Ok let me break it down, so many people question the lack of story, but there is so much story! they can't force feed the answers as in life! and any story around minor events leaves us saddened that we didn't get more of the big picture! It's pretty genius leaving all this open to interpretation, anything Bungie writes eliminates more possibilities than it creates The Traveler is 'God' , the darkness is 'not god'. light is the favor of 'god-traveler', symbolic of not being 'in the dark(ness)' Tie in all the religious themes you can, particularly the struggle between 'god - purity - cleanness - goodness' and 'not god - darkness - greed-absence of light/god' you can fit in the timeline how you want, but WE are all 'versions' of beings created to worship 'god-traveler'. Vex - the machine, programmable, logic version. Created by god-traveler to worship the big ball way back, only god-traveler knows its not real as no free will, abandons project, leaves vex to spin up into their current selves with shoddy worship and civilization building code and the instense internal, but not explainable need for worship. When they were abandoned they worshipped what was left, no light, aka darkness. over much man time it consumed them wholly. Hive - take 2, the organic version, with all the trimmings, built to worship god-traveler, not machine based, left to grow of its own accord, has no, or crazy structure, god-traveler is not pleased, abandons project, hive grow like kudzu, but damm some thing in them makes them just want the light. Fallen - first combo versions, lets call them humans 1.0, except like adam and eve they were greedy! damm scavengers put themselves up in front of god traveler, created kingdoms (houses), wanted more and more. god-traveler very frustrated, abandons project, Fallen (oh my the symbolism) spiral further out of control, houses fight, they fight, everyone fights while trying to reclaim the god-traveler-light. Humans (2.0) - us, the peeps, the chosen, Gods people - made out of the best of machines, organic, and our predecessors. WE are the best, we are perfect, we rulez! Ahhhh the golden age, expansion, exploration, wonderment! But alas, as is the story told a 1000 times in our histories, we also drift, but God traveler is not ready to start over again (or is he?). WAR, did we cause it by fighting to KEEP the traveler? did they causing by trying to take the traveler? was the traveler leaving at all? or did it, as in all the stories, decide we worth saving and send his only son, the bight white ball to save us? so many questions, no answers, HMMM sort of like religion? Am I a christian or a buddist? all i know is darkness is in us, and the traveler knows it. What about the EXO and the Awoken? Well, we are living in the current generation, meaning the most relevant history to us is happening right now, millenia ago were there other vex? Purple vex? Were they the only version? did variations occur during their history and prehistory that are lost through the generations? did the vex timeline end in a biblical event like a flood, only to have a few survive and eventually develop time travel and come all the way forward to chase light? Awoken are a hybrid fallen/human, cabal are a hybrid human, they are other variants of our current generation, imagine if humanity had start in several locations solar systems apart? more than one 'test' of the new supplicant race. tl;dr Vex are HAL, Fallen are Gollum, Hive are Xenomorphs and we all trying to win gods love.