A Destiny cutscene finally explains the Witness and The Veil

Since its inception, Destiny has been riddled with long-standing mysteries. Destiny 2Since its release, it has deepened these mysteries. So it’s a tad surprising that, after years of offering more mysteries than answers, Bungie decided to drop a massive lore bomb on a random Tuesday in the middle of Destiny 2Season of the Deep

The new cutscene, which appears after the week five part of the “Into the Depths” quest, explains the origins of the series’ big bad, The Witness, and even starts unraveling the mystery of The Veil — the MacGuffin players chased throughout the most recent Lightfall expansion, only to learn nothing about it in the end. More importantly, the cutscene finally gives players some information on what The Traveler — the giant space orb that has sat in Destiny’s skyline for nearly a decade — actually is.

[Spoiler Warning: This post contains spoilers for a new Destiny 2 cutscene, as well as the end of the Lightfall campaign. If you don’t want to be spoiled, go play the Week 5 part of the “Into the Depths” questline and complete the Lightfall expansion first.]

The cutscene begins with a group that is the same race as The Witness. Sloane (a long-forgotten NPC) tells the player about The Witness’ progenitors, and how they were suffering alone on their planet. It turns out that The Traveler was always buried in their own world.

After being liberated from the planet, The Traveler blessed The Witness’ people with a Golden Age, and they called it The Gardener. This name is significant, as it confirms that The Traveler and The Gardener — thought to potentially be two different Light entities for years — are actually one and the same.

During the cutscene’s depiction of this Golden Age, we see that these people built the ominous Pyramid Ships that have threatened players since the ending of Destiny 2’s Red War campaign. But after “eons” of prosperity, the people grew tired of The Traveler’s silence, and demanded that it give them some form of further guidance. The search began for an entity The Veil or The Winnower that shared a link with The Gardener.

It is important to note that this cutscene contains the biggest lore reveal. Bungie has long teased players about the identities of the prime forces of Light and Darkness — calling one The Gardner and the other The Winnower — and Guardians have spent years speculating who or what they could be. Now we know that The Gardener is The Traveler (a being of pure Light) and The Winnower is The Veil (the Traveler’s Darkness counterpart).

The Witness’ people found The Veil, and in turn, it taught them about the nature of Light and Dark. Light has the ability to create and destroy. They viewed the Light as a chaotic force that needed to be controlled. The Darkness was their answer to this chaos, as it was shaped by “thought and consciousness.”

Image: Bungie via Redrix on YouTube

By using The Darkness to tame The Light, The Witness’ people believed that it could create the perfect universe, which they called The Final Shape. It is a significant revelation, because it gives the meaning of Destiny 2’s next expansion: The final shape.

However, when The Witness’ people attempted to use The Veil to tame The Traveler, the orb abandoned them. Unable to accept that their Final Shape would never come to be, they used The Darkness to merge themselves — all of the remaining members of the species — into The Witness (so named because they had “witnessed the truth in the darkness”).

Since then, The Witness has chased The Traveler through the cosmos in an attempt to “impose meaning on a meaningless universe.” The cutscene ends with an image of the merged Traveler and Veil, which happened at the end of the Lightfall campaign.

In a little over three and a half minutes, Bungie explained the entire setup for Destiny’s Light and Darkness saga, which is set to end with The final shape. And while it’s still currently unclear who or what created The Traveler and The Veil (and who knows if we’ll ever get those answers), this is the most information we’ve ever gotten on the origins of The Light, The Darkness, and The Witness.

This cutscene is a welcome taste of transparency after Bungie’s overly cryptic Lightfall expansion. Here’s hoping that the studio sticks the landing in The final shapeThe annual report will be released on 22 August. Destiny 2 Showcase.