The Collector's Edition is now being received, so scans and videos about the Collector's Edition are going up today. Compiled by Eido through research and discovering ancient records going all the way back to the days of the Witness' precursors, we've received quite the picture of how the precursor civilization developed, and Eido's own realization about why the Witness acts the way it does. I'll put the following summary of the [i]Entelechy's[/i] contents under spoilers for those who do not want to see the information just yet: [spoiler]The discussions between RS and HNW in the communications reveal the social structure of the Precursors and what they were doing up until they were merged together into the Witness. HNW once set out on a project to terraform an entire star system, to make it a garden suitable for life. However, another civilization in the past arrived and wiped out all signs of life within the system. There were three factions among the Precursors who had a governing body called the Consensus: the Penitent, the Nihilists, and the Solipsists. It was the Penitent who would decide to enact the creation of the Witness, wiping out the Nihilists and Solipsists who dissented against it. A particular line within the text appears to prove speculation I've heard before, and have expressed on the forum here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/263544160?sort=0&page=0 Here's the text: [i]"After our exuviation, we will no longer know the shape of your absence. [b]What we are becoming will not be capable of doubt or dissent. [u]It will never have been capable of such things[/u].[/b] We will forget our pain, our strife, our petty grudges, our prejudices. It will no longer exist, and therefore will never have existed."[/i] Exuviation means "to shed". As Eido herself realizes, the Penitent chose what to forget, and to not allow for new possibility, but to destroy it, when they "shed" their existence to create the Witness. The Witness, quite literally, is incapable of doubt and dissent. It "knows pain", but the implication is the internal strife, grudges, and prejudices of the Precursors were "forgotten" by the Witness. What is still very much present is its barely-hidden rage and malice towards the Gardener and the Light. There is a civilization called the Noesis that was destroyed by the Witness, but it had never interacted with the Traveler. The contrast between how the Witness acted during the Whirlwind and the Collapse, and how it acted with the Noesis, is distinct and remarked upon by Eido. NOTE: There is also mention of a "Nightmare" who assailed the Noesis in the past, so it seems Nezarec was haunting them as well before the Witness' arrival. The Witness was swift, methodical, and thorough with the Noesis. It took entire planets, disassembled and reassembled structures, unraveled and sectioned living beings into slices. It "unmade" and "finalized" the Noesis. It also spoke to them, including the Noesis who composed the message Eido found. Contrast this to the gravitational weaponry the Witness used during the Collapse and the Whirlwind, with no evidence of the "slicing, anatomizing, and temporizing" that occurred with the Noesis. Instead, Sol was hit with natural disasters. Tidal waves on Titan; earthquakes, poisonous air and gravitational waves, all from different accounts. Eido compares it to theatrics and realizes why the Witness acted as it did during the Collapse. In the Inspiral entry[url=https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/irae#book-inspiral] Irae[/url], Mara Sov says that the Witness "cradles rage enough to burn the stars to cinders". Rasputin would also describe the Darkness, as it was known back then, as "[url=https://www.ishtar-collective.net/cards/ghost-fragment-darkness]directed and hostile[/url]". Eido realized that the Witness isn't indifferent to us. It sees us, and because both Humans and Eliskni were blessed by the Traveler, [b][i]it wants us to suffer[/i].[/b] It wants to crush us with despair, as much as it wants to burn anything and everything the Traveler has touched to the ground. In her final conversation with Mara Sov, Eido realizes the Witness' Final Shape is a state of compression. Combining a chosen past and limitless future into a "perfect forever", a state that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could ever be. But without the Light and the Traveler's power, the power that the Witness' power does nothing but mutilate and scar reality. It goes a long way to explain why so much of the environment in the Final Shape has a "dissected" look. It can take things apart, but it can't put them back together in the way the Light can. As a final note, there are a number of connections that seem to directly link the Precursors and the Vex together. In the first entry alone, we see that the term [final shape] is interchangeable with [summit] and [[b]Pyramidion[/b], written as [summit | Pyramidion | final shape]. The use of "glass-minds" to improve the predictive power of the Observatory to trim excess branches and leave behind the "strongest paths", with Eido mentioning the etymological overlap with the names of Vex Minds. The last entry from the Precursor duo was even found in a [i]Vex Minotaur core[/i], retrieved in the past from the Sol Divisive in the Black Garden by Uldren Sov. Does this mean the Precursors created the Vex? Honestly, I don't think so. Among the Observatory's readings that RS shows HNW, among them is "Machine-plagues carving their prediction engines into moons". It is entirely possible that the Precursors did encounter the Vex in the past, and used their radiolaria to create "glass-minds" to improve the Observatory's readings to the point where it sees events that will come to pass, such as the destruction of HNW's "garden". But the fact that the word "Pyramidion" is interchangeable with the Final Shape, when Vex machine worlds each have their own Pyramidion installation on them, is as direct as you can get.[/spoiler]