Destiny 2: The Witch Queen introduced many new characters in Savathûn’s Throne World, both to interact with and to fight against. The most mysterious of those new characters, however, is one that you barely actually see or hear from: The Witness.
The Witness is a paracausal character spoken of primarily in whispers and conjecture. It’s clear that The Witness is a powerful figure, but precious little is known or revealed about them during The Witch Queen’s campaign. The end of the campaign reveals a little more of The Witness, a figure that even Savathûn seems to fear, and players finally get to see The Witness for themselves. And the character, frankly, is haunting.
Ahead of Destiny 2’s next major expansion, Lightfall, here’s everything we know so far about The Witness and the role it has to play in the story to come.
Who is the Witness in Destiny 2?
The origins of the voice in the darkness
At the end of The Witch Queen’s campaign, the Witness is revealed. It is thin, pale, and cloaked, with a never-ending stream of smoke coming from the top of its head. While it’s our first time seeing it visualized, The Witness has been an antagonistic, paracausal force operating in the shadows for years. Dubbed “the voice in the darkness” by figures such as Calus and Savathun, the implication is that the temptations and the whispers that surround Darkness as a power originate with it.
The Witness is set up to be a dark parallel to the Traveler—an opposing force of equal strength. Its past with the Traveler and our universe dates back long before any of human history.
The Disciples of the Witness
It was a guiding voice that convinced Rhulk, its first Disciple, to destroy his home planet of Lubrae until he was all that remained of the planet’s people. It offered Rhulk ultimate power for his loyalty, teaching a set of principles that colloquially come to be known as the Sword Logic via the Hive.
The Hive too is another creation of The Witness. When the three young Krill siblings Sathona, Xi Ro, and Aurash left the Osmium Court to travel to their home planet of Fundament, The Witness conversed with them through a fossilized worm familiar. It spoke of a god wave, a cataclysmic event that would annihilate Fundament and the Krill along with it. This was deception because instead, The Witness was concerned with the arrival of the Traveler to Fundament and the potential gift of Light it would bestow on the Krill.
Following The Witness’s whispered advice, the siblings traveled to Fundament’s core and found the worm gods. The gifts of these worms led to the Krill ascending into what we now know as the Hive, and it was only due to the guidance of The Witness that such a terrible fate was reached. Savathun eventually rebelled against this fate when she excised her worm and embraced the Light, sealing Rhulk away in his Pyramid on her Throne World where the Guardian defeated him during the Vow of the Disciple raid.
The Witness also lured Eramis, the Kell of House Salvation, down the path that led her to where she is now. Enraged at what the Traveler did to her people when it abandoned the Eliksni home planet of Riis, Eramis was an easy target for The Witness’s voice. It offered her a path to revenge through Stasis, but when the Guardian defeated her with the same power, it violently revoked it from Eramis by freezing her in a Stasis coffin.
In Season of Plunder, The Witness freed her from her prison to once again do its bidding, ordering her to secure the relics of Nezarec. The threat of returning to her previous fate looms over her head, so Eramis remains loyal to its plans. This is despite multiple instances that show her hesitation and doubts surrounding The Witness. Her transformation into a full Disciple is still yet to happen, and if her anger toward The Witness and its treatment of her Eliksni house remains, she might continue to resist it.
The role of The Witness in Lightfall
With the dramatic conclusion to Season of the Seraph, the Traveler is more vulnerable than ever. Sensing Eramis’s plan to use Rasputin’s Warsat network against it, the Traveler attempted to flee before ending up trapped in Earth’s orbit. The Witness’s Black Fleet was already here, and so the Traveler instead is holding its ground and facing down the end alongside humanity.
In Lightfall, we know a few key facts about The Witness’s role: it plans to finally defeat the Traveler to put an end to the game of Light and Dark they’ve been playing since the beginning of time, and it will ascend ex-Emperor Calus to the role of a Disciple to enact its will. From the snapshots we’ve seen, The Witness will remain focused on the Traveler while Calus takes on the Guardian within the hidden city of Neomuna on Neptune.
The fate of all parties involved is one of the great unknowns, with only The Final Shape expansion left after Lightfall to act as a final conclusion to the narrative saga that started with Destiny’s launch in 2014.
Lightfall is set to be Bungie’s largest expansion yet for Destiny 2, launching on Feb. 28. It is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
