Project V17/Powers/Shardless/Destiny Upgrades

Young Wolf (Destiny)

Cost: 25 SP

Required: Lightbearer (Destiny)

Like the legendary Iron Lords, you are a peerless warrior and a master of the Light. In terms of raw statistics, you are a fifth sigma Lightbearer—ranking in the 99th percentile in terms of precision, restraint, and raw power. Compared to your fellow Guardians, your Light is far more powerful and flexible—benefiting from your superior self-understanding, clarity of purpose, and internalized phenomenologies and ontologies. Unlike most Lightbearers, you are not merely resistant to the whims of fate and paradox, but completely immune to such threats. Your Light fiercely resists being suppressed or drained and grants you complete freedom from fate.

Having mastered all of the skills necessary to be a Titan, Hunter, and Warlock—along with all of the relevant subclasses—you have reached the pinnacle of what it means to be a Lightbearer. As your ability to wield the Light grows, you will naturally uncover new optima within the space of possible techniques: allowing you to alter your powers as a Lightbearer to better suit you and even invent entirely new ways of wielding the Light. With time, you will be able to push past the artificial limitations of things like ‘subclasses’ and wield the Light in ways that your peers can only dream of. In a direct confrontation, you are able to match the feats of the greatest Lightbearers in history and do battle with gods. Faced with seemingly insurmountable limits, your Light allows you to reach impossible outcomes that no amount of brute force could achieve.

Gardener (Destiny)

Cost: 60 SP

Required: Young Wolf (Destiny)

You are not merely a Lightbearer, but are instead a physical embodiment of the Light itself. You no longer require a Ghost to fuel your powers and can instead generate Light in vast quantities without limit. Should you wish, you may take on the form of a moon-sized sphere of neutronium and electroweak matter that is nigh indestructible.

Like the Traveler, the paracausal power that flows from you is one of pure potential that, if unrestrained, can cause pearlescent flora to bloom in its wake. Using this power, you can reach into alternate timelines to draw forth knowledge or material, create almost anything you can imagine out of matter or Light, and influence the physical world to augment the living or resurrect the long dead. Should you wish it, you can terraform whole planets with the Light—turning toxic, lifeless balls of rock into flourishing garden worlds. You could even use this power to create singularities containing their own fully formed universes within.

As a paracausal entity, you are utterly impossible to simulate, and your existence itself is protected by the Light. No act of temporal manipulation will ever be able to affect you, and no compulsion of fate will ever limit you. Even ontological weapons cannot negate your existence which is entirely self-sustained by the Light. Unlike lesser wielders of the Light, your power can never be truly taken from you, for the very act of taking itself is antithetical to the power that you now represent. On the other hand, by temporarily sacrificing a part of your power, you can create Ghosts to seek out worthy individuals according to your criteria to become Lightbearers.

King Morph (Destiny)

Cost: 10 SP

Required: Worm Larva (Destiny)

As the being known as Aurash once did long ago, you have taken on the unique Hive King Morph. Whether or not you are actually descended from the line of the Osmium King, you may now appear as the undisputed ruler of the Hive. Standing at over 20 feet tall, you tower over ordinary Hive creatures and have the strength and endurance to match. Having mastered both the physical and the arcane elements of Hive warfare, you are an unmatched warrior and warlord. With two enormous batlike wings, you can soar above your foes, while your mastery of Hive magic is second to none.

Worm God (Destiny)

Cost: 20 SP

Required: Worm Larva (Destiny)

Required: Anthem Anatheme (Destiny)

Required: Sword Logic (Destiny)

Whether you are a sibling to the five spawn of Xita or the descendent of some other great worm from Fundament’s deep seas, you are now a Worm God. Your body takes the form of an immense chitinous worm strong enough to crush houses and sweep away armies. In your flesh grows an endless supply of larval worms which you may offer to others in the form of a bargain. By taking these larvae into themselves, your subjects will become dependent on you—tithing a portion of the destruction they cause as power to you in exchange for immortality, the ability to shape their own flesh, and the power to call upon the Darkness through their pact with you.

As a Worm God, your affinity for the Darkness grants you complete mastery over every aspect of Hive sorcery. Through the Sword Logic, you may continue to grow limitlessly—fed through the Anthem Anatheme by the endless death-tithe provided by your subjects. Though it may take eons, you will eventually reach such size and power that you could swallow entire nations.

Taken King (Destiny)

Cost: 30 SP (King Morph (Destiny))

Cost: 25 SP (King Morph (Destiny))

Required: Taken (Destiny)

Required: Sword Logic (Destiny)

Like Auryx the Navigator, you have communed with the Darkness and been given the power to Take. Commanding a sinister black and white flame, you may stretch out your hand to drag any living thing into a rift where it will be remade by the Darkness. When your target reemerges, it will do so as one of your Taken—an utterly subservient monstrosity whose body and mind have had all weakness carved away. You are also able to create Blight: a shadowy liquid or gas that contaminates its surroundings and acts as a transmitter of sorts.

You are able to create as many Taken as you want—transforming anything and anyone into your loyal slaves. Once remade, your Taken no longer require food, water, rest, or any other biological needs. Furthermore, each entity you Take gains a single ability designed to compensate for some weakness it had in life. Normally, Taken entities lose their independence and free will, but sufficiently strong individuals may retain part of their consciousness. You may choose to do this intentionally in order to create servants that retain their intellect while still remaining loyal to you.

The power to take is an ontopathogenic weapon which infects the very existence of its victims. As such, only extremely powerful paracausal entities can resist being taken, with Lightbearers being one common example.

Witness (Destiny)

Cost: 40 SP

Required: Taken King (Destiny)

Required: Umbral Core (Destiny)

The binding potential of the Darkness has transformed you into a cosmic entity of immense power. So great is your mastery of the Darkness that you may now command it on a truly universal scale—reaching across the vast distances of space with ease in order to influence the fate of entire races. It would not be an exaggeration to call you a god, for even godlike entities would struggle to defeat you in a confrontation.

Physically, you appear as the amalgamation of countless individual entities, with each movement you make being shadowed by illusory copies of yourself. Your mind is similarly inhuman, and yet fundamentally you still comprehend the individual suffering of all things. You know pain. Your purpose is its end. Where others might break when confronted with suffering or anguish, your resolve is only strengthened by it.

The Darkness derives its strength from purpose and meaning. Your purpose is clear: the Final Shape. But only you can determine what this truly means, for there are as many interpretations of this goal as there are those who pursue it.

Axis Mind (Destiny)

Cost: 45 SP

Required: Vex (Destiny)

Rather than being merely a member of the Vex Collective, you are now one of its Axis Minds. Your mental abilities have increased by an order of magnitude—improving the quality and quantity of your simulations and making you far more dangerous in combat. Optionally, you may choose to take the form of a larger, enhanced version of a standard Vex unit.

To go along with your new powers, you now have access to your own copy of the Nexus. While this nascent version of the Vex Network is largely empty, it does come with a token garrison of Vex units to serve as an initial force for you to command. Besides serving as a highly protected base of operations, this trans-dimensional, trans-temporal virtual environment allows you to access alternate timelines and manipulate your own subjective past in limited ways.

While it will take time to implement, you now have access to the most advanced forms of Vex technology such as the ontological weaponry pioneered within the Vault of Glass and the planet-sized simulation engines that power the Infinite Forest.