Final Shape

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This article is about the goal of The Witness. For the conclusion of The Light and Darkness Saga, see The Final Shape.

Civilians of the City being calcified as Earth is reshaped.

"You fight and build and live and die, and always you struggle against your opposition. The predator, the parasite, the illness, the chance storm, the slow collective forgetting of your art and history, the death of a star, the heat death of the universe. You must live longer, be stronger, think quicker, and still there is something waiting to take everything from you, always. Always.

So you have to keep getting better, and better, until you are perfect. Until you are, and cannot be anything else, because there never was anything else. Until you, inevitably, are the final shape."

— The Witness

The Final Shape is a term used to describe a potential end-state of the universe that has been sought after by multiple entities related to the Darkness. While the exact nature of the Final Shape is open to interpretation, it broadly seems to involve the universe being reduced to a simplified, eternal, self-sustaining state of existence.

Possible Forms

The Witness's Final Shape

The Witness's Precursors became fixated on the idea of a "Final Shape" out of a desire for meaning and purpose, as they found none in the universe, the Light, or the Traveler. Various factions within the civilization's governing body, the Consensus, arose with differing conceptions of the Final Shape, but all were eventually supplanted by the Penitent faction, who believed that the Final Shape was to be a universe free from suffering. After the Traveler fled the Precursors' home world, the Precursors used the Veil to merge themselves into the Witness, a single being with a composite consciousness containing all of their minds and memories, driven by their collective fury at the Traveler and obsessed with realizing their vision of the Final Shape. However, the Witness would become deaf to members within its collective that opposed the atrocities it committed, choosing instead to cut out any dissenters from its mind and sequester them away until they could be re-integrated during the creation of the Final Shape.

The Witness' vision of the Final Shape entailed reshaping the universe into a more orderly state in which nothing could exist without its consent and no actions could be taken by any other sentient being, thus halting what it perceived to be the "meaningless cycle of action and reaction" that inevitably led all beings to experience suffering. The Witness sought to achieve this by using the Veil's Darkness in combination with the Traveler's Light, using the former's ability to project possibilities contained within thoughts and memories and the latter's ability to grant those possibilities physical form. The end result of this would be a calcified, frozen, timeless version of reality, in which all sentient beings would be immortalized at the moment of their greatest triumph or most profound regret, unable to perpetuate the cycle of suffering which the Witness viewed to be the supreme injustice of existence. The Witness itself would not be part of the Final Shape, but would instead effectively become a god presiding over a perfected universe for all eternity.

As the Witness attempted to enact its Final Shape from within the Pale Heart, Earth began to be transformed per the Witness' vision, with all matter being converted into the same colored stone-like material seen throughout the Pyramids of the Black Fleet, the surface of the planet being divided into massive blocks that began shifting and rearranging, and the inhabitants of the Last City being transformed into warped, bisected statues. However, the Traveler managed to resist the Witness' efforts and undid all of these changes moments after they began.

As the Guardian and the Vanguard approached the Witness' Monolith, the Witness drew upon the memories of its enemies using the Darkness to offer them a more personalized Final Shape. It showed Crow a future where he would rule the Reef and beyond and be looked at with pride, trust and love by his friends and sister, and offered to erase his past mistake with the Dreaming City. It also offered to bring him out of the shadow of his sister, and hinted that it would let him see "[his] sunrise" again. For Zavala, it offered to bring back Safiyah and Hakim, allowing him to spend eternity with them at their old homestead, and later offered to remove any doubts or fears he had in his lack of purpose and join the Witness's amalgam mind. For Ikora, it offered to remove her from the endless cycle of death and rebirth that it believed she had grown weary of, and instead have her friends returned and let her only experience eternal victory in battle forever.

To the Guardian, the Witness initially offered freedom from their unending life in "enslavement" to the Traveler, but later, believing they desired endless challenge, offered to make them into that which destroys all that can be destroyed, to make them a Disciple and be regarded as being above all other Guardians. It then offered to grant them an escape from their eternal cycle of battle for rewards and commendations, and instead promised all the vast riches the Guardian's strength was "owed". Finally, claiming that the Guardian's potential was being limited by the Vanguard leading them, the Witness offered to help them achieve the power they deserved, raising them up instead to stand alongside the Witness, apart from the Final Shape, as a god ruling over all of existence. Their Ghost, however, saw that the Witness was only making these offers because it was desperate and terrified of what the Guardian could do, and sought to prevent its own destruction.

As Understood by the Disciples of the Witness

The Witness never revealed the full extent and nature of its vision of the Final Shape to its Disciples, and as a result each Disciple appears to have developed their own conception of what the Final Shape entailed. According to an unnamed and long-dead potential Disciple whose thoughts are recorded in the Inspiral Lore book entry "The Cave," Nezarec believed the Final Shape to involve becoming one with all of existence, whereas Rhulk believed it to be a universe free of disparity and differentiation, and Savathûn and her Hive believed it to be a universe in which the Sword Logic was triumphant. An unnamed potential Disciple subsequently concluded that none of the Witness' followers could fully grasp the true nature of the Final Shape, and that the Witness was allowing each of its Disciples and other servants to act according to a greater plan that would ultimately realize all of their seemingly disparate visions of the Final Shape.

After receiving a vision of the Final Shape from the Witness, Calus concluded that it represented the end of all things, and resolved to be the last being standing as the rest of the universe was consumed.

As Understood by the Worms and Hive

"If a civilization cannot defend itself, it must be annihilated. If a King cannot hold his power, he must be betrayed. The worth of a thing can be determined only by one beautiful arbiter — that thing’s ability to exist, to go on existing, to remake existence to suit its survival."

— Yul, the Honest Worm

The Worms received their understanding of the Sword Logic from the Witness and later passed on their conception of the Final Shape to the Hive. According to the Worms, the Final Shape is what remains when everything that can possibly be destroyed has been destroyed, leaving only that which has proven its ability to defeat all obstacles to its continued existence. Oryx, the Taken King described the Final Shape as "a fire without fuel, burning forever, killing death, asking a question that is its own answer, entirely itself".

The Witness itself stated that the Hive had misunderstood its vision of the Final Shape, becoming too fixated on the idea of destroying all "unnecessary" entities in the universe and extrapolating the Final Shape to be a single being or entity which had destroyed all other things in the cosmos. In contrast, the Witness' Final Shape entailed the creation of a simplified, "perfected" version of reality in which all sentient beings would continue to exist, albeit in a frozen, timeless form.

Having extensively studied the Hive and their beliefs, Toland, the Shattered seems to have come to a similar conclusion as the Hive regarding the nature of the Final Shape. In his writings, Toland describes the universe as being ruled by conquest and domination even at its most fundamental level, and claims that the universe will inevitably come to be ruled by those which have defeated all opposition to their rule, eventually achieving a level of absolute dominance such that nothing can exist except by their consent.

The Winnower's Final Shape

As described in Unveiling, the Winnower promotes a philosophy of might-makes-right and "survival of the fittest," claiming that only those things which must exist should exist and that any entity which cannot defend its own existence is morally equivalent to that which has never existed in the first place. As a result, it encourages its followers and those that have read Unveiling to destroy their enemies, reject the ideals of peace and cooperation, and pursue ever-greater power, so that they might eventually become the Final Shape.

The Vex's Final Shape

As described in Unveiling, the Vex are the descendants of the "Final Shape" that repeatedly arose in the state which preceded the universe, referred to as the "flower game". In their current incarnation, they seek to become the Final Shape once more by weaving themselves into reality at its most fundamental level, thus becoming the only entities in existence - a goal described as the "pattern" by Praedyth and the "convergence" by Osiris.

Trivia

• While it was never confirmed, the Vex's predicted future following the destruction of the Undying Mind revealed a simulation of a monolith situated above the Last City, which may have been the Vex's attempt to simulate the Witness' successful realization of its Final Shape.

List of appearances

• Destiny: The Taken King (First mentioned)
• Destiny 2: Forsaken (Mentioned only)
  • Season of Opulence (Mentioned only)
  • Shadowkeep (Mentioned only)
  • Season of Arrivals (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Lost (Mentioned only)
  • The Witch Queen (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Haunted (Mentioned only)
  • Lightfall (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Deep (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Witch (Mentioned only)
  • Season of the Wish (Mentioned only)
  • The Final Shape (First appearance)
  • Episode: Revenant (Indirect mention)
• Entelechy (Mentioned only)