Traveler (Destiny)

The Traveler is a mysterious, massive sentient planet-like sphere that travels to Earth to aid the progression of advanced technology and a Utopian society for mankind.

History
If we assume that the Darkness speaks truly, then here is the origin of the Traveler. Before time, there was a field of possibility that prefigured existence. In it, the Gardener and the Winnower played a game with the "flowers" that grew in the field. They existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. The game of flowers resembles John Conway's game of life in the same way that a a seed resembles the star that fed the flower and all the life that made it. In their game, the gardener and the winnower discovered shapes of possibility. They foresaw bodies and civilizations, minds and cognitions, qualia and suffering. They learned the rules that governed which patterns would flourish in the game, and which would dwindle. They learned those rules, because they were those rules.

The Gardener became displeased at the outcomes of the game, as one single pattern seemed to overwhelm all others and "win" the game, even though not even they could know whether a pattern in the flowers would cycle forever or someday halt. Seeking more interesting patterns, the Gardener proposed a change to the rules of the game, to reward those who make space for new complexity. The Winnower disagreed, proposing that the new rule will only create false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them, and when they pop they would blight the whole garden. According to the Winnower, whatever exists because it must exist and because it permits no other way of existence has the absolute claim to existence. This would become known as the Sword Logic. But the Gardener made itself into a law in the game, the growth and preservation of complexity. In retaliation, the Winnower used the trowel in their hand as the first knife and fought the Gardener in the garden, creating the first knife, and bringing ruin to the garden. The destruction of the flowers, in the perturbation of the field that was the garden before the first tick of time and the first point of space, were the detonations that made the universes. The wrestling of the two pushed things out of the garden, namely, the Ahamkara which were worms in the garden, and the Vex, the dominating pattern of the flower game, into the primordial space of the new universes.

And so, the Gardener becomes the Traveler, and the Winnower becomes the Darkness, and the two battle each other through the universes, presumably. In our universe, the furthest back we know of the Traveler's doings comes from the Book of Sorrow, the history of the Hive (Destiny). The Traveler uplifted a sentient race known as the Ammonites on the 52 moons of the Hive homeworld, Fundament. Meanwhile, the Hive were left to their own devices on Fundament, while the forthcoming alignment of the moons would cause the ocean to destroy their entire civilization. In desperation, three survivors of a Hive dynasty commandeer an ancient abandoned spaceship and dive deep into the abyss of their ocean. There, a leviathan, a follower of the Traveler, urges them to turn back, but they continue. They come upon five Ahamkara, known as the Worm Gods, that followed the Sword Logic of the Darkness and could directly commune with it. Empowering the three survivors, led by Oryx, with the paracausal powers of the Darkness and the Sword Logic, the Hive quickly took control of Fundament, and began making war on the Ammonites, in misguided vengeance against the Traveler for the God-Wave caused by the moons that could have destroyed their civilization, which the Worm-Gods blamed on the Traveler.

The Traveler fled after the Ammonites were finally overcome, going to several different species and uplifting them in defense of itself and its ideology. While it could be assumed that all of the civilizations that the Hive destroyed in their crusade against the Traveler, only two are explicitly stated: The Harmony, whose position around a black hole and the technology to weaponize it were given by the Traveler, and the Eliksni, who seem to be uplifted similarly to how Humanity would later be. However, the Traveler fled each civilization uplifted when beset by the Hive or the forces of the Darkness.

The Traveler came to our solar system in the not-to-distant future and terraformed moons and planets such as Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, etc. Because of this, it wasn't long before it caught the attention of mankind, who sent a team of astronauts to the next planet The Traveler was going to visit: Mars. Upon the arriving to Mars, the astronauts came across The Traveler in the middle of terraforming the planet by creating rain. As The Traveler came to Earth, it uplifted mankind by creating advanced technology for the humans and helped them achieve space travel. All of which led Earth into a Utopian era called the Golden Age. However, it was discovered that The Traveler had various enemies such as the Vex, Hive, Cabal, and the Eliksni in an alliance known under the alias: The Darkness. Upon discovering The Traveler's location, The Darkness went from planet to planet in the solar system killing the human inhabitants and having themselves thrive on the planets.

This massacre from the Darkness and fall of humanity's societal growth is known as an event called The Collapse. The Darkness then set it's sights on Earth and destroyed many cities and began to populate the Earth, killing whatever human crossed their path. In an attempt to save what's left of humanity, The Traveler began to move under mankind's last remaining city and have it protected by a powerful energy resonating from The Traveler called Light (not to be confused with literal light and is supposedly the energy that helped humanity reach the Golden Age). The Traveler then used what Light it had left to create tiny flying robots called Ghosts before The Traveler became dormant. The Ghosts then searched long dead soldiers and warriors on planet Earth and resurrected them with Light, turning them into Guardians who use the Light given to them by the Ghosts to fight the Darkness and save humanity and The Traveler.