Winnower

The Winnower is an entity referred to in several Lore entries pertaining to the Darkness, and which has apparently communicated with various entities across time and space, notably Oryx and the Guardian.

Overview

"It is the nature of life to favor existence over nonexistence, and to prefer the fertile soil to the poisoned wind. Because those who open their mouths to that wind pass from the world and leave no descendant, whether of flesh or of thought.
But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrective. Imagine a world without me."

— Unveiling

During their exploration of the Lunar Pyramid, the Guardian received a spherical artifact from the Witness which relayed a series of messages addressed to the Guardian by a mysterious entity calling itself the "winnower," which seemed to present itself as either synonymous with or the source of Darkness itself. The true nature of this entity remains contentious at present, and its relationship to the Darkness has yet to be fully elucidated.

In the messages relayed to the Guardian, the winnower claimed to be one of two primordial entities which predated the universe, alongside their counterpart, the "gardener". The winnower described itself as embodying the reduction of complexity, whereas the Gardener embodied the growth and preservation of complexity. In the allegorical story recounted in the messages by the winnower, the gardener and winnower are said to have fought with one another in the "garden" which preceded the multiverse, and upon inadvertently creating the multiverse as a by-product of their struggle, each became a paracausal force which would serve to further their respective goals within its many universes. The winnower claimed to have subsequently influenced the evolution of life throughout the cosmos, stating that it was responsible for the Cambrian Explosion that gave rise to complex animal life on Earth, and thus the evolution of humanity. It ended the messages with an appeal to the Guardian, in which it attempted to sway them to its point of view and convince them to take its side in its cosmic struggle against the Gardener.

Upon reading another copy of the above creation story found in a series of apocryphal texts discovered on the Moon and translated by Eris Morn, Ikora Rey interpreted the story as having been narrated by the Witness, which she believed to have deceitfully presented itself as a monolithic cosmic force; however, in a later conversation with Mara Sov, she wondered whether the texts were in fact a shadow of the truth, in which the Witness was merely a tool, much as the Witness had secretly allowed its power to be wielded by Oryx to create his Taken. The Witness itself confirmed Ikora and Mara's suspicions shortly before its destruction at the hands of the Coalition, as it stated to a Guardian Raid fireteam that it was not the Winnower, but merely "the first knife clutched in its hand". The Witness also described the Winnower as a god, and claimed that the Winnower had forged it into what it was, much as the Guardian had similarly been shaped by a higher power. Given that the Witness was formed from the Precursors through their use of the Veil and its Darkness, this makes its statement rather dubious.

Other Darkness-wielding entities have also referred to a "Winnower". Ahsa described the Veil as a "Winnower" when she recounted the origin of the Witness to the Guardian, and the Witness' memories of Oryx preserved within the Echo of Navigation also referred to the "Winnower" as a higher power which Oryx revered, superordinate to him and his Taken; notably, the Echo also explicitly denounced the Witness as a charlatan that had led Oryx's sisters into heresy, indicating that it had not been referring to the Witness. In the description for one of the Tablets of Ruin acquired on the Dreadnaught, a line from Oryx's conversation with the Deep in the Books of Sorrow is attributed to the Winnower, seemingly indicating that the two are one and the same.

Aside from these descriptions and references, there has been no independent confirmation of the Winnower's nature, origins or existence. Following the discovery that Stasis and Strand could be safely wielded by Guardians, and that the Darkness once believed by the people of the Last City to have caused the Collapse was in fact the Witness and its Black Fleet, the Vanguard has for the most part adopted the view that the Darkness is a neutral force, without any form of guiding intent or goal, and without any inherent ability to morally corrupt its wielders. Similarly, various statements once ascribed to the Darkness itself have since been recontextualized as having originated from the Witness, which was referred to by Mara Sov as a "Voice in the Darkness".

Several additional Darkness-related Lore entries contain statements by an unnamed person or entity that are written in a similar informal, conversational tone as the Winnower in Unveiling, and in some cases seem to reference the contents of Unveiling specifically; however, as of the present, the identity of the writer of these entries remains unconfirmed. One of the entries in the Lore Book Inspiral, titled "Winnowing", appears to reference and elaborate slightly on the information presented in Unveiling, describing how a garden requires both a gardener to care for its plants, and a winnower to prune away excess growth and rot; if there is no winnower to do the pruning, the plants will be forced to do it themselves lest the garden deteriorate. Much as with Unveiling, this description appears to be allegorical, and seems to suggest that both the Darkness and Light are necessary to maintain the stability of life and civilization within the universe; as the narrator states, "there can be no gardens without knives". The Lore tab for the aforementioned Tablet of Ruin recovered from the Dreadnaught also contains what appears to be one half of a conversation between the Guardian and an unknown interlocutor, again written in a similar style and tone as used by the Winnower in Unveiling.

List of appearances

• Destiny 2: Shadowkeep (First mentioned)
  • Lightfall (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Deep (Mentioned only)
  • Episode: Heresy (Mentioned only)
• The Hidden Dossier (Mentioned only)