Natah

The echo on Uranus

When the Tenno meet unfamiliar drones in the depths of Uranus, an ancient being wakes: Hunhow. The name he calls Lotus by shakes years of trust in a single word — Natah.

Lotus is Hunhow’s daughter. In the Old War she was sent to infiltrate the Orokin order, turn the Tenno against their masters, and then destroy the Reservoir.

The tomb Tyl Regor opened

Hunhow’s return does not happen by itself. The Grineer scientist Tyl Regor breaks the seals while investigating the Sentient tombs beneath the oceans of Uranus. He is looking for old technology to cure Grineer genetics; instead he wakes one of the greatest minds of the Old War.

Oculyst drones move through the system like Hunhow’s eyes. As the Tenno scan them, Lotus grows uncharacteristically anxious and withholds information about the mission. Teshin questions that behaviour, because he considers it dangerous for the Tenno to trust Lotus without knowing whom she answers to.

The quest thus sets up two questions. Will Hunhow attack again? And, more personally: is Lotus protecting the Tenno by real choice, or is this still part of a running Sentient plan?

The final order never carried out

Because crossing the Void wounded Sentient fertility, Natah believed she could never be a mother. The bond she formed with the Tenno offered her another kind of motherhood. Rather than destroy the children she hid them, and chose the Lotus identity that carries Margulis’s likeness.

Telling Natah, Lotus and Margulis apart

Natah is the Sentient identity she was born into; Lotus is the identity she built to protect the Tenno and came in time to own. Margulis is a separate human being of the Orokin era. Ballas’s manipulation and Lotus’s appearance deliberately draw the three names together, but treating them as one person breaks the story.

By using the name Natah, Hunhow calls his daughter back to her “real” family. That language assumes the Lotus choice is false. From the Tenno’s side, the person who protected them for years is Lotus; that her origin is Sentient does not automatically void the bond they lived.

The choice of name at the end of The New War settles that distinction. Natah stands for the past, Lotus for the chosen duty, Margulis for the love and human shape she took as a model. The choice is not one of them erasing the others.

CANON NOTE — Lotus’s choice is questioned again in later quests through manipulation, memory and Ballas’s influence. Even so, the decision to protect the Tenno is a real and defining part of the narrative.

A war of families

To Hunhow the choice is treason. He sees Natah as his lost daughter and the Tenno as the enemy who stole her. Teshin, trying to bring Lotus’s secret into the open, shows the risk of the Tenno’s blind trust.

The tragedy in Hunhow’s view

Hunhow is not merely a commander who wants conquest. He is the father of a people who lost their power to reproduce on the return from Tau, and he experiences Natah’s choice of the Tenno as the loss of his line. That pain does not justify his actions; but it explains why he sees the children as enemies and the Lotus identity as a sickness.

That he later helps the Drifter against Ballas in The New War shows Hunhow is not absolute evil. Seeing his daughter used by Ballas, he can form a temporary alliance with an old enemy. The Natah quest is the first open act of that complicated family war.

Hunhow is not entirely stopped at the quest’s end; the presence of a larger coming assault is felt. Lotus keeps her identity, but the Tenno now know the past behind her face.

What did we learn in this chapter?

Lotus and Natah are not two people cancelling one another out but one being’s identities between duty and choice. Hunhow’s next move will target the Lua where the Tenno are hidden, and the truth of the Operator.