Destiny 2has a rich history, story, and lore that spans the universe dating back billions of years, even to the beginning of time. ThoughDestiny 2and its continuing expansions do a great job enhancing the narrative framework, meanwhile the collection of lore that players can read throughout the world enriches it. The flower game is one such example.
Though not featured in any cutscenes, information about the flower game can be acquired bytalking to Eris Mornafter finishing the “Beyond” quest in Shadowkeep. The lore is part of the bookUnveiling,which tells a more extended narrative throughout its entries. This lore creates an exciting origin story for many of the themes and conflicts seen in theDestinyuniverse, but its narrator is unreliable given it follows the Darkness talking to Guardians.
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Destiny 2: The Garden, the Gardener, and the Winnower
To understand the flower game withinDestiny 2, it’s helpful to understand another entry inUnveilingthat details theGardener and the Winnower. The Darkness claims that it and the Gardener (the Light) lived together in a garden before time existed. The Darkness claims it and the Light existed as ontological dynamics of advanced mathematical structures with no antecedents or constituents.
In this garden, the Light planted seeds in the morning, while in the evening theDarkness harvested and shapedwhat would live and what would die, culling the failed crops. During the daytime, the Gardener and the Winnower play a game, ultimately called the flower game. This garden as a focus appears to be a metaphor for existence and reality - before and after space-time and the laws of physics that make up causality. In this metaphor, the garden represents the space from which all universes could arise.
The Flower Game in Destiny 2
Just as the garden represents a reality in which all possible universes may exist and die, the flower game represents these universes' natural creation, expansion, and end. Within the primordial garden,possibly the Black Garden, simulated realities created in the flower game took on shapes and patterns across a two-dimensional grid of flowers.
In this allegory, as the flower game unfolds, the same pattern always dominates and leads to the final shape.The Darkness found this pleasing, whereas the Light did not. The Light desired complex and diverse patterns to simulate, existing in a harmonious universe together. According to the Darkness, the Light decided to achieve this by transforming itself into a new rule that promised the diversity it craved.
To keep the game balanced, the Darkness did the same. Still, its rule followed the idea of simplicity - existence is a struggle, and only the shape that can exist and dominate above all others deserves to live. This ideology is reminiscent of the Sword Logic that’s followed by Hive Gods. TheDestinyuniverse was created when these new rules (Light and Dark subclasses) entered the flower game. The old rules, set aside, became the Vex.
Destiny 2is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
