#cabal stuff

Okay, so it should be no surprise to any of my followers that I love the Cabal. The common census is that the Red Legion are traitors to the Empire and while I can understand the sentiment, I personally disagree and here’s why.

The two things to keep in mind are loyalty to the leader and fear of exile.

The Broken Legion disobeyed direct orders and got exiled, classed as enemies to the Empire, and were basically made an example of why you always obey your superiors no matter what.

So the Cabal on Mars. We don’t know why they’re here but I can pinpoint when they arrived. Destiny’s timeline has no concrete dates but we can confirm that the Cabal on Mars were deployed during Calus’s reign.

How do we know this? Simple. One of the early grimoire cards for the Cabal is a Ghost’s recollection of hiding in a Cabal outpost where they say it feels like the cabal are running from something.

For all their might and strength, for all that they have dug into Mars and flung up battle walls with the bureaucratic grimness of conquerors, I suspect they are fleeing from something. That within their hard shells and thousand-folded shields is a sharp seed of terror. But of what? Does something follow them? Should we fear it too? 

The card “Ghost fragment: cabal” talks about disputes between Cabal, some pledging allegiance some not.

We can dismiss these are low morale troops questioning their superiors, or, we could take it as a hint of foreshadowing.

Ghaul replacing Calus as leader has some big ramifications that would make their way to the troops and here is where we see the Cabal arguing, here is where we see the seed of terror.

It’s only out on the front line, far from home, where they can safely voice their dissatisfaction with the change in power and the change in leadership style. Calus as far as we can tell is like by his people while Ghaul rules by fear.

This leads to the Red Legion.

Imagine you’re a soldier, the leader of your country is a tyrant ruling by fear from a position taken illegally. You cannot voice opposition to him because your commander is with them. You voice opposition and you risk being deemed a traitor, the worst possible crime. What do you do?

If it was just you, maybe you’d be brave enough to stand up. But what about your friends? Your family? If you’re classed a traitor what will happen to them?

So you bide your time. You hate the commanders and you sense everyone else is in agreement with you but you don’t dare stand up. It goes against everything you’ve had ingrained into you from childhood.

Your loyalties don’t lay with the current leader but you have to follow to survive.

The Red legion are not loyal to Ghaul, they only fight for him because of social conditioning and fear. Their true loyalties lay with Calus and how do we know this?

After Ghaul dies the Red Legion get a message from Calus, it’s the mission where we learn that he wants Nessus ground up for a drink. The Legion oblige without hesitation. He is their leader, it’s with him their true loyalties lay.

Those on Mars know this, they may not agree but when you’re so far isolated from the issue it’s easy. You’re on the outside looking in. When the Red Legion breaks and crumbles, they know they need to keep fighting. Because those on Mars understand why the Legion acted as they did, they don’t see the Legion as traitors. Some do, many don’t.

Okay, so, I hit up destinypedia for the first time since d2 dropped for the new lore on the cabal. I’ll break this ask up into sections.

Firstly, the Cabal and Psions aren’t the only two races in the empire. The number of species in the empire is supposedly “beyond reckoning” but the reference link doesn’t exist so oof. We know there are the Cabal, Psions, then a third race that got mentioned briefly in passing once in flavour text and never again because Bungie are cowards and weak.

Secondly, I hate that we haven’t been given the cabal’s proper name. Am I the only one to be annoyed with this? They cannot call themselves the Cabal, they simple cannot. And if Bungies tries to tell me they are, they are objectively wrong and are welcome to fuck right off with that shit.

Thirdly, to get to the ask, these are all canon unless I state otherwise because Bungie couldn’t write good the Cabal well if they were given the writing on those sheets you give children to trace over letters.

Psions originally didn’t have much in the way of any religious beliefs. Some societies may have had some superstitions but nothing really in the form of organised religions. In their early days, sure maybe they had some religious beliefs, but I think  those would have been shrugged off with the creation of the OXA machine, a clairvoyant device.

The Cabal themselves, many deities. Lots of them. Maybe not as many as ancient Rome but still, more than one. Destiny Lore states that in Cabal mythology the first Emperor allegedly took the sun, his name is Acrius by the way.

Since this is mythology in Destiny lore, something that is accurate until it is inconvenient, I’ll do you a favour and say this is fact. This is Cabal Mythology. The story got embellished, I don’t know how, but the myths around Acrius are based to some extent on true historical events. He is their big daddy god.

Acrius would be the god of prosperity for the empire as a whole. There’d be separate deities for things like childbirth, war, crops, etc. With the introduction of more species in the Empire, there are likely more religious beliefs which have mingled and changed Cabal religion itself.

Much like we have multiple religions, the Cabal Empire has the same with some funky fusions of their religions where things seem to fit.

Guess what? Because you’re awesome and put up with me bitching about Bungie and mostly seriously talking about claiming the Cabal as my own, you get some extra good shit.

The Tusking Ceremonies. What are they? Nobody knows.

Syke!

I’ll tell you what they are!

Much like christmas it’s origins were religious but has since grown into more of a celebration than a purely religious affair. Unlike christmas it’s not the birthday of a man who was nailed to a cross for talking about how nice it would be if people weren’t dicks to each other.

The Tusking Ceremonies were originally a celebration of the Cabal’s strongest women and this was done by a sort of gladiatorial combat where contenders would fight without weapons. These fights would normally be non-fatal, but injuries weren’t uncommon. Women could also challenge women to fights to the death if they felt it was necessary. E.G. A woman thinking they could do a better job than Umun'arath could challenge her to a fight to the death over it.

The Ceremony was not only a celebration of strength, and sometimes a bloody way of settling disputes (if the Emperor allowed the fight), but a celebration in honour of whichever deity(ies) the Empire believes gives them strength, or possibly even to Acrius himself. But yes, the Tusking Ceremonies are specifically for women since they’re the only ones who have tusks and it would be silly for the tuskless men to participate in the Tusking Ceremonies.

How did Ghaul know his cage would work?

How the fuck could the cabal have had Light sapping technology?

Without access to the Traveller how would they have been able to do the R&D necessary?

So, to fully understand the Bone Crushers you need to understand the standard operating procedures for the Empire’s territory acquisition.

On Mars the largest Legion is the Sand Eaters. The Dust Giants are, according to destinypedia, a subdivision of this legion. To that I say no, they were a subdivision. Since their founding the Dust Giants have become their own Legion.

Amongst the Dust Giants is a subdivision called the Siege Dancers. These yellow and blue beauties are basically storm troopers whose job is to secure new territory and erect fortifications.

So on Mars the Cabal’s procedure is pretty straight forward. Sand Eaters defend the area calling in for Dust Giants when they need back up. When lines have been lost or an opportunity arises, the Seige Dancers will go forward and reclaim lost or new ground. Though in the time period between the Taken King and the Red Legion arriving, I can see this happening less with the Cabal’s reduced numbers, with the Seige Dancers helping hold positions rather than fortify new ones.

The tl;dr is that basically the Cabal have an assault group that goes and gets ground and fortifies, and a defensive group who holds these positions.

However, not all combat is in open spaces like Mars, and this is where the Bone Crushers come in.

The Bone Crushers are a specially trained Legion for fighting in urban and heavily built areas. They would rely less on vehicles like interceptors and tanks because of how much of a target the can be for ambushes. For example, if a column of tanks is advancing up a road in a city and the leading one is destroyed, that kinda clogs up the road a bit. And this is assuming the roads are big enough for these vehicles. Instead they often work on foot and use vehicles like the one on the right (please ask me about them because I won’t go into details here to save time).

Cabal troops get to send messages home. These personal messages are collected and then regularly sent back to the Empire. These messages get scanned before being sent to the recipients.

This post, like many, is an opinion piece. I will back up claims and ideas where I can and I’d suggest people who disagree to respond with sources and reasons too.

To be blunt, the Cabal have been poorly portrayed.

Let’s talk logistics. Where are the Cabal coming from?Before I begin I will point out I am not going to tell you how far away, or where, the cabal empire is based. This information is unavailable.

What I will do is use a series of assumptions given by what we know to estimate how far away the Cabal are from us.

To do this we need to take into account several factors:

1: The Cabal do not have faster than light travel.

2: Their communications cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

3: The time jumps in the time line are not accurate to the day and there is some leeway.

With these three factors at our disposal, let’s look at what the game tells us.

According to Destinypedia.com, the Red War occurred two years after the events of the Taken King. I am aware, that the statement they give could be interpreted in two ways.

The statement is as follows:

Two years after the Taken War, the Cabal Empire's would respond to the losses suffered at the hands of Guardians by dispatching the Red Legion, led by Ghaul, to launch a major invasion of Earth.

This could mean that it took two years for the message to go out and for the fleet to respond or it took two years for Ghauls fleet to Launch.

Working on the assumption that it took two years for the message to go out and for Ghaul to arrive, we can deduce a simple limitation.

The Cabal can be no more than one lightyear way from our system.

The other alternative, is that it took two years for the message to have reached the Cabal and for them to launch a fleet. Using factor 3, we can safely assume that it is unlikely that Ghaul launched his fleet exactly two years after receiving the message. If we assume that the message took two years to respond then the cabal can be no further than two lightyears away.