The collector's editions for Destiny 2 expansions include a lot of the usual stuff, like statues and stickers, but the most interesting items included are always their physical lore books. The book inside The Witch Queen Collector's Edition doesn't hit quite as hard as the journal included in the Beyond Light CE (which details how Clovis Bray was almost mind-controlled by the Vex), but it does feature a bunch of interesting tidbits about Ikora Rey, the Darkness, and the Hidden. It also gives us something we've been waiting for: word from Fenchurch.
The lore book in The Witch Queen CE sets the stage for the story of the expansion, though one fascinating entry in particular fits nicely in with the story we've seen unfold in the Season of the Lost. That season was all about Mara Sov, the Awoken queen, who has been missing in action since all the way back during the Forsaken expansion. Mara has been around, though, even if we didn't know the full details of her exploits. In fact, the CE lore book tells us that in the period between Forsaken and the Shadowkeep expansion, she was hanging out with Eris Morn. She might also have destroyed one of the Darkness' Pyramid ships.
Within the Witch Queen CE lore book is a report from Fenchurch Eververse, who most players will know from a voice line delivered by Tower cosmetics merchant Tess Eververse: "No word from Fenchurch today. He must have found something interesting." Canonically, Fenchurch is the guy who finds all the weird artifacts Tess sells in the Eververse Store, but he also has a story role with the Vanguard, serving as one of the Hidden, Ikora's secret group of Guardian spies. The entry in the Witch Queen CE is one of his reports to Ikora, which actually completely explains another of his previous reports--one that was among the spookiest recent lore entries in the game.
That lore entry is called "Fragment," and it appeared way back during the Season of the Drifter in 2019. In it, Fenchurch submits a report about a day when he was patrolling on the moon with some other Guardians, before he suddenly was overwhelmed by a splitting headache. He went to lie down, but instead instantly fell asleep and had a strange dream. The lore entry mentions specific people in the dream, but Fenchurch uses Hidden codes that obscured who the main participants are. One is definitely Eris, but the other--VIP #0704--was unknown until now.
In his dream, Fenchurch saw Eris and tried to catch up to her in a crowd, but couldn't. He woke up a few moments later to find a Hive thrall standing there, looking at him and not moving. Fenchurch blasted the thrall and found a weird piece of black material, the fragment the entry is named for, sticking out of its chest. Fenchurch's Ghost, Neville, tried to scan the fragment but had a hard time doing so. Eventually, Fenchurch touched it with his hand and had a sudden vision.
The vision showed Eris and VIP #0704 together in a field of black debris, apparently that of a destroyed ship, with #0704 dressing a big gash in Eris' thigh. Before the vision ended, Eris turned and said something to Fenchurch in Russian, which roughly translates to "pathetic" in English. (We never do find out what this Russian part is all about.)
The CE lore entry has Fenchurch offering a new report on the vision, the weird thrall, and the black item he found stuck in its chest, after talking to Eris and convincing her to tell him what the hell was going on. Eris explains that Fenchurch's vision was an event that actually happened, and that she sent the thrall to find a Guardian in order to make a report in case she and VIP #0704 died doing whatever they were doing.
There's a whole lot more to the situation we learn from the new report, though. First and foremost, we can pick up that VIP #0704 is, in fact, Mara Sov.
Fenchurch reports what Eris tells him: Between the Forsaken expansion and the Shadowkeep expansion, Mara consulted VIP #0101 (who we soon figure out is Elsie Bray, the Exo Stranger) about the approaching Pyramid ships. (As an aside, assigning #0101 to Elsie has to be a Terminator joke: T-101 was the designation for Arnold Schwarzennegger's killer robot in a movie about time-traveling robots, and Elsie is a time-traveling robot.) We saw during Forsaken that Mara was aware of the Darkness' Black Fleet before just about anybody else--she's been making plans to deal with it since the original Destiny.
Using a combination of Elsie's future tech from other timelines and some time traveler insights, as well as the Warmind artificial intelligence Rasputin and the AI Failsafe from the Exodus Black, Mara was able to pinpoint one of the Pyramid ships within the solar system long before the rest of the ships showed up during the Season of Arrivals, and before the one on the moon was discovered in Shadowkeep. This one was in orbit around a dwarf planet called 136199 Eris, a body that exists in the solar system (in the real world as well as the game) but which is pretty distant. Together, Mara and Eris made for 136199 Eris to see what the deal was with the Pyramid ship.
Post a Comment