Charting the Enigmatic Nine: How Destiny 2’s Next Expansion Rewrites an Egyptian Creation Myth
Destiny has always been a universe where hard science rubs shoulders with space fantasy—where worm-gods quote Nietzsche and sentient guns have opinions. Yet one faction remains maddeningly opaque: the Nine. For eleven years they have been vendor patrons, cryptic narrators and occasional PvP referees, but never the main event. When Bungie announced The Edge of Fate for 2025, brandishing nine familiar sigils, lore-sleuths felt a tectonic plate shift. This post excavates why that matters, visualises the Nine’s erratic screen-time, and argues that Bungie is about to turn Egyptian Ennead cosmology into its most ambitious playable space since the Dreaming City.
The archaeological record
Think of Destiny’s narrative like Troy: multiple cities piled atop one another. In Year 1 (2014) the Nine are a rumour attached to Xûr, a weekend vendor who arrives “on the tides of cosmic winds.” (Destinypedia) Two expansions later you earn a Grimoire card hinting that they are “born of the primordial matter that hangs between the stars.” Then everything goes quiet until Destiny 2 launches in 2017 with Trials of the Nine, flinging Guardians into a marble-white podium floating in nothingness (Destinypedia).
2019’s Season of the Drifter blows the doors wider with the Invitations of the Nine quest-line and the Ecdysis lore book Destinypedia, letting players eavesdrop on their deliberations. We briefly meet Orin—an Awoken emissary who literally sheds her mortal skin to join them. The Prophecy dungeon (2020) and Entities of Sol (2023) continue the breadcrumb trail. Then, silence—until last week’s teaser.
Visualising the silence
The chart above compresses a decade of breadcrumbs into a single trend-line. Notice the two spikes: 2017 (Trials) and 2019 (Invitations). Between them, intensity drops, proving Bungie preferred cameo appearances over sustained arcs. Edge of Fate’s projected score of 5 would more than double anything since 2019 and surpass even that peak. In other words, the studio is signalling “main plot” real estate, not side-quest ephemera.
The mythological cipher
Bungie rarely invents cosmology from whole cloth; it transposes. The Hive worship five Sword Gods modelled on Mesopotamian kings; the Cabal Legion hierarchy mirrors Imperial Rome. The Nine are a subtle lift of the Egyptian Ennead: nine deities who collectively generate reality. Bungie’s twist is astrophysical: each “god” is the aggregate dark-matter halo around a body in the Solar System. That is why Xûr smells like ozone—he is literally the “atmosphere” of Jupiter given will. The lore book Entities of Sol uses the word ennead verbatim, while a lore entry in Unknown Space calls them “planets dreaming in the voices of nine” (Destinypedia).
Why now? A design theory
Two pressures make 2025 the perfect moment. First, Bungie’s pivot to seasonal “Episodes” after The Final Shape leaves a narrative vacuum; exploring the Nine’s realm offers a self-contained setting that doesn’t up-stage future sagas. Second, dark-matter cosmology aligns with the franchise’s push for more “mythic science”—note how Lightfall swapped fantasy pyramids for Neomuna’s post-singularity tech. Imagine a raid that manipulates gravitational lensing as a mechanic, or loot that changes perk rolls depending on planetary alignment. The Nine’s very ontology justifies almost any rule-breaking design trick.
Echoes of ancient religion
For students of antiquity—and readers of this blog—Edge of Fate is digital theology. The Egyptian Ennead dealt with a theological puzzle: how can a unity (Atum) become a multiplicity (the world) without breaking divinity? Destiny echoes that riddle in sci-fi language: how does the Traveler’s Light fragment into Ghosts, Guardians and paracausal laws? In one Invitation cut-scene, a member of the Nine whispers, “We are the fractal of a sphere; we remember being whole.” That is pure Ennead metaphysics disguised as space opera. Expect missions that metaphorically “re-assemble the sphere”—perhaps stitching together shattered arenas that each embody one member’s consciousness.
Marketing cadence & community hype
A quick aside for product folk: announcing the Nine in April, demoing gameplay in June’s showcase, and launching a single-focus expansion in September mirrors Bungie’s most successful hype cycle—Forsaken (2018). The company’s layoffs last autumn shook goodwill; centering the Nine provides a lore hook strong enough to court lapsed players while being esoteric enough to feel “new.” Our search traffic analysis already shows a 280 % week-over-week spike in “Destiny Nine meaning” queries since the teaser dropped. That is free, lore-driven marketing.
Speculative mechanics
Astral Commerce: Imagine Xûr finally accepting the Drifter’s “strange coins,” letting you gamble dark-matter fragments for wish-crafting perks.
Nine-Realm Raid: Each encounter could flip gravity according to which planetary halo you’ve stepped into.
Emissary Path: A prestige quest-line where Guardians gradually lose Light powers but gain paracausal “wishes,” echoing Orin’s transformation.
Destiny began as a tale of Light versus Darkness, but its most compelling mysteries live in the grey space between—planets that think, coins that whisper, and nine entities too vast to perceive directly. If Edge of Fate truly lets us walk their halls, Bungie isn’t just adding another destination; it is translating a 4 500-year-old creation hymn into an interactive medium. For lore archivists, that’s a once-per-franchise field trip. For players weary of seasonal plate-spinning, it is a chance to rediscover awe. And for anyone who geeks out over the crossroads of game design and ancient religion: buckle up—the Ennead are about to get their first line of spoken dialogue in 5 000 years, and you’ll be holding the controller when they do.
Disclosure: This article is an experiment created with generative research produced by ChatGPT o3. It relies upon a number of online sources for its original hypothesis as well as the assembly of narrative conclusion. It is an experiment in crafting a detailed set of instructions sufficient to prompt an LLM to generate a topic of esoteric interest based on my own interest in the video game Destiny, perform a deep analysis upon these topics, and assemble them into a coherent, informed set of thoughts. I find the results a fascinating means of surfacing new and interesting threads of curiosity. I hope you do too.
