I always thought the most interesting thing about Destiny as an IP was the attempt to recover a Manichean narrative of good and evil from a science fictional premise. Is it possible to define ‘good’ and ‘evil’ without an objective morality, using only the laws of reality around us? Could Destiny say something about the difference between right and wrong actions in real life? Wouldn’t that be something worth spending ten years and a gazillion dollars to say?
Throw that away and you’re just another story about people with special powers.
— Seth Dickinson, October 2024 (Reddit)
Destiny started out as a story about good and bad, about humanity defending itself against evil aliens in a mysterious setting mixing fantasy and sci-fi. But nowhere in pre-production did anyone write down anything about a Witness, a Final Shape, or the Sword Logic. It’s not even clear on whether Light and Darkness were concepts until the reboot and crunch that lead to the shipped Destiny 1 story. Destiny’s story we know today is, essentially, a universe built on top of a salvage job.
This page explores some of the core concepts of the Destiny we know today - the “Light and Darkness Saga,” as it’s been retroactively referred to by marketing materials - and their origins. It focuses mostly on the writings of Seth Dickinson, who conveniently not only wrote a lot of the material that defined Destiny’s universe, but also has written extensively after the fact about how, when, and why these concepts came about.
The origins of The Light and The Darkness
It’s hard to say where exactly Light and The Darkness came from. I can’t find any references to Light or Darkness from Destiny’s 2013 public materials.
It’s possible that they came from Joe Staten’s original Destiny mythos, developed along with the early pre-production team on Destiny. It’s always been very hard to determine what aspects of Destiny lore were set down before Staten was fired in Summer 2013. We famously know what wasn’t kept from Staten’s original Destiny 1 campaign, but it’s less clear on what was.
While Staten’s been quiet on what his original story entailed, it’s pretty clear that while he helped steer the tone of the universe, he didn’t really create the “mythos” beyond the idea of a Traveler, a Golden Age, a mysterious collapse, and a Last City to defend. He certainly helped develop the alien races and much of the iconography that defines Destiny today, but many of the things we take for granted about the Destiny universe were not designed by him.
Neither sword logic nor ‘Rasputin shot the traveler’ nor Guardians coming back from the dead nor any version of ‘the Traveler is evil’ came from Staten’s work. e: and I don’t think Oryx existed at all
— Seth Dickinson, September 2018 (Reddit)
Notably, the famous E3 2013 trailer did contain this line:
Your mission is vital, Guardian. If you succeed you will become legend. If you fail, this city will fall and the last light of civilization will go out.
But it’s hard to say whether this was capital-L Light, or just, y’know, “the last light of civilization.”
By Game Informer’s January 2014 issue, we do see capital-D Darkness, which as far as as I can tell is the first public appearance of the word:
Generations ago, the Traveler came to the solar system and prepared the way for humanity’s expansion into the stars. It reshaped planets and moons, and taught us new technologies and mystical powers that led to a golden age. Then the Traveler’s ancient enemy returned. The mysterious Darkness swept through the system, devastating civilization and leading to the Collapse.
And:
While humanity huddles behind the safety of its city, the solar system is overrun by a multitude of alien species, each with its own goals and abilities, but all linked to the force of Darkness that threatens to wipe out our species.
My theory, which you can take or leave: I think the “Iron Bar” team (which included Jason Jones, art director Chris Barrett, and design lead Luke Smith) came up with the phrase, looking to try to unify the disparate races under a single term.
Maybe the long-term plan had been to eventually introduce a unifying controlling force - the Pyramid ships were being actively teased as early as the March 2013 GDC talk, literally with the phrase “we can’t talk about these guys yet,” so it was clear there were always plans to reveal a bigger bad. Maybe at that point we would have gotten “Darkness” in its original intention. Hard to say.
As for capital-L Light, that comes up here too (though technically Game Informer didn’t yet know it would be capitalized under Destiny’s style guide):
“The [subclass] is the thing that carries all your abilities,” Green explains. “It allows you to take the Traveler’s light and turn it into effects in the world.”
At minimum, we know by the time the reboot story was taking shape, we had vague notions of a “force of Darkness” that was associated with our enemies, and a force of “Light” that came from the Traveler. How did these get shaped into what we know today?
The Sword Logic & Seth Dickinson’s development of The Darkness
I mean my thoughts about the Darkness aren’t a secret, I defined it pretty openly in the D1 grimoire and I’ve kept to the same concept since. It’s an idea that fascinates me because it’s real, right? It exists in our universe, it dominates everything we do. All the good we want to achieve, everything we want to make better about the world, is constrained by the fact that systems first have to keep existing and resist their competitors before they can actually, like, do good stuff. It’s awful. It’s tyrannical. It weighed on me a lot as a depressed burnout locked in a room at Bungie banging away at OneNote. “Is creation, whether it’s a video game studio or a nation or a species or whatever, ultimately ruled by those who put all their energy into Winning The Game, and none at all into Being Decent or Having Purpose?” What’s the point of writing a great game if no one plays it? Does it matter if you write a bad game if everyone plays it? Is there really any meaning to anything that can exist beyond the awful metric of ‘first, promote your own existence’?
— Seth Dickinson, March 2023 (Something Awful)
Seth Dickinson started in March 2014, months after the story was rebooted and Joseph Staten was fired, and only months before Destiny originally shipped. Importantly, Dickinson was brought on as one of many writers who contributed to the Grimoire Cards in Destiny 1. It is absolutely a mistake to assume that Dickinson was in any way the “primary author” of Destiny or the Grimoire, as he’s repeatedly made clear in comments.
Dickinson left Bungie just before Destiny 1 shipped, but continued to work with them as a freelancer for years. However, he was in no way a “steward” of the lore:
I was not a full time Bungie employee and I had no voice in the creative process. […] Bungie would hire me once or twice a year. I didn’t get to talk to the narrative team or participate in any kind of planning or review, and often people on the narrative would come and go without me knowing. […] I never knew if anyone at Bungie outside the people editing me read the stuff I wrote.
— Seth Dickinson, February 2025 (Reddit)
But he also - seemingly unintentionally - did come up with many of the concepts Bungie would run with in defining the years of Destiny to come.
The first piece of writing to deal with what we now know as the Sword Logic is a Ghost Fragment from vanilla Destiny 1, attributed to everyone’s favorite ball of light, Toland, the Shattered:
Existence is a game that everything plays, and some strategies are winners: the ability to exist, to shape existence, to remake it so that your descendants - molecules or stars or people or ideas - will flourish, and others will find no ground to grow.
[…]
Everything is becoming more ruthless and in the end only the most ruthless will remain (LOOK UP AT THE SKY) and they will hunt the territories of the night and extinguish the first glint of competition before it can even understand what it faces or why it has transgressed.
[…]
This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears.
But I do not think those spears will hold against the queen of the country of armies. And that is all that will matter in the end.
This is where we first get the idea that runs throughout Dickinson’s work in defining the Darkness: the Darkness is the force of existing through defeating everything around you. And it goes along quite well with our four core enemy races: the Cabal’s dreams of total empire, the Hive’s desire to feed their worms through destruction, the Fallen’s own internal power struggles between their various houses, and the Vex’s work to convert the universe to their own desired order.
“The logic of the sword” is first named in the Grimoire card for the Ascendant Sword in The Dark Below, in a piece presumably narrated again by Toland:
Understand that this nightmare logic underpins His nightmare world, and you will see why the ascendant blade has so much power there. Whenever in our passage we find ourselves in need of power—remember that the greatest authority here is a blade made keen by eons of use.
This is the world the Hive craves: a universe creased by the edge of the sharpest sword.
From what I can tell, the Sword Logic is not quite the same as the concept of Darkness. Think of it as putting Darkness into effect: Darkness says “those who destroy their competitors have the right to exist,” and the Sword Logic says “by defeating my enemies, I prove my right to exist,” plus some paracausal magic on top that makes it self-reinforcing.