: WHAT?! Where are you getting this info? Is this a joke?
: You're messing with us right?
Only partly. That post was a half-joke, but it is based on an actual theory of mine. The biggest, most involving and frightening theory of all, because nothing ever mentions any connection to it directly anywhere, but all the little unsolved bits of evidence and theory tie neatly together with this one idea of mine, and it terrifies me to think that Bungie might have actually planned all this... or not.
It started with the 16th level of the first Myth. Someone pointed out that only Dwarves can pick up the crystals in "Smiths of Muirthemne" - hence, the Smiths must have been Dwarves! This wasn't very compelling evidence, but people says "Yeah OK, whatever", and accepted it as there was nothing against it.
Myth II enhanced that idea, though, with the fact that the ghosts of the masons who built the Mausoleum of Clovis in Muirthemne were Dwarves. It also introduced the evidence that the Smiths were spider-cultists, which makes sense considering they build the Tain. Then, you will note, that the Dwarves around the Great Devoid know much of spiders, having legends of them running about in their tunnels and such. Also, on the walls of Muirthemne (in "Walls of Muirthemne"), there are spider engraving, so if the masons, who were Dwarves, worshiped spiders, as did the Smiths, and all of them worked in Muirthemne, AND the Dwarves have close ties to the spiders, then it makes sense that the Smiths, Masons, Spider-cults... all were the same group of Dwarves.
Now things start to get weirder. The Dwarves are experts in magical technology, and the Smiths particularly in interdimensional technology (see the Tain). In the comic Tales from Myth TFL we see that there are shrines in the Tain that lead to some aetherial other place, and that when human bodies near these shrines they are magically zapped and the soul transported across the realm - and a Spider Queen grows out of the corpse's skull.
So, the Tain does a lot of stuff with interdimensional magic. What other interdimensional magic do we know of? The Fetch. Now I know it's jumping to conclusions to say that the two instances of interdimensional magic we know of are the same dimension, but look at the supporting evidence. One - where did the Fetch come from? Balor summoned them. What prior instance of interdimensional magic do we know of Balor/Connacht using? The Tain. Then there's the physical appearance. Fetch we see as human because of their skins; but what we've seen of them outside their skins - the spines down their backs, their horns - seems to suggest to me a very different kind of physiology, perhaps partially insectoid. Now go look at the gate on Smiths of Muirthemne. There's a female horned thing giving birth - what other female horned things do we know of? Fetch. And what are they doing carved on the Tain gates, then? Perhaps the Smiths knew them from the other realm, the Spider-realm.
A minor bit of evidence is lightning. Balor had green lightning. Balmung has yellow lightning. All of the white lightning that we know of, with the exception of the Bow of Furious Incandescance and that stuff Myrdred throws at Soulblighter (though that could be Tain-related) comes from the Fetch and from Tain devices.
Now things start to get really interesting, when we take into account the Great Devoid. GURPS mentions that some speculate it may end in another dimension, though the Dwarves, whose many tunnels sometimes connect to it, dismiss this as nonsense. Spiders are earliest known in Dwarven legends, and the Dwarves live around the Devoid. What if the Spider came up from their realm through the Devoid, the Dwarves began to worship them and their gods, and now they don't want humanity to know what's at the bottom of the Devoid. See also that giant Fetch spirit that shoots out of the Devoid at the end of the last level of TFL.
Now then, where did the Devoid come from? The Callieach blew up and created it. Why would Callieach blowing up create a portal to another realm? Well, what if the Callieach were FROM that other realm, and didn't actually kill themselves but instead bored a passage through reality back home to their world? This ties in to the Trow - if the Callieach were sent by the Spider-gods, then could the other races the Trow fought also have been sent by them? What if the whole cycle is set up by them?
What's this about the Old Gods though? We know the Ghols worship the Old/Dark Gods. The Ghols also live around the Devoid. Could the Old/Dark gods be the SAME GODS as the Spider Gods? In that case, it would make sense that they would be behind the cycle, because Wyrd supposedly tricked the Dark Gods when he created the world, so they would want to destroy it.
Now things start to get really conjectureified, and most of this next stuff I don't really wholeheartedly believe myself. In fact, I wrote it as a story behind a netmap (!) for someone! But it still has some theorietical credence. The theory began when the person said they needed a story for a big crater-map, and the first crater I thought of was the Deep. According to GURPS, the Deep was created where a "piece of the sun" fell to earth - a big firey hunk of something tumbled from the sky and cratered. It occurred to me: what if a piece of the comet fell here? And this story/theory came to mind:
In the beginning, the Old/Dark/Spider Gods ruled over a world inhabited by beings like the Spiders, Fetch and Callieach. Then a comet appeared in the sky, and from it came Wyrd, Nyx, and their son Segoth. The comet was a portal to another realm, the One Dream. Wyrd and family had come here to create a vision that Wyrd had had in the One Dream. So he picked a world - the Old Gods' world - and started to craft his vision, drawing magics from the One Dream. But he and Nyx had creative differences; Wyrd wanted to make his vision on the Balance/Imbalance line of the chaos/order/balance division the Dark Gods had established on this world. Nyx wanted to put it on the line of perfect balance. Wyrd did what he wanted, but Nyx got bitchy and made the Trow to dominate his land, and spat on the most perfect chaos/order/balance spot of his world, creating Tharsis. Then she went to make the Faraway.
The Dark Gods didn't like this one bit. They cut off their son Segoth's head and hurled it to the earth. Then they shattered Wyrd's link to the One Dream, the comet, and threw the 49 pieces of it to the earth as well. In vengance, Wyrd banished the Dark Gods and all their kind to another, icky realm, but left the portal to our realm in a millenial orbit, perhaps because he had no power to do otherwise, or perhaps so they could watch their old world - who knows.
Wyrd, now almost powerless, could not stop the Trow on his lands. The Dark Gods tried, though; every thousand years as they passed by, they would create a race to attack the Trow, but inevitably failed. They finally shatter a piece of their comet off into the Trow lands, creating the Deep, and through it send their own avatara to the world, the Callieach, who dealt a mighty blow to the Trow, but still died. Then they gave up for a while.
The Trow had finally weakened to the point that Wyrd could create his own races, the Younger Races of humans, fir'Bolg, Dwarves, Oghres, Forest Giants, Myrkridia, etc. They eventually overcame the Trow dominance and established their own tribes and later empires. He established a pattern of balance here, where every thousand years a champion of chaos and a champion of order would clash, and alternately win, keeping the world in relative balance.
The Dark Gods took this opportunity anew; they used the Younger Races against themselves. Every thousand years, one of them - the Leveller - would possess a one of the human Champions and push him over the edge of his affiliation into imbalance, driving him to destroy all the others for the sake of his obsession. But the way their orbit synched with Wyrd's cycle, approaching from opposite directions each side, they could only win half the time, when approaching from the east, where it is most imbalanced to begin with.
And thus the cycle was begun :)
