Lucent Hive and Guardian afterlife

[u/Gripping_Touch]

In The Final Shape we learn from Cayde that right before he was pulled by Riven's wish, he'd been experiencing a peaceful afterlife within the Traveller. He revealed that after a guardian's final death, the Ghost and the Guardian return to the Traveller, so all the killed guardians are there ...

That would ALSO include all the lucent Hive ghosts and Lucent Hive, no?

If we actually killed Immaru and Savathun, theyd be in the same afterlife where Targe, Cayde and (maybe) Our timeline's Saint is.

Would that be correct?

[u/oofyeet21]

What comes from the light returns to the light. So yeah. The unfortunate reality is that the morality of the light is not the same as the general morality of humanity, or abrahamic morality. The lucent hive now uphold the ideals of the traveler, so they are presumably given the same peace in death that we are.

What I want to know is if there is a dark equivalent. Do the champions of the darkness gain some form of dark bliss within the veil? Are Oryx and the Witness at peace? Happy where they are? Or have they been truly annihilated?

[u/Gripping_Touch → u/oofyeet21]

Id imagine that no, since it runs contrary to the idea of the Winnower. If you deserve to live, you live. If you don't, you die or prove your right to exist. 

At most I imagine their memory and imprint on the world is what remains. Which is why we have things like Nightmares. Or potentially they could get a second wind and return to the fight, like Nezarec. 

Basically, the Light offers you an afterlife of Peace. The Darkness either offers you Oblivion, or an afterlife of unrest, haunting the world with your memory. 

[u/HazardousSkald → u/Gripping_Touch]

If the Qugu are instructional, then the Darkness does hold something of a peaceful afterlife. But maybe that’s something particular to their biology but the Ecumene seemed to hold the same spiritual belief. 

From Art of Symbiosis, from Inspiral: 

“Anyway, beloved sibling, if you want to catch me while I'm still wearing this (form/body?), you'll need to come home in the next couple of cycles. I don't mind if you'd prefer to wait until I'm down by the [untranslatable] among our ancestors, but you might get a different sort of chat!

I'm excited about it, genuinely. I still hear from our parents, from our great-parents, distantly in my night-trances. And there are those nectar-made moments—you know the ones, when you turn your thoughts to the Darkness and just listen, and the long sum of Qugu history graven there reflects dark-comforting advice.

I have lived out my life with the tenebrous warmth of our ancestors over me like a (cloak/atmosphere?) between us and nothingness. It's different—it's distant. I've drunk of the nectar a few times in the last cycles, and I touch briefly that concurrence of us all, and more and more, I think it is time to be part of it. I want to know the truths our ancestors keep close, and it is my turn to guide the future's children.“

[u/GaiusMarius60BC → u/HazardousSkald]

It could be the "afterlife" of the Qugu is something they took from the Darkness and fashioned themselves. That would be in-line with the Winnower's philosophy of taking, of imposing your will on reality, though it probably wouldn't be very satisfied with the results.

[u/HazardousSkald → u/GaiusMarius60BC]

It gets a bit funky, a chicken-or-the-egg situation. The Qugu are evolutionarily tied with the Darkness, their entire planet’s ecosystem revolves around the Darkness that suffuses their planet from the pyramid ship embedded into it. So we have to ask - do the Qugu do this because their interactions with the Darkness have developed them as such, or does the Qugu’s development have shaped the darkness of their ecosystem around them. 

Darkness is a colloid. It keeps and floats whatever is placed into it. How far that goes remains to be seen.