Hello everyone! I am MattConrad and I am a new member of the Collective but have enjoyed reading Lore here long before I joined. This will be the first of hopefully many posts attempting to explain the mysteries and anomalies of the Sol system, its inhabitants, it's history, and beyond. It is well known that the Nine are a mysterious and, as often referred to, legendary group of beings, pseudo-beings, and/or artifact-like objects that exhibit extreme intellect and wisdom. They are also highly revered as a powerful and borderline feared group that rules areas beyond our current knowledge or whose status is lost to our current recollection. This post is my attempt at delving into who or what they are on a deep theoretical, factual, and speculative level. First things first I feel we ought to examine what might be the most helpful piece of grimoire we have been granted access to on the subject: Ghost Fragment: Legends 2. It reads as follows: [spoiler]NINE The Nine are survivors of the cis-Jovian colonies who made a compact with an alien force to ensure their own survival. The Nine are deep-orbit warminds who weathered the Collapse in hardened stealth platforms. The Nine are ancient leviathan intelligences from the seas of Europa or the hydrocarbon pits of Titan. The Nine arrived in a mysterious transmission from the direction of the Corona-Borealis supercluster. The Nine are the firstborn Awoken and their minds now race down the field lines of the Jupiter-Io flux tube. The Nine are Ghosts who pierced the Deep Black without a ship and meditated on the hissing silence of the heliopause. The Nine are the aspects of the Darkness, broken by the Traveler's rebuke, working to destroy us from within. The Nine is a viral language of pure meaning. The Nine are the shadows left by the annihilation of a transcendent shape, burned into the weft of what is.[/spoiler] I will tackle each of the nine descriptive pieces this offers in order to the best of my understanding. 1. I have seen many talk about this in great detail but most seem to miss something I find to be one of the most important parts of this line, [b][i]Cis[/i][/b]-Jovian. Most take this to simply mean colonies on Jupiter, however the key missing piece here is the prefix Cis- which actually means, "On this side of." This changes things quite a bit. In truth Cis-Jovian means on this side of Jupiter or closer to the sun than Jupiter. Now what can we take from this to aid our understanding of this description? I believe this means survivors of the collapse that lived on our colonies on Mars, Venus, Mercury, and even the Reef who made a pact with the invading forces of the darkness or some other alien force in order to survive. Now for some speculation, what do these survivors look like? I believe they are one and the same in race as the exotic black market trader, Xur. My reasons behind this come from his dialogue. He states his will is not his own and that the Nine control his actions to a certain extent he also carries himself in a hunched almost slave-like manner like he is used to being a bit of a pawn in his regular life led by the will of others. He also says that he had a choice and the Awoken did not. This leads me to believe that his group was one of these Cis-Jovian colonists who made a pact with the Aliens of the Nine to survive the Collapse because they willingly made the choice to change where the Awoken just transformed due to their location at the time of the collapse. This pact could give reason for why Xur has limited will and is tasked with jobs he has no option to deny. It is also likely the reason he has such a changed appearance from his pre-collapse self. He was changed by the alien race when the pact was made so he could survive the Collapse. As for more information on this I have more theories but will cut this here for now to save space and not become too speculative. 2. This one brings me to the only one of the nine who we know to have power and is possibly willing to help us. The Warminds of the deep solar system that weathered the collapse. It is known that the central commander of sorts of the pre-collapse Warminds is Rasputin. We also know that by activating the array in the cosmodrome during the Last Array mission on Earth we gave Rasputin the ability to retake assets lost in the collapse and command them once again. This likely means any Warminds that survived the collapse were among those assets Rasputin retook control of. Because of this I believe that there is a good possibility that Rasputin is reluctant to communicate and work with us because he now works with the Nine who are also reluctant to have direct dealings with us. Most of this is speculation however it has some merit in facts that I think are notable which is why I choose to mention it here. 3. This one is a hard one to speculate too much on simply due to the fact that this line is the only information we have on this part of the Nine. Leviathan intelligences both hailing from the depths of large bodies of liquid. One being the liquid water under-ice seas of Europa, the other from the liquid methane-ethane lakes of Titan. Both locations are thought of as potential life holding locations within our solar system or in Titan's case a precursor state to what modern day earth is. This could in theory give rise to the potential of life coming from these locations possibly ancient in origin, vastly intelligent, or both, but seemingly semi-dormant. The collapse could've woke them up and caused them to start acting as a powerful knowledge source of the solar system pre-collapse which would be beneficial but this is all pure speculation and can be taken or left where it sits until more information is available. This is one of 3 posts on this subject. The second can be found here: [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/142424020/0/0]Part 2[/url] The third can be found here: [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/142621762/0/0]Part 3[/url] Thank you for reading and please comment on this below if you have anything to add, discuss, or correct!