After an extremely long wait, Destiny 2’s Season of the Lost is finally coming to its end. The game’s next big expansion, The Witch Queen, launches on February 22, and this week marks the conclusion of the story that has been setting up the game’s next chapter. Mara Sov completed her exorcism of Savathun’s worm, but not all went according to plan.
The final mission of the season, dubbed “Exorcism,” is now available in the game. We’re going to discuss the story of the conclusion, how it wraps up the season, and what it means for The Witch Queen–so note, there are spoilers from here on out. If you haven’t played “Exorcism” on your own yet, you might want to do that before reading further.
The conclusion of the Season of the Lost sends you to the Dreaming City for one last Astral Alignment-like fight, as the forces of Xivu Arath stream into the Blind Well through the Ascendant Plane in a last-ditch attempt to stop the exorcism and capture Savathun. Luckily, Saint-14 is there to help, and together with a group of other Guardians, you’re able to fight your way into Mara Sov’s spire across the bridge we’ve seen being built during the course of the season. Though Xivu Arath throws a lot of force to stop you, including the two bosses you’ve been battling in the Astral Alignment activity and a new champion, the Guardians are able to hold off the attack and Mara finishes the ritual, removing Savathun’s worm.
Before we go on, here’s a quick story catch-up if you’re struggling to remember what’s going on in the Season of the Lost, or just not that deep in the intricate magic-infused stories of Destiny 2. At the start of the season, Savathun revealed herself. All year, she’d been impersonating the exiled Warlock Osiris, acting as an adviser to the Vanguard while apparently sowing discord and distrust. For her part, Savathun argued that she had actually been secretly trying to help, and while her actions can seem evil, they did, ultimately, have some good results, like driving humanity to find allies in the Cabal and the Eliksni.
The spire we’ve seen in the distance of the Astral Alignment activity is finally accessible, but Xivu Arath’s forces attack it during the exorcism.
After the Season of the Splicer, when Osiris seemed to have a hand in helping Lakshmi-2 open the door for a Vex invasion of the Last City, the Warlock fled to the Dreaming City and finally let it be known that he was actually Savathun, the Hive god of cunning that players have been fighting proxy battles against for years. Savathun encased itself in a giant crystal and struck a deal with Mara Sov, the Awoken queen. If Mara would help Savathun get rid of the worm inside her, Savathun would help us defeat the Darkness, while also returning the real Osiris. Mara took the deal, but had a double-cross planned: Once Savathun’s worm was removed, she would be vulnerable, and Mara intended to kill the Witch Queen once and for all. It was Savathun who cursed the Dreaming City with a three-week time loop back during the Forsaken expansion, which persists to this day, and Mara hoped to finally break it–or at least get some payback–with Mara in her clutches.
To understand all that, you need to understand how the Hive work. Each of the Hive has a parasitic worm inside of it as part of a pact the Hive made with the worm gods (like Xol from the Warmind expansion); the Hive gained special Darkness powers in return for feeding the worms with constant conquest and murder. In Savathun’s case, her constant lies and deceptions are, apparently, what she uses to feed her worm, so her evil-seeming machinations are required to keep her alive–if the Hive stop feeding their worms, the worms will consume them instead. It’s a bad deal, and Savathun told us she wanted our help to get out of it.
The story of the Season of the Lost has been about helping Mara Sov gather her Techeuns, a coven of space witches, to exorcise the worm from Savathun. With the worm removed, Savathun would lose the connection to the Darkness that gives the Hive its power, as well as her ties to immortality, so Mara had an interest in helping Savathun–it would give her the opportunity to assassinate the Witch Queen. Meanwhile, Xivu Arath, the Hive god of war and Savathun’s sister, is aware that Savathun is attempting to betray the Darkness. Xivu Arath spent the whole season trying to find a way into the Dreaming City to get to Savathun. Our work to help the Techeuns this season had the side effect of opening the door for Xivu Arath more and more. When we finally got to the end of the season, Xivu Arath was able to mount a major assault on the Dreaming City.
What we saw in the Exorcism mission, however, was that Savathun had a plan in place for Mara’s betrayal. After holding off Xivu Arath’s forces, Mara and her Techeuns completed the ritual and removed Savathun’s worm. When Mara broke into Savathun’s crystal, however, the Witch Queen wasn’t there. Somehow, Savathun had already escaped, or maybe, she’d never been there to begin with. Stuff with Hive magic and the Ascendant Plane is, uh, kind of weird. Suffice it to say that Mara was beaten and she wasn’t able to kill Savathun, even though the exorcism was a success.
Inside the crystal, however, was Osiris, and it appears that when Savathun was impersonating him over the last year, it might have been more accurate to say that she’d found a way to possess him. It seems like Osiris was trapped in that crystal all along; while Saint-14 was searching for him during the Season of the Lost, Osiris was right under everyone’s nose. That’s good news, although we’ve seen in some lore already this season that Osiris’s experience has been incredibly traumatic. While Savathun was wearing his face and impersonating him, Osiris was largely aware of what was happening, trapped in his own body and watching as the Witch Queen manipulated his friends.
Saint-14 is on-hand to help protect Mara and the Techeuns, hoping to learn about Osiris’s fate.
Savathun, then, held up her end of the bargain: She returned Osiris. And Mara held up her end: She exorcised Savathun’s worm. The escape of the Witch Queen wasn’t a total loss for Mara because she apparently captured the worm and plans to, apparently, interrogate it or otherwise glean information from it. So it’s possible we might still learn some useful things after everything that happened this season, especially as we go into the next chapter in The Witch Queen.
This mission leaves a few questions, though. First, we know that Savathun is able to take control of the Traveler’s power, the Light, in the next expansion. There was some speculation this season that Savathun would, in fact, die when her worm was removed, allowing her to be reborn as a sort of Hive Guardian, the way players used to be living humans but were revived after their deaths to become Guardians. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, which adds another dimension to the question of how Savathun was able to gain the Light.
There are some other dangling threads, still, too. As Saint-14 notes, we have no idea how this experience might affect Osiris going forward, or whether he’ll recover. Osiris-Savathun has played a major role in the story of late, and Osiris’s return seems like it’s potentially a big deal for a lot of people, including Ikora (who plays a major role in the next expansion) and Saint (who at least appears to be participating in the story, according to the trailers).
Finally, there’s the question of that one last Ahamkara egg in Mara Sov’s chamber. We speculated that the Ahamkara might play a role in Savathun’s exorcism, but it doesn’t appear that that’s the case. So what’s the egg all about? Ahamkara keep coming up in relation to Savathun, and Bungie wouldn’t just drop that egg in there for no reason.
Of course, there are no current answers to those questions, but we should learn more in a week when The Witch Queen finally launches. In the meantime, make sure to tie up any loose ends you still have hanging in the Season of the Lost before February 22.
Source: Gamespot
