Destiny 2‘s newest expansion, Lightfall, continues the story of the game by bringing the long been imminent threat of the Second Collapse. With The Witness and its Black Fleet managing to get close to The Traveler and subdue it, all of Earth’s forces, allies, especially the Guardians, are now left to wonder the catastrophe that they are bound to face now that Darkness has seemingly taken over Light.
Read ahead as we go through the ending of Destiny 2’s Lightfall campaign and try to get a better understanding as to what happened and what’s about to come in the future expansion.
Destiny 2 Lightfall Campaign Ending Recap
After The Witness managed to get close to The Traveler and get visions about The Veil being kept in Neomuna, The Witness has sent its disciple Emperor Calus to go to Neptune and retrieve The Veil. Led by Osiris, the Guardian race to Neomuna to stop Calus. Thanks to the help of the Cloud Striders Rohan and Nimbus, the Guardians manage to get hold and learn to use the power of the Strand.
Despite all efforts to stop them, Emperor Calus managed to breach through the site where The Veil has been contained, but he dies to the hands of the Guardian with the help of Caiatl’s forces and Nimbus. When it seemed like the threat has been dealt with, The Witness possesses the Guardian’s ghost and uses it to get close to The Veil and finally get through to The Traveler with the use of the Ghost’s Light.
With The Veil in their control, The Witness approaches The Traveler once again and carves open a portal on the surface of the The Traveler. The Black Fleet ships surrounding The Traveler gets sucked into the portal, followed by The Witness who floated in right after. The campaign ends as the Zavala and his allies all look at the portal anticipating the doom that will surely follow.
Destiny 2 Lightfall Ending Explained
There have been a lot of questions brought on by this ending and the events the preceded it and events that will follow it. With how this campaign is written, it’s basically a penultimate chapter to the Light and Darkness Saga of the game, and although we can’t answer all of these questions right now until the next expansion comes, we’ll try to make sense of what we can.
Who is The Witness?
The Witness plays the part of the big antagonist of the Lightfall Campaign. It appears to be the envoy of Darkness, similar to how The Traveler is the envoy of Light, and based from The Witness’ lines, it doesn’t appear to be as *the* Darkness incarnate itself, but rather just an executor of what the Darkness “wills”.
Despite this, The Witness appears to be immensely powerful, most likely the most powerful enemy that players have seen in the game so far. It was seen to be able to “psychically” cut through Ghosts, Guardians, and ships by just effortlessly waving its fingers. It also has the entire Black Fleet under its control, as well as Calus and his army, whom it made as its newest Disciple.
Despite its antagonistic role, The Witness appeared to talk with empathy towards The Traveler as it opens the portal, bringing up more questions as to what its role really is and what the Darkness’ ultimate goal is.
Looking back at the analog of the Gardener and the Winnower as The Traveler and The Witness, respectively, it is speculated that The Witness is simply trying to fix the fault that The Traveler has caused when The Traveler “interfered” with how things should have been in the attempt to overcome the “Final Shape”. It may also be possible that the creation of The Veil was done to help with that attempt.
What is The Veil?
The Veil appears to be an artefact that is closely related to The Traveler. Despite being a familiar name that has been heard in the previous seasons of the game, not much has been made clear as to what its purpose is and why it exists.
But based from how The Witness badly wants to get a hold of it, it is assumed that The Veil is of The Traveler’s creation and thus, it has the strongest connection to the Traveler through Light energy. Unfortunately, this also made The Veil as sort of a “backdoor” that allowed The Witness to eventually open a portal to get past all of The Traveler’s defenses.
What’s next?
With how the campaign just abruptly ended with a gaping portal on The Traveler, our best guess is that Guardians will now have to venture through the portal to stop whatever The Witness is planning at all costs. It’s uncertain if the portal directly leads to the unexplored physical innards of The Traveler since despite The Witness carving it on the surface, it’s also shown that the portal itself is hovering over the surface. It may also be that the portal directly leads to the “dimension” where Light, or whatever entity represents it, is residing.
For now, we’ll just have to wait until the next expansion of the game drops which is known to be the finale in the Light and Darkness Saga. We can also hope that the events that Bungie plans to drop in the interim will also provide more details that will answer our looming questions about where this story is headed.
Check out this video by evanf1997 showing and explaining the events of Destiny 2’s Lightfall campaign and its ending: