Two years ago, when Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion came out, Prince Uldren — the snobbish fellow from the Destiny 1.0 campaign — came back to put a bullet in the beloved Exo Cayde-6.
It’s a long story, but basically Uldren was corrupted by Riven, last of the mythical Ahmkara, itself “Taken” by the Darkness everyone in Destiny’s so afraid of all the time.
Before hardcore players took on Riven in the expansion’s high-level raid, Last Wish, they first got payback for Cayde’s life. Gun pointed at Uldren Sov, the screen cut to black, and shots rang out. But later on, a Ghost woke him.
This Uldren gasped, panicked, seemingly a new person in the same body that had shot Cayde-6 dead at the start of the Forsaken storyline. This Uldren Sov was a newborn Guardian.
In the two years since, Uldren’s new life has been hinted at in flavor text — such as the lore tab of the Amnestia-S2 exotic jumpship.
“For the last three weeks, the Guardian has been camping in a rusted-out shipping container, far off the main pathways that are always buzzing with Sparrows. He stays out of the way of other Guardians, and if he can’t do that, he keeps his helmet on. Always,” the Amnestia-S2’s flavor text reads.
“He spends his days alone. Other Guardians are an unpredictable source of pain and confusion, and they see him the same way. Some react to him with outright hostility. Others are overcome by some personal and unexplained grief. He doesn’t know why.”
The likely explanation for this, of course, is that some Guardians recognize him, hating or fearing him. They surely know who killed the legendary Cayde-6.
The vignette also mentions a silk sheet “the Guardian” woke holding, along with a ring he now wears around his neck. In the cutscene where the Awoken prince rises from the dead — just before his Ghost wakes him — he has a sheet draped over him in the Dreaming City.
So, what now?
Forbes contributor Paul Tassi seems to think that a new Beyond Light NPC teased by Bungie might in fact be the resurrected Uldren Sov. And I dig the theory. According to Bungie, a Guardian named Shaw Han is investigating Hive activity in the Cosmodrome. His face is hidden beneath a helmet.
“They just made up a New Light guide Guardian. I love it,” Tassi said on Twitter. “But start speculating who’s under that helmet.”
If we know Sov’s been camping out in a rusted-out shipping container, well, that sure sounds like the Cosmodrome to me. And, as Tassi points out, it only took Destiny 1.0 players a couple weeks to be resurrected, learn to wield their Light as a Guardian, and take out a couple of gods.
Last month, Shacknews also spotted a familiar symbol in the Beyond Light Triumphs interface: the same one seen on Prince Uldren’s chest in the original Destiny 1.0 campaign. (The symbol’s covered up in Destiny 2, making this theory all the more fun, frankly.)
There’s a very good chance Shaw Han is the Awoken prince once known as Uldren Sov, and the dramatic potential there — redemption, bitter conflict, new priorities, the intermingling of dark and light — is pretty thrilling.
Who better to fight the Darkness than the prince who lost everything because he was so utterly corrupted by it in a past life?