Atheon, Time's Conflux

"PASSION AND PARADOX. \ AID THE VISION. \ SIMPLICITY REQUIRES COMPLEXITY. \ RESENT THE JOKE. \ GLIMPSE THE CHASM."

- Last recorded thoughts of Atheon, Time's Conflux

Atheon, Time's Conflux was a massive Vex Minotaur and the Axis Mind that oversaw the Vault of Glass on Venus.

Biography
As the Axis Mind responsible for bridging the Vex's own calculations into existence, it was difficult to describe whether Atheon was the creator of the Vault of Glass or whether it created Atheon. Atheon had control over time within the Vault and converged causal pathways from every axis in the space-time bulk. This meant that Atheon had the ability to send Guardians into the past, future, or spaces without time at its discretion. It was the centerpiece of the Vex Conflux network, which extends the gate networks across space and time as part of their plans to incorporate the Vex into reality itself.

While it held total control over the time streams, it became subjected to the paradoxical strain over maintaining multiple time streams in its favor. The Guardians exploited this weakness with the fate-defying Aegis as it converged along with its past and future iterations during battle. Atheon's attempts to separate the Guardians across different timestreams proved to be insufficient as their reconvening ultimately led to the destruction of itself, thwarting the Vex of their command over the Glass Throne and the current time stream.

Its eye was later retrieved after the battle and delivered to the Future War Cult for analysis.

Gameplay
Atheon's encounter is the most difficult in the Vault of Glass. It is split up into 2 parts and requires multi-tasking, focus, and awareness.

Awaken the Glass Throne
In order to start killing Atheon, it must first be lured out by awakening the Glass Throne. To start this process, the player should kill all enemies in sight, including a Gatekeeper, a Vex Hydra which lacks a shield, but compensates with its ability to teleport. Killing this Gatekeeper will begin the encounter. There will be 2 Vex Transfer Gates that must be opened by capturing their respective Sync Plates. Additional Vex will pour out of these gates when they open. Two people should stand on one plate and guard it. However, this will cause more Vex to spawn, including Praetorians, which should be the top priority target during this part as they have the ability to capture Sync Plates as well, giving control of them back to the Vex. If one ever gets captured, an Oracle will spawn above the gate. Failure to destroy it will cause the team to wipe. Maintaining control of these plates will open up a gate. The remaining team members will enter the gate and proceed to kill all enemies inside. There will be another Gatekeeper waiting at the end of the area. Killing it will drop the Aegis, but all players in the gate will then be marked by the Void. This can be counterracted by having the Aegis holder use the cleanse function of the relic. Failure to cleanse results in death. This debuff will keep being applied until everyone has exited the gate. A Conflux will then spawn in the middle of the arena, after which a group of Minotaurs will spawn and try to sacrifice themselves to it. Failure to defend it results in the entire team being expunged. After the conflux has been defended, the people who guarded the first plate should now go for the second plate and maintain a firm hold on it to unlock the next gate. As soon as the remaining Guardians enter it, they will be marked by the Void again. The relic holder must keep cleansing everyone to keep this debuff off. There will be one more Gatekeeper to kill, which will drop another Aegis for someone else to pick up. After both relics have been claimed, all Guardians must defend the central conflux from more Vex until the Glass Throne awakens.

Destroy Atheon
With the throne open, Atheon will spawn and face the Guardians personally. It will walk forward and fire his Torch Hammer at all players in sight. Shortly after, he will open the Timestream and teleport 3 team members at random into either the distant future or past. Those teleported will again be marked by the Void and must be cleansed. Focus should be placed on killing all the enemies inside and destroying all the Oracles being summoned by Atheon. Failure to do so will result in Atheon immediately killing the inside team using the Prophecy of Doom. Destroying all the Oracles will result in a safe exit. Meanwhile, those on the outside with Atheon will be detained. Players must shoot their way out of these bubbles like how they did when facing the Templar. In addition, Supplicants, which are Harpies that act as kamikaze units, will flood the arena and move very erratically towards the player. If they get too close, it can result in serious damage being taken or an immediate death. These Supplicants will spawn until the inside team makes it back out, at which point the Aegis holder will have attained a buff called Time's Vengeance, which greatly boosts all damage to Atheon. This is where the damage phase begins. The buff lasts 30 seconds. Once the buff expires, the process resets. Note that the lower Atheon's health, the faster the fire rate and the bigger the blast radius of its Torch Hammer becomes. Repeating the process enough times will eventually result in Atheon's death.

Challenge Mode
Age Of Triumph introduced a challenge mode for Atheon, in which every member of the fireteam must kill 1 oracle in each phase. If someone kills more than one oracle, the challenge will not be registered. This means that the players holding the portal open must enter the portal one at the time and kill one of the oracles.

Destiny 2
In Season of the Splicer, Atheon returned in the reworked Vault of Glass raid, with slight changes to his previous mechanics:

In phase one, instead of Praetorians, there will be Overload Minotaurs attempting to capture the sync plates. Also, instead of bringing The Aegis from the transfer gates, players need to enter and protect a conflux inside both gates from enemies, including Major Wyverns. On one of the sides, a Praetorian with immunity shield will spawn in, attempting to sacrifice itself for the conflux and, if successful, will cause a team wipe. The player on said side should inform the person holding the Aegis at the boss area which side the Minotaur is at, so that they can run inside the gateway to disable the shield and kill it. Moving through the gateway with the relic will cause a debuff that disables portal transportation for a period of time, meaning the two players should switch roles and deliver the shield to next person inside the boss room, so that they can aid the other side in similar fashion. The relic switching continues a couple more times until the final conflux appears in the center of the Glass Throne, which must be defended from additional enemies.

In phase two, the only major difference is that all the Oracles must be shot in the correct order. 9 Oracles will spawn in sets of 3. Like with The Templar, the Oracles will first spawn twice in order to show the order in which to shoot them, after which they stay in place to be killed. The twist is, the order will be shown for the players that didn't get transported by Atheon, so the players that stayed behind must transmit the order to the team that got teleported. Once the ninth oracle is killed, the damage phase starts immediately. Doing damage to Atheon is mostly the same as before. However, similar to Golgoroth in King's Fall's Hard Mode, one player will receive a debuff called "Imminent Detain" which will lock them inside a bubble in 4 seconds, disabling their abilities and weapons, and which kills them in few more seconds. If they stand too close the other players once the counter hits zero, the bubble will detain all nearby players as well, so the debuffed player must get further away from others so that they can free the detained player by shooting the bubble. Once the Time's Vengeance buff ends, Atheon will be immune again and the cycle must be repeated.

Trivia

 * The name Atheon may be derived from Atheos, which roughly means "atheist". This appears to be in conflict with the Vex's apparently religious nature. Alternatively, the name Atheon may be a combination of the latin word Atheos, in addition to the word Eon, which measures the duration of 1,000,000,000 years. When paired together, this then creates the name of Atheon, in effect, translating as either that which does not believe in time, or that which is capable of removing itself from time altogether. The latter seems more likely, given the Vex exist/originate outside of what mortal races consider linear time.
 * In every causal pathways converging on Atheon from every dimensional axis in the space time bulk, there are two things to note:
 * Axis is a fixed reference line for the measurement of coordinates of a dimension, each dimension has an axis.
 * Bulk is a hypothetical higher-dimensional space within which the eleven dimensions of our universe (the three dimensions we can see, plus time, plus the six/seven extra dimensions that we can't see but String Theory theorizes are all around us) may exist, but considering that the Vex are capable of adding an additional six dimensions to the 4-D spacetime around Nessus, this is not that far fetched.
 * In Year 1 of Destiny, there was a particularly famous exploit in the Vault of Glass where the team facing Atheon could push him off the edge of the platform where he was standing. Doing this effectively meant the team doing the raid would complete the encounter and receive full rewards.

List of appearances

 * Destiny
 * Destiny 2
 * Curse of Osiris
 * Beyond Light
 * Season of the Splicer