This is is a bit of a long-winded post but feedback, new ideas, and further proofs/disproof are all GREATLY appreciated. I've been piecing this together for a while. A question I never asked myself but wish I had: why are all of the guardians in the tower from before the golden age? Every character created, everyone you see had the same start to the game; you know nothing of the Traveler, the Golden Age, Tower, or any of the alien races present. The game puts so much emphasis on the Golden Age knowledge lost and trying to recover it... why not simply chose a guardian to revive that lived through it? Lets go over some facts to start answering that question. 1: The Fallen held the Traveler before Earth, referred to it as "The Great Machine." It brought about their own Golden Age, then left them and ripped away their memories of the past civilization they had built, leading them to pursue it here in desperation. (see collections of Variks dialouge in the Reef, the Variks grimoire card, Ghost Fragment cards from Skolas' pov) 2: The Hive were given dark worms of some kind by the traveler long ago which granted them some form of immortality/longevity, but the Traveler sought to wipe them out, forcing them to fuse with the worms to survive, mutating them into the monsters we see in the game, but leaving them without their previous powers. The hive now pursue the traveler relentlessly. (see the calcified fragment cards, book of sorrow) 3: The Vex manipulate the timeline to merge different possible pasts and presents to their advantage, effectively drawing surviving versions of lost Minds and hordes through time and spreading them across multiple timelines. (The Restorative Mind strike, various in-game dialogue) 4: The Vex seek to turn every world into a machine world, like mercury. These next three are biggies, and pretty frequently overlooked, but also very indisputable thanks to the grimoire. 5:The Vex have an ancient presence in our solar system, as in pre-traveler. (See ghost fragments 1-4 cards) 6: The traveler gave us ghosts before the collapse. The grimoire card for the Last Word is a long, winding story about violent and personal exchanges between a few named guardians. The thing is, it is set DISTINCTLY pre-Tower era, as it takes place on the road between various named, non-tower cities. There is little to prove that the individuals in the stories are indeed guardians save for the fact that there is a single passage describing a character's Ghost floating about and keeping watch, validating a number of other passages and nonchalantly refer to "Guardians" as an accepted fact of life. WHAT THIS MEANS is twofold, and very important: firstly, Ghosts (our ability to revive ourselves from death) existed before the Traveler moved to the tower, meaning they were part of the Golden Age tech that propelled humanity forward so much. from this, we also know that the Speaker has lied to us when he tells us that the traveler created ghosts with its dying breath right before going dormant. Why? i know. but first... 7: The Traveler was trying to leave earth and rasputin stopped it somehow. After the other warminds fell, Rasputins morality objectives changed, it recognized that the traveler was trying to leave earth, and stopped it to try and prevent a "civilization kill event." (PLEASE see grimoire cards Ghost Fragments, Rasputin 3, 5) and finally... 8: The Vex were active in our system before the collapse, separate from their potentially dormant presence before even the traveler. see grimoire cards Vex, Ghost Fragments 1-5. All of this is certain. now for the fun part: Inferring! The traveler gave some great power to the hive, then took away for some reason, causing a collapse of their home system and way of life. The same thing happened to the Fallen. Thus we can assume that a similar cycle was set to repeat on earth; Ghosts extend life indefinably and human technology booms as the Traveler stimulates Earth, until some unsure point at which the Traveler will abandon us and take the powers it granted us away... according to Rasputin, it already happened. Earth was falling to the Fallen and Rasputin trapped the Traveler here (somehow, plausibly maiming in whatever way caused it to go dormant in the tower) to ensure our (and his) survival. But if Earth's path follows the patterns of the Traveler's Past, the Traveler should be responsible for this collapse, right? well, we know there were Golden Age guardians. if these guardians had their ghosts taken back by the traveler as it prepared to leave, much would be lost...including all of these guardians, to time, forever. More importantly, the Earth would have been defenseless against the annihilating waves of enemies (im pretty sure "the darkness" is just the Speaker's propoganda blanket term for "scary bad guys that you need to kill without questioning"). We stand against them now! We have even gone so far as to push back and kill major strategic entities, borderline gods with the power of Guardians and Ghosts. If we had this technology once and the Traveler never undermined this, there would have been no collapse. If Ghosts and Guardians were present in the Golden Age, the Traveler must have taken them away, thus initiating the Collapse. The Traveler ended our Golden Age, intentionally, and brought us to our knees. But why are there Ghosts and Guardians now? to answer this, lets look further into the Vex presence in our system that predates the Golden Age, and the implications of this. The vex are capable of teleportation, time travel, timeline manipulation, and complex reality simulations. (mission dialouge, Vex ghost fragment card 2) If they were present before the traveler, why not overrun our solar system immediately? why not terraform everything before the Traveler has the chance to build us up, and make our system nothing but machine-worlds without human resistance? Im going to make a statement to answer this question and begin to fill in holes, and justify it later: THE TRAVELER IS A VEX BEING. Boosting up undeveloped and under-evolved worlds to see what technology they can create or innovations they can reach before wiping them out again is a form of collateral-damage-minimization for the Vex, hyper-intelligent beings who perceive all timelines and thus can make no true progress as a species alone, before they wipe entire worlds out. Now, humanity has bloomed and the Traveler has learned what it wants / done what it needs (The specific point it was trying to reach is till unclear.) It pulls out the Ghosts and prepares to abandon Earth and we start to succumb to The Fallen. Rasputin stops it somehow, but all the old guardians have died by now, so before it shuts down, it selects new dead human souls for guardians, makes them ghosts, and sends them out to seek its new defenders while it sleeps. Funny thing thought... all these newborn guardians have been dead since before any of this happened. All of them. Meaning none of them remember... anything. The Golden Age, with ghosts and guardians, the Traveler-initiated collapse that killed everybody. They are the only humans that ever lived that could still justify fighting for the Traveler: those who have no idea at all what the hell is going on. What caused the collapse? how long have we been holding out in the tower? And for the love of god, why wont Rasputin communicate and work with anyone in cahoots with the Traveler? (I think you know why.) hilariously, the seeming lack of explanation for ANYTHING this game may not be entirely accidental or lazy. Finally, lets take a look at all of the evidence that the Traveler is Vex. 1: The Vex have mastered some kind of revival technique using timeline manipulation (see the Restorative Mind strike). This seems terribly closely tied to the ability that the Traveler gave guardians. Maybe ghosts are using this same power to revive us, pulling living versions from alternate timelines. Both the Hive and the Fallen have souls and known methods for reviving them that are tedious, costly, and lengthy (Crota and the Archon Preist of year 1). Prehaps we were not the first race to be given this specific power as a form of civilization boosting and then see it taken away. 2: The Traveler kind of IS the speaker, who advises and really oversees the factions, vanguard, and crucible. The Traveler runs tower. NOBODY in tower advises you to bring the war to the Vex, a mere single planet away, but have all kinds of bloodlust for fallen and hive, two races CLEARLY less potentially dangerous than the borderline-omnipotent Vex-mind. These quests are spurred by the Stranger alone, and follow-up black garden quests are guided by Eris. It seems idiotic that the Tower officials do not know about the Vex on venus and Mars, signaling two possibilities: -TowerN'co know the Vex are not attacking humanity -TowerN'co want the Vex to reach The City, and the Traveler. 3: The Vex were in our system pre-collapse. The vex also see past, present, and future at once through complex simulations so they knowingly allowed the Traveler to advance humanity to exactly the point that it did, not lifting a finger to stop it. This indicates they had something to gain from this whole rise-and-fall process. TL;DR: The Traveler is a vex catalyst used to extract potential unimaginable technologies from races before their extermination to create the all-vex-all-planets-all-timelines utopia that they seek. The Traveler caused Earth's collaspe and the death of nearly everyone, but the Vex failed to predict Rasputin maiming and trapping the Traveler on Earth, which forced it to create a proxy army of Guardians who remember nothing of it's treachery until the Vex can make their way to Earth and revive it (and destroy us.) "Does the world stand as it does because of the Vex?" -Eris Morn, The Restorative Mind.