The tower and the Crypt could be both a real and symbolic place.
The last secret of Cayde
In the material coming within the “Taken King” Collector’s Edition DLC, we have some input from Cayde-6:
Saturn. No, someplace else. Someplace colder.
This moon has been almost completely converted, a sarcophagus of ice and iron.
Stone towers rung round with glaciers, rooted deep within a heart of snow.
I came here flesh and bone. Gave everything to the ice.
Started over.
Rebooted.
— Cayde’s Journal
It looks like the place where Cayde was rebooted as an Exo could be an icy moon around Saturn. The recollection is complete with the description of “stone towers” and words such as “sarcophagus”, all of them reminders of the Crypt’s main symbolism.
Cayde is one of the keys to this mystery, as he is on a personal mission to find the Crypt and something… maybe someone related to it.
In the same package of the Journal, we find a sketch of Saturn… but the observer is clearly on one of its 62 moons.
After Cayde’s death in Forsaken, we were sent to recover his Ace of Spades. While opening his secret stashes, we got some recorded messages, which, among all the other things, shed light on Cayde’s quest against someone connected to the Crypt.
This one’s for the minds behind the Deep Stone Crypt. You think just ‘cause you made me, you can unmake me? Hey, I understand. I were you, I wouldn’t want people knowing what I did either. Guess you better hope I didn’t tell anyone about the crypt. Or about the, uh, what was it? Oh yeah… Long Slow Whisper. ‘Cause if I did, that would be real bad for you, huh? I may be dead, but I guarantee you ain’t heard the last of me.
Cayde is looking for the “minds behind the Deep Stone Crypt”, on what seems to be a personal vendetta. It looks like he thought that one possible contender for his killing could have been someone or something related to the Crypt, as he knew their secrets and these seem to be important enough to get killed for. In particular, he knew about the Long Slow Whisper. This name is a peculiar hint, as it’s an exotic combination of three words, and it’s connected to the Crypt in an interesting way (we will see about this later).
The messages in the stash included this last line:
Oh, and, uh, tell “Paladin Oran”: If the sun over Nessus escapes nebula cycle, evac labor after dawn, under solstice. You got that, P.V.?”_
The recipient of this last part of the message is Petra Venj, as it uses an old Reef encryption system (as in the lore of the Telesto). When all the first letters of the words following the keyword “Paladin Oran” are put together, we get the real message:
“It’s on Enceladus.”
Enceladus is an icy moon of Saturn – the last piece of the puzzle that connects Cayde, his journals, the sketch of the planet, and the Crypt together. Could it be that the Crypt is located on Enceladus, then?
As a reinforcement of this idea, we have another source for the location of the Crypt, though alleged. An old series of concept art from Frank Capezzuto when he worked for Bungie, reveal a hulking structure, resembling a great tower, rising from the tundra in a frozen location and displaying Braytech design cues. These elements alone are enough to suggest that this could have been a preliminary vision for the Crypt, discarded in the process as many other concepts.
The éminence grise
Thanks to the marketing material for “Beyond Light”, we now know that the Crypt is on Europa, another icy moon, but in Jupiter’s orbit; our quest to unravel the secrets of the Exos becomes more complicated, all of a sudden.
What’s on Enceladus? And still, the old question remains: what was Cayde after?
On the 18th of August 2018, the well-known content creator and loremaster Myelin Games was part of a multi-conference called Destiny Down Under. After the conference, he ran through all the messages received and a weird pair caught his attention:
The user who sent these messages was called Oryxbng, and a quick search revealed they were connected to Bungie. The name, though, goes back to a company called Oryx Design Lab, which is in turn managed by none other than Chris Barrett, ex-art director, now game director, and lore curator at Bungie. Why did Barrett send those messages to Myelin, and what do they mean?
The term “Long Slow Whisper” was already quoted by the recording after picking up the last of Cayde’s stash. It’s part of Cayde’s quest against the “minds behind the Deep Stone Crypt”, and this is an important hint.
If we recall, the Clovis Bray corporation manipulated and exploited people like Cayde into being Exos. Cayde was one of the few Exos (and, in time, Guardians) who knew about his past through some inputs and some journals he found with himself. Even though most of this information is likely a fabrication, Cayde seems to know what happened to him, and he was actively looking for this individual or entity behind the Crypt, with the help of some allies such as Petra Venj. This mysterious villain seems to be connected to the House of Bray. Clovis Bray was the mind behind the Exos. He is deeply connected to the second line of Oryxbng messages, as Elsie Bray is almost certainly the Exo Stranger, and her “being refused 42 times” is a clear indication of her being unfit for the Exo Program until something happened. She is the long-lost sister of Ana Bray, one who distrusted Bray with so much intensity that she rebelled against him in the past in various forms, as confirmed by the lore of Worldline Zero.
However, the Exo Stranger is not likely to be responsible for the troubles of Cayde and the Exos. Nor is Ana, and those are the last two Brays around, aren’t they?
Cayde’s anger, though, is not just about the past. In his words, one can feel the burning drive for justice – in the present. His enemy lives in this time, right now. What if the one most responsible for this, the gray eminence behind it all, could be someone we all believe is long dead, lost in the mists of the Collapse?
This person could be no other than Clovis Bray in the flesh.
Putting the hints together
Clovis Bray always wanted to live forever. He created an empire; he created the Exo Project for war, probably, but the “struggle” quoted in the definition might have been for something else. He had another goal in mind: to allow mankind to outlast its own time. For him to become an Exo and keep his house and his projects to be perpetuated forever. We never had any confirmation via any lore that Clovis Bray is really dead – this door was cleverly left half-open. And Cayde, somehow, was on the tail of this man. Even though the Crypt is on Europa, maybe Clovis’ hideout is the subject of “it’s on Enceladus,” or something else related to it.
Clovis was remembered by many as a man obsessed with his plans, projects, and creations, who treated every person (including his offspring) as mere collaborators and had in mind a universe of possibilities for humankind. He is deeply connected to what happened during the Collapse, as the lore of the K1 Project suggests. He probably knew about the Pyramids and the Darkness coming too, and never saw the Traveler as a savior, but as an opportunity.
His presence is constant in the Destiny narrative – for example, in the current Season of Arrivals, we cannot ignore the reemergence of Clovis Bray’s long-lost journals, the Atlas, which Ana is currently looking for and that, allegedly, could contain all the answers we seek about the mysteries of the Golden Age and beyond.
To have a good depiction of Clovis – the man – we could use a short quote from the Grimoire, whichhad Clovis working on his last project, a never-ending one, nicknamed “The Sisyphus Project”.
“Clovis refuses to back down. Meanwhile, the others have taken to calling it ‘the Sisyphus Project’…” — laboratory notes found at a Clovis Bray facility
This is a very important subtext: Sisyphus was a Greek mythological king who used his cunning to challenge the gods and, in one or two cases, even wins over them. He betrayed the sacred principle of xenia (a complex hospitality tradition in Ancient Greece), imprisoning the god of death and subverting the natural order of the world. His ego was almost larger than his intellect and he was ruthless to the point of creating a deathless world. This is a perfect description of Clovis Bray – a man who exploited the power of knowledge coming from the Traveler for his agenda, who wanted to live forever beyond the consequences.
Sisyphus was thrown into Tartarus, the deepest part of the netherworld in Greek myth, where he was forced to roll a huge rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it fall down and start all over – the proverbial Sisyphean task, a monumental but futile effort. Is this a metaphor of the last, never-ending project of Clovis Bray… to live forever inside an Exo without the downsides of it? If this was the plan all along, this could explain the inception of the Exo project.
Why are Exo minds human?
[…]
Why does a war machine have emotions? Why should a war machine have awareness? These are not useful traits on the battlefield.
[…]
Now. This is what I believe happened, back in the time before any Exo can remember. It explains everything.
I think someone wanted to live forever.
Solving an impossible problem
The task is not an easy one. To allow Clovis to be transferred into an Exo and virtually live forever, without DER and retaining his memories, we have to jump over some major hurdles. The first is that a special Exo is needed, which we know is feasible today. After Rasputin was almost wiped by the Pyramids’ attack, Ana transferred him into a special Exo, using a singular engram from the remnant of the Pillory technology, exploiting the ECHO project – a system created to fragment a rogue Warmind neural network and transfer it into a series of custom, special Exos. It was already hinted in the lost concept art of the DLC “Warmind”, and it is now a reality for the upcoming DLC after the Pyramids shut down Rasputin (who will probably come to the Tower in this guise in the near future). We have another advanced Exo in the lore, and that was Felwinter – who had access to all the Seraph technology by the touch of his hand.
The hardware of this special Exo can support the huge amount of space needed to have a Warmind like Rasputin transferred into it via the Pillory Engram. This engram, we can argue, could host the whole amount of data that form the memories of a man. Clovis could be rebooted to avoid DER and, subsequently, his entire life uploaded via this engram, after being previously saved. This would allow Clovis to keep being Clovis – one of the main goals of this whole endeavor.
The second issue is… how could Clovis Bray survive alone, isolated between alien invading armies, hostile creatures, and other calamities such as the coming of the Pyramid ships?
We are missing the final piece here, to connect it all… that could be the Long Slow Whisper.
With his cryptic messages, Chris Barrett is suggesting a connection. When a mysterious subroutine called 4988.00.XK is rejected, then the Long Slow Whisper is recommended to be reiterated. So, the Whisper could be another routine as well, some very important part of the Exomind, deep inside the code of their neural system.
What if this routine is connected to the Exo Dream, to the original idea behind the Exos?
The army
The original purpose of the Exo Project seems to be creating a war machine, more efficient than a standard combat frame, with a human mind acting in synergy with superior hardware and software. This is reiterated by the words of Christopher Barrett when, at the Game Developer Conference in 2013, he defined them as “sinister, powerful, and tireless war machines.”
The Dream, we know, is just the remnant of this ancient code, buried deep in them. Some of them, especially the Exo that are now Guardians, have grown out of their original purpose and coding, becoming something else entirely. But the Dream still goes on.
The idea of making the Exo kill people that they know – and possibly love – fits the description of war machines above: they have a switch, a trigger that devoids them of all humanity which would eventually be an obstacle on their path to fulfill orders and bring havoc. This is working in pair with the imagery of the Tower – this mystical place they are recalled to, a military base, not only a construction complex – the Deep Stone Crypt. This location houses something that activates the trigger; this is the place that all the Exo need to reach, to gather there, and await the next order to fulfill, called back by something, by someone.
The whole concept is very close to another very well known one in science-fiction, used for example in Star Wars – the infamous order 66, a liminal command that superimposes the waking will and turns one personality into something else – usually, a blind killing machine.
What if this is the Long Slow Whisper… a hidden message, whispered slowly for a long time, buried deep inside the waking mind?
Such a vast, infinitely replicable army of Exos could be very hard to stop in the right hands, and it seems to have been used at least once, and against the Vex.
In a confusing vision, a lonely Ghost (probably trapped inside the Vault of Glass) witnesses a fierce battle between an army of Golden Age Era Exo soldiers and a group of Vex. It’s not clear if the Ghost was present (probably not, as this is a vision), but the Exos involved seem to not understand what a Ghost is when he is spotted and grabbed by one in the vision. When the dust settles down, the Ghost observes a crashed vehicle nearby.
Most details are obscured by dark and shadow, but one detail is easily made out: a massive crashed spacecraft. The last image: a sigil of Golden Age Earth, emblazoned on the side of the ship’s prow.
This incredibly obscure but deeply interesting Grimoire reference is now connected to the Deep Stone Crypt. In the trailer about the “Beyond Light” DLC, Bungie has shown a very interesting frame, possibly taken from the new Raid ambience of the Crypt:
In this special chamber, a Vex Goblin and an Exo prototype are tied together, suggesting a very intimate link between the two technologies. It is clear now what Clovis Bray’s interest in the Ishtar Collective was: he cannibalized and retrofitted the advanced technology of the Vex to suit the Exo project. What allowed a Vex to retain its organic data inside an artificial body must have worked as well to keep a human mind inside an Exobody. Both, if we have to deconstruct their essence to the basics, are cybernetic organisms. Placing the Exomind Project as derived from the most ancient and advanced technology in the universe will surely explain why even the Ghosts cannot understand it properly, as we have seen.
When Cayde describes the icy moon in his journals as a place almost completely converted, we could infer a Vex action, a place converted by a Vex mind, as it happened for Nessus and Mercury.
An army of Golden Age-branded Exo raiding a Vex installation sounds like Clovis Bray is trying to exhume more secrets from the Vex, and hints at the Vault of Glass’ great comeback – which is planned for the near-future (vaguely put in 2021). If we will ever return inside the Vault, maybe it’s because of the events that will unfold in the Crypt on Europa. This connection is more evident when we check a text from a scannable item on Nessus (the theorized Destination from where we will access the Vault again), while using an Exo as a PG:
Aah! I think this Conflux reacted to your Exo body… and then it burned out. Is there some connection between the Exos and the Vex? That can’t be.
Other similar instances of scannable on Nessus, such as a terminal created to allow an Exo to connect to the Vex network, are dismissed by our Ghost as “Cayde’s doing”. But now there is a new, sinister meaning behind these coincidences, masterfully hidden by Bungie lore-tellers.
This brings us back to Cayde. He may have known the dark secret behind the Long Slow Whisper and the Deep Stone Crypt. Is this the “final plan” the Raid announcement text is referring about?
Below the frozen tundra of Europa lies the Deep Stone Crypt. For decades it has remained dormant. Your fireteam cautiously approaches, weapons raised, and the final plan is set in motion.
Heading to Europa
We know that “Beyond Light” will have Europa as the next Destination, with the Deep Stone Crypt serving as a Raid. Images of the Raid were shown and the Crypt looks like it’s forged in the classic Braytech attire – a design shown, again, in the discarded concepts for “Warmind”. Braytech’s visual style is different from the Seraph’s, implying that Rasputin and the Warmind project had little to infer in this environment, even though it was free to access to the Warmind. We know that Ana and Rasputin were actively looking for the Crypt before the Pyramids attacked him – which is peculiar as Rasputin had full access to the location and resources of the Crypt in the past, as specified in the lore of Felwinter’s Lie. This could imply that the Deep Stone Crypt is not a fixed complex, but a movable one or a series of structures (Cayde described the towers as many), and can reconcile with the “Enceladus” hinted location of the past. The number in the designation of the Crypt quoted in one of the Felwinter lore (“Crypt-342”) could be the clue, even if probably related to an address inside the complex.
“See that? This is the first time SIDDHARTHA GOLEM is mentioned. It…” She paused, then went on, quieter, “It says, ‘Initiate SIDDHARTHA GOLEM upload at DSC-342.’” A beat. “DSC, Felwinter.”
Felwinter was silent, thinking, uncomprehending. “DSC?” he asked quietly.
“Deep Stone Crypt.”
More and more layers of mysteries are piling on this story, including the massive presence of the Vex in the site – their interest in the place of mass production of the Exos then it could be a confirmation of the link that ties both together.
We will have to wait to have all these old mysteries to be revealed – to know the truth about what ties the Crypt, Cayde-6, Clovis Bray and his house, and the Exo Stranger (whose presence in the next DLC is not a coincidence at all, following our reasoning). Although, pursuing these shadows, in the end, could be a way for the community to honor the memory of Cayde too, to win his last, desperate battle against an opponent whose influence is spanning all over time and space in the world of Destiny. That opponent is, obviously, Clovis Bray.
Some of these questions will find their final answer inside the game, but we can grasp a great deal of the truth behind this tangled story way before that: with the Collector’s Edition of “Beyond Light” a physical book is coming along, which sports the Deep Stone Crypt logo on the cover. This is the fabled journal of Clovis Bray, or a great part of it, mysteriously resurfaced. In the next installment of this article series, we will examine them, with deep attention, revealing secrets, confirming many of the theories waved in the past years and in this article as well. We will keep tracking the trail of Clovis Bray, relentlessly.
As for now, the mysteries of the Deep Stone Crypt stay. Whatever the truth behind this story will be in the end, between the threat of facing an army of warmongering Exos, the illusion of immortality and the will of discovering the real nature of why the Exos dreams the Dream, the shadow of the Deep Stone Crypt is now stretching toward us. And soon we all will be under it.
“In memory of the Deep Stone Crypt, the tower where we were born.”