What's going on in The Edge Of Fate's story?

Okay, I think I can get this done in a few (long) paragraphs. Deep breath.

First basic Destiny story: the Traveler is a big magic orb that showed up in our solar system one day and started terraforming planets and giving us free shit, we had a Golden Age, then there was a big Collapse where bad aliens attacked The Traveler and humanity, but The Traveler sacrificed itself to protect humanity and released thousands of Ghosts, tiny little drones that can revive the dead. Today, most of the risen dead are the Guardians of the Last City, which is, as the name implies, the last major human settlement on Earth. The Last City is protected by the Vanguard, who are basically the main organization of the Guardians, with one main representative from each Guardian class (Titan, Warlock, and Hunter) as the leadership.

We just got done fighting a big long fight against The Witness, a very evil big bad who it turned out engineered The Collapse in the first place. We defeated it, but the alien races it brought along with it - the Vex, the Hive, the Fallen, the Cabal, the Taken, and the Dread - are still around with various new managers in charge.

The opening cutscenes show two things: First, Orin, the Emissary of the Nine, finally quitting her crappy job. Orin used to be a Guardian before The Nine recruited her to speak for them, which has not been a fun experience for poor Orin. The Nine are mysterious dark-matter beings that represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and The Sun (and are referred to by their Roman numerals I through IX respectively). They exist in a realm we cannot see, and cannot be brought into our world. They also have this weird guy named Xur who shows up at The Tower and sells us guns, but he’s not important to the story (at least, not yet). Second, The Nine sent us (the player) an invitation to go check out Kepler at the end of last season, and also sent Ikora Rey, the Warlock Vanguard, an invitation in the form of throwing a subway train at her. Pretty rude.

Upon arriving on Kepler, we get a distress call. The call turns out to be from Lodi, an oddly-normal human who doesn’t seem to know much of what’s going on. I won’t spoil what’s going on with him, or his friends, that’s for you to discover.

We also get an unwelcome surprise on Kepler: Maya Sundaresh, a Golden Age scientist who has survived through a lot of complex bullshit is alive and leading the Vex (who, historically, are a big hive-mind collective AI situation and not, like, working for some human). She’s doing this through the Echo of Command, a magic (or in Destiny terms, “paracausal”) McGuffin that gives her magic over the Vex. Her goal is to use some combination of the Vex’s time-travel capabilities and The Nine’s time-travel capabilities to go back in time to the Golden Age and save humanity from the Collapse, and reunite herself with her dead spouse, Chioma Esi. This would be a sweet love story if her plan to do so didn’t involve destroying our universe and timeline in the process.

We also meet the House of Exiles, a faction of Fallen who worship an anomaly on Kepler. This is another story for you to discover. If you’re unfamiliar with Fallen lore - they are an alien race that previously also was blessed by The Traveler, but The Traveler left them during their own collapse, so they’ve followed it to our solar system. Some of them are trying to defeat humanity to reclaim The Traveler’s Light, some are allies with us, and some, like the House of Exile, are out in search of other things to worship - in their case, a singularity and some weird fungus, it seems.

I think that’s everything? The last cutscene might not make much sense, so I recommend Googling it afterward (I won’t put an explanation here since I don’t feel like adding spoiler-tag technology to this site) if you’re confused.