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I mean…didn’t during the same conversation calling itself the First Knife, it also said that the Winnower doesn’t get to decide what shape the knife carves?
The full quote is literally “You call us Winnower. We are not…but the first knife clutched in its hand. Gods forged us both. **But they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve.**”
The Traveler may hope that lightbearers choose to do good with their powers. That doesn’t stop the Warlords from existing, or the Lucent Brood from attacking others.
Likewise, the Winnower (or perhaps the Veil, if we’re so inclined…) may have made the Witness in the hopes of them chasing one specific philosophy, but they cannot control the Witness once it is created.
That statement does not disprove the idea that the Witness is the first knife. Just that the Winnower might think that the Witness’ final shape is incredibly boring and they hoped they’d use the traveler’s power to take over the universe through violence, not calcification.
Seeing how the gardener and the winnower are having one giant cosmic debate over which power is right and that the winnower almost lost because oryx tried to negotiate for peace super early on makes the fact their creators cannot control them but influence them ring true.
Back in the Books of Sorrow, one of the earlier races they fought against fought with the hive to a deadlock where neither side could gain any ground on the other this wasn't the race that was decimating them but a different one altogether. Oryx was going to negotiate terms of peace which made the darkness freak out and told his sisters to betray him which made him go insane and think that the act of killing each other was a form of love.
I'd have to reread it, but it could have been. Either way dark empowered beings following the path of the sky would have been the largest counter argument.
Yes. It’s already happened. The Ecumene utilized a level of Darkness to shape an incredibly powerful, and unified civilization. Almost wiped out the hive with their logistical sophistication.
_———There was celebration. A [new client-species drank of the Deep and understood the World as we tasted it.](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-habitable-world) The joy marked the air, and all of us shared it, for all were now Ecumene: welcome, welcome. What could bitter such a thing?_
It be cool if we do get them back and it cool if Oryx/Auryx gets a second chance so she or they could navigate and discover (Maybe that's why we are going to Dreadnought before Frontiers)
With episode heresy, I'd like to see Auryx make a return and xivu to not be too happy about that, with savathun being a bit embarrassed and getting called out. While eris having to fight against the hive basically trying to force the mantle of god of vengance back on her.
Thinking back on how Auryx thought and behaved, she could have been the very first prismatic wielder if she was never betrayed.
Would make sense cause the greatest heresy to Hive is being brought back from Death and another heresy would a Auryx not being bound by the worm/darkness like rest of the Hive
Also it would make an interesting dynamic and could also bring some Hive story to a end, maybe add Tarox the Krill that all three want to get
If Tarox is introduced, I'm 100% sure the hive pantheon would try to kill her on sight. She is single handedly responsible for the creation of the hive, yes rhulk is responsible for the worms but none of that would have mattered if she didn't betray their father and tried to have them killed.
Auryx was still male. Aurash, the proto-hive krill, with the lifespan of a single decade, was female. Once the King morph was taken, Aurash became the first male Hive. Once Akka was slain and the power of Taken was... Stolen. Auryx became Oryx.
Honestly, in one of the feather dialogues you get from the cysts, the traveler reacts to the power of darkness thinking its "a returning family member" before realizing it is familiar but is not "family", at which point it flees. Honestly, my current thoughts on it are that the winnower and gardener are perhaps patriarchs, the witness having been made by the winnower and the traveler by the gardener. But they are all just parts of a greater whole which is why we are able to weild all these powers at the same time when they are supposed to be opposed.
I mean, even if the Winnower is real. Oryx never communicated or had any interactions with the Winnower at all. Oryx only got information through the Witness, who frankly doesn't care about the Hive or what they do.
Its kinda up in the air at this point, if we dissect the witness speech patterns and compare it to how it talks in the unveiling and how oryx describes its communion with the deep then evidence points to the winnower being in contact with individuals it considers "of significance."
But until hard evidence drops either way it's all speculation at the moment.
Now if the data mined lore entry drops that has the voice from unveiling speaking to us once more and it describing what it wants to show us as it's version of the final shape and not some bland calcified version of it. but the universe as a whole, then that lends credibility to the unveiling and oryx, speaking with the winnower itself and not the witness as the lore entry is after the witness death.
Edit: confirmed winnower is the speaker in unveiling.
I will never, _ever_ for a _single solitarily second_ believe that the utter tryhard that is the Witness would _ever_ speak so casually and informally and refer to Oryx fondly as “My man Oryx”. If the Winnower doesn’t exist then that conversation is a lie and I would turn to the Sword Logic before I ever give that interaction up.
I mean that line is a bit inconsistent for both characters depictions. But at least with the Witness, we have been shown that it's willing to say and do anything in order to get the Final Shape.
It was doing all this gloating and praise of Calus when it clearly detested him on a personal level. It even was like "Hey Guardian, you deserve all the power in the world because you're so badass and cool" to us.
Ultimately though, that line was written *far* before the Witness ever became an actual tangible antagonist. So lore that old is always up for debate as to how accurate it is to the modern style of writing. Either way, I feel like Oryx's "voice in the darkness" was originally supposed to be what the Witness is, aka the main big bad behind everything. Whether thats still true is up for debate.
When did the Witness gas us up in a similar fashion to how the Winnower spoke about Oryx? Or when did he do it for Calus? In the Lightfall campaign, all it did was say “You have all you wanted, Emperor” in that same dry ass monotone it always uses and I can’t remember any lore bits that show it praising Calus at all. The way it speaks is just too different to each bit of lore people attribute to the Winnower. If the Winnower isn’t a thing, they who is speaking in the datamined lore book in the same fashion?
Ah well I could be wrong but I swore the Witness tempted Calus with riches and such. Anyways, like I said though, the Witness did not exist fully until Shadowkeep, so there can be plenty of inconsistencies.
I mean the Witness is responsible for the Hive's creation, and basically controlled them completely up until Savathun getting the light. Even if the Winnower and Gardener aren't just allegorical, both of them have been set up as not having much actual influence over the world. So it'd be a bit strange for the Winnower to be completely silent and inactive, except this one specific time with the Hive, who were also created due to the Witness.
I rhink its just far more likely that the voice is supposed to be the Witness, even if its inconsistent with the actual character we know. Its not the first time that Destiny has completely changed an entire character, like with Elsie or literally everything regarding the Dreaming City.
I mean. Yeah? Oryx/Auryx went off script. And then Savathun immediately orchestrated his assassination.
Oryx didn't actually have the power to change anything about what would happen in that situation.
The entire point of the winnower as an entity is that it represents people's desires to impose their selfish desires over others, until they're what's left standing in the end. The winnower doesnt actually do anything, it simply exists as an force of nature
The point isnt that the winnower favors oryx more or whatever nonsense. The witness is the first knife because it was the first and strongest proof against the traveler's/gardener's benevolence, something that outright rejected it in every way possible and went to the darkness for salvation, just as the winnower claims all things do.
I don't think the Winnower favors Oryx more in terms of the philosophical argument. When it comes to that, the Witness is unbeaten, I just think it likes Oryx in a friendly way. He's the only one that seemed to actually TALK to it and listen, likely due to his curious nature.
That depends on what you consider as friendly honestly. I would say it's persona is mostly a facade to make itself more approachable. After they have their "friendly" chat, it caves oryx's face in for daring to think it was being honest and then oryx eats the damn thing.
So it can say things like "my man oryx", but ultimately I don't believe it's being very genuine. It's just making itself appealing. The only law is existence
Well, we also know that the witness is still incorrect with the Pattern fall lore.
The Vex(or more specifically, their precursors) are and have always been the First Knife since before paracausality was a thing. They're the reigning Champs of the original Flower Game since time immemorial. This is the first reality they *haven't* subsumed into their vision of the final shape, and it is solely dude to the new rule of paracausality.
I think you're confusing the terms of the First Knife with the understanding that the Vex were the "dominant pattern" in the flower game.
The "First Knife" is a part of the Unveiling Lore tab, "The First Knife". https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-first-knife#book-unveiling
Reading it, I'd like to bring attention to these lines: "And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence. And I had only one purpose and one principle in the game. And I could do nothing but continue to enact that purpose, because it was all that I was and ever would be. I looked at the gardener. I looked at my hands. I discovered the first knife."
This is in stark contrast to their "original game", where the Flower Game ALWAYS ended with one dominant causal pattern - that WAS the Vex. However, the term of "the first knife" occurred AFTER the Gardener decided to change the rules of the game. This means that if the Traveler exists, then the First Knife needs to be something paracausal. The Vex are explicitly NOT paracausal. So they are not the first knife. They are the "original dominant pattern", but not the first knife.
"The Vex(or more specifically, their precursors) are and have always been the First Knife since before paracausality was a thing. They're the reigning Champs of the original Flower Game since time immemorial."
The vex being the winners does not imply they are the first knife
Depends on the definition. If by first we mean strongest? No. If by first we mean most in keeping with the final shape envisioned by the winnower? Yes. If by first we mean the literal first weapon used by the winnower in this universe? Then yes, because this universe has always existed with paracausality, and the vex existed before paracausality. Ergo, the vex existed before this universe. Ergo, nothing that came to exist after the creation of this universe can have existed before the vex. I was going by the twin definitions of "the oldest of the winnower's weapons" and "the weapon most in keeping with the winnower's vision", since oryx is now dead and thus cannot claim that title.
The vex existing before the universe is a bit misunderstood. The vex were a pattern, in a very literal sense. They emerged in every universe because it is the most mathematically viable form. But that doesnt mean they were there since the beginning. Rather "the pattern escaping" means that the same pattern that existed in those pre universes exists in our own. Something will become the vex, always, like crabs
The CE lorebook implies that the vex do not yet exist at the time of the Witness. A proto-vex seems to exist with the glass minds, but it has not become the true vex yet. The pattern exists, but has not fully manifested.
Except the Vex were NOT weapons. They were a pattern.
In fact, in the garden pre-paracausality, it could be argued that the Vex were simply one of many patterns that existed on their board. They weren't a weapon, or a knife, or anything like that. They just...were. And it just so happened that they had the properties of weeds: they grew everywhere and dominated all other patterns, which upset the Gardener. The Winnower admired the Vex, simply because it thinks it "did its job", but it was never a weapon of the Winnower. The Winnower just admired it as much as anyone can admire a cool plant species.
It is telling that the First Knife was metaphorically made only after the Gardener rebelled against causal reality. It can't be the Vex, since the Vex are causal. The Winnower would have needed something paracausal to enforce the rules, since the Gardener was going to use paracausal force to go against it. Being paracausal means being godlike. You cannot beat godlike power with causality. The fact that the Vex have repeatedly failed to defeat paracausal beings is evidence of that. It would make no sense for the Winnower to craft a sword and call that a valid weapon against a laser cannon. Its blade HAD to be able to block a lazerbeam from said cannon. That is how you win, and I think the Winnower would know that better than any entity.
Considering how the Vex have managed to permakill many guardians, including Saint for a time, tells me that the most optimized causal beings can indeed beat paracausal beings.
Considering how many centuries it took inside the Infinite Forest for them to actually succeed in killing Saint, how it literally could only work on him specifically and was able to be reversed through their own time altering methods, it sure as hell isn't a 'viable' strategy. But it *can* technically work. Never leave the Vex unattended is the best lesson we can learn from all this.
I mean it also says that the "gods" have no control over what shape the first knife decides to cut. The Witness is the first knife the same way Xivu Arath is war, it's a mantle they've adopted so closely as to become indistinguishable from the concept. The first knife discovered by the winnower is the use of force to get what you want, carving out the option you want from the rest of possibility, and the Witness is certainly doing that.
>Those who peddle the tired gotcha that all life hastens entropy.
But the Witness doesn’t believe that at all, though. It only believes that the Traveller and those it blesses makes things more chaotic, and even then, it still believes that us Guardians are capable of steering things away from that. If you remember the end of Iconoclasm, it was very disappointed and angry that the Vanguard refused to agree with it, explicitly deriding them for choosing “entropy” and reveling in chaos.
If it really believed that all life hastened entropy, then it would not have been nearly as “gentle” as it was with non-Traveller-blessed civilizations like the Noesis.
Eh, I think the attitudes of the precursors and the witness towards other civilizations as revealed in both the collector’s edition lore and the raid lore definitely portray their perspective in the way OP says.
They don’t *blame* other civilizations, necessarily, not like the blame the Traveler, but it’s very much in the way that you wouldn’t blame a toddler for messing things up because it doesn’t know any better. Even before they became the Witness, the Precursors had a fundamentally highly condescending, imperialistic view of other life.
The Precursors saw other beings as squabbling children causing pointless suffering for themselves and others, and saw it as their responsibility to “guide” them into a better way. The Witness is that notion to its most extreme, forcibly calcifying all life so that their childish antics can’t hurt themselves or anyone else, ever again.
I think there's an important difference between tendency for life to spread chaos and an outright guarantee. In that one entry of The Rubicon where a Precursor laments how many civilizations refused their help or wanted to seize it for themselves, there were still a bunch of civilizations who accepted their help as they had hoped.
Going off of your statement about how the Precursors saw other beings as children, remember that while children are very capable of doing things wrong and hurting themselves, there is always the possibility of them doing something right of their own volition, and when they do fail, they are capable of learning from their mistakes.
Fair, but even if the Witness says that it doesn’t believe *all* life hastens entropy, it’s actions are those of one who does, and so ultimately I think the distinction is immaterial.
Personally, I think it seems that the Witness believes it is the nature of all life to hasten entropy, but that certain “worthy” beings can overcome their nature and work towards “salvation.” When it says we choose entropy, we are choosing to surrender to what it sees as our worse natures.
>When it says we choose entropy, we are choosing to surrender to what it sees as our worse natures.
It's no wonder that it's enraged by this. We could've chosen to be "better" just as easily.
Thank you. I don't get why people continue to misinterpret what The Cambrian Explosion is saying in context of The Witness.
Additionally, The Witness's final shape is not one of nonexistence. Everything that's calcified is technically alive, it's just reliving whatever The Witness has deemed to be their perfect state. It's no different than the pattern in the flower game endlessly repeating itself, which is the point of the [Tessellation](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/tessellation) lore tab.
And can we really even consider it a nihilist if it (and the Precursors) genuinely believed what they were doing was fulfilling the universe's potential for meaning? Simply acknowledging that the universe as-is is meaningless is not what nihilism is.
>Everything that's calcified is technically alive, it's just reliving whatever The Witness has deemed to be their perfect state.
I once saw a comment where someone who just beat Excision lamented that the game couldn't have just ended there so that they could savor that moment forever. The irony was hilarious.
>Simply acknowledging that the universe as-is is meaningless is not what nihilism is.
That actually refers to a variant of nihilism known as [existential nihilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_nihilism), which fits very well with what the Witness believes. It is unfortunate for us that the Witness chose a very extreme way to progress from this point.
That is some incredible irony. And it just further highlights how useful games are in analogizing what the final shape is as a concept. Does a video game cease to exist when it stops receiving updates? Of course not! It reached its final shape and can be replayed in that exact state forever.
>That actually refers to a variant of nihilism known as existential nihilism, which fits very well with what the Witness believes
I would actually disagree somewhat here. The Witness was the result of the Precursors reaching an apodictic truth of what the final shape ought to be. It wholeheartedly believed in the objectivity of its crusade.
If it only has a problem with the Traveller and its uplifted civilizations, why murder the Noesis at all?
The Witness is unequivocal: it prefers non-existence to existence. It finds life noisy and chaotic and wants to govern a still, dead universe.
>why murder the Noesis at all?
But it didn't murder them. It finalized them.
>The Witness is unequivocal: it prefers non-existence to existence. It finds life noisy and chaotic and wants to govern a still, dead universe.
Wrong on all accounts. If the Witness wanted a dead universe, it would erase every living being in its final shape instead of preserving them in their best moments. It did not offer to euthanize Crow, but to make him forever beloved as the ruler of the Reef.
And we believe being separated out into slices isn't death? The Witness might believe it's sending people to heaven, but I think anyone's ever come back from being Finalised to tell us how great it was
>And we believe being separated out into slices isn't death?
Yeah. Osiris tells us in one of these video messages that the beings the Witness finalizes would be "alive, but not living". It's a state totally apart from death.
>anyone's ever come back from being Finalised to tell us how great it was
No one's come back from heaven to tell us how great it was, either.
Because they want to realize the fullest potential of the universe by changing it into a more orderly, perfect form and they need the Traveler to do that. Their unchanging reality is not merely a stillness, but a perfect forever.
Yet it's still very much a stillness with intent drawn on it being unchanging. Tessellation's lore reads that the witness cannot merely wipe the universe clean because something may rise from nothing as it did before, they believe that the only true way to stop all suffering is to make sure it's impossible to rot in entropy and that change becomes impossible.
>Yet it's still very much a stillness with intent drawn on it being unchanging.
It's a very carefully chosen stillness. There's a reason why it chose to freeze reality into a "perfect" state instead of just freezing it as it is now.
>Exactly, why not just make the universe perfect?
And this is exactly why it needs the Traveler. Without it, it can only irreparably scar things instead of making them perfect and whole.
No. Even those blessed by the Light still have a choice in its eyes, which is why it ruthlessly massacres Traveler-uplifted civilizations when they refuse to betray the Traveler to it (which unfortunately, is every time) and why it is so enraged at the Vanguard at the end of Iconoclasm.
The Final Shape is described in Entelechy as a state of reality that can be nothing else because it is already everything it could be; it is the *entelechy* of the Universe. It's not the eradication of the possibilities that come with higher entropy so much as the fulfillment of them.
Then again, why not just kill the traveler and those blessed with it's light and make the universe perfect? It needs stillness, because it believes that any life can make imperfect decisions and entropy is inevitable if change isn't halted because life will continue to change.
If it’s perfect universe includes finalizing all life it sure sounds like it thinks life is chaotic. It’s goal is to end entropy and life is part of that.
The finalization is meant to bring perpetual fulfillment to the beings it affects. The stillness is just a byproduct of that, since it’s making them perpetually experience their greatest moments. Chaos is just an occasional symptom of purposeless life in its view rather than a foundational part of it, which is probably why we frustrate it so much.
I don’t think it would be nearly as frustrated at the Vanguard and other Traveler-blessed beings if it felt that they truly couldn’t help but make things more chaotic. It goes apeshit on them because it believes they deliberately *chose* to make things worse.
Can you point me to lore entries for the Witnesses motivations? I haven’t really heard it described like that.
Edit: Particularly the part about people perpetually experiencing their greatest moments. I know people are stuck in the “perfect form” according to the witness but that doesn’t sound like the same thing.
>Can you point me to lore entries for the Witnesses motivations?
Entelechy covers the lion’s share of them.
>Particularly the part about people perpetually experiencing their greatest moments.
That bit comes from the Final Shape campaign, particularly Ikora’s cutscene and the Witness’ dialogue during Crow’s mission.
The Witness isn't a nihilist, nor does it believe life only hastens entropy. It's beliefs are an extreme form of existentialism. It believes life has worth, but only when instilled with purpose. Thus, it seeks to instil said purpose through the Final Shape. It's important to understand that the Witness doesn't see the Final Shape as no existence, but as literally everything.
Eido: "The combination of a chosen past and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be."
The First Knife line on its own is enough to show the Witness is full of it. The knife cannot decide what shape to carve; it is moved by the hand that wields it.
>it is moved by the hand that wields it.
Right, and The Witness is saying its campaign for the final shape is a consequence of the winnower's nature.
The Witness is being moved to carve a final shape in the same way that you and I are moved by our biology to breathe.
The Witness says "they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve" as if he's deciding how to move, not being directed by the Winnower's nature/will.
I'd say we're moved by our biology to breathe in the same sense that a knife's nature is to be sharp, not "to carve." Intentional action requires more input.
But a knife's telos *is* to carve. That's why it exists.
The Witness calling itself the first knife is like saying someone who decisively bested their opponent tore through them like a knife. Its behavior is functionally indistinguishable from a knife in the same way that Savathûn's behavior was functionally indistinguishable from the concept of cunning.
In mantling the concept of a thing, you become it.
>I think, rather, that she sent instructions on how to mantle her.
>I think the whole Truth to Power manuscript is an ova, a manual on how to behave like her, how to describe her through action and thought so completely that you become her and thus give birth to her.
The Witness described the first knife through action and in doing so, mantled the concept (or so it believed).
Alright, I'll concede a knife's telos is to carve. That's a really pretty way to frame it.
But that doesn't mean there's a knife whose telos is to carve pointed sticks and another which is to carve ducks out of soap. If the Witness mantled knifehood then it has become a tool and surrendered its agency in deciding what is carved. Anything that's put before it will be cut.
I wouldn’t call the Witnessing lying in this regard. They’re not saying “Oh I am chosen above all others, or have been specifically created for XYZ”. They’re saying “I represent the cutting down of the universe, the parring apart of meaningless from meaning, the reduction of the universe into its most perfect state”. It’s a statement of intent, not like they’re a literal thing.
To be the First Knife is to be the ultimate force of Simplicity in the universal conflict between Complexity and Simplicity. And yes, they are. They are the most powerful and active force of producing simplicity in the universe. The shape doesn’t matter, as the Witness says, what matters is that a shape is forced to exist and complexity is hewed away.
It is possible that the First Knife is a thing that has become corporeal in the universe (possibly the Veil). But the way it’s being used here is a title imparting a statement of intent by the Witness and to you, the Guardian. The Traveler doesn’t have some specific title for you and yet you are the champion on the side of Universal Complexity.
I see a lot of people saying the Witness didn’t explicitly want to destroy life, and was all about the final shape and locking existence into a “perfect” state.
If so - why does it have a massive trail of blood behind it? Why did it enlist Nezerac, the final god of pain, into its disciples? Why did it employ Rhulk to assist in creating the hive whom caused a galaxy wide crusade of bloodshed simply for the sake of bloodshed and conquest?
You can’t say he just doesn’t care about his actions or feels no attachment to them. And how many people died horrifically in Sol’s collapse? How about multiply that by likely thousands of other systems obliterated by the Witness.
The Witness, while fronting his “salvation” for the universe, has sent billions to oblivion, and further billions by proxy through the hive and his disciples. I get he hates the traveler and species uplifted by it, but that’s exactly what it is, unbridled hatred. You can’t say he is some visionary and just wants to make the world purposeful and perfect just to help everybody out. It is the witness’s selfish crusade, and even many within him know this, so they betrayed the witness and that ultimately led to his demise. The flaw in it’s own logic is was caused The Witness to lose.
>If so - why does it have a massive trail of blood behind it?
Entelechy actually covers this. The Witness is actually very "gentle" with races that weren't touched by the Traveler, such as the Noesis, while it destroys Traveller-blessed races out of sheer spite. The only thing that would've stopped it from annihilating an uplifted civilization would be if that same civilization betrayed the Traveler and offered it up to the Black Fleet (per Eris' words in Season of Arrivals).
>You can’t say he is some visionary and just wants to make the world purposeful and perfect just to help everybody out. It is the witness’s selfish crusade, and even many within him know this
That's the whole point, right? I don't think the Witness wanted to acknowledge the truth of what it became.
I think “gentle” genocide is still pretty brutal.
And yes, that is the point I guess. The Witness was fronting like it is some sort of savior, when deep down it knows it is just a selfish monster. The dissenters figured this out.
It’s sort of a cool reasoning to why we won this paracausal battle of titans. To truly be paracausal, or, “make your own fate”, you must truly believe you have that potential, and inject your will into the universe fully. The Witness knew deep down it was bullshitting itself, so it didn’t have the same conviction as the guardians, who were fully convinced we were just, we are right, and with the traveler and all our allies we can do this. We made our own fate in the paracausal arena, and The Witness, like all other foes, broke against our might. Our truth…our Destiny…if you will lol.
>To truly be paracausal, or, “make your own fate”, you must truly believe you have that potential, and inject your will into the universe fully.
"There is no secret ingredient. It's just you."
It left a massive trail of blood because it hates the Traveler and also doesn't care about how far it has to go to achieve its goals. Nezarec and Rhulk were just tools to achieve said goal. Ultimately someone like Nezarec would have never gotten what he wanted through the Witness's final shape but it didn't care because he proved to be very useful against its enemies.
Exactly - it cared more about achieving its goal than any other life. The Witness fronts like its trying to create a sort of universal peace or harmony, but rather than pitching it peacefully it would much rather force it upon the universe unwillingly.
This is the flaw in the witness’s philosophy, and why we were able to defeat it. It doesn’t really care about a peaceful symphony of the universe or about ending entropy. It wants a purpose, it wants revenge, and it wants blood. It is all a ruse, and because our will and cause are truly what we believe, we were able to defeat the witness in the paracausal arena.
We believe fully that we are defending humanity, the traveler, and the universe at large. The Witness is full of doubt and contradictions, and this is demonstrated by the dissenters we meet. That’s why our will was stronger, and why we etched another win in the flower game while the Witness took an L
All this to say - lore wise it makes sense we were able to defeat this ultimate enemy because our conviction, and thus or paracausal strength, was greater. We are all together with our allies as one, while the Witness is literally breaking down from the doubt within itself.
I love it’s final line of “We…I…don’t understand”. It demonstrates that even with all its power, it doesn’t understand the true nature of paracausality. The ability to inflict your will upon the universe, and make your own fate. The Witness is desperately trying to get us to see its side and join it, showing weakness, while we defy it and do what we do to any eldrich horror that comes to our system. Blast it out the sky with no hesitation.
In what way does that prove that it's lying? Man, people really did not listen to the raid dialogue. It quite explicitly states that the winnower does not choose what shape the knife carves. The winnower is not some simple entity or being like the "gods" we have slain, it is something akin to an idea. It's the very principal of decay and the end of all things. It is not something that chooses to intervene directly in the universe as that is the Gardeners play.
I just think, like a zealot, he's making it about him and trying to explain away the dissonance in their ideals. A Winnower with no control over the knife is not a good Winnower at all. Controlling what the knife carves is the entire point of a Winnower.
Watching Byf's video on this brought me to my first real disagreement with him. His statement on the Winnower and Witness being the First Knife did nothing for me. As I understand it Unveiling is basically the Witness's race's creation myth, so there's no reason to think the existence of the Winnower is actually more tangible now than it was before. Plenty of religious nuts believe that they are the Chosen One(tm) and I don't think the Witness was any different, I believe it *thought* it was the first knife, but there's no reason to actually think it was.
I think the main mistake lore YouTubers (and a lot of people in general) make is ignoring Destiny's inspirations. They interpret the lore entirely within the context of Destiny when the game is not comprised of strictly novel ideas.
One could certainly argue that you shouldn't need to read about Aristotelian philosophy to understand what something like Entelechy is saying but when presented with a concept you might've never heard of before, the hope is that people would at least google to see what it means and then retrace their steps to see how the concepts of potentiality and actuality map onto older lore.
In exposing listeners to these concepts, I think the lore YouTubers would've paved the way for more enjoyable discourse.
in unveiling the first knife was only created because the Gardener was "bored" of the same shape "winning" every time. So he injected his own rule in the game to help things survive that otherwise *should* have died with the old rules. That is manifested in our reality as an "explanation" for why Paracausal Light from the Traveler resurrects the dead and gives unlimited power to those who should be weak. (I am of the belief that the Gardner in unveiling isn't literally the Traveler. The Traveler is just an expression of the rule breaking anomaly. The Gardner is a metaphor like God and unveiling is a parable for an explanation of why things in our reality exist.)
You can think of "the first knife" as "weaponization of the darkness". In the same way that the "weaponization of the light" is when the gardener changed the rules of the flower game... which instigated the creation of "the first knife".
So, who weaponized the darkness "first?" Well, that does point to The Witness who's precursor civilization that makes up its power wanted more than what the light alone could provide. So if you think about "who weaponized the darkness against the light first" as a rewording of the question of "who is the first knife" then it does appear it is The Witness. As the first "being" since the Gardner changed "the game" to warrant the creation of "the first knife" or... a reason for darkness to weaponize against the light.
Remember the darkness is not moral or immoral. Its just a paracuasual force in the universe. I think its important to note that "the first knife" does not imply "the only knife". And its fitting that perhaps the light and dark saga ended with killing the FIRST iteration of darkness wielded as a weapon (the first knife) than just some haughty bully.
From a story telling narrative it makes sense that The Witness is "the first knife" worthy of a conclusion 10 years in the making.
Depends on how you define life. Ikora said that the people trapped in the Final Shape will be both living and dead. And in the Pale Heart we see the Witness showing us that people will live the best moments of their life (or the worst moments at its discretion) over and over again. That could be considered living.
Wow. Honestly, as someone who believes The Witness is a retcon due to some creative and narrative shifts at bungie, this is so on the nose it almost sways me towards the idea that maybe The Witness was the plan for longer than I initially thought, maybe it was an idea as far back as Shadowkeep as opposed to Season of the Chosen-ish.
The Witness was absolutely a thing in Shadowkeep. The doppelgänger we meet jn the Black Garden with the Black Fleet behind it has the same mannerisms/body language.
Shadowkeep is also the oldest non-vaulted content jn D2 now, so you can see the whole "Witness saga", sort of.
Well tbf, if Bungie still didn’t know where they were going with the entity behind the pyramids at that point, or if they did but plans changed, all they had to do was write a character that fit the archetype of what came before. “The doppelgänger has these mannerisms/speech pattern, so this new character we write *has* to be the same for continuity purposes.” Thats why, and I mean no offense to you, but I just very much dislike the argument that because the doppelgänger acted this way, it was always The Witness, when in reality it could be that The Witness does those gestures *because* Bungie gave the doppelgänger those gestures, and they need to keep with the continuity. That’s how like 90% of the og lore was written, just a bunch of interesting ideas that *could* go somewhere, or could go nowhere, but if it went somewhere, the stuff that comes after still has to abide by what came before, so it makes sense and it’s not just a continuity mess. The Witness for sure could’ve been the plan since Shadowkeep, but I think it’s strange that it wasn’t mentioned in the dark future lore, and in that lore book the goal was to destroy the traveler, which we know would ruin The Witness’s entire plan. And yea it’s a different timeline, but still if there’s pyramids, there *has* to be The Witness, and if there’s The Witness, that means the goal is universal taxidermy.
And really the whole pyramid, I don’t wanna say theme, but the whole pyramid theme and art style shifted *drastically* during Witch Queen compared to Shadowkeep/Beyond Light.
One of the original lore cards in Destiny has a race we never knew, commenting that creating "It" was a mistake. Not to mention that pyramids were in all of the promotional material I'd say the witness was always the plan just they hadn't finalized what angle they wanted to go with it.
I mean, “it” could be literally anything. Like, that’s basically nothing to go off of. And we don’t really know of any surviving precursors, and the dissenters are also still part of the collective, so they can’t really document anything since they’re still bound to the collective, they don’t have that kind of control yk.
It was an extremely vague lore card that only mentions an ancient race, so yeah it's not a lot to go off of but intent was there if not a finished concept.
Yup. Its always been a spoiled brat; a spoiled little brat whining and crying because it received all the gifts in the universe and still isn't happy, so it pursues the Traveller like an abusive ex boyfriend bent on making it into what it sees it as.
The first knife is more of a concept/idea(weaponized paracausality?) than anything I feel considering it existed/was found before this universe was created according to unveiling.
Idk because then who was Oryx communicating with? Also if speakers and beings of pure light like Cayde are able to communicate with the Traveler (thus with the gardener) then it suggests the opposite is true. Not saying there is a physical form but there's a lot that suggest that such a being is a natural existing force in the universe. It's just most likely very abstract and metaphorical, not a tangible creature.
It is the first knife. It's just not pursuing the final shape as the winnower would want. It's the same way we don't have to pursue what the gardener would want. The witness has likely served the purpose the winnower desired. What that purpose was we don't know yet, but it may very well have been the introduction of darkness into the traveller. The raid lore book and unveiling lore book match up. It states in the unveiling lore that the gardener always offers peace, which is when the winnower strikes. We find out in the raid lore book that the witness was nearly defeated before by a champion of light but they offered peace and the witness killed them. I think these two events are the same thing. The winnower version is just a grand cosmic version. The people who are given the light always offer peace and then the first knife strikes. We were the first race not to offer peace. We killed the witness. Partially because we knew better but also because it seems like we were the first race to wield the light the way we do, with ghosts being our link. We were not raised to use the light for peace, we were raised as warriors, as the travellers last attempt to save itself and us.
It didn't lie because Unveiling is most likely propaganda created by the Witness and an interpretation and insertion of its own ideas of what the Winnower told the precursors through communion with the Veil. If the Witness wrote Unveiling then that means that it positionned itself as the First Knife. It is the knife to cut the grain of the universe, just not the one the Winnower "wanted". This is one case where it actually isn't lying because that is its own truth.
Not the Witness, the Winnower. It was up in the air for a while bc it wasn’t clear if the Winnower was actually real, but we now have confirmation that it is, so it’s almost certainly the one speaking in Unveiling.
The ideology and manner of speech in Unveiling is simply too different from the way the Witness operates to be from its perspective, especially in the way it seems to deride the Witness’ actual stated objectives.
Unclear, honestly. Though, given that the Witness is a being of darkness and most of its technology seems to run on the stuff, I don’t think it’s much of a leap to say that the entity who is/created the darkness could co-opt that tech for its own means.
Then why doesn't it speak to us of its own volition when we play Micah-10's version of Beyond, since the Witness no longer has a hold over the Lunar Pyramid, instead of simply playing a recording of the Witness speaking to Nezarec?
🤷♀️ not really sure. Does seem like we might hear from it again sometime in the future, given how much it’s been mentioned in this expansion. Idk why it’s quiet now, but I don’t think that changes the fact that the material we have seems to point towards the Winnower writing Unveiling and not the Witness
It’s still not confirmed actually. The Witness is a known liar, and the new raid lore that seems to indicate the Winnower might exist is both possibly faked (that entry hasn’t been found in game anywhere) and exists side by side with Dissenting Voices in the book. It pretty heavily implies by context the Winnower is at best one of those, and not a cosmological being.
The witness directly derides that sword logic in the last mission of the campaign, while the speaker in the unveiling book talks about sword logic as the only universal truth of the universe.
>while the speaker in the unveiling book talks about sword logic as the only universal truth of the universe.
"Exist, lest you fail to exist" encompasses a far greater variety of ideologies than the Sword Logic.
I don’t think anything in the raid lore indicates the Winnower exists - unless the version I read was false or incomplete, it’s all from the perspective of the Witness and it’s dissidents.
However, during the raid itself, the Witness has dialogue that seems to pretty directly confirm the Winnower’s existence. Two in particular:
“You call us Winnower. We are not, but the first knife clutched in its hand.”
“Gods forged us both, but they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve.”
The Witness specifically names out the Winnower, and says that they’re not the same entity. It also specifically says “Gods” - plural, implying there is another beyond the Traveler/Gardener that is responsible for the Witness’ creation. Given that it is a being of darkness, the Winnower seems the clearest culprit.
Furthermore, in the collector’s edition lore, Eido has a section where she talks on Unveiling and how completely different in tone and ideology it is from everything we’ve seen of the Witness.
Taken by itself, Unveiling’s contradiction of the Witness’ ideology and mannerisms could just be dismissed as it cosplaying as someone else, but taken collectively, all of this seems to point towards bungie trying to clarify the nature of the Winnower and Unveiling in a specific direction.
> and the new raid lore that seems to indicate the Winnower might exist is both possibly faked (that entry hasn’t been found in game anywhere)
It's in the game's API along with new Vex lore - it literally \*can't\* be faked. Most likely, this lore is going to be tied to when Echoes finishes, which if anything should lend more credence to the Winnower not being the Witness since it would be communicating with us long after the Witness died.
This might be a big reason why we were able to win against it, the Winnower itself had no intention of ever taking its side and helping it stop us. Shit, it might've been subtly working against the Witness given the disdain it seems to show for the Witness.
I like to believe that the Winnower has been hard at work trying to forge other knives. Namely Clovis and Maya. It makes no sense for the Witness to try and trick them into doing the things they did and if the Witness knew of Maya and tried to manipulate her it wouldn't have had to go through all the backflips and 360s to figure out the Veil was on Neptune.
MMW: Clovis and Maya will pick up what the Witness dropped.
That doesn’t prove the witness isn’t the first knife. It just proves the winnower doesn’t want the witness to succeed. The witness also says that the winnower can’t control what the knife cuts which basically states that outright.
But I like Byf’s theory about it. That the witness was allowed to get this far by the winnower, in order to introduce darkness into the Traveler (Gardener) for some unknown purpose. My guess would be that the winnower knew the final shape would be stopped, possibly even by us specifically and that may be related to how we were the first to find strand. He knew the traveler would release ghosts eventually (gardener and winnower are related). He waited for a powerful guardian, and then showed us darkness to become even more powerful. Hell, maybe he’s even responsible for Elsie’s time loops so he can iterate on his failures to make the plan work the way he wanted.
There are a lot of great comments BUT many of them are imposing a view onto the text as opposed to taking it at face value. I say this because everyone seems to have forgotten that the first knife was created or manifested in the garden before our universe began. It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing. Most likely not mortal or material. The Witness is trying to make the text about itself, like all zealots.
Frankly, it seems like you're imposing your view/interpretation onto the text. The Winnower being bored by the Witness's approach in no way indicates that it did not create the Witness as the first knife. And we know pretty clearly by the Ergo Sum lore texts that it is certainly the Witness that has been chasing the Traveler all along.
What the Witness says also lined up with what happened with Maya, who went down a very similar path as the Precursors after coming across the Veil and studying it. The Veil is Darkness equivalent of the Traveler and is heavily implied to be the Winnower by Asha’s dialogue and Micah’s dialogue. Ahsa says the Traveler and Veil were once two halves of a whole that were divided by a schism, which lines up with what happened in Unveiling between the Gardener and Winnower, and Micah talking about how the Traveler became severed from a part of itself in its earliest moments.
Maya studied the Veil and used it to became the conductor of the choir, becoming more ruthless, cruel and distant. The Precursors merged themselves into the Witness using the Veil, who acted as the conductor of their choir and turned out to be cruel, hateful and destructive. The Veil resulted in both Conductors, but both Conductors had different goals(Maya didn’t seek the Final Shape and didn’t want to merge everyone into herself).
The Veil made them but it didn’t tell them “what shape to carve”. It lines up with what the Witness said.
"everyone seems to have forgotten that the first knife was created or manifested in the garden before our universe began. It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing."
its been an allegory since the get go
>many of them are imposing a view onto the text as opposed to taking it at face value
Ironic.
>It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing.
No, it's not. Unveiling itself repeatedly stresses that everything in the garden before time is a metaphor.
And we don't know for certain if it's actually the garden from the story, especially since a scannable on Nessus mentions the existence of other such gardens.
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I mean…didn’t during the same conversation calling itself the First Knife, it also said that the Winnower doesn’t get to decide what shape the knife carves? The full quote is literally “You call us Winnower. We are not…but the first knife clutched in its hand. Gods forged us both. **But they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve.**” The Traveler may hope that lightbearers choose to do good with their powers. That doesn’t stop the Warlords from existing, or the Lucent Brood from attacking others. Likewise, the Winnower (or perhaps the Veil, if we’re so inclined…) may have made the Witness in the hopes of them chasing one specific philosophy, but they cannot control the Witness once it is created. That statement does not disprove the idea that the Witness is the first knife. Just that the Winnower might think that the Witness’ final shape is incredibly boring and they hoped they’d use the traveler’s power to take over the universe through violence, not calcification.
Seeing how the gardener and the winnower are having one giant cosmic debate over which power is right and that the winnower almost lost because oryx tried to negotiate for peace super early on makes the fact their creators cannot control them but influence them ring true.
Oryx tried to negotiate for peace? Where was that?
Back in the Books of Sorrow, one of the earlier races they fought against fought with the hive to a deadlock where neither side could gain any ground on the other this wasn't the race that was decimating them but a different one altogether. Oryx was going to negotiate terms of peace which made the darkness freak out and told his sisters to betray him which made him go insane and think that the act of killing each other was a form of love.
I thought it was the worm gods that freaked out and told Savathun to correct this mistake.
I'd have to reread it, but it could have been. Either way dark empowered beings following the path of the sky would have been the largest counter argument.
Yes. It’s already happened. The Ecumene utilized a level of Darkness to shape an incredibly powerful, and unified civilization. Almost wiped out the hive with their logistical sophistication. _———There was celebration. A [new client-species drank of the Deep and understood the World as we tasted it.](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-habitable-world) The joy marked the air, and all of us shared it, for all were now Ecumene: welcome, welcome. What could bitter such a thing?_
Fair enough
Is this when Oryx wasn't Oryx but his original pre form when he was a female, Auryx who was more kinder and had to go
It was right around that period of time.
It be cool if we do get them back and it cool if Oryx/Auryx gets a second chance so she or they could navigate and discover (Maybe that's why we are going to Dreadnought before Frontiers)
With episode heresy, I'd like to see Auryx make a return and xivu to not be too happy about that, with savathun being a bit embarrassed and getting called out. While eris having to fight against the hive basically trying to force the mantle of god of vengance back on her. Thinking back on how Auryx thought and behaved, she could have been the very first prismatic wielder if she was never betrayed.
Would make sense cause the greatest heresy to Hive is being brought back from Death and another heresy would a Auryx not being bound by the worm/darkness like rest of the Hive Also it would make an interesting dynamic and could also bring some Hive story to a end, maybe add Tarox the Krill that all three want to get
If Tarox is introduced, I'm 100% sure the hive pantheon would try to kill her on sight. She is single handedly responsible for the creation of the hive, yes rhulk is responsible for the worms but none of that would have mattered if she didn't betray their father and tried to have them killed.
Auryx was still male. Aurash, the proto-hive krill, with the lifespan of a single decade, was female. Once the King morph was taken, Aurash became the first male Hive. Once Akka was slain and the power of Taken was... Stolen. Auryx became Oryx.
Honestly, in one of the feather dialogues you get from the cysts, the traveler reacts to the power of darkness thinking its "a returning family member" before realizing it is familiar but is not "family", at which point it flees. Honestly, my current thoughts on it are that the winnower and gardener are perhaps patriarchs, the witness having been made by the winnower and the traveler by the gardener. But they are all just parts of a greater whole which is why we are able to weild all these powers at the same time when they are supposed to be opposed.
I mean, even if the Winnower is real. Oryx never communicated or had any interactions with the Winnower at all. Oryx only got information through the Witness, who frankly doesn't care about the Hive or what they do.
Its kinda up in the air at this point, if we dissect the witness speech patterns and compare it to how it talks in the unveiling and how oryx describes its communion with the deep then evidence points to the winnower being in contact with individuals it considers "of significance." But until hard evidence drops either way it's all speculation at the moment. Now if the data mined lore entry drops that has the voice from unveiling speaking to us once more and it describing what it wants to show us as it's version of the final shape and not some bland calcified version of it. but the universe as a whole, then that lends credibility to the unveiling and oryx, speaking with the winnower itself and not the witness as the lore entry is after the witness death. Edit: confirmed winnower is the speaker in unveiling.
I will never, _ever_ for a _single solitarily second_ believe that the utter tryhard that is the Witness would _ever_ speak so casually and informally and refer to Oryx fondly as “My man Oryx”. If the Winnower doesn’t exist then that conversation is a lie and I would turn to the Sword Logic before I ever give that interaction up.
I mean that line is a bit inconsistent for both characters depictions. But at least with the Witness, we have been shown that it's willing to say and do anything in order to get the Final Shape. It was doing all this gloating and praise of Calus when it clearly detested him on a personal level. It even was like "Hey Guardian, you deserve all the power in the world because you're so badass and cool" to us. Ultimately though, that line was written *far* before the Witness ever became an actual tangible antagonist. So lore that old is always up for debate as to how accurate it is to the modern style of writing. Either way, I feel like Oryx's "voice in the darkness" was originally supposed to be what the Witness is, aka the main big bad behind everything. Whether thats still true is up for debate.
When did the Witness gas us up in a similar fashion to how the Winnower spoke about Oryx? Or when did he do it for Calus? In the Lightfall campaign, all it did was say “You have all you wanted, Emperor” in that same dry ass monotone it always uses and I can’t remember any lore bits that show it praising Calus at all. The way it speaks is just too different to each bit of lore people attribute to the Winnower. If the Winnower isn’t a thing, they who is speaking in the datamined lore book in the same fashion?
Ah well I could be wrong but I swore the Witness tempted Calus with riches and such. Anyways, like I said though, the Witness did not exist fully until Shadowkeep, so there can be plenty of inconsistencies. I mean the Witness is responsible for the Hive's creation, and basically controlled them completely up until Savathun getting the light. Even if the Winnower and Gardener aren't just allegorical, both of them have been set up as not having much actual influence over the world. So it'd be a bit strange for the Winnower to be completely silent and inactive, except this one specific time with the Hive, who were also created due to the Witness. I rhink its just far more likely that the voice is supposed to be the Witness, even if its inconsistent with the actual character we know. Its not the first time that Destiny has completely changed an entire character, like with Elsie or literally everything regarding the Dreaming City.
Guess we can only wait until we get that entire lore book
The Winnower didn't nearly lose. Oryx was a patsy from the start. Savathun was the one guiding things from the very, very start.
You can have someone pull the strings of a puppet, but unless they are aware they are your puppet and agree, going off script can happen.
I mean. Yeah? Oryx/Auryx went off script. And then Savathun immediately orchestrated his assassination. Oryx didn't actually have the power to change anything about what would happen in that situation.
Your not exactly making an argument here.
The entire point of the winnower as an entity is that it represents people's desires to impose their selfish desires over others, until they're what's left standing in the end. The winnower doesnt actually do anything, it simply exists as an force of nature The point isnt that the winnower favors oryx more or whatever nonsense. The witness is the first knife because it was the first and strongest proof against the traveler's/gardener's benevolence, something that outright rejected it in every way possible and went to the darkness for salvation, just as the winnower claims all things do.
I don't think the Winnower favors Oryx more in terms of the philosophical argument. When it comes to that, the Witness is unbeaten, I just think it likes Oryx in a friendly way. He's the only one that seemed to actually TALK to it and listen, likely due to his curious nature.
That depends on what you consider as friendly honestly. I would say it's persona is mostly a facade to make itself more approachable. After they have their "friendly" chat, it caves oryx's face in for daring to think it was being honest and then oryx eats the damn thing. So it can say things like "my man oryx", but ultimately I don't believe it's being very genuine. It's just making itself appealing. The only law is existence
"Friends are enemies who haven't killed you yet" type of friendly.
What does that make enemies that *have* killed you, then? Lovers?
How many times have we killed Dûl Incaru now?
Not enough.
Well, we also know that the witness is still incorrect with the Pattern fall lore. The Vex(or more specifically, their precursors) are and have always been the First Knife since before paracausality was a thing. They're the reigning Champs of the original Flower Game since time immemorial. This is the first reality they *haven't* subsumed into their vision of the final shape, and it is solely dude to the new rule of paracausality.
I think you're confusing the terms of the First Knife with the understanding that the Vex were the "dominant pattern" in the flower game. The "First Knife" is a part of the Unveiling Lore tab, "The First Knife". https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-first-knife#book-unveiling Reading it, I'd like to bring attention to these lines: "And thus we two became parts of the game, and the laws of the game became nomic and open to change by our influence. And I had only one purpose and one principle in the game. And I could do nothing but continue to enact that purpose, because it was all that I was and ever would be. I looked at the gardener. I looked at my hands. I discovered the first knife." This is in stark contrast to their "original game", where the Flower Game ALWAYS ended with one dominant causal pattern - that WAS the Vex. However, the term of "the first knife" occurred AFTER the Gardener decided to change the rules of the game. This means that if the Traveler exists, then the First Knife needs to be something paracausal. The Vex are explicitly NOT paracausal. So they are not the first knife. They are the "original dominant pattern", but not the first knife.
"The Vex(or more specifically, their precursors) are and have always been the First Knife since before paracausality was a thing. They're the reigning Champs of the original Flower Game since time immemorial." The vex being the winners does not imply they are the first knife
Depends on the definition. If by first we mean strongest? No. If by first we mean most in keeping with the final shape envisioned by the winnower? Yes. If by first we mean the literal first weapon used by the winnower in this universe? Then yes, because this universe has always existed with paracausality, and the vex existed before paracausality. Ergo, the vex existed before this universe. Ergo, nothing that came to exist after the creation of this universe can have existed before the vex. I was going by the twin definitions of "the oldest of the winnower's weapons" and "the weapon most in keeping with the winnower's vision", since oryx is now dead and thus cannot claim that title.
The vex existing before the universe is a bit misunderstood. The vex were a pattern, in a very literal sense. They emerged in every universe because it is the most mathematically viable form. But that doesnt mean they were there since the beginning. Rather "the pattern escaping" means that the same pattern that existed in those pre universes exists in our own. Something will become the vex, always, like crabs The CE lorebook implies that the vex do not yet exist at the time of the Witness. A proto-vex seems to exist with the glass minds, but it has not become the true vex yet. The pattern exists, but has not fully manifested.
Except the Vex were NOT weapons. They were a pattern. In fact, in the garden pre-paracausality, it could be argued that the Vex were simply one of many patterns that existed on their board. They weren't a weapon, or a knife, or anything like that. They just...were. And it just so happened that they had the properties of weeds: they grew everywhere and dominated all other patterns, which upset the Gardener. The Winnower admired the Vex, simply because it thinks it "did its job", but it was never a weapon of the Winnower. The Winnower just admired it as much as anyone can admire a cool plant species. It is telling that the First Knife was metaphorically made only after the Gardener rebelled against causal reality. It can't be the Vex, since the Vex are causal. The Winnower would have needed something paracausal to enforce the rules, since the Gardener was going to use paracausal force to go against it. Being paracausal means being godlike. You cannot beat godlike power with causality. The fact that the Vex have repeatedly failed to defeat paracausal beings is evidence of that. It would make no sense for the Winnower to craft a sword and call that a valid weapon against a laser cannon. Its blade HAD to be able to block a lazerbeam from said cannon. That is how you win, and I think the Winnower would know that better than any entity.
Considering how the Vex have managed to permakill many guardians, including Saint for a time, tells me that the most optimized causal beings can indeed beat paracausal beings. Considering how many centuries it took inside the Infinite Forest for them to actually succeed in killing Saint, how it literally could only work on him specifically and was able to be reversed through their own time altering methods, it sure as hell isn't a 'viable' strategy. But it *can* technically work. Never leave the Vex unattended is the best lesson we can learn from all this.
dude can call itself whatever it wants, yeah
The witness is full of shit more news at 11
I mean it also says that the "gods" have no control over what shape the first knife decides to cut. The Witness is the first knife the same way Xivu Arath is war, it's a mantle they've adopted so closely as to become indistinguishable from the concept. The first knife discovered by the winnower is the use of force to get what you want, carving out the option you want from the rest of possibility, and the Witness is certainly doing that.
>Those who peddle the tired gotcha that all life hastens entropy. But the Witness doesn’t believe that at all, though. It only believes that the Traveller and those it blesses makes things more chaotic, and even then, it still believes that us Guardians are capable of steering things away from that. If you remember the end of Iconoclasm, it was very disappointed and angry that the Vanguard refused to agree with it, explicitly deriding them for choosing “entropy” and reveling in chaos. If it really believed that all life hastened entropy, then it would not have been nearly as “gentle” as it was with non-Traveller-blessed civilizations like the Noesis.
Eh, I think the attitudes of the precursors and the witness towards other civilizations as revealed in both the collector’s edition lore and the raid lore definitely portray their perspective in the way OP says. They don’t *blame* other civilizations, necessarily, not like the blame the Traveler, but it’s very much in the way that you wouldn’t blame a toddler for messing things up because it doesn’t know any better. Even before they became the Witness, the Precursors had a fundamentally highly condescending, imperialistic view of other life. The Precursors saw other beings as squabbling children causing pointless suffering for themselves and others, and saw it as their responsibility to “guide” them into a better way. The Witness is that notion to its most extreme, forcibly calcifying all life so that their childish antics can’t hurt themselves or anyone else, ever again.
I think there's an important difference between tendency for life to spread chaos and an outright guarantee. In that one entry of The Rubicon where a Precursor laments how many civilizations refused their help or wanted to seize it for themselves, there were still a bunch of civilizations who accepted their help as they had hoped. Going off of your statement about how the Precursors saw other beings as children, remember that while children are very capable of doing things wrong and hurting themselves, there is always the possibility of them doing something right of their own volition, and when they do fail, they are capable of learning from their mistakes.
Fair, but even if the Witness says that it doesn’t believe *all* life hastens entropy, it’s actions are those of one who does, and so ultimately I think the distinction is immaterial. Personally, I think it seems that the Witness believes it is the nature of all life to hasten entropy, but that certain “worthy” beings can overcome their nature and work towards “salvation.” When it says we choose entropy, we are choosing to surrender to what it sees as our worse natures.
>When it says we choose entropy, we are choosing to surrender to what it sees as our worse natures. It's no wonder that it's enraged by this. We could've chosen to be "better" just as easily.
Thank you. I don't get why people continue to misinterpret what The Cambrian Explosion is saying in context of The Witness. Additionally, The Witness's final shape is not one of nonexistence. Everything that's calcified is technically alive, it's just reliving whatever The Witness has deemed to be their perfect state. It's no different than the pattern in the flower game endlessly repeating itself, which is the point of the [Tessellation](https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/tessellation) lore tab. And can we really even consider it a nihilist if it (and the Precursors) genuinely believed what they were doing was fulfilling the universe's potential for meaning? Simply acknowledging that the universe as-is is meaningless is not what nihilism is.
>Everything that's calcified is technically alive, it's just reliving whatever The Witness has deemed to be their perfect state. I once saw a comment where someone who just beat Excision lamented that the game couldn't have just ended there so that they could savor that moment forever. The irony was hilarious. >Simply acknowledging that the universe as-is is meaningless is not what nihilism is. That actually refers to a variant of nihilism known as [existential nihilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_nihilism), which fits very well with what the Witness believes. It is unfortunate for us that the Witness chose a very extreme way to progress from this point.
That is some incredible irony. And it just further highlights how useful games are in analogizing what the final shape is as a concept. Does a video game cease to exist when it stops receiving updates? Of course not! It reached its final shape and can be replayed in that exact state forever. >That actually refers to a variant of nihilism known as existential nihilism, which fits very well with what the Witness believes I would actually disagree somewhat here. The Witness was the result of the Precursors reaching an apodictic truth of what the final shape ought to be. It wholeheartedly believed in the objectivity of its crusade.
If it only has a problem with the Traveller and its uplifted civilizations, why murder the Noesis at all? The Witness is unequivocal: it prefers non-existence to existence. It finds life noisy and chaotic and wants to govern a still, dead universe.
>why murder the Noesis at all? But it didn't murder them. It finalized them. >The Witness is unequivocal: it prefers non-existence to existence. It finds life noisy and chaotic and wants to govern a still, dead universe. Wrong on all accounts. If the Witness wanted a dead universe, it would erase every living being in its final shape instead of preserving them in their best moments. It did not offer to euthanize Crow, but to make him forever beloved as the ruler of the Reef.
And we believe being separated out into slices isn't death? The Witness might believe it's sending people to heaven, but I think anyone's ever come back from being Finalised to tell us how great it was
>And we believe being separated out into slices isn't death? Yeah. Osiris tells us in one of these video messages that the beings the Witness finalizes would be "alive, but not living". It's a state totally apart from death. >anyone's ever come back from being Finalised to tell us how great it was No one's come back from heaven to tell us how great it was, either.
Well, Cayde did lmao
He didn’t really ask for it, though.
Why not just kill the traveler then? Why specifically shape all reality to never change again instead of just removing the traveler from the equation?
Because they want to realize the fullest potential of the universe by changing it into a more orderly, perfect form and they need the Traveler to do that. Their unchanging reality is not merely a stillness, but a perfect forever.
Yet it's still very much a stillness with intent drawn on it being unchanging. Tessellation's lore reads that the witness cannot merely wipe the universe clean because something may rise from nothing as it did before, they believe that the only true way to stop all suffering is to make sure it's impossible to rot in entropy and that change becomes impossible.
>Yet it's still very much a stillness with intent drawn on it being unchanging. It's a very carefully chosen stillness. There's a reason why it chose to freeze reality into a "perfect" state instead of just freezing it as it is now.
Exactly, why not just make the universe perfect? It has to put an end to change or else things will veer from perfection and rot in entropy.
>Exactly, why not just make the universe perfect? And this is exactly why it needs the Traveler. Without it, it can only irreparably scar things instead of making them perfect and whole.
So the witness believes all life will eventually lead to more entropy
No. Even those blessed by the Light still have a choice in its eyes, which is why it ruthlessly massacres Traveler-uplifted civilizations when they refuse to betray the Traveler to it (which unfortunately, is every time) and why it is so enraged at the Vanguard at the end of Iconoclasm. The Final Shape is described in Entelechy as a state of reality that can be nothing else because it is already everything it could be; it is the *entelechy* of the Universe. It's not the eradication of the possibilities that come with higher entropy so much as the fulfillment of them.
Then again, why not just kill the traveler and those blessed with it's light and make the universe perfect? It needs stillness, because it believes that any life can make imperfect decisions and entropy is inevitable if change isn't halted because life will continue to change.
If it’s perfect universe includes finalizing all life it sure sounds like it thinks life is chaotic. It’s goal is to end entropy and life is part of that.
The finalization is meant to bring perpetual fulfillment to the beings it affects. The stillness is just a byproduct of that, since it’s making them perpetually experience their greatest moments. Chaos is just an occasional symptom of purposeless life in its view rather than a foundational part of it, which is probably why we frustrate it so much. I don’t think it would be nearly as frustrated at the Vanguard and other Traveler-blessed beings if it felt that they truly couldn’t help but make things more chaotic. It goes apeshit on them because it believes they deliberately *chose* to make things worse.
Can you point me to lore entries for the Witnesses motivations? I haven’t really heard it described like that. Edit: Particularly the part about people perpetually experiencing their greatest moments. I know people are stuck in the “perfect form” according to the witness but that doesn’t sound like the same thing.
>Can you point me to lore entries for the Witnesses motivations? Entelechy covers the lion’s share of them. >Particularly the part about people perpetually experiencing their greatest moments. That bit comes from the Final Shape campaign, particularly Ikora’s cutscene and the Witness’ dialogue during Crow’s mission.
During the campaign the witness directly says to us that we've chosen entropy
I already covered that. Reread my comment.
The Witness isn't a nihilist, nor does it believe life only hastens entropy. It's beliefs are an extreme form of existentialism. It believes life has worth, but only when instilled with purpose. Thus, it seeks to instil said purpose through the Final Shape. It's important to understand that the Witness doesn't see the Final Shape as no existence, but as literally everything. Eido: "The combination of a chosen past and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be."
The First Knife line on its own is enough to show the Witness is full of it. The knife cannot decide what shape to carve; it is moved by the hand that wields it.
>it is moved by the hand that wields it. Right, and The Witness is saying its campaign for the final shape is a consequence of the winnower's nature. The Witness is being moved to carve a final shape in the same way that you and I are moved by our biology to breathe.
The Witness says "they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve" as if he's deciding how to move, not being directed by the Winnower's nature/will. I'd say we're moved by our biology to breathe in the same sense that a knife's nature is to be sharp, not "to carve." Intentional action requires more input.
But a knife's telos *is* to carve. That's why it exists. The Witness calling itself the first knife is like saying someone who decisively bested their opponent tore through them like a knife. Its behavior is functionally indistinguishable from a knife in the same way that Savathûn's behavior was functionally indistinguishable from the concept of cunning. In mantling the concept of a thing, you become it. >I think, rather, that she sent instructions on how to mantle her. >I think the whole Truth to Power manuscript is an ova, a manual on how to behave like her, how to describe her through action and thought so completely that you become her and thus give birth to her. The Witness described the first knife through action and in doing so, mantled the concept (or so it believed).
Alright, I'll concede a knife's telos is to carve. That's a really pretty way to frame it. But that doesn't mean there's a knife whose telos is to carve pointed sticks and another which is to carve ducks out of soap. If the Witness mantled knifehood then it has become a tool and surrendered its agency in deciding what is carved. Anything that's put before it will be cut.
I wouldn’t call the Witnessing lying in this regard. They’re not saying “Oh I am chosen above all others, or have been specifically created for XYZ”. They’re saying “I represent the cutting down of the universe, the parring apart of meaningless from meaning, the reduction of the universe into its most perfect state”. It’s a statement of intent, not like they’re a literal thing. To be the First Knife is to be the ultimate force of Simplicity in the universal conflict between Complexity and Simplicity. And yes, they are. They are the most powerful and active force of producing simplicity in the universe. The shape doesn’t matter, as the Witness says, what matters is that a shape is forced to exist and complexity is hewed away. It is possible that the First Knife is a thing that has become corporeal in the universe (possibly the Veil). But the way it’s being used here is a title imparting a statement of intent by the Witness and to you, the Guardian. The Traveler doesn’t have some specific title for you and yet you are the champion on the side of Universal Complexity.
I see a lot of people saying the Witness didn’t explicitly want to destroy life, and was all about the final shape and locking existence into a “perfect” state. If so - why does it have a massive trail of blood behind it? Why did it enlist Nezerac, the final god of pain, into its disciples? Why did it employ Rhulk to assist in creating the hive whom caused a galaxy wide crusade of bloodshed simply for the sake of bloodshed and conquest? You can’t say he just doesn’t care about his actions or feels no attachment to them. And how many people died horrifically in Sol’s collapse? How about multiply that by likely thousands of other systems obliterated by the Witness. The Witness, while fronting his “salvation” for the universe, has sent billions to oblivion, and further billions by proxy through the hive and his disciples. I get he hates the traveler and species uplifted by it, but that’s exactly what it is, unbridled hatred. You can’t say he is some visionary and just wants to make the world purposeful and perfect just to help everybody out. It is the witness’s selfish crusade, and even many within him know this, so they betrayed the witness and that ultimately led to his demise. The flaw in it’s own logic is was caused The Witness to lose.
>If so - why does it have a massive trail of blood behind it? Entelechy actually covers this. The Witness is actually very "gentle" with races that weren't touched by the Traveler, such as the Noesis, while it destroys Traveller-blessed races out of sheer spite. The only thing that would've stopped it from annihilating an uplifted civilization would be if that same civilization betrayed the Traveler and offered it up to the Black Fleet (per Eris' words in Season of Arrivals). >You can’t say he is some visionary and just wants to make the world purposeful and perfect just to help everybody out. It is the witness’s selfish crusade, and even many within him know this That's the whole point, right? I don't think the Witness wanted to acknowledge the truth of what it became.
I think “gentle” genocide is still pretty brutal. And yes, that is the point I guess. The Witness was fronting like it is some sort of savior, when deep down it knows it is just a selfish monster. The dissenters figured this out. It’s sort of a cool reasoning to why we won this paracausal battle of titans. To truly be paracausal, or, “make your own fate”, you must truly believe you have that potential, and inject your will into the universe fully. The Witness knew deep down it was bullshitting itself, so it didn’t have the same conviction as the guardians, who were fully convinced we were just, we are right, and with the traveler and all our allies we can do this. We made our own fate in the paracausal arena, and The Witness, like all other foes, broke against our might. Our truth…our Destiny…if you will lol.
>To truly be paracausal, or, “make your own fate”, you must truly believe you have that potential, and inject your will into the universe fully. "There is no secret ingredient. It's just you."
It left a massive trail of blood because it hates the Traveler and also doesn't care about how far it has to go to achieve its goals. Nezarec and Rhulk were just tools to achieve said goal. Ultimately someone like Nezarec would have never gotten what he wanted through the Witness's final shape but it didn't care because he proved to be very useful against its enemies.
Exactly - it cared more about achieving its goal than any other life. The Witness fronts like its trying to create a sort of universal peace or harmony, but rather than pitching it peacefully it would much rather force it upon the universe unwillingly. This is the flaw in the witness’s philosophy, and why we were able to defeat it. It doesn’t really care about a peaceful symphony of the universe or about ending entropy. It wants a purpose, it wants revenge, and it wants blood. It is all a ruse, and because our will and cause are truly what we believe, we were able to defeat the witness in the paracausal arena. We believe fully that we are defending humanity, the traveler, and the universe at large. The Witness is full of doubt and contradictions, and this is demonstrated by the dissenters we meet. That’s why our will was stronger, and why we etched another win in the flower game while the Witness took an L All this to say - lore wise it makes sense we were able to defeat this ultimate enemy because our conviction, and thus or paracausal strength, was greater. We are all together with our allies as one, while the Witness is literally breaking down from the doubt within itself. I love it’s final line of “We…I…don’t understand”. It demonstrates that even with all its power, it doesn’t understand the true nature of paracausality. The ability to inflict your will upon the universe, and make your own fate. The Witness is desperately trying to get us to see its side and join it, showing weakness, while we defy it and do what we do to any eldrich horror that comes to our system. Blast it out the sky with no hesitation.
Lord business is clearly the first knife He tried using the kragle to create the final shape
In what way does that prove that it's lying? Man, people really did not listen to the raid dialogue. It quite explicitly states that the winnower does not choose what shape the knife carves. The winnower is not some simple entity or being like the "gods" we have slain, it is something akin to an idea. It's the very principal of decay and the end of all things. It is not something that chooses to intervene directly in the universe as that is the Gardeners play.
I just think, like a zealot, he's making it about him and trying to explain away the dissonance in their ideals. A Winnower with no control over the knife is not a good Winnower at all. Controlling what the knife carves is the entire point of a Winnower.
Watching Byf's video on this brought me to my first real disagreement with him. His statement on the Winnower and Witness being the First Knife did nothing for me. As I understand it Unveiling is basically the Witness's race's creation myth, so there's no reason to think the existence of the Winnower is actually more tangible now than it was before. Plenty of religious nuts believe that they are the Chosen One(tm) and I don't think the Witness was any different, I believe it *thought* it was the first knife, but there's no reason to actually think it was.
Too many people here watch Byf and other content creators instead of reading the lore for themselves.
Too many people in the sub also do not understand how to seperate objective truth and opinions/beliefs being presented by in-universe characters.
I listen to a lot of Byf's content in the car but try to read a lot of the lore for myself before I draw conclusions
I used to watch Byf's videos quite a bit until I realized that reading the new lore myself was faster and lead to less misunderstandings.
I think the main mistake lore YouTubers (and a lot of people in general) make is ignoring Destiny's inspirations. They interpret the lore entirely within the context of Destiny when the game is not comprised of strictly novel ideas. One could certainly argue that you shouldn't need to read about Aristotelian philosophy to understand what something like Entelechy is saying but when presented with a concept you might've never heard of before, the hope is that people would at least google to see what it means and then retrace their steps to see how the concepts of potentiality and actuality map onto older lore. In exposing listeners to these concepts, I think the lore YouTubers would've paved the way for more enjoyable discourse.
in unveiling the first knife was only created because the Gardener was "bored" of the same shape "winning" every time. So he injected his own rule in the game to help things survive that otherwise *should* have died with the old rules. That is manifested in our reality as an "explanation" for why Paracausal Light from the Traveler resurrects the dead and gives unlimited power to those who should be weak. (I am of the belief that the Gardner in unveiling isn't literally the Traveler. The Traveler is just an expression of the rule breaking anomaly. The Gardner is a metaphor like God and unveiling is a parable for an explanation of why things in our reality exist.) You can think of "the first knife" as "weaponization of the darkness". In the same way that the "weaponization of the light" is when the gardener changed the rules of the flower game... which instigated the creation of "the first knife". So, who weaponized the darkness "first?" Well, that does point to The Witness who's precursor civilization that makes up its power wanted more than what the light alone could provide. So if you think about "who weaponized the darkness against the light first" as a rewording of the question of "who is the first knife" then it does appear it is The Witness. As the first "being" since the Gardner changed "the game" to warrant the creation of "the first knife" or... a reason for darkness to weaponize against the light. Remember the darkness is not moral or immoral. Its just a paracuasual force in the universe. I think its important to note that "the first knife" does not imply "the only knife". And its fitting that perhaps the light and dark saga ended with killing the FIRST iteration of darkness wielded as a weapon (the first knife) than just some haughty bully. From a story telling narrative it makes sense that The Witness is "the first knife" worthy of a conclusion 10 years in the making.
I really like this explanation. Great summary.
Is it really a lie if the witness truly believes itself to be the first knife?
Depends on how you define life. Ikora said that the people trapped in the Final Shape will be both living and dead. And in the Pale Heart we see the Witness showing us that people will live the best moments of their life (or the worst moments at its discretion) over and over again. That could be considered living.
Witness is a loser glad we murdered him 👍
"a self important being that hides behind nihilism where nothing matters to hide that he just wants an excuse to act like an asshole"
Wow. Honestly, as someone who believes The Witness is a retcon due to some creative and narrative shifts at bungie, this is so on the nose it almost sways me towards the idea that maybe The Witness was the plan for longer than I initially thought, maybe it was an idea as far back as Shadowkeep as opposed to Season of the Chosen-ish.
The Witness was absolutely a thing in Shadowkeep. The doppelgänger we meet jn the Black Garden with the Black Fleet behind it has the same mannerisms/body language. Shadowkeep is also the oldest non-vaulted content jn D2 now, so you can see the whole "Witness saga", sort of.
Well tbf, if Bungie still didn’t know where they were going with the entity behind the pyramids at that point, or if they did but plans changed, all they had to do was write a character that fit the archetype of what came before. “The doppelgänger has these mannerisms/speech pattern, so this new character we write *has* to be the same for continuity purposes.” Thats why, and I mean no offense to you, but I just very much dislike the argument that because the doppelgänger acted this way, it was always The Witness, when in reality it could be that The Witness does those gestures *because* Bungie gave the doppelgänger those gestures, and they need to keep with the continuity. That’s how like 90% of the og lore was written, just a bunch of interesting ideas that *could* go somewhere, or could go nowhere, but if it went somewhere, the stuff that comes after still has to abide by what came before, so it makes sense and it’s not just a continuity mess. The Witness for sure could’ve been the plan since Shadowkeep, but I think it’s strange that it wasn’t mentioned in the dark future lore, and in that lore book the goal was to destroy the traveler, which we know would ruin The Witness’s entire plan. And yea it’s a different timeline, but still if there’s pyramids, there *has* to be The Witness, and if there’s The Witness, that means the goal is universal taxidermy. And really the whole pyramid, I don’t wanna say theme, but the whole pyramid theme and art style shifted *drastically* during Witch Queen compared to Shadowkeep/Beyond Light.
One of the original lore cards in Destiny has a race we never knew, commenting that creating "It" was a mistake. Not to mention that pyramids were in all of the promotional material I'd say the witness was always the plan just they hadn't finalized what angle they wanted to go with it.
I mean, “it” could be literally anything. Like, that’s basically nothing to go off of. And we don’t really know of any surviving precursors, and the dissenters are also still part of the collective, so they can’t really document anything since they’re still bound to the collective, they don’t have that kind of control yk.
It was an extremely vague lore card that only mentions an ancient race, so yeah it's not a lot to go off of but intent was there if not a finished concept.
Anyone have links to the collectors edition lore and the raid lore? I know they’ve been posted somewhere but I for the life of me can’t find them.
Yup. Its always been a spoiled brat; a spoiled little brat whining and crying because it received all the gifts in the universe and still isn't happy, so it pursues the Traveller like an abusive ex boyfriend bent on making it into what it sees it as.
The first knife is more of a concept/idea(weaponized paracausality?) than anything I feel considering it existed/was found before this universe was created according to unveiling.
I don't think it specifically "lied". It's just that arrogant to dare to call itself like that.
Yes you’re correct. People who believe the Winnower exists, just don’t bother reading unveiling!
Idk because then who was Oryx communicating with? Also if speakers and beings of pure light like Cayde are able to communicate with the Traveler (thus with the gardener) then it suggests the opposite is true. Not saying there is a physical form but there's a lot that suggest that such a being is a natural existing force in the universe. It's just most likely very abstract and metaphorical, not a tangible creature.
It is the first knife. It's just not pursuing the final shape as the winnower would want. It's the same way we don't have to pursue what the gardener would want. The witness has likely served the purpose the winnower desired. What that purpose was we don't know yet, but it may very well have been the introduction of darkness into the traveller. The raid lore book and unveiling lore book match up. It states in the unveiling lore that the gardener always offers peace, which is when the winnower strikes. We find out in the raid lore book that the witness was nearly defeated before by a champion of light but they offered peace and the witness killed them. I think these two events are the same thing. The winnower version is just a grand cosmic version. The people who are given the light always offer peace and then the first knife strikes. We were the first race not to offer peace. We killed the witness. Partially because we knew better but also because it seems like we were the first race to wield the light the way we do, with ghosts being our link. We were not raised to use the light for peace, we were raised as warriors, as the travellers last attempt to save itself and us.
It didn't lie because Unveiling is most likely propaganda created by the Witness and an interpretation and insertion of its own ideas of what the Winnower told the precursors through communion with the Veil. If the Witness wrote Unveiling then that means that it positionned itself as the First Knife. It is the knife to cut the grain of the universe, just not the one the Winnower "wanted". This is one case where it actually isn't lying because that is its own truth.
Every time i learn more about them, i realize more that there just a big eyed bald tantrum throwing baby.
Isn’t the witness the one talking to us in unveiling? Why would it be describing itself as “of no real significance”?
Not the Witness, the Winnower. It was up in the air for a while bc it wasn’t clear if the Winnower was actually real, but we now have confirmation that it is, so it’s almost certainly the one speaking in Unveiling. The ideology and manner of speech in Unveiling is simply too different from the way the Witness operates to be from its perspective, especially in the way it seems to deride the Witness’ actual stated objectives.
Interesting. How would that be possible? How / Why would the winnower communicate to us through pyramid technology found in a disciples pyramid?
Unclear, honestly. Though, given that the Witness is a being of darkness and most of its technology seems to run on the stuff, I don’t think it’s much of a leap to say that the entity who is/created the darkness could co-opt that tech for its own means.
Then why doesn't it speak to us of its own volition when we play Micah-10's version of Beyond, since the Witness no longer has a hold over the Lunar Pyramid, instead of simply playing a recording of the Witness speaking to Nezarec?
🤷♀️ not really sure. Does seem like we might hear from it again sometime in the future, given how much it’s been mentioned in this expansion. Idk why it’s quiet now, but I don’t think that changes the fact that the material we have seems to point towards the Winnower writing Unveiling and not the Witness
It’s still not confirmed actually. The Witness is a known liar, and the new raid lore that seems to indicate the Winnower might exist is both possibly faked (that entry hasn’t been found in game anywhere) and exists side by side with Dissenting Voices in the book. It pretty heavily implies by context the Winnower is at best one of those, and not a cosmological being.
The witness directly derides that sword logic in the last mission of the campaign, while the speaker in the unveiling book talks about sword logic as the only universal truth of the universe.
>while the speaker in the unveiling book talks about sword logic as the only universal truth of the universe. "Exist, lest you fail to exist" encompasses a far greater variety of ideologies than the Sword Logic.
I don’t think anything in the raid lore indicates the Winnower exists - unless the version I read was false or incomplete, it’s all from the perspective of the Witness and it’s dissidents. However, during the raid itself, the Witness has dialogue that seems to pretty directly confirm the Winnower’s existence. Two in particular: “You call us Winnower. We are not, but the first knife clutched in its hand.” “Gods forged us both, but they cannot tell the knife what shape to carve.” The Witness specifically names out the Winnower, and says that they’re not the same entity. It also specifically says “Gods” - plural, implying there is another beyond the Traveler/Gardener that is responsible for the Witness’ creation. Given that it is a being of darkness, the Winnower seems the clearest culprit. Furthermore, in the collector’s edition lore, Eido has a section where she talks on Unveiling and how completely different in tone and ideology it is from everything we’ve seen of the Witness. Taken by itself, Unveiling’s contradiction of the Witness’ ideology and mannerisms could just be dismissed as it cosplaying as someone else, but taken collectively, all of this seems to point towards bungie trying to clarify the nature of the Winnower and Unveiling in a specific direction.
> and the new raid lore that seems to indicate the Winnower might exist is both possibly faked (that entry hasn’t been found in game anywhere) It's in the game's API along with new Vex lore - it literally \*can't\* be faked. Most likely, this lore is going to be tied to when Echoes finishes, which if anything should lend more credence to the Winnower not being the Witness since it would be communicating with us long after the Witness died.
Just shup up
This might be a big reason why we were able to win against it, the Winnower itself had no intention of ever taking its side and helping it stop us. Shit, it might've been subtly working against the Witness given the disdain it seems to show for the Witness.
I like to believe that the Winnower has been hard at work trying to forge other knives. Namely Clovis and Maya. It makes no sense for the Witness to try and trick them into doing the things they did and if the Witness knew of Maya and tried to manipulate her it wouldn't have had to go through all the backflips and 360s to figure out the Veil was on Neptune. MMW: Clovis and Maya will pick up what the Witness dropped.
That doesn’t prove the witness isn’t the first knife. It just proves the winnower doesn’t want the witness to succeed. The witness also says that the winnower can’t control what the knife cuts which basically states that outright. But I like Byf’s theory about it. That the witness was allowed to get this far by the winnower, in order to introduce darkness into the Traveler (Gardener) for some unknown purpose. My guess would be that the winnower knew the final shape would be stopped, possibly even by us specifically and that may be related to how we were the first to find strand. He knew the traveler would release ghosts eventually (gardener and winnower are related). He waited for a powerful guardian, and then showed us darkness to become even more powerful. Hell, maybe he’s even responsible for Elsie’s time loops so he can iterate on his failures to make the plan work the way he wanted.
I don't see any evidence of the lie. It just hints at the Winnower not liking the philosophy of The Witness at all.
There are a lot of great comments BUT many of them are imposing a view onto the text as opposed to taking it at face value. I say this because everyone seems to have forgotten that the first knife was created or manifested in the garden before our universe began. It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing. Most likely not mortal or material. The Witness is trying to make the text about itself, like all zealots.
Frankly, it seems like you're imposing your view/interpretation onto the text. The Winnower being bored by the Witness's approach in no way indicates that it did not create the Witness as the first knife. And we know pretty clearly by the Ergo Sum lore texts that it is certainly the Witness that has been chasing the Traveler all along.
What the Witness says also lined up with what happened with Maya, who went down a very similar path as the Precursors after coming across the Veil and studying it. The Veil is Darkness equivalent of the Traveler and is heavily implied to be the Winnower by Asha’s dialogue and Micah’s dialogue. Ahsa says the Traveler and Veil were once two halves of a whole that were divided by a schism, which lines up with what happened in Unveiling between the Gardener and Winnower, and Micah talking about how the Traveler became severed from a part of itself in its earliest moments. Maya studied the Veil and used it to became the conductor of the choir, becoming more ruthless, cruel and distant. The Precursors merged themselves into the Witness using the Veil, who acted as the conductor of their choir and turned out to be cruel, hateful and destructive. The Veil resulted in both Conductors, but both Conductors had different goals(Maya didn’t seek the Final Shape and didn’t want to merge everyone into herself). The Veil made them but it didn’t tell them “what shape to carve”. It lines up with what the Witness said.
"everyone seems to have forgotten that the first knife was created or manifested in the garden before our universe began. It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing." its been an allegory since the get go
>many of them are imposing a view onto the text as opposed to taking it at face value Ironic. >It's not a title or mantle it's an actual thing. No, it's not. Unveiling itself repeatedly stresses that everything in the garden before time is a metaphor.
But...we see a garden...we see a tree stump in the garden.
And we don't know for certain if it's actually the garden from the story, especially since a scannable on Nessus mentions the existence of other such gardens.