The Witness is one of Destiny 2’s most mysterious characters, having spent years operating the background with neither a name nor a clear motivation. Seemingly as powerful as The Traveler yet far more active as an entity, The Witness is nonetheless as cryptic as that great paracasual sphere. We learn a bit more about the leader of the Black Fleet in Lightfall, but much remains unanswered.
We’ll try to answer more burning questions about The Witness here: what it is, where it came from, and what it wants.
What to Know About the Witness in Destiny 2
To grossly oversimplify, The Witness is the most powerful known Darkness entity in the Destiny franchise. It’s capable of moving planets between realities, killing Guardians and their Ghosts with a wave of its finger, and cutting a dimensional portal into The Traveler itself with the aid of the mysterious Veil.
The Witness commands the vast Black Fleet, an armada of paracausal vessels that’s chased The Traveler and its command of Light for billions of years. It is primarily responsible for the extinction of uncountable civilizations.
So who, or what, is The Witness?
What is The Witness in Destiny 2?
It’s hard to say precisely what The Witness is on a physical or realistic level. We know that it’s the chief commander of all Darkness in the universe, is The Traveler’s ancient enemy, and the cause of humanity’s Collapse some 500 years before the first Destiny’s story began.
Its secrets empowered the Hive gods and gave Oryx the power to Take. Its philosophy captured the attention of Cabal Emperor Calus — a philosophy of nihilism, where the only true perfection is in oblivion.
Savathun, one of its former top servitors, says The Witness was once a mortal alien like any other. Via some means, it gained command of Darkness powers and, after a time, rose to be the Dark’s primary servitor.
What is The True Form of The Witness?
Art and concept art of The Witness without its trademark garb shows that it has a fairly stereotypical humanoid alien physique, not unlike the Greys of Earth’s extraterrestrial mythology. What sets it apart is its size.
While not as large as The Traveler, if you compare The Witness’s height against its ancient prey, it must be at least several thousand feet tall — taller if you include the trail of smokey faces emanating from its head. The true form of The Witness is relatively unknown.
The Witness also refers to itself as “we,” possibly in the royal sense but more likely in a literal one. Savathun refers to it as a “being with a thousand names,” and it’s possible that The Witness collects the essences of those it or its servitors destroy.
Its Disciples, particularly Rhulk and the Hive are responsible for many extinction-level events. If The Witness draws power from removing life from the universe at a fundamental level, the stream of faces from its head might be a kind of exhaust. Put another way: it has to constantly jettison the souls of those it’s absorbed as a pressure release, lest even it be adversely affected.
We also know that The Witness is not all-powerful, as without the Veil (whatever that is), it cannot — or chooses not to — successfully interact with The Traveler in the way it wants to. What way that is is yet unknown.
What Does The Witness Want in Destiny 2?
Image via Bungie
For a long time, The Witness and the Darkness were synonymous. What one wanted, the other did as well. That’s no longer true. Darkness is a neutral force associated with the immaterial: thought, memory, and metaphysical equilibrium. All things exist in some way within Darkness, and like Light, some of it lives in everything everywhere.
The Witness, by contrast, has an agenda. One of its stated purposes in the lore is to “commune with The Traveler and drink the Light,” which it seems to start doing at the end of the Lightfall campaign. What that process entails is unclear.
We can glean some measure of The Witness’s intentions from one primary source: the Unveiling lore book.
The Unveiling: The Witness, The Traveler, The Winnower, and The Gardener
Unveiling is the lore book associated with where The Witness explained, in cosmic terms, its conflict with The Traveler. It positions itself and The Traveler as inheritors of proto-forces called The Winnower and The Gardener, respectively.
Short of explaining the whole story, these two personifications played an intimate game before time began, with The Gardener creating and The Winnower culling. Over time, The Gardener wanted its creations to do more than become fodder for the culling, desiring them to grow and flourish and revel in change instead.
The Winnower, wanting to continue the status quo, objected, and once our reality came into being, this conflict from outside spilled in. Now, while Light and Dark aren’t opposing in principle — one handles the physical, the other the immaterial — the philosophies of their servants, including the Witness, are.
And we know The Witness’s ultimate goal is the achieve the “final shape,” which Eris Morn describes as “what exists when everything that can be removed has been removed.” Calus believes this state of complete oblivion is the end of all things. The Hive belief in the Sword Logic, where only those who can survive are worthy of note and those who die should be forgotten, seems to be the beginning of the same idea.
The Witness uses anything and everything available to achieve that aim, seemingly viewing every being it interacts with as a tool toward reaching it. Our Guardians and its own Disciples are only stepping stones, easily cast aside when they cease being useful. In that, its dedication to the final shape is unrelenting and uncompromising.
There are dozens of smaller details about The Witness, from its seeming fascination with Guardians to its apparent pity for The Traveler, as shown at the end of Lightfall. Its ability to communicate via cracks in space is also interesting, as is its association with sharp angles and straight lines as opposed to The Traveller’s rounded edges and softness.
In short, that’s The Witness explained. Like a lot in Destiny 2, there’s much more to discuss, but hopefully, we’ve presented enough to get you started learning about The Witness.
Featured image via Bungie
