“Don’t fret. It’s a simple expedition. We’ll be back before lunch.” —Sjur Eido, First Queen’s Wrath
Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy
Element: Kinetic | Stasis | Strand
Perk: Queen’s Wrath - While aiming down sights with a fully-drawn bow, enemies behind walls are highlighted and arrows pierce shields. Strong against Barrier Champions.
Trait 1: Broadhead - Piercing arrowhead that damages the target on entry and exit. One shot can overpenetrate multiple targets.
Trait 2: Anti-Taken Fletching - Specialized to fight Taken targets.
Ornaments: Author of Devastation
Origin & Description: Hey so pop quiz: what's the best thing about the Marasenna lore book? Is it a) the Milton-esque tale of a woman who keeps her people from ascending to divinity in hopes of one day leading them back to heal the broken world they fled; b) the description of an enlightened matriarchal space-future society; c) THE FACT THAT BUNGIE CANONICALLY WROTE AN ENEMIES-TO-LOVERS STORY FOR THEIR ALOOF ETHEREAL SPACE QUEEN AND HER BIGGEST BUFFEST GIRLFRIEND.
I think you can guess which of those three I'm planning to talk about today.
Though the Awoken have often come up in these posts, we haven't talked much about the Distributary itself. I won't go into all the details - the Marasenna lore book is worth a read on your own anyway - but while the secret world of the Awoken was a paradise, it wasn't a utopia. At the first gathering of the Awoken after their rebirth they reached by consensus nine Verdicts that laid the foundation for their society and culture. But a theological/philosophical divide soon formed between the Sanguinists and the Eccaleists over the Seventh Verdict:
That the Awoken were created out of covenant with Light and Darkness, but the covenant was complete, and no further debt would ever be called, except the duty of the Second Verdict to remain on the Distributary.
The Sanguinists held to the Seventh Verdict, saying that the Awoken owed nothing to the forgotten past they had left behind. The Eccaleists, however, believed that the Awoken had been made from conflict and that one day that conflict would have to be resolved, their debt to the cosmos repaid. Given what we know about Mara Sov's master plan to engineer a return of the Awoken to the human solar system it's easy to see her hand in this theological divide: the Seventh Verdict, left unchallenged, would blunt any Awoken desire to follow her back to Earth. But even Mara didn't expect it to spark into open warfare with the advent of the Diasyrm, the Eccaleist leader who accused Queen Alis Li of deicide. The Diasyrm claimed that Alis Li in her creation of the Distributary-universe had had the chance to make the Awoken true gods, transcendent and free from all want or suffering, but had chosen to make them mortal instead (ironically this claim is true - but it was Mara who made that choice).
Alis Li denied the Diasyrm's claims and the Theodicy War began; but though the Awoken hunted and fished and sported at violence, true killing upset them greatly, even more so because they were otherwise immortal and to kill an immortal wastes the infinite potential of all they might become. So at last Alis Li asked Mara Sov to end the war, because Alis Li wasn't stupid and knew Mara had to have something to do with the conflict. After extracting Queen Li's promise of an unnamed future boon, Mara spoke with the Diasyrm. We don't know what Mara told her, but afterwards the Diasyrm vanished and, if she ever reappeared, it was not by that name. Thus the war ended...except for one loose end.
During the Theodicy War one of Queen Li's Paladins, her most trusted advisors and greatest warriors, defected to the Diasyrm. Sjur Eido broke her oath to punish what she thought was the greatest crime imaginable: this denial of divinity and the creation of suffering. Sjur killed during the war, too, cutting down one of the oldest Awoken - a member of the original 891-person crew of the Exodus Green. And when the rest of the Eccaleists and Sanguinists laid down arms, Sjur kept going. She went to the Gensym Scribes, who described her as "a woman of stellar height and furious wrath," and accused Mara Sov of the murder of the Diasyrm. She told them, "In my saddle, I have a weapon with only one death remaining. Take me to Mara, and I will deliver it." Thus Sjur traveled to the Queen's court carrying the maltech matter laser Queen Li herself had entrusted to her as a Paladin, and which she had used to kill during the Theodicy War, intending to use its final shot to kill Mara Sov. She found and followed her quarry, all as planned. And then...
Sjur Eido's fury and grief whetted themselves against Mara's thoughtless grace and ancient beauty, until at last her heart unseamed itself and spilled its hot blood in a shout. "Mara Sov!" she cried, throwing down her maltech matter laser between them. "I cannot live while you live, but I cannot bear to kill you. I challenge you to a duel to the agony. I will fight your most beloved companion to the death and leave you forever maimed or else die in the attempt."
Mara selected her brother Uldren to duel Sjur. Uldren challenged Sjur to three rounds of combat: once with knives, once with rifles, and once with fifth-generation air-superiority fighters. They drew in the knife-fight, Sjur won with the rifle, and Uldren won with the airplanes, ending the duel in a draw...
On the tarmac, Sjur Eido threw off her helmet and parachute and knelt before Mara Sov. "My lady," she said, "as I have fought your brother to a tie, I leave my fate in your hands. Be more kind to me than you were to my lady the Diasyrm."
"Rise, Sjur Eido," said Mara. "Let us take the stars together."
...and Sjur stood by her side as her bodyguard and consort for the rest of their time within the Distributary. Sjur and Mara are a really great couple and every glimpse we have of their time together is adorable: the time Mara stays awake wrestling with a dilemma "which kept her from wrestling with Sjur," the time Sjur falls asleep while Mara is reading and when she wakes up Mara goes, "You were drooling," Mara refusing to admit she wants a cuddle from Sjur but scooting over on a bench to pointedly make room for her, and so on and so forth. Sjur grounds Mara Sov in a way no one else does. When everyone around her plays in the cryptic-mystic space Mara creates, Sjur will have none of it - she once replied to a tremendously abstract plan of Mara's with, "That's cool. You know, when you talk like that, what you're actually saying is, 'I don't want anyone to understand me, but I want them to understand they don't understand me.'" And Sjur was right.
(We briefly interrupt this story of elven girlfriends for my cherished crack theory: Mara and Sjur's first meeting was not in the Distributary at all. In the brief glimpse the Marasenna gives us of life aboard the Exodus Green pre-Distributary, we meet Uldren (then Uldwyn) Sov in the middle of a violent zero-gravity sparring match with another crew member, "a big, brutal woman from Gravity Ops, a woman who's had her myostatin genes knocked out so she can swell up into a giant plug of brawn." The woman tackles him for the kill, then Uldwyn gets her into a chokehold - but it's too late, and she passes out just as Uldwyn is flung out of the ring to end it in a draw. While Uldwyn scolds his twin sister for her latest deep-space dive his opponent "stares at Mara in awe." I submit to you, good people of the internet, that Uldwyn's opponent in this scene is none other than the woman who will awaken in the Distributary as Sjur Eido.)
Anyway, like the Awoken who followed Mara, let's return to the main Destiny universe. At the same time Mara reluctantly assumed the crown back in the Reef she named Sjur as Queen's Wrath to serve as her emissary and representative. Sjur got up to all sorts of hijinks in our system including yeeting a satellite into heliocentric orbit via longbow, saving an eliksni captain named Misraaks, earning the name "Wishender" for hunting traitorous Ahamkara, earning the name "Siyuriks pak Variisis" ("Sjur the Unyielding") among allied eliksni, hunting down more than a few Guardians who learned secrets the Awoken would rather keep, surviving an attack by the mysterious world-ending creature known as the Aphelion, and oh yeah that one time she killed Shaxx and they became best friends. Famed for her skill with the bow, most prized of Awoken weapons, Sjur is a legend to every Awoken and her image is painted on the "Unyielding" ornament for the Hunter exotic Oathkeeper. She is the Queen's Wrath. Which makes Petra Venj's succession to the position all the more difficult, because in the middle of the Reef Wars the Nine maybe killed Sjur, maybe by accident, and she maybe died. Well, okay: Sjur is dead in that her body was found, dead, with a Strange Coin atop it in payment of weregild - the blood money that must be remitted to atone for a murder. Unable to divert her resources from the Reef War, Mara Sov instead sent Paladin Orin, an Awoken Guardian who had left Earth to swear service to the Queen, on the trail of Sjur's killer(s).
Orin's quest led her to the mysterious Jovian called Xûr who sells us exotics on weekends - and led us to one of my favorite crack theories of all, which is that Xûr is Sjur, which is not true but I fucking love it anyway. But while Orin's quest would ultimately transform her into the other-being known as the Emissary of the Nine, it yielded no clearer answers for Mara. The Nine seemed to believe they were somehow responsible for Sjur's death, but how it had occurred and what they had to do with it remained a mystery. But the Oracle Engine told her that Sjur would "recede and later return," and Sjur herself once dreamed of Mara breaking a pyramid with her bare hands - which is basically what's happening right now in Destiny story - while she herself was "dead, I think. Or... trapped? Like in a maze. But pretty close to figuring my way out."
Also a clue that Sjur's demise is not permanent: you can talk to her. When Mara Sov built Eleusinia, her throne world, she also finally carved a statue for Sjur - a statement whose meaning doesn't become clear until a Techeun tells you later that it's taboo among Reef Awoken to carve the likeness of someone who still lives. When players enter the ruins of Eleusinia in the Shattered Throne dungeon they eventually fight their way to that statue, and when you stand before it you'll hear Sjur's voice - and you'll see the statue holding a huge longbow. Back in the Distributary Sjur was famous for wielding a bow so massive that even she had to lean her entire body-weight on it to string it (which Mara canonically thought was super hot). When her body was found, her bow was gone. Given the context it's not hard to guess the longbow her statue holds is that missing weapon: Wish-Ender, slayer of Ahamkara.
Sjur is willing to pass Wish-Ender on to you - if you can prove you're worthy to wield it. You do so by first traveling to a hidden location on the tangled shore called Sjursrest, a beautiful mausoleum built at the center of a circular waterfall. Trapped within are Taken versions of three great foes Sjur herself slew in life. Kill them and you'll receive three Dreaming Tokens, one per boss - but the tokens' descriptions call them "worthless." You have to venture back into Shattered Throne, figure out the secret to conjuring Ascendant versions of each boss, and kill those as well to convert the Dreaming Tokens into Waking Tokens. Lay all three before Sjur's statue and she will declare you worthy, granting you Wish-Ender and telling you to prepare for her return.
Unlike all other bows in Destiny, including exotics, Wish-Ender is not a compound bow. There are no cams or pistons or other complicated systems that juice it up. Wish-Ender is a single piece of magical Awoken...stuff..fashioned into a big-ass longbow, pure and simple, and that big-ass longbow will canonically put one of its two-foot-long broadhead arrows straight through an inch of Guardian plate armor. Wish-Ender boasts a full one-second-long draw time and the highest impact stat of all bows. Major props to Bungie here: the animation and sound on Wish-Ender do an excellent job of conveying a sense of tremendous effort in drawing the weapon and of great pent-up power when you release the string and the arrow zips free. Unfortunately Wish-Ender's actual in-game punch doesn't quite live up to Sjur's reputation. It did enjoy a brief resurgence during Season of Dawn when a bug meant its entry-exit damage bonus was being applied four times rather than twice, and frankly I wish they'd left that in. Alright, four was excessive. Maybe three.
The inner portion of Wish-Ender's bow stave is carved with a relief of Sjur in full armor and as you draw it the carvings will illuminate. Once you reach full draw and the carved Sjur's sword is shining its exotic perk kicks in: any enemies behind cover in the part of your field of view covered by Wish-Ender will be clearly outlined. The illumination of the carvings will slowly decline as you hold it at full draw, letting you know how long you have before you have to release it (unless you're wearing the aforementioned Oathkeeper exotic) but you'll have plenty of time to use your X-ray vision to line up your shot with those idiots who think they're safe behind their pathetic "walls". No enemy of the Awoken can hide from the Queen's Wrath.
Mara and Sjur's tale has one bittersweet complication: even before her death the two had separated somewhat. Sjur heard the Techeuns whispering of Mara's incipient apotheosis and, though they discussed it and affirmed their love for each other, the knowledge of Mara's path caused them to drift apart - but gladly, "a kind and happy push, as a friend might urge a beloved companion onward to a distant opportunity." Personally I think the future may go another way. Like I said above, Sjur is the one person in the universe who can cut straight through Mara Sov's nonsense. She isn't awed by her. She knows the woman at the heart of all the stories and secrets. And she is the one person whose judgement Mara fears and desires in return. As part of the preparations for her death at Oryx's hands Mara finally told Sjur her deepest secret: that she was the one who chose to make the Awoken mortal, that she committed the crime Sjur broke her ancient oath to punish. And after she confesses this Mara waits in frozen terror for Sjur's response. Mara could bear the guilt of an entire war, the hatred of Alis Li, the deaths of thousands on her conscience - but not Sjur's hatred. Sjur won't lie to make her feel better, either; she answers, "You're the devil. You're the lone power who made death. You allowed the possibility of evil. You might be responsible for more preventable suffering than anything that has ever existed." But Sjur also understands Mara, even when Mara doesn't want to be understood, and so she also says, "Well, if you hadn't, none of us would be here. I guess I don't see what else you could've done, if you cared about those we left behind. If you wanted us to be able to go back and help in the fight," and Mara can breathe again. I don't know whether Mara Sov really will become a god, or what that term even means in the context of Destiny; but I think Sjur will return, and I think in doing so, in being herself and in bringing Mara literally back down to Earth, she'll save Mara from making a very big mistake. In other words: please come back soon, Sjur. Your girlfriend is scaring people.
Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum
[ Ace of Spades | Ager's Scepter | Anarchy | Arbalest | Bad Juju | Bastion | Black Talon | Borealis | Cerberus+1 | The Chaperone | Cloudstrike | Coldheart | Collective Obligation | The Colony | Crimson | Cryosthesia 77K | DARCI | Dead Man's Tale | Deathbringer | Dead Messenger | Devil's Ruin | Divinity | Duality | Edge of Action/Concurrence/Intent | Eriana’s Vow | Eyes of Tomorrow | Fighting Lion | The Fourth Horseman | Forerunner | Gjallarhorn | Grand Overture | Graviton Lance | Hard Light | Hawkmoon | Heartshadow | Heir Apparent | The Huckleberry | Izanagi’s Burden | The Jade Rabbit | Jötunn | The Lament | The Last Word | Legend of Acrius | Leviathan’s Breath | Lord of Wolves | Lorentz Driver | Lumina | Malfeasance | Merciless | MIDA Multi-Tool | Le Monarque | Monte Carlo | No Time to Explain | One Thousand Voices | Osteo Striga | Outbreak Perfected | Parasite | Polaris Lance | Prometheus Lens | The Prospector | Queenbreaker | Rat King | Riskrunner | Ruinous Effigy | Salvation's Grip | Skyburner’s Oath | Sleeper Simulant | Sturm | Sunshot | SUROS Regime | Sweet Business | Symmetry | Tarrabah | Telesto | Thorn | Thunderlord | Ticuu's Divination | Tommy's Matchbook | Tractor Cannon | Traveler's Chosen | Trespasser | Trinity Ghoul | Truth | Two-Tailed Fox | Vex Mythoclast | Vigilance Wing | The Wardcliff Coil | Wavesplitter | Whisper of the Worm | Wish-Ender | Witherhoard | Worldline Zero | Xenophage ]
