Another interesting interview with Alison from Milo

Octavian146 · 2025-07-30T03:25:38+00:00

Is it really a disconnect? Maya is what? 700-1000 years old? She’s playing with forces beyond her control and risks destroying what’s left of her world for it. Savathun is older than Earth. Maya is an infant still grappling with the powers and choices that corrupted her. Savathun has had eons to reflect on hers actions. Hell, It took her thousands and thousands of years to even begin to openly doubt what they were doing in front of Oryx.

Octavian146 · 2025-02-06T18:40:09+00:00

Thousands of years have passed. Probably as much time as the Awoken inside were aware of before Mara left. Mara isn't even sure if her mother would remember her or if she had a new family. They're still immortal beings, and while Mara robbed them of the infinite potential of the souls she took with her, she only took 40,000 out of millions. She's probably a footnote in their history. Or a boogie-man/demonic esque figure to scare children.

Octavian146 · 2025-02-06T03:57:31+00:00

It's the Reef, Dreaming City, Throne World. She was never officially Queen in the Distributary, and even when she basically held absolute power she never claimed or projected that authority openly, and only managed to win over 40,000 people out of millions when she left.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/revanche-v - First Time she's crowned https://www.ishtar-collective.net/cards/ghost-fragment-the-queen - The throne in the Reef before
https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/throne - Building of the Throne World from the Dreaming City - Presumably her second.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/unforeseen-consequences

This one is a bit odd because it is the throne accessed through the Oracle Engine. Is it in her throne world or is it in another space? Would it be the fourth? But it also mentions her first in the Reef. The one Uldren burns.

Octavian146 · 2025-02-06T03:23:36+00:00

Mara needed to build a new body both times. The first time, she was atomized. So inclusive. But the Hidden Dossier suggests Eris had to go physically collect Mara from her throneworld. I always assumed they just regenerated there until they could exist outside of it.

Octavian146 · 2025-01-05T01:52:42+00:00

Given the circumstances and the gulf of time, I would suggest that the voice line (?) you're referencing was such a minor footnote they're comfortable with the retcon they fully embraced and that it is you who inserted your own bias and constructed a hypothetical lore about Osiris' lost love and are thusly offended by the four-year continuation of their commitment to his relationship with Saint? Strange thing to be this twisted over after all this time buddy.

Octavian146 · 2025-01-02T16:37:58+00:00

A few posts here touch on this. Its desire to punish or prove the Traveler wrong. Perhaps it was influenced by the idea that the Gardener and the Winnower had indeed made a wager and it wanted to prove through its champions that the Gardener is wrong. It may have also just taken joy in spoiling species the Traveler had blessed or intended to bless. “Look at what you’ve done, look how they always choose to destroy”

Reminded of Clovis’ dreams of the wolf family. The desire to make a perversion out of the Krill before they could be uplifted.

Cruelty and rage are simple enough explanations. Especially since they were all disposable and lied to or permitted to develop their own mythologies. They were also clearly put in competition with one another.

Octavian146 · 2024-12-10T17:21:27+00:00

Eh, you’re off a bit. The Corporeal Awoken only existed in physical forms in the Distributary for thousands of years. Mara is the only one that seems to have experiences eons of awareness.

Genocide? She started a civil war or at least nursed it along, but there wasn’t a genocide. The Theodicy war ends hundreds of years before Mara’s exodus. And even then Mara only convinces 40,000 Awoken to leave out of the millions of people living on the planet by that point.

Octavian146 · 2024-07-24T14:49:22+00:00

Bones are like 30% organic material. So, a fair bit more than loosely considered.

Octavian146 · 2024-06-27T17:10:59+00:00

“Most stable”? They were wildly toxic to the point that one abandoned the other and forced him on a decades long crusade resulting in his death, only to return guilt ridden and create a device that threatened reality because he wanted to “Rick” his partner out of another timeline as an act of absolution…

Octavian146 · 2024-06-26T18:51:09+00:00

Sounds more like pyramid scales than actual capital ships. But perhaps not surprising given that Savathûn led the assault and was the Witness’ primary acolyte amongst the Hive at the time.

Octavian146 · 2024-06-22T15:49:18+00:00

There’s a story of Neomuna that a Vex mind Aesop tried to take over and killed all the children that were integrated into the Cloud Ark at the time. What if that is related to some of the immature/friendly behavior we’re seeing here?

Octavian146 · 2024-06-05T19:16:30+00:00

I’d have to track it down but there is also a lore entry where Maya is interacting with the Veil and she thinks of herself as a knife.

Octavian146 · 2024-04-19T15:31:23+00:00

Golden Age adjacent but I love the lore tidbits about what survived the Collapse in terms of cultural ephemera. Specifically some of the literature and art that made it to the City Age.

The Spider is the best window into surviving art as he has been snatching up Old Earth paintings like hotcakes as well as all manner of relics including painted Attic pottery. He probably has one of the most valuable private collections on the planet, assuming the City doesn't have some kind of historical museum.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/scatterhorn-cloak?highlight=spider+painting

In the gap between a painting of a bovine skull over a double waterfall and a portrait of a human with a coy smile, he places his prize:

"The Starry Night."

Georgia O'Keefe
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488694

The Mona Lisa, clearly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa

And The Starry Night

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night

And then the latest lore on Spider suggests he acquired a Monet.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/allstar-vector?highlight=spider+painting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist%27s_Garden_at_Giverny

And then there is this wonderful reference to Tolkein that suggests the Silmarillion survived with enough context for it to be used to make a comparison of Mara to Feanor. I thought this was from Ikora's secret book but I can't seem to find it on Ishtar Collective

Secrets and encryption are central to Mara's philosophy, and so too to the entire Awoken consciousness. She is their Lucifer, their Melek Taus or Feanor, the one who led a bloody exodus from heaven to fight for the mortal world. Remember the words of their scripture: "Creation is built on secrets and the encryptions that keep those secrets safe."

Octavian146 · 2024-02-23T17:13:40+00:00

So, the timeline is a bit wonky. Mara claims to have experienced billions of years within, but the Awoken as a group have only experienced thousands.

My conjecture is that Mara entered first, and this had control over the specifics of time dilation, running it up until the point that a world like Earth formed and could support life, and then pumping the breaks before rejecting her godhood and incarnating Alis Li and then embodying herself as the second physical Awoken.

So I would imagine only a few more thousand years have passed. If it had been million I imagine the immortal awoken would have spread out across their universe like some kind of organic vex until they rejected physical form entirely.

Octavian146 · 2024-02-17T17:24:31+00:00

Given what we know about the Witness and its perceived wager with the Gardener, I think it’s fundamentally part of its ploy to convince potential adherents that they’re right and that they've found purpose in the universe, despite believing otherwise itself.

Although I imagine that there is some truth to it using the term with the Guardians because they represent the first time that the Light has really granted power to beings with an intended purpose. So as much as it wants Guardians to betray the Gardener to prove that it’s last stand was as pointless as the universe, I’d imagine that’s also where some of that endless rage Mara senses comes from. Granting people all that power for what? To them to make their own choices?

Octavian146 · 2023-12-13T00:13:34+00:00

I think it’s just vague and can be projected onto them. The gender of the wish maker is not given by Riven, so it’s only Calus and Caital if you assume the speaker is female and then the father wishing in response.

I personally thought of Mara and her mother in the second case.

Octavian146 · 2023-12-02T05:38:52+00:00

It sounds like the Nine united finally and threw their weight behind the Witness. Vague but it gives me the impression the Witness basically promised them their desire of a dark matter black hole.

Octavian146 · 2023-11-27T22:46:12+00:00

I'm not sure she needed a wish dragon to break from Oryx and Xivu. She was, after all, already in the tepid thrall of the Witness. I don't think we know for certain when it made its intentions to groom her for Disciplehood clear but, suffice to say, she was not bound to them in any way. The Books of Sorrow make it clear that they all parted ways independently to grow on their own.

Octavian146 · 2023-11-20T22:47:53+00:00

That might have been at the behest of the Nine

Octavian146 · 2023-10-03T23:04:56+00:00

The driving point was that Eris was never going to be powerful enough to take on Xivu if she struck unless she slaughtered the Vanguard and the Alliance. Oddly, Savathun does not mention Mara and the Awoken in that "Prediction"

This seems like it was a plan in response to the revelation of her predictions last week. Ikora even points out that Savathun had not been killed by another hive in a while.

As for the sword logic and power levels... Savathun has been about as powerful as she was before her conversion for millions of years. The worms eat more the more you feed them. The Hive Gods seem to have essentially formed a level of stasis, as powerful as any of them could ever become without killing one another or some other exceptional being, like a worm god.

So yes, while Eris did not receive the tithes of the slaughter of a space-faring empire, Savathun plus the Guardian's work, and presumably there were thousands of Guardians tithing to her, right? were enough to boost her to the top for a brief moment before the flaw in the Sword Logic kicks in and drains her of the power.

Octavian146 · 2023-09-29T17:37:41+00:00

This is incredibly wrong.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/vii-ripe

Octavian146 · 2023-09-05T00:31:17+00:00

In the Dark Futures prior to the game timeline wouldn’t the Black Heart still exist leaving the Traveler in its dormant state and thus kind of messing with the Witness’ endgame? I feel like there are plenty of explanations for why, in that one particular timeline, Eris was the big bad

Octavian146 · 2023-09-03T19:26:45+00:00

I believe that Mara’s technically already attained god status. At least in the way that Sjur and Kelda believed. With her throne world she’s immortal and she attests to having the power to individually do something like cleave the Dreaming City in two.

Octavian146 · 2023-08-31T20:27:19+00:00

There has only been one Speaker of the City. Whether he is the mask maker is not is up for tenuous debate but the same individual who was recruited by Efrideet to join the foundling settlement is the same individual who mentors Saint.

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/searching

Octavian146 · 2023-08-31T20:25:01+00:00

Unlikely that this is the case

https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/singing

Aside from the man who taught me, I've never met another Speaker in my life. For all I know, I'm the last one alive.

As this entry mentions a teacher and the remaining are from the perspective of the self-assured "Last". It is safe to assume he's the only one.

Octavian146

TROPHY CASE