Destiny 2: Eliksni – From Desperation to Inclusion
We know them as “Fallen”, but they are Eliksni, as Variks once told us. Their long-lost struggle against the decline of their whole civilization defined them in our era, while they try to regain their dignity against the desperation of the times. Since the first inception of Destiny, it was clear that one day we would have reached a point in which the Eliksni would be turned into allies, neighbors, even brothers. We are now on the verge of that moment, through dark times and difficult choices, against the hate and trying to reconcile with a past of war, torments, and horrors.
Understanding the Whirlwind
“Ask them our name. Ask your masters what they call you. Ask the hollow, the hateful, the Awoken with alien dreams encysted in them! Ask them our name!
Grimoire, “Ghost Fragment: Fallen 3”.
Fallen. They name us Fallen.”
The Fallen were relentless opponents to the City. They are behind the two, best-executed sieges of the City’s history, both followed by the famous grisly battles: The Battle of the Six Fronts and the Battle of the Twilight Gap. After those attempts, they kept being a major threat to our settlement.
We never stopped fighting them, but there was something else behind all of this violence: Desperation, for what they have lost, and what they still have to lose.
“The Fallen are ruthless scavengers. Brutal and uncaring, they arrived on their massive Ketches in the wake of the Collapse to loot and pillage our devastated worlds.
Grimoire, “The Fallen”.
There are hints of ancient nobility to the Fallen – the scars of lost grandeur. The Kells of their scattered Houses still claim to be royalty. But they leave only grief and wreckage in their wake.”
The Eliksni are the only other species we know in the present that was blessed by the Light from the Traveler. It is not specified in what fashion, but the whole Eliksni civilization took grand benefits from the presence of the Traveler, causing them to spread in a vast interstellar territory, and create advanced technologies.
“During our Golden Age, the Eliksni civilization spanned many star systems. Farther than humanity could imagine. And in all of our exploration, we never found anything more wondrous than the Great Machine.”
Eido, in-game dialogue.
Then the Whirlwind came: A calamity of unclear source, that forced the Traveler to leave. Even though, we know now that the Traveler could have left for other reasons – namely, to avoid being worshipped as a god by the Eliksni.
“This word is rich with family.
“Dreams of Alpha Lupi – Riis”, from the lore book “Grimoire Anthology: Volume II, Fallen Kingdoms”.
You pause to rest. Life is a balm. You must cherish it where you find it.
You do not mean to stay, but longing and kinship forestalls your departure time and time again. These little gardeners are such careful stewards of fragility. They sing songs of disasters averted and loved ones lost. They fashion heavy elements combed from the bones of old stars into objects of peace and beauty.
You must force yourself to be cruel. Your presence is portent.”
Before the Whirlwind, the Eliksni race was prosperous. Civil wars and faction wars divided their people, but the House of Kings and the House of Judgment managed to forge a durable peace. Many Eliksni warriors of nowadays, included Mithrax, were builders, artists, creators.
READ MORE: Destiny 2: A Descent into the Vault of Glass
For example, it is well known that the fierce House of Wolves was a house of weavers, before the dark times. The Traveler itself considered them as manufacturers of beauty, artists. They were singers of desperate times when the Houses fought a civil war in Riis – a cautionary tale.
Such frailty was embedded in the Eliksni culture, this fear of falling, of recede into the barbaric age. Sadly, this was their fate all along, when the unfathomable doom of the Whirlwind hurled their civilizations into the abyss, on the brink of extinction.
“First, the Great Machine. Then, the sky fell away. Whirlwind ripped away the past. All honor lost, all hope. Judgement not enough. Cannot keep Wolves from Kings, Scar from Winter. Fell to fighting. Fell to hate.”
Variks, The Loyal.
As the apocalyptic event stroke, being abandoned by the Traveler without explanations was a tragedy inside the tragedy. The Eliksni felt betrayed while their doom crushed their homeworld Riis and their whole interstellar empire fell into oblivion.
“’Where is the Great Machine? Where is the Great Machine?’ —Chelchis, Kell of Stone”
“Doom of Chelchis”, weapon.
Suddenly, from an interstellar civilization ahead of its time, blessed by the enlightenment, the Eliksni society found itself broken beyond hope. They became fugitives, living a space diaspora while turning them into pirates and marauders for survival.
What happened after their fall put the Eliksni in a spiral of overwhelming desperation – something that will be a trademark of their culture for the ages to come.
The House of Light
When we met Mithrax for the first time, it was on Titan, during a mission that led us in the depth of the Arcology, on the tracks of a methane reactor contended by the Hive and the Fallen. A decision could be made, in sparing the Fallen captain, and canonically is what precisely happened.
The story of Mithrax, though, is a long one. He was a vandal member of the Wolves, once captured by Sjur Eido, the legendary fist Queen’s Wrath from the Awoken, he knew for the first time that his enemies can be merciful. Sjur treated him with honor and as an equal, ultimately freeing him.
From that point on, something in Mithrax changed forever. If all the inhabitants of the Solar System were like Sjur, maybe there was still hope; maybe, it was time to abandon the old ways.
He eventually started to travel with two Guardians, a Warlock, and a Hunter, forming a very unusual fireteam. The bond between them convinced him furtherly that he should be an agent of change.
“Why did they call themselves Wolves?” the Hunter asks. “You guys don’t have any wolves on your home world, do you?”
“Lord of Wolves”, weapon.
“Nama,” the Captain replies. He has perched on a rusted-out Skiff. He scans the horizon, trying to remember the way to the crypt.
“So… Why, then? Most people haven’t even seen one.”
“Yeah,” the Warlock chimes in. “I’d never even heard of wolves ’til I went to the Iron Temple.”
The Captain cocks his head in a way that makes him look very like a squat, hulking owl. “Why Eliksni accept name ‘Fallen’? Why Wolves accept name ‘Wolves’? Why Misraaks is now,” he grimaces as he mimes their accents, showing his serrated teeth, “Miff-racks?” He rises in one fluid motion and stands at his full height. “Why speak Guardian way instead Eliksni? Docked things do not word themselves.”
He hops down, brushing past the Hunter and the Warlock with the rippling strength of a hunting tiger. “House of Wolves, they been Mraskilaasan. Gentle weavers. Come. I know the way now.
One day, Mithrax acknowledge the death of the great Sjur Eido. She was his first step into the Light, the person that taught him that the world could be changed, that honor and compassion can be boundless. He decides then to go visit her tomb, to pay his respect.
In that moment, Mithrax decides to found the House of Light, while keeping his faith in the Traveler, he integrates in it the fundamental acceptance of the choice the Great Machine made: Us.
“‘Let them have the Great Machine. They deserve it.” —Mithrax, transl. from Eliksni’”
“Tangled Web Robe”, armor.
READ MORE: Destiny 2: Unraveling the secrets of Presage
A Long-awaited Alliance
The House of Light stayed in the background for a while, helping us now and then (for example, providing vital intel and support during the Zero Hour crisis, against Eramis). In Season 14, however, with the Vex direct hostility act toward the Last City, Mithrax stepped in, offering again an exchange of mutual support.
The House of Salvation latest attempt to overcome the dark fate of the Eliksni civilization has come to an end in the closing act of the “Beyond Light” DLC. Eramis will to use the Darkness as a revenge tool and reject the Traveler, is the peak of the desperation that the Eliksni has reached in their fall.
This is coming after the fall of the Houses, as we witnessed at the end of Destiny 1 and with the foundation of the House of Dusk in Destiny 2. Following the events of Forsaken, all that made Eliksni united has been thorned apart.
The idea of a future unity, cultivated in the darkness by masterminds such as Craask from the noble House of Kings, was shattered and with the fall of Eramis, all the false hopes sealed the ultimate fate of this culture.
Hence, Mithrax comes. He offered peace and shelter to the fugitives from the fall of the House of Salvation, helped by Variks, who never stopped to believe that, one day, the Eliksni would have become whole again. His name is a variation of Mithra, the god of the Mithraism religion, which means “friend” in Sanskrit.
Mithrax broke the cruel rules and traditions of the Fallen, who used the Ether not as sustainment only, but as a powerful social control tool, by taking more of it depending on the social hierarchy (hence the different sizes of Captains and majors). He even prohibited the barbaric arms docking tradition.
“He does not take more than his share of Ether, and he does not punish by docking limbs. These are radical, but popular, ideas in our House.”
Eido, in-game dialogue.
Bungie played a long stretch by suddenly making Mithrax a Sacred Splicer – a role that we never knew was applied to him before, and we can parse this as a tentative of introducing a resolution in Fallen storyline while having the Vex as a main villain in the season.
Since the beginning of Destiny, the Eliksni – or Fallen as we better knew them then – were pivotal for the game. The very first alien species we met, after waking up in the Cosmodrome, their howling in post-apocalyptic Russia is a signature of the franchise.
Back then, we knew that the Fallen were our dark mirror, something that we could have become after the Collapse if the Traveler would have left us too. The alliance with them has a long way coming, but are we ready for this awaited change?
READ MORE: Destiny 2: The Dark Future of Praedyth
The Roots of Hate
After reaching out to the human race, the Eliksni of the House of Light was welcomed by the open-minded Vanguard. Ikora and Zavala have recently dealt with their doubts and prejudices, allowing Rasputin, and a resurrected Uldren in the flesh of Crow in their ranks.
They even approached Darkness with an open mind and welcomed Caiatl and the Cabal in an alliance against our common enemies. As Osiris says, though, the temporary settling of the Eliksni “stands at the edge of decrees and democracy”, on a very thin line of tension.
Dealing in the same manner with the Eliksni is just another natural step on this process and, storywise, they should have been the very first to be so. Bungie decided for another course of action, a little bit paradoxical considering our history with the Fallen, but instrumental for the story they wanted to tell.
This is a story about inclusion and compassion; it’s about sheltering war refugees and being human.
In this sense, a vocal opposition raises with Lakshmi-2, the representative of the Future War Cult faction. Her faction, founded by the renowned Maya Sundaresh after her experiences with the Vex, is using a device called Chasm, based on Vex technology, capable of scanning possible future timelines.
“I have glimpsed our future, Guardian. And what I saw was chilling. Skies dark with smoke. Shouting. Gunfire. And in the center of it all, standing in our City… a group of Fallen. The same Fallen I saw earlier.”
Lakshmi-2, in-game dialogue.
In these possible futures, she has seen a battle in the middle of the City, with the Eliksni at its epicenter. She started then a vocal opposition to the Eliksni presence in the City, broadcasting hate propaganda and going so far as vandalizing the refugees camp, plotting against the Vanguard authority, and attempting a coup.
Even though Lakshmi is misguided (we will discuss this in the future, along with the plot storyline), she is simply following her nature, and feeding her misconceptions, hatred, and ignorance to all the citizens of the City.
As we introduced, the story of the Fallen Eliksni is a story about us. How we could have been in their place and how we are behaving in our real-world toward the topics of inclusion, sheltering, the fight against discrimination and hate.
“For centuries, the vulnerable have found shelter and security under the watchful eye of the Traveler. Now, it seems that includes Fallen. Once they sieged our walls, and now Ikora Rey throws open the gates. A charitable act from a compassionate leader. But is it the right thing to do?”
Lakshmi-2, in-game dialogue.
Even if the story was forced in having Mithrax helping us against the Vex, we now see what Bungie is pointing at: Are we capable of showing mercy and acceptance towards a former opponent that has redeemed itself? Detractors as Lakshmi seem to have not even stopped to consider them our enemies.
“Can we really spare the energy and resources to shelter our enemies while we are under Vex attack? Can we afford to extend a peaceful hand to those who might bite it?”
Lakshmi-2, in-game dialogue.
The same, heavy question was laid on our shoulder when we dealt with the Crow. The community has shown a polarization towards this character, in most cases not willing to let go of the fact that he was Uldren in a previous life. Even though he lost all his memories about that life, and has shown his value towards us, the hate stayed in many cases.
The way Lakshmi approaches the issue of the refugees is telling way more about us than about her. She gazes in some sort of future, making hypotheses about issues that could rise or not, ignoring the present time, where the real needs of these refugees are grounded.
Since the Eliksni are our dark mirror, we could have been in the same situation, fleeing from annihilation, from the death of our civilization and culture, and being refused by who could help us to rebuild.
The Ruins of a Civilization
While wandering in their camp, in the Eliksni quarter, the words of Eido, the adopted daughter of Mithrax named after her lost friend Sjur, cradles us into the lost culture of our former foe, shedding light on many aspects we thought only our culture in Destiny could still hold.
Among other things, Eido tells us how Eliksni hatchlings were afraid that Guardians could come while they were asleep and slay them. So, the parents used to draw symbols to exorcize the enemies, to keep them away from the camps, just to have them rest peacefully. Such the Guardians were feared, as scary boogie men.
“After the Whirlwind, many Eliksni were overcome by feelings of hopelessness. They were homeless, hungry and hunted by Guardians and Hive alike.”
Eido, in-game dialogue.
In a cutscene, Mithrax speaks about the other side of what we do every day: Killing Fallen. His story about the terrible monster called “The Saint” is a cautionary tale, a warning for all of us. Our hero, one of the best among the Lightbearers, a Guardian, and a legend, Saint-14 has been seen as a monster by the Eliksni who he relentlessly hunted down and killed.
Even though is easy to say “our heroes will always be some others’ villains”, the intention of this message is that war spreads horrors, on both sides. These horrors scorch our minds and erode our moral fiber. All that is left in their wake is fear and trauma.
Saint is one of the most vocal against the Eliksni presence in the City since he has fought against them for his whole life, not stopping for a second to think about them as nothing more than disposable foes. He will argue with Mithrax during the missions, raising his voice but, ultimately, becoming aware that the Kell is just doing the same as he does every day: Fighting for saving his people.
Saint is right, the Fallen killed many humans. And so it is Mithrax, as humans did the same. But Eido, once again, shed enlightenment in all of these desperate attempts to push the fault on the opposite side, maybe a foreshadowing on things to come because of Lakshmi.
“Let ours be a cautionary tale: No matter how enlightened a culture, there are always those who prey on our worst impulses for their own gain.”
Eido, in-game dialogue.
Mithrax will say “we will need to learn to live aside with this monster”, speaking for Saint but even for a different kind of monster, the inner demon of hate and fear. We all are Saint: We will need to learn to love our former foes, putting aside the hate, the conditioned response to reach for our weapons at their sight. We will slowly see a change in Saint, little by little. If he can change, then this is the signal that we can follow his steps.
“They watched as Ikora and Zavala conversed with departing mourners. The Dreg and his son approached, and with a bittersweet smile, Ikora made certain to introduce them to Zavala. Big, stern, stoic Zavala took to one knee and spoke to the child, eye to eye.
“X – MEMORIAL”, from the lore book “Beneath an Endless Night”.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Saint finally said, unable to look away.
Mithrax responded, not with words, but with a fluttering purr-like rumble and mirrored Saint’s posture.
“Do you think this will hold? An alliance, fragile like glass, held in a fist?” Saint asked.
“Only the Great Machine knows what will come from over the horizon. We must be content with our own limited perspectives,” Mithrax said with conviction.
Saint nodded.”
What Will be Left
As we walk in the ruins of the final stage of the raid Scourge of the Past, where we defeated another Fallen fanatic, we find ourselves in the middle of metaphorical destruction: The values of the Last City can crumble like these very stones, no matter how beautiful the architecture is.
It only takes blindness, fear, and ignorance. We will be able to refuse to be driven by hate and become not simply the sum of our parts but a different, better whole?
