Some folks who pre-ordered the collector’s edition of Destiny 2: Beyond Light have already received their boxes, and — as reported in Forbes — it’s good news for Destiny lore hounds.
Reddit user RunTaker has linked to a scan of the booklet that comes with the collector’s edition, and it’s worth poring over. It’s essentially an in-universe diary belonging to Clovis Bray, a Golden Age scientist who fled to Europa in his megalomaniacal quest for immortality.
From what I’ve been able to glean so far, Bray was obsessed with transferring his consciousness into an exo body, but didn’t want to do so until he was certain his mind would be perfectly preserved. So he used other people as test subjects first — including his own son.
In the journal entries, he speaks of “Clarity,” which I think is probably the artifact of the Darkness glimpsed in some of the Beyond Light trailers.
“I am now in contact with Clarity Control,” Clovis writes at one point. “I am in communication with an intelligence so far beyond our own that it can manipulate us like stones on a go board.”
The Exo Stranger from Destiny 1’s story campaign said something about not being “forged in Light,” implying she wasn’t a Guardian.
So it sounds like, perhaps out of desperation, Elsie Bray became an exo to escape the “Clovis Curse,” the mutation that threatens to kill her entire family. My suspicion is that she didn’t want to become immortal, like her grandfather.
She probably just wanted to stop him.
Other fun lore tidbits from the collector’s edition, hinted at in the booklet, are being teased apart in various Reddit threads. There’s mention of giant tentacled colony creatures beneath the surface of Europa, which sound like they could be related to the Nine.
If the leviathans of the Jovian moons somehow came into contact with the Darkness, would that explain the Nine? There’s a mention of “dark matter” on Europa, and the Nine showing interest in it.
“Readers beware,” the Stranger writes.
“My grandfather was worse than you know.”