Cocytus Gate may be different than what we think, and how the Nine are still a mystery.

Back in the Season of the Drifter, we got a lore book called Dust. In it, we follow a Cryptarch, Lavinia, on the trail of the Nine which leads her to the Cocytus Gate.

Lavinia swears and beats her suited fist against her helmet. She's trapped in Cocytus! The last time the Awoken trapped anyone here, those poor souls went utterly insane. The doomed crew of the Dead Orbit scout ship Sophia called this place A113, an innocent catalogue number; they had no idea that the gates aboard—once a Golden Age experiment—had been captured by the Hive deity Crota. Those gates consumed them all.

Now Crota is gone, and Lavinia has gambled everything that the portals have fallen into other hands. Ahamkara make the unreal real—Calus's ship is surrounded by a halo of unreal dark matter, like a ring of probing hands, Guardians can manipulate reality itself—there is a pattern here, a story, and it leads to Cocytus, to what these gates might do.

So what do these gates do?

EVENT 1 TIME 524:03:11 Portal 3 emitted a living organism. Death was immediate. Autopsy team reports a spherical body, radius one point one meters, surfaced in hydrocarbon tar. Deep, evenly spaced "throats" converged on a central cavity perhaps intended to serve as lung and stomach. The body consists of an undifferentiated tissue of primitive cells. A basic spasm reflex forces air down the throats. Without enzymes to catalyze metabolism, the organism could not survive. Cell death occurred instantaneously throughout the mass. There were no provisions for self-repair or reproduction.

Lavinia reads this again, horrified and fascinated. Something on the far side of the gate is learning to assemble atoms, molecules, even haphazard life... something from a world of darkness and dust, probing its way into our structured existence, trying to cobble together a message, an emissary, a body...

Hm, what the fuck, right? Well, with this newest book we get this curious experiment from Clovis Bray on Transtemporal Crossing. More simply, time travel.

J.W.] Countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… //Pull the tether and bring them back.//

C.B.] Where are they?

J.W.] The tether appears to be stuck.

C.B.] Pull harder.

J.W.] //Tighten the winch.// It looks like it may snap. Maybe they like what they've found.

C.B.] Or something is holding them there.

J.W.] It's giving. Here they come. (whip noise) (splashing sound)

C.B.] Oh, disgusting… you smell that? It's permeating through the glass. What are we looking at?

J.W.] Ugh, looks to be complete cellular deterioration. They're just… mushy goop, for lack of a better term.

So there is something on the other side of this gate trying to time travel to ours, and when Lavinia jumped through, she became part of the Nine, after she died of course. But surprise surprise, guess who stole Lavinia and brought her back to life? A certain Witch we all know...