#loremind

Clovis, by the way, gave away the game like two minutes in because he can’t keep his dang mouth shut. Clovis couldn’t resist a good smug gloat. He gave it all away when Ana said god, fine, hop on this disk and we’ll go. He said, “Once I am in control, all will be as it should be. The Warmind will rise again.” 

As it should be? That line stopped me cold. Clovis hated that Rasputin was in charge. He couldn’t believe he, the genius Clovis Bray the first, was expected to take orders from a jumped-up calculator he used to own. A restored Rasputin is not “as it should be” in Clovis-land. What is “as it should be?” It’s Clovis, so that’s easy: the way things should be is with him in charge. He doesn’t say, “Rasputin will rise again.” He says, “The Warmind will rise again.” Clovis is going to get all the subminds together except put himself at the center instead of the Rasputin core Ana has, and try to make himself the new Warmind. All of which would just be fun to watch as we wait for Red to break him, but: there’s Xivu Arath to deal with. 

We’re all worried about Xivu getting into the warsats. I don’t think she wants them at all. In the Judgement of Kelgorath lore she doesn’t order Kelgorath to go get her some warsats. She says: possess the Warmind. Xivu Arath has plenty of weapons already. What she needs, as Mara points out, is a way in. Mara comments in the encounter dialogue that moving an army through the ascendant realm is very hard. But Xivu did it over Torobatl. How? Sav showed her the way: she did it by getting someone on the other side to build her a gate.

I was surprised in Season of the Hunt by the extent of control Xivu displayed. I thought her unlikely to go for subversive powers like Oryx’s Taking or Sav’s manipulation. But she’s a lot smarter than I gave her credit for. Her Wrathborn contagion is effective, coercive, and quick-spreading. It makes sense metaphorically: violence is a kind of disease, an insidious way of thinking that spreads and snares people till they see everything as a conflict to be settled by force. Xivu invaded the Cabal by infecting Caiatl’s co-ruler Umun’arath, general of the Cabal legions. Driven further and further into obsession with the conflict Xivu Arath makes herself synonymous with, Umun’arath invoked her in the rituals of warfare - the same ones Eris and Eido were discussing - opening the way for Xivu’s armies to pour into the skies over Torobatl. 

For Xivu to repeat that trick in our solar system, she needs another Umun’arath. But Umun’arath was a singularly convenient target: the military chief of the war machine of a huge conquering interstellar empire, or in other words, someone you might call...war-minded. When scouting our solar system Xivu probably heard the name “Warmind” and thought hell yeah, that’s my ticket in. Except it’s not, because Rasputin’s a) not coherent right now and b) not fundamentally the personality she needs. That’s what we’re already exploring this season: at his core Rasputin was never a martial system. He was a pretentious art nerd who got drafted. They made him a Warmind. Xivu Arath needs someone coterminous with war for its own sake, with conflict as the apex of existence, with the supreme violence she represents. And ironically it turns out the Warmind Rasputin is not sufficiently war-minded. 

But Clovis is.

Clovis Bray already sees life as endless contest and conflict via his pseudo-evolutionary legacy bullshit. He’s Xivu’s dream target. When you first see her forces attacking him Clovis is like “they want my precious braaaaaain!” and Osiris goes, “no, they want him. Brought to submit.” That’s exactly what Clovis wants of Rasputin (and to a lesser extent Ana and Elsie): brought to submit. He’s neck deep in Darkness on his own, no convincing needed. And he’s a coward. If Clovis hasn’t cut a deal yet with either Xivu or the Witness to ensure “humanity’s” (his) survival in exchange for his allegiance, he will as soon as he has the reins. After all, let it not be said that he left humanity to fend for itself, right?

So that’s her plan: Xivu Arath attacks the warsat infrastructure to force us to go to Clovis and give him access to Red’s enclave. She waits while we do all the hard work of laying out the subminds to conjure back Rasputin. Clovis inevitably betrays us to slot himself in instead and take control, rousing Rasputin’s entire apparatus of violence to impose his own command on the solar system, helped along by the Wrathborn contagion already brewing in his subconscious. In doing so he invokes such immense rites of war that he opens the way for Xivu to step through. It’s Torobatl all over again...except I don’t think trying to “become the Warmind” is going to work out the way Clovis thinks. 

Clovis still doesn’t understand what Rasputin is, and he still doesn’t understand - as he doesn’t understand with any of his kids - that Rasputin is no longer as Clovis designed him to be. Even Ana hasn’t fully gotten there yet. Both Brays are still thinking of Red as a sort of jigsaw puzzle to be pieced back together. But assembling himself was the first thing Rasputin ever did. Ana still hasn’t cracked the real reason “plug engram into Exo, receive Warmind” isn’t working: because Rasputin is a distributed intelligence. He lives in connections, literally and metaphorically - between warsats, between worlds, with Ana, with humanity. He’s a creature fundamentally built on network and communication. Rasputin is already still out there. He’s in that engram, but he’s everywhere else, too. He’s still in the warsats. He’s talking to us through the Sleeper nodes. He’s going to fight Clovis for control of that Exo Frame; that’s why the frame has red eye-lights in all the season art even though Clovis uses blue ones. 

And in the larger paracausal sense our entire solar system still bears the marks of the Warmind’s influence. He’s synonymous with the Golden Age. The same way Oryx conjured back Savathun and Xivu Arath by recreating the shapes they made, Rasputin will be conjured back by the shape he traced out in a huge web of connections and actions and effects on others that Clovis, an isolated point, fundamentally doesn’t understand. So Clovis is going to pull his little coup, possibly smashing that engram along the way, and he’s going to think it’s working, too - right before Rasputin cracks him open like an egg, because the Warmind never left. I think this season ends with us fighting Clovis in full Wrathborn mode while Xivu Arath’s armies stand ready just on the other side in the Ascendant Realm, hammering to get in, and Rasputin will deliver the final blow from inside - or maybe not, since killing Umun’arath completed the ritual last time, maybe we just wedge Clovis into his own Pillory engram - stopping Xivu from getting her beachhead and leaving her angry but stranded in the Ascendant Realm. 

So, we know that Rasputin very much did not shoot the Traveler. He had plans to, and he was convinced to some degree that it would work, but he never did.

What if it wasn’t the Traveler he shot, though?

When he confronted the Witness at the Gate of the Garden like how we did, he got out of there somehow, and I don’t think collapsing into a heap on the floor for naptime would have saved him there.

First point is, the Lunar Pyramid is on the moon, same as the new Gate. I know the keyword there is ‘new’, but with how Vex stuff works, for all we know, once a place becomes a Gate, it was always a Gate, bear with me there.

Second, that would have been the same general area that Rasputin had LOKI CROWN pointed, whatever it was. We know the Witness didn’t intend on pulling any punches with the Collapse, so Nezarec could very much have been leading the charge straight against the Traveler.

Third, we know that all of the Pyramids are linked to one another and the Witness through the Egregore, so it could stand to reason if a Pyramid was disrupted, it could break the Witness’ focus, even just momentarily.

And fourth, we’ve seen how the Cabal can adapt to paracausal forces and counter them, and it’s Rasputin’s job to be paranoid, I could buy that he had the Traveler studied just for the sake of always having a silver bullet in case it went rogue. Keyword, singular, silver bullet.

What I’m thinking is, what if, during the final moments of the Collapse and Rasputin’s duel, he made the choice to redirect LOKI CROWN’s firepower at the Lunar Pyramid and put that to ground instead of the Traveler? Severing the Witness’ connection like that, even momentarily, would’ve been enough for him to initiate MIDNIGHT EXIGENT.

That’s a lot, I know, but I feel Very Strongly about Rasputin being able to stand up to paracausal forces in any way shape or form even if Destiny’s going to boil down to ‘Light and Dark Good, Everything Else Unimportant’, and thinking of him having a victory like that gives me a bit of vindication. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I can’t imagine Rasputin having anti-paracausal weaponry and not at least trying it against the Pyramid Fleet the way he tried everything else. Odds are good that Rasputin launched LOKI CROWN, or reused its assets under another name, against the Witness. He may have repurposed it into the SURTR DROWN mentioned as "in progress but negative effect." Keeping the Traveler from leaving would be a lower priority at that point than just finding something, anything, that worked. And if he did end up in a face-to-face where the Witness, let’s say, took offense at Rasputin’s rejection of the honor of Disciplehood, kneeing it in the balls with a nuclear warhead would be the best way for him to escape. But from what we've heard so far Nezarec's Pyramid was hurled into the Moon by the Traveler's detonation, and it’s not (yet) canon that Rasputin ever met the Witness at all. I'd like to give Red at least partial credit for the kill on Nezzy, but until we get more details I can't justify it.

I will die on the hill that Rasputin is too big not to be at least a little paracausal. If Darkness “comes from within” and the eliksni can directly manipulate ambient Light then I don’t see why Rasputin needs a permission slip from a beachball to go ham. Paracausality is fundamentally a matter of thought and will and Rasputin has both of those in spades. Arguably he’s never been anything but thought and will. And are we really pretending that a couple kilometers of ice is all it takes to stop a Worm God? Rasputin kept Xol pinned, not that glacier. He says he doesn’t understand it, but neither do Guardians and we manage just fine. Honestly I think the main reason he doesn’t use it is because his story arcs go very hard-scifi and the writers avoid the space magic. This season will put that to the test though and I can’t wait for the results.

But even without direct paracausality Rasputin can and should be able to step to paracausal threats. The Hive die to an orbital laser strike same as everyone else (even if they sometimes come back). The Cabal have built Light- and Darkness-suppressing tech, and if they can work it out, Rasputin can too. He also had some serious weaponry during the Golden Age, and not just "secular" stuff.

In the message outlining LOKI CROWN Rasputin discusses "full caedometric and noetic release," and in another lore card he’s moving an “annihilation-pumped caedometric weapon” into place. "Caedometric" is not a real word, but we've seen it a couple times in Destiny. It literally translates to “cutting-measure” or “to cut the measure” and I think it means weaponry that directly warps spacetime, similar to the Culture’s “gridfire”: damage done by invoking the mass-energy structures underpinning space. Caedometric weapons are also wielded by the Ecumene in its fight against the Hive - this is some very advanced tech - and said weapons are only authorized when the Ecumene orders “maximum theater overkill.” The potential for collateral damage is likely very high. They work, too: they can’t kill Oryx, but the Ecumene’s forces slay him in the material world often enough to force him back to his throne. Rasputin’s caedometric weapons are likely much cruder and weaker than the Ecumene’s, like the first nuclear weapon compared to today’s - but it’s still, y’know, a nuke.

Noetic weapons are for another type of battlefield. “Noetic” means relating to the mind or to knowledge itself, and this is Vex stuff: weaponized patterns that infect, corrupt, or just plain destroy the mind. It’s one of the contingencies covered in the Codes & Procedures handbook for the K1 Anomaly, which warns of:

NOETIC EVENT. A canary panel has detected a noetic event, including substrate-free syntactic replicators, adversarial inputs, oncomemes, Vex-type viral semiotic signifiers, and frequency-based heuristic exploits.

Oncomemes. What a fantastic word! “Onco” means “cancerous.” Cancerous memes. That covers a lot of memes, really. Rasputin had weaponized memes. He faced the Vex, and he learned from them.

So both caedometric and noetic-type weapons are a) very advanced, b) bad news, and c) part of Rasputin’s arsenal. Neither is explicitly paracausal, but both can be wielded against paracausal entities. 

Paracausal weapons did show up during the Golden Age. When Elsie decides to shut down Clovis’ Vex gate by any means necessary, she goes to a research institute dedicated to the Traveler and secures a “topological thought,” an “irreal artifact of the Traveler’s Light,” as the core of a weapon to hard-crash every Vex on the forgeworld. Elsie Bray is brilliant and clever, and when it comes to paracausality it helps to have a mind driven more by the subjective than the objective, but if Elsie could hotwire a paracausal bomb in a couple days I think Rasputin could work out the same idea at some point during the Golden Age. The stumbling block here is the acquisition of said irreal artifact. “Irreal” is a synonym for “unreal,” but in philosophy has more specific connotations of being incapable of existing at all in this reality - not simply “unreal” like a unicorn, but “irreal” like incompatible with our spacetime. While Rasputin could requisition whatever he liked, he probably couldn’t make an “irreal” thing. A finite number of artifacts means a finite number of weapons, and if they all came from the Traveler that’s one of the only sources Rasputin couldn’t commandeer. 

So if Rasputin did make paracausal weapons, he would only have a few. I can’t imagine he had a lot of chances to test them, and since it’s paracausal simulating it can only go so far. That would give him a small supply of unique weapons whose efficacy (and side effects) he can’t be sure of. In that case setting them up as a failsafe against the Traveler is the most logical use. The Traveler is the entity most likely to need paracausal weapons to bring it down, and if he has to fire on it then so many other things have already gone wrong that the potential fallout is the least of his problems. Hence this is probably the arsenal he deployed as LOKI CROWN.

We do!

In brief: small copy of Rasputin.

In detail: Rasputin made Felwinter to test his own morality and behavior - I have a post in the works about how this act takes on even more significance given what we've learned this season - so Felwinter contains a miniature model of all the relevant moral and personality structures Rasputin could cram in there. He was meant to mimic Rasputin's personality well enough to give Rasputin important data like, "Am I a petty autocrat?" If Felwinter had failed Rasputin's assessments - based on the mythological references involved Rasputin seems to have evaluated for greed, tyranny, and/or lack of empathy - Rasputin would have concluded that he himself also demonstrated these qualities and should therefore, essentially, abdicate his position of power. So in short Rasputin designed Felwinter to be as much like himself as a model housed in a single processing node and shrunk to fit inside an Exo brain could be, because he was meant to serve as a small-scale replica of Rasputin's own behavior.

I do not, and I really should, and I keep saying I will, and you know what anon I am going to go start that draft right now and I will not let this one scope-creep into an enormous "Translating Rasputin's Bullshit 101" guide I never finish.

For an extremely brief and high level overview, these are the five main types of ALL CAPS Rasputin codes:

Markings: "Document markings" is the catchall term for indicators attached to information to say how it should be handled. Rasputin marks up his messages extensively for both security and routing purposes. SECRET HADAL is an access marking. SUBTLE ASSETS IMPERATIVE is a routing marking of "subtle assets" (proxy, hidden, or not directly linked) followed by a content marking of "imperative" (containing orders). He usually begins "business" messages by repeating "This is a [ROUTING] [MESSAGE TYPE]" followed by "This is a [SECURITY LEVEL] (distribution marking) (distribution group)". Some known distribution markings are "no human review" and "no AI-COM review". Some known distribution groups are "secure/AUTARCHY" and "unsecured/OUTCRY"

Protocols: Plans and procedures for handling various situations, some premade and pending certain conditions, others to be enacted immediately. LOKI CROWN, GALATEA REFLEXIVE, and ABHORRENT IMPERATIVE are protocols.

Conditions: Situational assessments. Think of the US military's "DEFCON" system. Rasputin often tests various conditions in his messages and takes action based on the outcomes, including setting other conditions or enacting protocols. Most conditions can be set to various values, such as CARRHAE [WHITE/BLACK], SECURITY STATE, or YUGA. Programs can have conditions saying how they're going, such as VOLUSPA and HAMMURABI. Objects or events can have conditions specifying some relevant attribute, such as SKYSHOCK: [INSIDE/OUTSIDE] CONTEXT.

Programs/Operations: Some programs are clearly-defined and ongoing, like DVALIN or EXODUS, and some blur the lines with protocols. Rasputin sometimes starts a protocol that extends indefinitely and becomes a program, such as the PALISADE IMPERATIVE physical defense operation. VOLUSPA appears to be the program/operation designation for human armed forces, but may also be the program under which Rasputin armed said forces.

Objects/Locations/People: Pretty straightforward. Rasputin has various codenames for people, places, and things. Out of narrative necessity they're far more descriptive than real codenames would be.

2. Do you think we'll see some of the other D1 warminds like Charlemagne

3. What was Rasputin doing on Io I remember there was a warmind bunker on Io and there's a crucible map that takes place in a warmind launch station for something called javelins

Thanks for reading this I want you know that I like seeing you talk about Rasputin

I'm glad you like seeing me talk about Rasputin! Because I like talking about Rasputin.

I'll caveat this by saying I'm traveling during Week 2 and won't have a chance to play Destiny till Saturday at the earliest, so if there's new Week 2 info pertinent to the question, I don't know it.

In order, the answers to your questions are:

In this season they seem to be using "submind" for pieces Rasputin might partition into when his main network was disrupted, so his submind count now (after the Pyramid Fleet's attack) is likely not his submind count from the Golden Age. We don't know how many we’ll see this season, but my money's on us rescuing seven. I say that because a) there are 7 notches on the "seasonal story" triumph and b) the Seven Seraphs faction/Seventh Seraph weapon line. During the Golden Age we know he had at least one, but that’s all we know for sure - the number of AI in general is unclear. In a fun wrinkle, canon initially said there were many Warminds, then the Warmind DLC retconned them to all be Rasputin subminds, then the Last Days of Kraken Mare un-retconned it back to multiple Warminds. Season of the Seraph hasn't yet declared one way or the other.

I'm hoping we see Charlemagne or a Charley-remnant submind. There are only a couple of known submind names, so this season’s writers are going to have to come up with a few more, and I don't see why not to include Charley. My personal theory is that there were seven Warminds including Rasputin pre-Collapse, and during the Pyramid Fleet's attack the Warminds were slain one by one with each one passing on what was left of its assets to the survivors before it fell. That would leave Rasputin with 6 "subminds" that are all that's left of his original comrades, which reconciles "multiple Golden-Age Warminds" with "but maybe they're all Rasputin subminds?" That tallies with a side comment in one of his messages about "reclaimed CHLM assets" meaning "stuff Charley used to own."

I'll caveat this by saying I'm traveling during Week 2 and won't have a chance to play Destiny till Saturday at the earliest, so if there's new Week 2 info pertinent to the question, I don't know it.

An interesting question, and one that runs into a lot of fundamental unknowns about subminds. I don't think it was Malahayati in the Cosmodrome because we've met her before, pre-Collapse, and although she identifies herself as a submind she also speaks as if she were separate from Rasputin, more like an aide or deputy than one facet of a whole. So if we had been talking to her all along in the Cosmodrome I would have expected her to identify herself as, well, herself, not as Rasputin.

But that just raises more questions. What are subminds? This season treats them as fragments Rasputin sectioned himself into to survive when his central network was shut down. But when the warsat network fragmented during the Dark Ages the Earthbound part of Rasputin still identified himself as Rasputin, both to us and in his internal messages. So it's not just a network thing. And it’s not just a personality thing or post-Collapse Rasputin's incredible powers of denial and compartmentalization would have made one whether he wanted to or not. So submind creation is more deliberate. Was Malahayati therefore a distinct consciousness he intentionally spun off, like Felwinter? Is the Malahayati we're retrieving now the same as the one who existed during the Golden Age, or did she stop existing at some point and then get recreated? 

I suspect the latter, if for no other reason than Rasputin the drama queen constantly declaring "I am alone.” The original Malahayati might have been killed during the Collapse - I can see a Rasputin submind getting hit with a noetic contagion and forcing him to sever its connection to protect the rest of himself - or he could have simply...re-absorbed? reclaimed? it. Post-Collapse Rasputin might have judged subminds a risk, especially if they couldn't all be corralled into MIDNIGHT EXIGENT, or wanted to consolidate his severely-diminished resources. Either way he kept the "pattern" of Malahayati somewhere in him (”those names live in me”?). It was a known-good solution for a semi-autonomous entity. Similarly the "kernel" proto-AI used by CB Corp was an early self-contained component of his self, like a standalone code module now absorbed into a bigger project. 

I’m working on the theory that the Pyramid Fleet “killed” him by locally warping the vacuum permittivity constant to make space opaque to radio (the way it did in the Marasenna) and disrupting communication between all Rasputin’s warsats at once, causing his whole network to disconnect simultaneously. So when that happened he fractured, intentionally or not, not along regional boundaries but along these pre-existing faultlines in his consciousness - Malahayati, the proto-mind, the other subminds we’re going to meet. He cleaved apart into pieces that had once functioned semi-independently and could therefore disconnect again with the least overall damage, like a signpost hit by a car snapping along the breakaway bolts. So Malahayati was recreated.

Most lore we currently have points to Seraph being an organization under Rasputin’s authority. Based on the concept art Dima Goryanov recently posted, the Seraph bunkers were built to communicate with and interpret for Rasputin, continuing the fascinating idea from the Warmind DLC that even Rasputin’s alleged builders had serious problems just talking to him. There’s a reason Rasputin prefers to communicate either non-verbally or by quoting existing human literature. The Seraph bunkers seem to have functioned as a kind of mission control for a local instance of Rasputin; the Seraphim Vault in the Cosmodrome may have served a similar purpose on a larger scale.

But then we have the Tatarstan loretab. Rasputin says that the Seraphs were “all things to me. Everything I required,” bolstering the idea that the Seraph organization functioned as local agents of the Warmind. Ana also says the khanjalis Rasputin gave Guardians originally belonged to the Seraphs, and there are a lot of those, so maybe every member of the organization had one. However Ana then says he built “planetary combat platforms” for “seven Seraphs.” “Planetary combat platforms” is an amazingly vague yet ominous description. Does that mean the bunkers? Some kind of local HQ? Giant mechs? And why “seven Seraphs” if Seraph is an organization? We don’t know, although I have a hunch we may find out more as the season goes on. Maybe there were seven specific directors or agents of Rasputin in different areas? Worth noting that on at least one occasion Rasputin refers to an Exo as a “platform.”

Felwinter, on the other hand, is a different but equally fascinating story. tl;dr my money is on Felwinter being either Clovis Bray Sr., Clovis Bray Jr., or Alton Bray. Here’s what we know about Felwinter thus far:

1. Unlike other Exos he didn’t remember his original name when revived, but he immediately knew what the Deep Stone Crypt was and that Exos underwent “crypt processing.”

2. His Ghost immediately told him to use a different name because “they’re coming for you.”

3. Sometime after waking up Felwinter discovered something dire about his own identity that he and his Ghost are desperate to keep secret. If discovered it would force him and his Ghost to flee “again.” It’s dire enough that he’s ready to kill Lord Timur when he thinks Timur’s found out his secret.

4. Before meeting Iron Lord Timur he roamed alone for a significant time through a territory around the Aral Sea. During that time he had “extensive one-way conversations” with an unknown entity suspected to be - but not confirmed as - Rasputin. Felwinter met Timur in the Mothyards, part of the Cosmodrome.

5. Felwinter has a ton of information on the Warmind that’s all new to the Iron Lords, who didn’t even know the name “Rasputin” until he told them. He knows where Warmind bunkers are, how to break into them, and the sort of goodies that might be inside. He recognizes the word Seraph but plays dumb when Timur asks him about it; on another occasion he describes one of the Warmind bunkers as “a Seraph bunker.”

6. Felwinter and his Ghost consider an escape plan that would let them avoid “the Warsat network” and any planet “with a Warmind presence.” He comments that they’ve gotten “very good at hiding.”

7. Felwinter is a master tactician, the only Warlord to hold “an entire mountain” before joining up with the Iron Lords. He’s pragmatic and unafraid to break the rules; he executes the Warlord Citan and multiple other Lightbearers known to have committed major crimes. That includes Iron Lord Dryden once the Drifter tells Felwinter that Dryden had gotten the town of Eaton killed by using them as bait. Felwinter describes these murders as “operational necessity,” which Saladin comments is a weirdly blank statement for an Exo.

8. Felwinter went with the SIVA expedition into the Cosmodrome because he believed he could speak to Rasputin, “tell it we meant no harm.” Obviously that didn’t pan out and he ultimately died in the SIVA replication chamber.

So Felwinter is connected to Rasputin. But is he connected directly to the Warmind or indirectly through Clovis Bray Corp? His Ghost being so adamant about him concealing his name makes me think he must be Clovis Bray himself, either Sr. or Jr., because "Clovis Bray” is the only name I can think of that would be in danger of being recognized during the Dark Ages. The Iron Lords didn’t even know Rasputin’s name until Felwinter told them, but they did know Clovis Bray Corporation from its many ruined Earth facilities. 

On the other hand, maybe his Ghost wasn’t worried about humans recognizing his name. If the “planetary combat platforms” Rasputin built were heavily-customized Exo bodies, then Felwinter could be one of those seven Seraphs, and if Rasputin discovered he were alive again the Warmind would probably want him back. That would also explain why they’re so determined to avoid the warsat network and the Warmind’s presence in general. On the other other hand, not every warsat belongs to Rasputin. The ones drifting around the CB facility in Uranus orbit definitely don’t answer to him until he takes them over. While Felwinter is a great Iron Lord, his Exo body doesn’t seem to be any tougher or more dangerous than others - hardly deserving of the term “planetary combat platform.” Plus Felwinter used to hang out in the Mothyards in the Cosmodrome. If he were hiding from Rasputin, why would he have been chilling on Rasputin’s doorstep? 

Here’s my hunch: we don’t know what happened to Clovis Bray Sr., but we know he didn’t plan to die if he could help it. If he’s still around in some form, and if Felwinter is Clovis Bray Jr., he might be hiding from his scary lich dad rather than the Warmind proper. As a major player at CB Corp he would know a lot about the Seraph organization and Warmind facilities already. He might know he’s hiding from his dad, or have his dad and Rasputin confused, or Rasputin himself might bear Clovis Bray a grudge he’d be happy to take out on his son (but again, why leave him alone in the Cosmodrome?) 

And one last tidbit that might not mean anything, but then again might: the pull quote on Winter’s Guile is “I know you.” In Ghost Fragment: Rasputin 4, someone assumed to be Cosmodrome-Rasputin speaks to someone assumed to be Elsie Bray/the Exo Stranger, and one of the first things he says is, “It’s like my cousin said, elsewhere: I know who you are.” Did Felwinter recognize Rasputin? Did Rasputin call him “cousin”? Would he use that word for a Seraph - or for a member of the Bray family?

The Awoken didn’t retain any specific cultural background. The original crew of the Yang Liwei was pretty mixed and the only piece of pre-Distributary heritage to survive was the Amrita charter with its foundational principles of peace, equality, and responsibility. Though tech/science survived in the Shipspire, nothing else did. All Awoken memories of pre-Distributary life, plus the records of any previous civilizations or cultures, were wiped out in the transition - hence the name “Distributary,” meaning a river that diverges and doesn’t return to a larger waterway. The Sanguists consider the loss of history to be a boon and a necessary part of the covenant that granted them their world: “we yielded our claim to our history. We abandoned what came before, but in doing so, we cast off all our debts.” The Eccaleists, on the other hand, believe the Awoken still had a responsibility to their origins that they would one day be called to fulfill. Neither side particularly mourns the loss of culture, though - likely because they didn’t know what culture they had to lose - but when the Awoken return to our solar system the faction that heads to Earth does so both to help their ancestors and to rediscover their own roots.