Destiny 2 Beyond Light Collector's Edition And ARG Illuminate The Stranger, Deep Stone Crypt

The new expansion of Destiny 2, Beyond Light, brings a big step forward in the story developer Bungie has been slowly telling over the last six years. The next chapter sends players to Europa, where we don't just meet the Darkness--the evil force Destiny characters have feared since the game first launched--but embrace its power.

But why Europa? We've seen a few hints at what's hidden beneath the ice on the planet. Messages from the Darkness are drawing us there, and trailers for the new expansion have shown that the Exo Stranger, a character not seen since the vanilla campaign of Destiny 1, is involved as well. Europa hides secrets from the Golden Age of humanity, before the arrival of the Darkness and the Collapse, that we're still uncovering--particularly in the Deep Stone Crypt raid.

There's actually a lot of information that Bungie has already released, thanks to a journal included in the Beyond Light Collector's Edition. It's written from the perspective of Clovis Bray, a Golden Age industrialist responsible for creating some of humanity's most powerful technologies. It was Clovis and his company that built Rasputin and all those facilities on Mars, for instance. In the journal, we uncover what he thought would be the most important discovery for humanity: the Exo program.

Exos are one of the three character races you can choose when you make a Destiny character, but you make that choice without really knowing much about them. Essentially, Exos are robots with human minds. The brains of living people have been scanned and downloaded into the Exos, so in Destiny's universe, they're a different kind of human. For Clovis Bray, however, Exos were the future of humanity, and he was obsessed with creating them--despite some serious failures.

Destiny lore previously implied that Exos were created as war machines, but in Clovis's diary, we find the truth that he was chasing immortality, hoping to create machine bodies for humans so they could live forever.

We can stop right here to talk about the Exo Stranger, a character who pops up in Destiny 1 just long enough to tell you that you have to stop the threat of the Vex and the Black Garden, changing your main goal in the middle of that game's campaign. The Stranger provides almost no information and we learn almost nothing about her, except that she's pressed for time but thinks the fate of the solar system hangs in the balance. You follow her advice, head to the Black Garden, and destroy its heart, a big gooey mess of living Darkness that was apparently harming the Traveler.

With that crisis averted, the Stranger disappears--until now. We discover her real identity in the Collector's Edition materials, something she confirms directly in Beyond Light's story campaign. The Stranger is Elizabeth "Elsie" Bray, Clovis's granddaughter. That also makes her the sister of Ana Bray, the Guardian who has been fighting to power up (and later rescue) Rasputin on Mars.

This is important because Elsie potentially knows a lot about the Golden Age and what happened with the Darkness, and we could be getting a great deal of new information from her. Elsie is an Exo, but she's not a Guardian, which is a key distinction. When Guardians are first resurrected by their Ghosts, they lose all memory of their past, original life. Since she's not a Guardian, Elsie never lost her memories, and she's been around since the Golden Age. It's very likely she knows more about history than anyone else we've ever met in the game, other than the Warmind Rasputin.

Clovis's story on Europa actually begins on the Moon, with more Golden Age lore. Clovis was involved with the K1 Artifact mission, which, during the Golden Age, discovered the pyramid that would later become the focus of Shadowkeep. Though the pyramid corrupted the researchers and turned them against each other, Clovis believed the intelligence within--which he called Clarity--was trying to guide him to establishing the next step in human evolution. Clovis was a genius, as well as a narcissist, so he was pretty convinced this god-like intelligence was meant just for him.

At this point, Clovis was extremely old and sickly, his body shutting down on him. He'd been working on the Exo program in an attempt to secure his own immortality and move humanity onto what he believed was its next step. Clovis had scanned numerous people's brains and saved them for transfer into Exo bodies, but he'd run into some serious problems in making the idea work and saving himself. First, the best possible brain scan, needed to transfer a mind into an Exo body, was lethal to the human--so Clovis had to be absolutely sure he got it right, since he only had one shot.

Second, human minds downloaded into Exos degraded and eventually shut down, often with catastrophic results. In fact, one of the early Exos was Clovis Bray II, a clone Clovis created of himself that he treated as his son. Like the original Clovis, the son was a genius--but he also had a degenerative genetic disease. When Clovis transferred his son into an Exo body, Clovis II's mind degraded, and apparently, he physically tore himself apart, something early Exos were known to do.

Thus, Clovis didn't want to risk putting himself into an Exo body until he was sure it would work. He finally came to believe that Clarity was trying to give him the answer to the Exo problem, and that was why Clovis headed to Europa. He enlisted the help of Elsie Bray, despite the fact that she (and her sisters Ana and Willa) refused to speak with Clovis after what happened to their father, Clovis II.

Clovis's research on Europa proved fruitful. He followed what he learned from Clarity, setting up a huge research facility called Eventide, and eventually followed instructions to discover how to create a huge portal. It turned out to be the same kind of technology used by the Vex, and the portal took Clovis and the other researchers to a Vex facility near a star they had turned into a massive forge. When Clovis discovered the Vex forge, he realized the secret to solving his Exo problem: He needed to incorporate Vex tech. More specifically, he had to incorporate the Vex's "milk," the white fluid that runs through them. It's suggested that Clovis started doing experiments on human subjects with the Vex, with some devastating results.

The journal ends soon after, with Clovis convinced the Exo program can work using a combination of the Darkness and Vex components. The Collector's Edition also kicked off a new Destiny-related alternate reality game and as community members uncovered and decoded it, they discovered the final entry of Clovis's journal. It hints at what happened to him as he prepared to transfer himself into an Exo body, while also suggesting that when we enter the Deep Stone Crypt for the raid, we might discover his ultimate fate.

After the decoding was done, Bungie shared the final journal entry on its website, and it's a doozie. As Clovis continued his experiments on humans and his work in trying to create viable Exo bodies, he discovered that he got the best results by wiping his subjects' memories. Whenever an Exo started getting a little weird, a memory wipe would refresh them, preserving their minds. That's why so many Exos you encounter in Destiny 2 have numbers after their names--those numbers refer to the number of wipes they've gone through during their lifetimes.

Still, Clovis wasn't sure he wanted to jump into an Exo body if it meant wiping his own mind and memories, so he created a contingency plan. He would make a copy of his mind as an AI and leave it in Deep Stone Crypt. That's probably what we're going to face in the raid, because unfortunately, things didn't go to Clovis's plan.

All those experiments on the Vex didn't just go off without a hitch. As they have a habit of doing, the Vex started to find ways to seep into the Europa colony, invading computer systems and starting to take over. With that big Vex portal he'd built, Clovis had basically created a clear pathway for the Vex to get to his facility. Elsie took charge of trying to fight the Vex invasion, but with her health deteriorating, she wasn't able to be very effective and the problem was getting worse. Eventually, she agreed to let Clovis transfer her into an Exo body, killing her human form. Clovis also didn't tell her the full story about the program, including its reliance on Vex tech and the influence of Clarity on the project. She also didn't know memory wipes would be part of the process.

Meanwhile, Clovis had brought in a Vex expert to help with his experiments: Maya Sundaresh. Lore-heads might recognize that name from the old Destiny 1 Grimoire entries from Venus. Sundaresh was a member of the Ishtar Collective team studying the Vex on that planet. In one of the game's best lore entries, the research team discovered midway through their studies that the Vex were simulating the research team and the world around them perfectly. They came to realize that they had no way of knowing whether they were real people or Vex simulations. Eventually, the research team figured out a way to break the cycle--they brought in a Warmind, figuring the Vex couldn't simulate it. They were right, and wound up rescuing hundreds of simulated copies of themselves from the Vex network.

Sundaresh helped Clovis on Europa until he fired her for questioning his work--but soon after, he discovered there were no records of Sundaresh being in his employ, and Elsie told him she had no memory of Sundaresh working on the Europa team. That's how Clovis realized that the Vex hadn't just invaded Europa, they had invaded him. He had been interacting with a Vex copy of Sundaresh the whole time. The Vex were working on him and invading Europa in hopes of getting to Clarity.

After that, it's not clear just how messed up Clovis is by the Vex influence, but it seems like his thought processes are becoming more and more corrupted. During one of his gross pig organ transplants, Sundaresh hijacked the medical robots, vivisecting Clovis while he was still alive and waking him up during the procedure to taunt him. Elsie rescued Clovis and got him put back together, but that was a pretty clear demonstration that the Vex threat on Europa had become massive and potentially disastrous.

As Elsie kept fighting the Vex, she discovered the truth of Clovis's unethical experiments. She attacked the floating orbital platform above the Europa site, a research station whose real job was to drop out of orbit and crash into Eventide and destroy everything. She never made it, however--Clovis had her killed, then rebooted her with a memory wipe so she could keep fighting the Vex for him.

The journal ends with Clovis finally committing to the brain scan so he can be transferred into an Exo body, a fatal procedure. It's then that we realize Sunadresh's influence. It's not just Clovis that's being uploaded into Deep Stone Crypt, but the Vex corruption within his system as well. That goes a long way to suggest that we'll probably run into an AI and/or Exo Clovis, corrupted by the Vex, in Deep Stone Crypt, probably as its final boss. Who knows how dangerous that's going to be, but a safe bet is on "very."

There seems to be even more lore about Clovis, the Vex, and the Exos waiting for us in Beyond Light in the future.

Elsie says we'll clues in Clovis's digital journals, which you can uncover in-game. And she's promised to tell us more about her own past as the campaign unfolds. In the meantime, though, the Collector's Edition sheds light on the weirdness of the Exo race. They're a people who don't know their origins, struggle to remember their past lives, and share a traumatic dream about a distant black tower--which they're drawn to in the dream, but they must fight through an army consisting of everyone they've ever met to reach it.

In Forsaken, we learned about the origins of the Awoken, who were born from an accidental collision of both the Traveler's Light and the pyramids' Darkness. Now we know that the Exos also have something related to the Darkness coursing through them at a fundamental level. That may well start to change what we know of the Exo race in Destiny 2.