StarDestroyer.Net BBS

L: The Mantle. You still hold to that [fairy tale] after all that has happened? After this thing has consumed a million worlds? Can't you see? Belief in the Mantle sealed our doom, weakened our [protectorates], bred dependence and sloth. Our [so-called Guardianship] has stripped those we would keep safe of any capacity for self-defense! Were we such noble [Guardians] when we drew our line and abandoned billions to the parasite?

D: The Mantle has not failed! I've already razed scores of worlds - sterilized systems, routed and [disintegrated] the parasite! We're learning its tricks and strategies. We can halt this thing! I will not allow our people to follow in Their footsteps! There are no unstoppable forces in this universe. There are no immovable objects. Everything gives if you push hard enough.

L: And what about us, Didact? We've been irresistible and immovable for too long. Maybe it's our turn to give.
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// FRAGMENT ENDS
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D: Mendicant Bias is trying to prevent us from firing the Array. He speeds back to the Ark, but he won't succeed. Offensive Bias will stop him, and I will burn this stinking menace in your name.

And then?

I will begin our Great Journey without you, carrying this bitter record. They will not let me come to you nor will you allow me, a testimony to by sins and failures. We will go and walk the path of our Precursors, those who we cast down in their moment of need. Our time in [this galaxy] is over. We will run and rebuild anew, and carry with us the burdens of ongoing events. Those who come after us will carry the Mantle on their shoulders and will know what we bought with this [false transcendence] - what you bought, and the price you paid.
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// FRAGMENT ENDS
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Circa 80, 000 years ago
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The atmosphere below was a withering blanket of swirling clouds of fire; ash and smoke obscuring the surface. To the naked eye the burning ground, twisted and overturned mountains dotted by the left over ruins of grand cities over the wasted forests would have been indiscernible to the sky which churned angrily as if in reflection to what was going on the surface. Passively, these young eyes long accustomed to the fury and disciple that the Corps was capable of, I watched as hundreds of thousands of Seekers ravaged the planet accompanied by billions of automated weapon-drones, Attack Runners and their successors, Devastators, brought cleansing flame to the tainted cities. They were tiny, impossible to see but their effects were always seen even from high orbit. I remembered the last time I saw my people bring their complete damnation unto another race, the last war I fought before my sleep, awakening, death and ultimate rebirth. Fifty years the Humans held of my relentless attackers, fifty years that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Forerunners and the beginning of the endless war.

I recalled watching as my brothers and sons descended down to Charum Hakkor in greater numbers than now, watching as mountains were toppled, as vast cosmopolitan cities vanished overnight and the human defenses buried in the Mantle of the planet were ripped out. But what I had seen before, that these eyes hadn’t seen, paled in comparison to how far we Forerunners had advanced in the face of an impending threat. The dismantling of the Prometheans, the fall of the Warrior-Servants from its high standing had not dulled their wits, had not made them weak. It had only strengthened their resolve and furthered their studies in improving their war machines so they would be ready when their people called on them again. I was now witnessing what a thousand years of technological innovation and progress had wrought.

It frightened me.

I had believed we had reached our pinnacle a thousand years ago when Faber first proposed the creation of Twelve Fortress Worlds, the Halo Array. An array of super weapons capable of doing the job of his caste in mere minutes yet they were weapons that violated the highest mandates of the Mantle. I remember fighting against Faber, bringing the heft clout of the Corps against the respectable and powerful Builders. It was a battle I lost and for that I was exiled. Others took my place and paid the price for it – the Promethean Order disbanded and her warriors scattered across the galaxy to die in isolation. I believed that the Fortress Worlds and their counter-parts represented the culmination Forerunner Astroengineering.

It was astonishing even for my eyes, burden by the actions and failures of a mind hundreds of years older than this body, the destructive power that were arrayed before me. I was certain a force a fraction of what I had commanded a thousand years ago would have leveled the defenses of Charum Hakkor within a handful of years. Yet we were fighting foe that defied conventional logic, a foe that didn’t have any logic in their movements, who advanced in the face of sterilization and, despite enormous odds, defied the will of the Forerunners and won.

This was the enemy that I was fighting now, an enemy that the Forerunners had waited too long to deal with while hiding behind subterfuge and their vaulted Fortress Worlds. It was an enemy that was led by the last of the Precursors and the greatest AI ever devised by my hands.

I turned away from the hardlight screen – the ships hulls wept over the screen – and turned towards the map of Galid. I was alone on the bridge, a fitting reminder that I alone held the fate of my people in my hands. My hands drifted among the shifting surface of Galid, feeling the rough holographic edges as my eyes watched the might of Forerunner military root out the infestation.

“Chilarch has reported Diadect.”

I paused in my motions and raised me head – and Glory stood there with the grace of a potential Promethean in a suit of armor. Had the Corps already constructed a new suit of armor already? The new suit was more form fitting than the one I wore, reminiscent of the earlier robe-like models that I recalled seeing prior to my exile. “What does he say?” I asked.

“His legion was ambushed;” she reported flatly. My armor’s Ancilla anticipated my thoughts and connected with the ships AI, the map zooming in to where I could see the infected hordes of Flood now resuming their expansion outward. “Several thousand corrupted War Sphinx’s and Juggernauts over took him. He reports that he lost several hundred Seekers with the potential for 36% being infected.”

My focus shifted to a cluster of drones which had finished eradicating a city tainted with the Flood.

“Sterilize the region.”

The drones turned, their shells combining into an oblong-shape. These drones had not existed when I fought the Humans, when I first learned about the Flood. They had been designed to build the Shield Worlds, to serve as the surface of the hardiest of worlds and to act as their defenders. The cluster was now gone, replaced by a single form racing across the surface. Glory waited, watching while I watched the combined fire of the amalgamation of drones cut a needle light across the continent, glowing arcs of light that expanded into enormous fires miles wide.

Among the fires they emerged, blackened and once-pristine armor of the Infected Seekers and War Sphinxes, the hulking machines twisted by the firepower leveled on them yet unwilling to relent.

“What about the other Legions?” I asked. Legions – a term that he had brought back into usage, forgotten by modern Warrior-Servants who had grown accustomed to smaller military formations.

“The infection is more rooted than expected Diadect,” she said more humbly. “The smaller continents have been pacified but Ty-ad and its surrounding continents have been sites of mounting infection rates.”

Expected but not wanted.

“Bring all Legions back,” I ordered, snapping the map off. There were other sites to deal with, worlds that weren’t yet consumed by the Flood. Galid was lost – it had been lost from the beginning but I had hoped to reclaim it. A naïve thought and one unlike me that had resulted in needless deaths. Was it the nativity of Bornstellar, the Forerunner who had unwittingly become the vessel for my mind? Was his mind affecting my judgment, I wondered? Now was not the time for reminiscing, not the time for questioning my minds coherency.

“Then what?”

Behind my visor, I gave her a surprised look. I had forgotten how young she was, how naïve she still was despite the hardships of that his war taking on all Forerunners from all ranks.

“We will destroy this system.”

So what do you think?
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There had once been a time when the Yearning Devotion would have inspired awe among the Forerunners. The Fortress-class vessels had been the most powerful ships designed and crafted by the Warrior-Servants, capable of assaulting the defenses of an entire world single handily. Automated weapon-ships numbered in the hundreds of billions could descend on any world with firepower surpassed only by Seekers and Assault Runners. The weapons on the ship were capable of cracking the surface of a world, capable of rendering a world inhabitable for centuries. The Warrior-Servants Corps had crafted hundreds, each supported by hundreds of thousands of Dreadnaughts and Cruisers. Our might had been unchallenged even by the humans. They had been great foes, technologically, but their skill in war had been average at best.

I would know. I destroyed them.

Yet the Yearning Devastation was nothing more than a glorified mining ship, shuttling vast quantities of drones to new worlds so that they would cut open, their riches ripped apart to service us. Only a handful of independent military vessels remained, shadows of what was once the pride of the Forerunner Navy.

Yet it was ironic that by destroying the humans I’d planted the seeds of my people’s destruction and fell into the panic that the Precursor had cleverly sown in my heart. Retribution, the Timeless One promised retribution and a continuance of a circle of rise and fall that had predated the oldest known race in the Universe. The Flood, the plague had ravished the ancient Precursors and they had been on the verge of overcoming it when our ancestors rebelled, cutting away the cure from them. The plague, what would become the Flood, had targeted the previous owners of the galaxy. Our creators, the shapers of Forerunner and Human, had taken their revenge millions of years after our ancestors rebelled against them.

The events of that time had been lost when our ancestors began the troublesome task of enforcing the Mantle, an ideology that the ancient Forerunners had created, across the galaxy. We had created the Mantle, the code of ethics that defined all aspects of Forerunner civilization and culture, a code that we all believed had been handed down by the Precursors. It was a lie, but a clever lie that had given our ancestors a purpose and a reason for being. Even now, even as my people, those who had the fortune of joining my fleet before the firing of the surviving Fortress Worlds known as the Halo Array, laboriously rebuild our civilization that had fallen to a ancient weapon crafted by our old enemies, they clung to the ideals of the Mantle even though it was no longer our burden to bear. But I no longer believed in it because it was a lie and while I led our remnants I could not hold unto a lie.

The ship sensed by want and reformed, a crescent-shaped console taking shape before me a holographic projector taking shape into Novi Ghibalb. The world we claimed for ourselves was in the center of a nebula rich with young stars. I was reminded of the Orion Complex, the birthplace of Bornstellar, the manipular who had unwittingly become the vessel for my mind, for the mind of the Diadect. His memory was my own, or was it the other way around? Was I but an echo of the murdered Diadect, a container for his mind or was I the Diadect reborn? The Librarian had believed the latter, had embraced me with the safe love for her lover.

I had not.

Was that the reason why she pushed herself further and further into the infected regions of the galaxy, rescuing specimens even as the front advanced and I sought to find ways to out maneuver the Flood’s relentless advance? Had I pushed my wife, the wife of the last Diadect (myself?) away and so unintentionally was forced to abandon her on Eden-Tyre when the time came? I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know – I didn’t need to punish myself with the events tens of thousands of years into the past nor did I need to reminiscence on what could have been. I needed to live in the present and adapt the mistakes of the past to the now.

Worldcrafting was beyond us, the great astroengineering projects that had pocketed the galaxy were closed to us even after so long. We could no longer create worlds or experiment with them, tame young violent stars or shape the heavens to suit our vision of beauty. We were broken civilization, marred by ugly truths and horrid failures that we couldn’t blame on anyone else except ourselves. The Forerunners were a shadow of their former selves, but we held ourselves high and we persevered. I wondered if the others wondered why I had led our convey of ships beyond the galactic rim, traveling to a galaxy three million light-years away? We understood just how vast the galaxy unlike the races we took under our charge (the same races we abandoned to the maw of the Flood.) We’d been content. The others wanted to return to the galaxy, to reclaim the Mantle and resume study of the Flood.

They’d learned nothing.

I gripped the edges of the table, my armor slipping into the indentations that formed around my tightening fist. We weren’t worthy of the Mantle – we’d never been worthy of such an esteemed belief. It was our arrogance that brought an end to the Precursors and it was arrogance that destroyed our race. How could any reasonable Forerunner still believe we had a right to uphold the Mantle? We no longer had a place in a galaxy we’d been force to sterilize in order to save it. The cycle would begin again, the Reclaimers would come to dominate the galaxy and we would ensure they understand the legacy that we would leave for them: Our blended history, our might and flaws, our actions and inactions, the mistakes we made and the triumphs we achieved so that they would, hopefully, not fall as harshly as we did.

We rebuilt in a grand fashion after we finished our two year trek to this galaxy, crossing the Intergalactic Void until we came to the galactic ‘edge.’ My grip lessened and I sat back, sitting on a chair that had formed from beneath me. In my campaign against the Flood I discovered many things – the identity of the Timeless One and why the Precursors had deemed it necessary to lock him away on Charum Hakkor, the true extent of the war and how far the Forerunners had fallen since the war with the humans and more. But the most important thing I found was a ship long abandoned on a distant world near the center of the galaxy, a ship that bore the ancestral bodies of Forerunner, Human and Precursor. The Old Tongue had not been hard to translate, all Forerunner languages stemmed from the tongue of the Precursors, and it was only minutes before I understand why the Precursors fell, what they were called, what they had done, why my people rebelled against such a neglectful and abusive race but most important of all, I learned where this ship had intended to go – where the Precursors fled.

Here.

Someone had come.

“What is it?”

Moth… Bornstellar’s Mother strode in with false bravado, an uncertain look in her eyes, a look that I recalled seeing only once before when I evacuated my body’s old home before the Flood had arrived. It had been a victory, albeit a bitter one when I destroy the star to wipe out a fleet of Flood vessels. Interesting: The first word I thought at seeing her was Mother, but that wasn’t a title that I could give to her because she wasn’t my mother. She was Bornstellar Makes Ever Lasting’s Mother, the mother of my body, not that of my mind. Memories were being involuntarily dredged up now, memories that belonged to these youthful, memories that weren’t mine. I could imagine what she thought – seeing the malformed body of her son, a third Promethean, a third Warrior-Servant and a third Builder, standing before her, knowing that it was her son’s body that stood before her yet it was a body with a mind so much older, wiser and burdened with the guilt of failure, betrayal and righteous anger.

I waited.

Then we turned.

There was nothing to say between strangers.

“Report.”

“Several new worlds have been inspected and deemed acceptable for further exploitation,” said the Librarians AI, the same AI that had led Bornstellar to the Cryptum that had changed him into me. “Excavations reveal a preceding race had claimed the world before us.”

“How is this of interest?”

“They found a Precursor artifact. An Astria Porta.”