Chapter One:
The Traveler is a murderer. Whatever it touched that is not fit for its needs, it destroys. The whole of the Eliksni homeworld was destroyed by this cold blooded, destructive monster. The Eliksni Houses, allied with the Cabal Empire, chased this planet-sized destroyer with all of their forces, until they came upon something disturbingly interesting. It had stopped. The Traveler had stopped at the third planet of a habitable star, in a system across the galaxy from any other world with intelligent life. This world, the only blue and living world in the system, was the home to humanity. We had seen humans before because of their technological golden age, even traded and helped them in their wars; we were their friends, the Eliksni and Cabal. But, when The Traveler arrived, it brainwashed their leaders into thinking the Traveler was helping them, that it and not humans themselves, had begun the Golden Age. It took over the minds of their greatest people, people we knew, and changed them. They trained their soldiers to fight us, to fight the people who went against The Traveler's rule.
Whole colonies of Eliksni citizens on the human moon, Luna, and their fourth planet, Mars, were destroyed by the same people that had helped us colonize them. Back on the second homeworld of the Eliksni, Sekturus, our Master Kell understood why his people were killed, and he does not blame the humans for these atrocities.
We damaged The Traveler with all we could when we arrived at the human homeworld with the Eliksni and Cabal armadas, and we weakened it beyond return. But, in response, The Traveler created the one thing that would beat our forces back and separate them from each other, Guardians. The Eliksni Houses sent to the humans, the Kings, Devils, Wolves, and Winter, stayed where they were, refusing to back down from the fight against The Traveler. Within the next century, the majority of the Eliksni Houses' forces stationed in the human Solar System were destroyed, and the Houses struggled to keep the upper hand on the humans. No Eliksni soldier would ever show mercy to a Guardian, be it a Dreg or Vandal.
For the humans that weren't Guardians, however, we sympathized. They were not the ones brainwashed, and they cowered in fear and confusion at the Eliksni and Cabal. They did not know why we were attacking their people, and vice versa. They did not understand the purpose of the arrival of The Traveler and the war it brought with it, and if they tried to fight against the war, the Guardians would enforce the corrupted leaders' rule without thought. Their people did their jobs in society constantly with the fear that they would be attacked by their 'enemies.' They were constantly told that the Eliksni and the Cabal were the enemy, and that we would destroy them all, and they - rather unfortunately - embraced that as the truth.
In the human year of 2765, five centuries after the Great War and forty-five years after the birth of the Speaker, the Eliksni House of Wolves revolted against the Awoken, a subspecies of humanity birthed from the remains of humans escaping Earth, and the dark magic of the approaching Hive. The Awoken had sided with no one, but showed mercy to the Eliksni, particularly the Wolves. But when the House Wolves attacked, it provoked the Guardian Forces to attack relentlessly on the other Eliksni Houses. Within the next year, the House of Winter on Luna had been reduced to a mere eight hundred warriors, and the Kings almost completely extinguished by a lone Guardian seen as a hero by humanity and as a demon by the Eliksni and Cabal.
The Cabal had seen the same casualties as the Eliksni, and with the loss of the Broken Legion during the attack on the Awoken, their losses were greater. The Blind Legion, the Dust Giants, the Sand Eaters, the Ice Reapers, the Skyburners, and the Siege Dancer detachments of the Cabal Empire suffered greatly on Mars, even at the military strongholds of Rubicon and Delphi, and at their naval base at Phobos. They had fought bravely alongside the Eliksni Houses, and had set up great bases along the fourth planet of the human system to fend off the Guardians.
Amidst the constant, complicated war between humans and the Eliksni-Cabal Coalescence, the Hive had taken Luna, building tunnels under the gray soil and infusing the crust with its dark magic. But, the same Guardian who had destroyed the Eliksni Houses also killed the Hive Prince, Crota, putting the Hive in disarray and calling a greater threat to not just the Solar System, but the galaxy. Oryx, The Taken King, has arrived, and with him, war.
