Destcember Day 13: Theism
From the journals of Warlock Aviur Menacham.
God. A word that carries a lot of different meanings to different people. For some, it refers to an all-powerful, all-knowing deity that created the universe and everything in it. For others, it has meant a pantheon of beings of various levels of power that influenced different aspects of nature. Then, for some, it was simply a concept to be scorned and left behind. These days, the concept is a topic of frequent debate.
First, there was the Traveler. When that great, floating orb showed up in system, it was a marvel. It could terraform planets in a way humanity had only dreamed. Thanks to it, human life-spans were tripled and humanityâs Golden Age began. There were people then who began to consider it to be a god, and after the Collapse, Traveler worship cults became common. Now we have the Fallen, or Eliksni if you prefer, in our system, who worshipped it as a god when it first found their people. Even now, they revere machines and craft their Servitors in its image. Whether their strange form of machine worship lead to them accepting the Traveler as divine or sprang from it, we cannot yet say.
From the Traveler came the Ghosts, filled with Light and able to raise the dead, a miracle in itself. These Risen then were imbued with fantastical powers that some of the ancients would certainly have attributed to gods, things like immortality or the ability to summon fire or lightning seemingly at will. At the very least, they would have been hailed as demi-gods. Before the Iron Lords changed things, there were even some Risen who saw themselves as gods, with baseline humanity something for them to control or use.
In the years since the Collapse, several other enemy species have invaded our system, each of them with their own notion of god. Some of them were even called gods themselves, creatures like Crota and Oryx. Once we understood more of the Hive, we grew to understand that these âgodsâ were beholden to the Worm gods, leaving Oryx and his ilk as some for of second tier deity. Some of the Cabal seem to venerate their emperor, and the Vex had the Heart of the Black Garden. Such an odd concept, machines with faith.
So where then does that leave us?
Oryx, Crota, and the Black Heart are all dead. A team of three Guardians slew one of the Worm gods on Mars. I would venture to say that being killed by mere bullets would strip any claims of true divinity.
A number of Guardians have had encounters with Emperor Calus, or at least machines posing as him or delivering messages for him. From what I can ascertain, he is a madman. Calus claims to have seen the end of all things and wants to reserve the right to be the final thing alive in the universe. He has even had scribes writing out âfuture historyâ, which includes a Guardian siding with him, and helping him wipe out everything else that could take that claim. I do not imagine a god would need to fear being the last one standing.
The Traveler still hovers over our City. It was caged and trapped during the Red War, and somehow awoke from its long slumber to free itself, but had done nothing overt since then. I say nothing overt because there does seem to be an increase in the number of Guardians that claim to have received some sort of communication from it in recent years. With its shell cracked the way that it is now, we can see more of the inner workings of it than ever before, lending more credence to the name given to it by the Fallen, The Great Machine. It is incredible, and obviously capable of great power, but it is no god.
Could it be a conduit to one, though?
We have these vague concepts of âLightâ and âDarkâ to describe the ontological powers that seem to be waging a conflict that we are stuck in the middle of. One Guardian claims to be receiving communications from the Pyramid ship on Luna talking about beings called the Gardener and the Winnower, which seem to be actualizations of the Dark and Light, and claims that they existed before, and brought about, all things through a game. Could our universe and existence be the result of a pair of deities playing a game of probability? It is a bold claim for sure, and impossible to prove or disprove currently.
That is always what it comes down to, isnât it? The impossibility of proof, of being able to label and test something that could lie beyond the scope and realm of our ability to study and dissect it. I have seen, experienced, and felt enough in my time as a Guardian to be able to say one thing for certain, a quote from a playwright who lived a millenia ago, âThere are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.â
That and hope that if there is a God or Gardener out there, that they preserve us from the scythe that both Emperor Calus and that Drifter seem to see coming.
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