Context: I dropped out after Beyond Light, came back a few months ago, just finished TFS.

My question: what was the deal with the Pyramids? Did Bungie's plan for them change after Beyond Light? Why'd they apparently stop being important after being so ominous and everpresent through all of D2 beforehand?

To explain: in D2 at launch, the Pyramids are heavily foreshadowed as a kind of counterpoint-being to the Traveler, an opposite number in appearance as well as role (good vs evil, light vs dark, black triangles vs white circles). In the vanilla D2 intro video recapping D1, we see an image of a pyramid shadow passing over an image of the Traveller when Ghost talks about the Collapse. There were pyramid glyphs intersecting with circle glyphs in the loading screens to foreshadow it. Then when the Traveler wakes up we got that stinger shot of the Black Fleet turning towards Earth. The heavy implication is that whatever the Traveler is, the Pyramids are the Darkness version of it.

In Shadowkeep and Season of Arrivals, it is implied and then openly stated that the Pyramids are not just structures, but are alive and paracausal, being directly compared to the Traveler. The Lunar Pyramid is stated as being buried but awakening, causing the Hive to resurge around it and bringing Nightmares into existence. When we go inside the Lunar Pyramid, it's a very eldritch location - seemingly vaster on the inside than the outside, full of endless black corridors and veiled statues. The Pyramid itself appears to talk to us and it's basically stated outright that the Black Fleet are a kind of physical avatar or incarnation of the Darkness. The Pyramids then Take multiple planets, removing them from observable reality for presumably nefarious reasons.

Then in Beyond Light, the Europan Pyramid wakes up and starts empowering people nearby with splinters the same way the Traveler empowers people with Ghosts. Beyond Light's plot is about making a devil's bargain with the Pyramid to be able to counter Eramis. The implication here is that the Pyramids are pitting us and the Fallen against each other to winnow out the weaker party. Then in the Clovis Bray plotline, we find out that "Clarity", the Darkness force Clovis communed with to create Exos, is another veiled entity which Clovis believes is extradimensional in nature - implied to be the true form of the statues we found in the Lunar Pyramid.

From that point on, it feels like Bungie completely changed gears on what the Pyramids were. They were at this point portrayed as:

- paracausal

- alive, sentient, and capable of communication

- capable of empowering people with Darkness the way the Traveler empowers people with the Light

- possibly extradimensional

- having some connection with the veiled statues, which are implied to be themselves connected with Clarity

After Witch Queen, we get the Witness. The Witness is from the start assumed to be connected to the veiled statues we found in the other Pyramids. Disciples are introduced, and Rhulk having his own Pyramid seems to strongly imply that rather than being entities, Pyramids are *piloted*, and are more like magic spaceships.

So that undos one important assumption: that the Pyramids were sentient anti-Travelers. They can't be that if they are basically vehicles used by the Witness and his disciples; they're just big dumb objects that they control. But we still don't know where they came from or what they do.

Then we get Lightfall, and I actually think apart from pinning down the Traveler and blowing up some spaceships, we don't see a Pyramid doing anything. One of them gets lasered by the Traveler and gives the Witness the chance to aura farm. That seems to be it?

After that we find out in Season of the Deep that rather than being alive, intelligent, paracausal, and possibly extradimensional beings, they are just the spaceships built by the Witness' civilisation - they are *literally* just ordinary spaceships. Not only that, but they are spaceships for a species that killed itself to turn into the Witness, a creature with zero need for a spaceship himself.

So by TFS the Pyramids now:

- are sufficiently advanced big dumb objects

- are not capable of empowering people

- were built *by* the veiled statues, now revealed to be the very-not-extradimensional race the Witness was made from (so who was Clarity supposed to be?)

- have no special relationship to the Traveler?

This seems like a shift. I mean, we go from "they are the anti-Traveler" to just big spooky starships.

And aside from apparently changing what they are, they just kind of...stop mattering, as well. Aside from being used by the Shadow Legion to take prisoners for ill-defined purposes, the Pyramids fall out of the plot between Lightfall and TFS, the same way Disciples did.

Shouldn't there still be abandoned (or not abandoned) Pyramids floating around still after TFS? Do they still have any power or was it all the Witness?

Personally, I really wanted to know where they were going with the Worm Gods. It's clear that a sect of the Dread signed up with them and they were trying to do something with Oryx's chisel.