Savathûn, the Witch Queen
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Witch Queen
 Sathona
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Other name(s): |
Sathona |
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Female |
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Height: |
21ft [15] |
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Affiliation: |
Savathûn's Brood (formerly) |
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Rank: |
Witch Queen |
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Notable info: |
Hive God of Cunning and Lies |
| Savathûn, the Witch Queen | |
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Other name(s): |
The Witch, Radiant |
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Species: |
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Faction: |
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Witch Queen |
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Female |
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- "Savathûn, mother morph of Sathona, we delight in your sharp mind. […] We are pleased with your use of our larvae to create mighty knights and plentiful warriors. Taox's retreat to the Hydrogen Fountain proves your superior strength. But you must know that reclaiming your home is not enough."
- — Worm Gods[16]
Savathûn, the Witch Queen, formerly known as Sathona, is a Hive god and sister to Xivu Arath, God of War and Oryx, the Taken King. Together with her two siblings, she was a progenitor of the contemporary Hive species and one of its chief gods, having made a pact with the Worms of Fundament. She is driven to understand the deepest secrets of the universe and gains power from the deception and confusion of those who seek to understand her unfathomable schemes.
However, her true goals were revealed to undermine the Witness and its goals of realizing the Final Shape, working her own secretive agenda from the inside to prevent humanity's extinction during the Collapse and to protect and preserve the Traveler at all costs. She had also schemed to free her kind from the Worms' pact she originally made back on Fundament; pursuing other means to acquire sustenance beyond the Sword Logic. For her actions she would become reborn as the first Hive Lightbearer with Immaru partnered as her Ghost, with the two together created the Lucent Brood as her own army of Light-wielding Hive.
Biography
Origins
- "I am Sathona, middle daughter of the dead king. I will take back my home and eat the mother jelly. I will raise my spawn on the corpse of the Helium King. On my right eye I promise this."
- — Sathona[17]
Savathûn was born Sathona, on the planet Fundament. She was one of a short-lived species whose homeworld had crashed into Fundament millions of years earlier, with the shards of the planet forming Fundament's continents.[18] The Osmium Court was one such continent, ruled by the Osmium King. Sathona was the second-born daughter of his final brood, older sister to Xi Ro and younger sister to Aurash. The three sisters were tutored by Taox, a sterile Mother, the proto-Hive morph capable of spawning children, which also allowed them to live longer by eating "Mother-jelly" in adulthood.[19] The proto-Hive's harsh lives convinced Sathona at an early age to become a mother, not because she wanted children or feared dying, but because she wanted to live long enough to have meaning in her life.[20]
However, by the time her father turned ten Fundament years (a lifetime by the standards of their species), he had discovered a dead Worm on the shores of the Osmium Court, which he started tending to it as a familiar. He began raving that the Syzygy, a prophesied disaster, would soon occur. While Aurash took her father's warnings to heart, Taox concluded that the King was falling to senility in his old age and that none of his daughters, who were two years old at the time, could properly rule the Osmium Court and protect it from the Helium Court, a rival kingdom. While acknowledging that Sathona was a brilliant thinker, Taox noted that she could not fight. In desperation, Taox sent a message to the rulers of the Helium Court, the Helium Drinkers, saying that she would help them assassinate the King and his daughters if they installed her as their regent. The Helium Drinkers accepted Taox's proposal and attacked, killing the King but failing to kill his daughters.[21] In the confusion, Sathona managed to steal her father's Worm in their escape.[citation needed] Reaching Aurash's ship, the three sisters made a blood oath to return and take vengeance, with Sathona vowing that she would become a mother and raise her spawn on the corpses of the Helium Drinkers.[17]
Over the next year, the three sisters sailed the oceans of Fundament. During this time, Sathona began to hear her father's worm speak to her, guiding her to acts that would save the sisters over the year. Finally, the three sisters found a ship they named "The Needle", built of high technology, but whose crew had died obscenely after hatching an egg from a creature they could not recognize. Xi Ro insisted that they sell the ship at the Kaharn Atoll, where the species of Fundament gathered, saying that an auction could raise enough money to hire mercenaries to fight the Helium Drinkers. However, Sathona told Xi Ro that the ship was worthless. Aurash instead suggested that they repair the ship. With prompting from the Worm, Sathona agreed with Aurash and convinced Xi Ro to repair the ship.[20]
Over the next two years, the sisters repaired the needle, but by this point, the sisters were five years old. Sathona raised her fears that she would soon be too old to eat mother-jelly and that the sisters would be unable to fulfil their oath. Aurash said that the sisters had to dive beneath the oceans of Fundament, traveling to the planet's core. Xi Ro warned that this was how the crew had died, but Sathona, urged on by the Worm, agreed with Aurash.[22] The sisters took the needle into the deep. They finally reached a point where they could use the ship's sensors on the oceans. To their horror, they discovered that the Syzygy was real and that Fundament's moons had already aligned. Just then, they were encountered by the Leviathan, a creature long spoken of in proto-Hive myth.[23] The Leviathan warned the sisters that they needed to turn back or else would unleash disaster upon the universe, saying that they faced a choice between the Light, which offered civilization, and the Darkness, which offered only violence. However, the Leviathan offered no hope to the sisters to avoid the Syzygy. Sathona then revealed the Worm's help to her sisters, and how it urged them to go down. Rejecting the Leviathan's entreaties, the sisters dove into the core.[24]
Reaching the very center of Fundament, the three sisters found the Worm Gods: Akka, Eir, Ur, Xol, and Yul. The Worm Gods offered the three sisters a chance for the proto-Hive to escape Fundament as well as achieve immortality. All they had to do was take the Worms larvae into them as symbiotes and spread them among the proto-Hive. The Worms posed the caveat that the sisters must never cease their natures: Xi Ro must always test her strength, Sathona must always be cunning, and Aurash must always try to understand. The sisters accepted the pact and became the first Hive: Xi Ro took the Knight morph and became Xivu Arath, Sathona took the Mother morph and became Savathûn, and Aurash took the King morph, transforming into a male and became Auryx, the King of the Hive.[25][26][16][27]
Campaign of Destruction
- "I don't have a strict proof yet, you know. This thing we believe — that we're liberating the universe by devouring it, that we're cutting out the rot, that we're on course to join the final shape — I haven't found a strict, eternal proof. We might yet be wrong."
- — Savathûn[28]
As Auryx and his sisters forced an ultimatum on the remaining proto-Hive to accept the worms or perish,[26] Auryx turned his attention to Fundament's moons and the Ammonites there who had allied with the Traveler and gave asylum to Taox.[29] Initially, he was willing to negotiate with the Ammonites, but his sister Savathûn, under pressure from the Worms, killed Auryx as punishment. Rather than dying, Auryx's soul instead passed to his Ascendant Realm, or throne world, where his soul resided until he returned to the mortal realm. Rebuked, Auryx purged what sympathy and goodwill he had left, becoming a merciless tyrant.[30] He and his sisters warred with and killed one another on a regular basis after the defeat of the Ammonites, as part of their worship of the Sword-Logic and their attempt to become the sharpest blades in the universe, heading to their Ascendant realms when defeated. Their war of revenge against Taox had transformed into a campaign of genocide when they slew the Ammonites and other interstellar civilizations to feed their worms. When Oryx established the Court of Oryx to study the sword logic, Savathûn was inspired to establish a court of her own, known as the High Coven.[31]
During the war with the Ecumene, Auryx came to realize that the Worm Gods had deceived him and his sisters. Their worms' appetites were growing past their ability to feed with death.[32] Meeting with his sisters in his ascendant realm, surrounded by their servants (some of which despised them for showing weakness) they despaired over their dilemma. When his sisters offered their power to help Auryx find a way to save them, Auryx killed them, and then used that power to confront his patron god Akka.[33] He killed Akka so that he could steal its ability to call upon the Deep and created the Tablets of Ruin, which gave him the power to Take. His transformation complete, Auryx was now Oryx, the Taken King.[34] During the subsequent war with the Ecumene, Oryx revived Xivu Arath in an act of war and revived Savathûn in an act of cunning. He then decreed the tithe system: each Hive would kill their enemies, take some to feed their own worm and tithe the rest to their superior. Thralls would tithe to Acolytes, Acolytes would tithe to Knights or Wizards, the Knights and Wizards would tithe to the Ascendant Hive, those who commanded legions of warriors and earned the right to enter the Hive gods' Ascendant realms. All of this violence would eventually reach Oryx, Savathûn, and Xivu Arath, allowing their worms to feed on violence while continuing to invoke their inner natures.[35]
Following the Golden Amputation, Oryx declared to his sisters that the Hive had conquered its way to the edge of the Deep and that it had granted him a personal audience. [36] As Oryx retreated into his throne world to commune with it, Savathûn conspired with Xivu Arath to strand him there and steal his Tablets of Ruin by cutting off the tribute flowing through his tithe system. [37] They were ultimately unsuccessful, and on returning, Oryx waged war on Savathûn and crippled her own tribute.[38]
In the aftermath of this attempted betrayal, Savathûn learned of one of Oryx's daughters, Ir Anûk, and was both enraged and delighted by her brilliance.[39]
While Oryx was off studying the Deep, his son Crota was deceived by Savathûn into using his Cleaver to cut a portal inside his throne world, allowing the Vex to invade it. This amused Savathûn. Her daughter alerted Eir to the situation, who alerted Oryx in turn.[40] After Oryx dealt with the incursion, Savathûn told Xivu Arath that Oryx's throne had been compromised and showed her where to cut into it so she could kill him. However, Oryx had recognized that his throne world was vulnerable, so he moved it into a mighty Dreadnaught scrimshawed from the remains of Akka, stealing from Savathûn her Scalpel to make it.[41][42]
After Oryx confronted and captured Quria for the last time, he presented the Vex to Savathûn as a gift, hoping she would be pleased by its simulations. When she asked him what proof they had that what they were doing was right, Oryx simply replied that the Hive's existence was proof enough in their convictions to live eternal by the Sword Logic.[28] Following the war with the Harmony, Savathûn decided that her fleets would enter the black hole that the Harmony lived around, claiming that they would become stronger for it, while Xivu Arath took her fleets away from Oryx's as she felt he constrained her too much.[43]
The Plan
- "I shall discorporate, so that I exist wherever my schemes and conspiracies also exist. And so I will be immortal, as long as anyone seeks to understand me and fails."
- — Savathûn to a confused Thrall[2]
Around the same time that the Hive's tribute system was established, Savathûn, unsatisfied with the established method of Worm-feeding, embarked on a project that would allow her to escape the trap feeding the Worms created. To do so, she attempted to increase the rate at which her subordinate Hive gathered tribute for her, by placing several Ascendant Hive in orbit around a black hole. In doing this, she hoped that because time would pass more slowly for the Ascendants relative to the outside universe, the Ascendant's Worm would perceive an increased rate of tribute produced by lesser Hive elsewhere in the cosmos, and thus be satisfied without a true increase in tribute.[2]
However, this plan was unsuccessful, as the Ascendants' Worms understood what was happening and increased their hunger.[2] Consequently, Savathûn resolved to try another approach, in which her subordinate Hive would gather tribute in a region of space where time passed faster than the rest of the universe. She planned to use the power and insight attained through this method to completely overhaul how she gained tribute through the Sword Logic, going from a system where tribute was obtained through violence to one where tribute was obtained through the failure of other beings to understand her schemes. This new system of acquiring tribute would be known as "Imbaru".[44] To achieve this, she purposely led Crota to let the Vex into his father's Throne World, to compel the Vex to create Quria, Blade Transform.[40][2] Later, when the campaign against the Harmony was complete and Quria was Taken and given to her as a gift, Savathûn left her siblings behind and entered the Harmony's black hole, hoping to further her plans and prevent the Taken Vex Mind from reporting her work to Oryx. While in the black hole, she taught Quria to harness Hive magic and apply it to computational problem-solving. Using this, Quria learned how to navigate and engineer the singularity, and then format the information for Savathûn to understand. Now able to understand the singularity's inner workings, she began moving forward with her grand scheme.[2]
Savathûn explained the details of her plan to a confused Thrall, as per a rule of the High Coven that a Wizard's schemes should be incomprehensible to a Thrall. She then recorded her conversation and encrypted it with the assistance of Quria, along with a message for a future reader. This message would remain unread for an untold span of time, until the Guardian stumbled upon it, encrypted within Glimmer, while exploring the Dreaming City.[44]
Service to the Witness
- "Your brother's conquest cut a path towards the final shape. When you have finished pouring your poison in his ear…"
"Not MY poison."
"We see your doubts. You speak them to Oryx."
Doubts? After all this time, you think I have doubts?"
"Remember your sisters, little Sathona. Remember the syzygy.
What changed the motion of our moons, my Witness?
You cried out… as your brother did, as your sister did. Into the Darkness. Now the children of Sol do the same.
You aren't the answer they want.
We are the answer you received." - — The Witness conversing with Savathûn[45]
At some point, Savathûn became aware of the power within the Darkness that had been guiding her and her people's fate since she had first heard the whispers of her worm familiar as a child on Fundament: an ancient and terrifyingly powerful entity that called itself the Witness.[46] She pledged herself in service to this being, seemingly unbeknownst to either of her siblings and would follow its direct commands alongside its Disciples.[citation needed] One of these Disciples, Rhulk, was tasked with watching over Savathûn from inside her own Throne World.[47]
The Collapse
Savathûn was present alongside the Witness and its Disciples as the Black Fleet ravaged Earth during the Collapse. When Nezarec had the paracausal object known as the Veil secured for the Witness' plan to establish a connection to the Pale Heart, Savathûn betrayed Nezarec; killing him and cursing his remains while hiding the Veil away on Neptune.[48] The Witness was also deceived by the Witch Queen into thinking the Veil had been lost, causing it to withdraw its forces and retreat to the depths of intergalactic space.[49]
At some point either before or after the Collapse, Savathûn approached the human Sean Rigby in the guise of a human woman, and told him of a coming catastrophe. She instructed him to follow a star to the south and to sing a special song to it every night. Sean and his family followed Savathûn's instructions, and eventually found themselves beneath the Traveler, where the Rigbys have lived ever since.[50]
From the Shadows
