The Dawn arose. Like always. The Light prevailed against the Darkness.
Yet the fight never ended. For Light to mean anything, there must always be a Darkness to follow. And just as there is a Darkness, there is always a Light to give it meaning.
This held true since the beginning of time, since the primordial paracausality took shape into the materium of this reality.
Spartan-2 stood in his Throne World, a haven open to all who sought protection from the Darkness. As he stood there, he held in his hands a Vex Collective. Not just one individual vessel of the Vex, but an entire collective.
It had been a pet project of his ever since Maya Sunderesh had returned. He had collected a sample of radiolaria and began to cultivate it as a pet. However it grew to be much more than that, as new rivers of radiolaria flowed through his Haven, The Twilight Collective was born. A collective of Vex who swore themselves to The Dawn, to the paracausal and ontological meanings.
However this Collective had been... "stuck" in a sense on a specific moment in time, from before the arrival of Stasis. It kept simulating the same moment in time, rebuilding and reiterating moments from the past, as if it was trying to uncover some secret that had been lost.
After months of deliberation, the Twilight Collective reached a Consensus. It was missing a critical factor in its iterations.
It was missing Paracausality. While The Twilight Collective had been able to simulate and learn Hive Magic properly, it failed to simulate Paracausality.
It needed an outside variable it could not account for.
So it reached a natural conclusion.
In the center of The Tower, where events were usually built and held for Guardians, the Twilight Collective ripped open a gateway using Hive Magic, constructing a Vex Gate into their network. A Minotaur of the Twilight Collective stood outside the gate, offering the challenge to Guardians: Enter the Past, introduce the missing variables, earn rewards.
They had borne witness to how the Guardians and Lightbearers operated, how they were motivated by loot. And they knew Vex and Hive weaponry was enticing. But they also offered weapons of the past, weapons that had been ontologically "sunset."
There was a catch. Weapons and powers of the modern day were forbidden, as they were not of the simulation's time period, and such powerful equipment would afflict their calculations negatively. They would provide equipment, a starting point, and suppress the Guardian's Light to within the time period, using technology taken from The Witness and The Conductor.
Do you, Guardian, take the Challenge? Dive into the Past, discover the secrets they seek?