Destiny 2 players may have solved one of the series’ biggest mysteries

Exactly who—or what—are the Nine? We may finally have an answer.

The lore of Destiny is full of mysteries we may never know the answers to: What is the Darkness? (Even Bungie doesn’t know.) How in the world can Cayde-6, a robot, eat and enjoy ramen? Why did our Ghosts suddenly stop sounding like Tyrion from Game of Thrones?

But now, at least, we may have answers about some of the most enigmatic figures in the Destiny universe: the Nine.

Originally introduced to players through Xûr, the shadowy merchant who serves as their emissary and deals out rare loot to Guardians who can track him down each week, the Nine have reached new prominence in Destiny 2 as the sponsors of the sequels Trials. Now that the first Trials event has concluded, fans on the game’s official subreddit (via Eurogamer) have pored over clues from the lore tab of the gear awarded to victors in the PvP mode and built a fairly solid case for who and what the Nine actually are.

To understand the most recent discoveries, you’ll probably need a short bit of backstory. One of the first game’s unlockable Grimoire cards—effectively lore dumps you had to go on Bungie.net to read—offered nine possible theories as to the true nature of the Nine:

• The Nine are survivors of the cis-Jovian colonies who made a compact with an alien force to ensure their own survival.
• The Nine are deep-orbit warminds who weathered the Collapse in hardened stealth platforms.
• The Nine are ancient leviathan intelligences from the seas of Europa or the hydrocarbon pits of Titan.
• The Nine arrived in a mysterious transmission from the direction of the Corona-Borealis supercluster.
• The Nine are the firstborn Awoken and their minds now race down the field lines of the Jupiter-Io flux tube.
• The Nine are Ghosts who pierced the Deep Black without a ship and meditated on the hissing silence of the heliopause.
• The Nine are the aspects of the Darkness, broken by the Traveler’s rebuke, working to destroy us from within.
• The Nine is a viral language of pure meaning.
• The Nine are the shadows left by the annihilation of a transcendent shape, burned into the weft of what is.

By comparing that list with some of the new lore attached to loot from the new Trials, Reddit user echof0xtrot makes a strong case that the sixth theory—the Nine are Ghosts without Guardians who travelled beyond the Solar System—is the correct one.

For example, the lore text on the shotgun A Sudden Death refers to the Nine as “the deep-orbit minds,” and that of the submachine gun Adjudicator refers to the “deep black,” mirroring the language of the sixth theory.

More telling still is the lore on the sniper rifle The Long Walk, which is framed as lengthy conversation between the Nine and someone called Orin (possibly the Exo Stranger from Destiny). For one thing, the Nine who speak are all identified by the letter G followed by a number, quite possibly an abbreviation for Ghost. At one point, Orin remarks, “They said you all went to the deep without a ship.” One of the Nine then responds with what amounts to a fairly definitive confirmation of the theory: “Our charges are gone, but we’re still creatures of Light. No different from the one you carry in your pocket.”

So there you have it. The Nine aren’t quite the mysterious, unknowable figures we thought they were. If they hadn’t ditched their Guardians and ran off into space, they’d still be hanging out in our pants, tracking our kills and telling us about the provenance of lunar wizards.

Of course, that still doesn’t explain why they chose to reward anyone who completes the Trials flawlessly with a really, really big guy. Some mysteries we may never solve.