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There is much history in the dust here. Grasp a handful and you will hold Light now extinguished. You will hold power misguided.

These grounds are covered in the madness of days gone by. Of Guardians and Hive alike. History haunts this place.
Exploration and discovery are pleasant but thin euphemisms for conquest. This was as true in our history as in any you’ll find.

Our first steps into the inky dark were no different. Lest we forget: The Hive’s lunar settlements predate our own.
They told others their mission was exobotany, but this fig leaf could not hide their desire. They wanted knowledge the Traveler would not give them. Nothing is sweeter than forbidden fruit.
The study of alien flora concealed stranger sciences, but it was not without its own merit. They learned much here that has since been lost.
So many wonders of the age, so many sciences still used, conceived of here, in silence and secrecy. What inspired them? What did they find in this desolation?
In our own time of need, we failed ourselves. Crota struck us down en masse and destroyed much of what was built here, Moonbase included.

The Traveler had come, it had brought us into a Golden Age. And yet little from that era mattered in the shadow of Crota.
Those who worked here sought knowledge despite dangers, heedless of consequences. Some seekers found reward, others ruin. Which shall you be?
The Brays were here. How fine their avarice, how grand their hubris. Such great spirit echoes throught time and space. It lives on long after any mortal form. Are they all gone? I wonder…
For millennia, humanity gazed at the Moon and envisioned visiting it. Yet, no one dreamed it a trespass. The Hive is not a welcoming host, as you well know.
Does it burden you, Guardian, to know that your presence here was not simply expected, but desired? That you were summoned?

It is no mere coincidence that you, the slayer of Oryx, have been drawn to this place.

The Pyramid can’t conjure Nightmares from Hive minds. They require a human psyche – anguished, burdened, Lightbearing vessels.
Deep below, the rudderless Hidden Swarm seek guidance. Order. They won’t find it. Because of what you did – what you didn’t do.

It should’ve been your hand guiding them in Oryx’s stead. Yet you disrupted a glorious engine. You, the arrogant, anomalous variable.
New voices reverberate through the lunar formicary. Heresies whispered in the dark.

Below your feet, the Hidden Swarm are acquainting themselves with deeper magics beyond their reckoning. To say nothing of ours.
This place reeks of death. This could be said of any structure on the Moon, but this hall is…especially saturated.

You yourself carry painful memories of this place. Discard them. Their only use is to weigh you down – and to empower your enemy.

I wish Eris could see it this way. But she is bound irretrievably to her pain.
Just think of the old colony ships, lumbering toward some distant planet loaded with bodies.

And then some soulless cargo package flashes by, shot from this Accelerator and piloted by an AI. It weighs you down, life.
All great journeys begin with a single step, but not if you stand at the precipice.

How does one tell the difference between the horizon and an abyss in a place like this? They couldn’t. Are you certain you can?
All the Guardians lost here on this dead orb. All the Hive destroyed by our push against their dark will. So much loss on both sides.

And always the Fallen, there to pick at the carnage, the scrap – surviving, thriving on the waste of this unending war we call existence.
The fissures appeared when the Pyramid stirred. They quake and belch, setting loose the potent energies that have long simmered just below.

Should they be allowed to continue, the Hidden Swarm will make further outgambles to the surface. This is but a taste of the change to come.
Serenity. Tranquility. Fertility. It seems a fine place for investigating alien life. Yes, but what of Storms? What of Cold? What of Crises? When does a sanctuary become a prison?
Dark the Moon. Dark the night. Hush the station. Hush the Hive. Gone their leaders. Gone the Light.
Before we could leap from planet to planet like fleas, we had to crawl through the void like worms.

The accelerator flew humanity’s necessities on swift wings, fitting them from the Moon to the colonies like starlings.

But worms do not survive flights with birds.
The Hellmouth: the foundry of Crota’s deepest dreams.
Behold: causation in all its exquisite majesty. Your persistence reshapes the Hidden Swarm, in turn, the Swarm reshapes the Moon.

Their adaptations will only become more profound, the effects more pronouced. They have you to thank for this.
There is much history in the dust here. Grasp a handful and you will hold Light now extinguished. You will hold power misguided.

These grounds are covered in the madness of days gone by. Of Guardians and Hive alike. History haunts this place.
The Moon sits lush with schisms. The result of Eris’s curiosity. A Pyramid of pure power with the ability to terraform.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If the Traveler is a god of Light, then what does that make the Pyramid who spews our tragedies back at us?

We must always question the unknowable, for that is the only path to knowing.
Though Crota would ultimately face defeat, he was still able to plant the seeds of the Hive within our very home.

It was from here that the Hive was launched in Seeder Ships to Earth, spreading Crota’s brood beyond the simple reaches of Luna.

Crota may be gone, but the Swarm lives on.
I entered the Hellmouth with a sense of fateful inevitability. We should all die, or worse. I knew this to be true.

Woefully unprepared was what we were. I stand by that. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t respect them. I did then, and I always will.
There were those who believed that in Crota, the end had come. From the Moonbase, they cried out for help.

Their message beamed far and across the system. It would land with those who would not respond. Deemed to be only “affairs of the City.”
Exploration and discovery are pleasant but thin euphemisms for conquest. This was as true in our history as in any you’ll find.

Our first steps into the inky dark were no different. Lest we forget: The Hive’s lunar settlements predate our own.
The Moon is fragile. Even more so now than before. Look no further than the oozing schisms brought forth by the Pyramid.

May they serve as a warning: The Moon has been carved out, far beyond imagination. Fetid miasma rises. It belongs to the Hive now.
Crota claimed innumerable souls in this pit. The wages of our heroism were countless corpses and a strengthened, emboldened enemy.
Few perils in the cosmos are as dangerous as an idea. And few ideas are as dangerous as the heretical notion festering in the Hellmouth.
In a nest left untouched, the Hive pulse beneath the surface of the Moon. Their influence grows. Their presence spreads.
What you see rising from the schisms is the very essence of the Hive themselves. For there is naught else within the Moon’s core.
The origin of many Nightmares can be traced to this exact location. Here the Hive bred fear itself, enduring and true.

There are no guides here. It is a place of scheming queens & traps unsprung.
Do you like it here? It’s scenic, I will say that. The sisters did not do much redecorating when they moved in, but I say, give them time…
Leave the Dreaming City while you still can, dear squanderer.
Why do you come here? Is it duty to your slavish orthodoxy? Fealty to an absent queen? Sympathy for your Awoken friends?
This curse is a prototype, I’m sure. A step to something far more cunning.
Sickness, weakness, bad luck, pestilence – that’s the old idea of a curse. This repetition is an innovation purpose-built for Guardians.
The curse itself is how the deceiver manifests; she has learned from her brother’s death. Clever girl, clever girl…
The curse cannot be unraveled. You’re so deep into the web of her will.
If you’re looking for the heart of the curse, you will not find it here. It is smuggled away, secret and safe…

 

Though Crota would ultimately face defeat, he was still able to plant the seeds of the Hive within our very home.

It was from here that the Hive was launched in Seeder Ships to Earth, spreading Crota’s brood beyond the simple reaches of Luna.

Crota may be gone, but the Swarm lives on.
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