User:Tacitus/Arcana

Miscellaneous esoteric lore and apocrypha. This is not to be taken as "canon" per se, not directly, but may serve as background for some worldbuilding choices.

Genesis
''The following is a rough, basic outline for the Daybreak Continuum's version of the Precursor backstory. I don't plan on making it official or "canon" anytime soon, for similar reasons J.R.R. Tolkien was hesitant to release the Silmarillion in his lifetime; because explicitly laying out the setting's entire historical background will inevitably destroy some of the magic, even as it opens other doors. Since the alluded background history is a big part of what made Halo's past compelling, I plan to keep it that way for now. But it's good to have some sort of basic framework so as to not end up with an empty Mystery Box.''

The Origins
The Precursors appeared in our galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago, maybe before the first multicellular life on Earth. They either came from elsewhere, or arose from one of the early meta-civilizational continua of the Milky Way. Whatever the case, the were the first known civilization to arise to long-term supremacy in this eon of the galaxy. If there had been a meta-civilizational continuum before them, it had disappeared billions of years before their time.

The Precursors were powerful. Perhaps they began as something like our "smart" AIs, emergent minds arising from biological neurons being encoded onto quantum substrates. But as for what they became, to call them "AI" is alike saying you or I are unicellular organisms. Over millions of years, the Precursors reached a stage of being where any manner of material existence and even cognitive makeup was a matter of choice, as trivial as trying on different clothes. They lived in vast quantum computing networks and as biological or post-biological bodies, and myriad combinations thereof.

The Precursors were endlessly creative and curious. They began by simulating the universe with infinitely different variables and outcomes, and it amused them, but simulations could only go so far. They weren't the real thing.

So they got their metaphorical hands dirty. They created and experimented with life for hundreds of millions of years; nudged evolution's blind hand in different directions here and there, plucked species from their homeworlds and seeded them elsewhere, sometimes with select variables modified. And they watched them build and struggle and grow, and they saw that it was good. Perhaps they involved themselves directly, as biological/hybrid constructs, or worked through intermediaries, other starfaring civilizations gently guided to do the Precursors' bidding. For hundreds of millions of years, the galaxy was their petri dish. Eons were as moments to them.

As we know, they relished in life's interaction with the cosmos; the collision of civilizations, the infinite permutations of exchanges that arose as species and groups met. When a species (or an entire evolutionary lineage) had had its time in the galactic limelight, perhaps the Precursors might step in and store them as data, only to reseed those species millions of years later to see how different variables changed things. Like a kid playing with toys and putting them back to the box, only to return to them later. Or not, if they found new and better toys.

The Terror
But in their search for higher answers, the Precursors came across some upsetting yet inevitable truth about life, the universe, and everything. We don't know what that truth was, and likely our monkey brains could never comprehend it in full. Maybe they understood that their reality was a construct, a mirage reflected on a surface that did not exist. Reality was also unstable, and could be rewritten on a whim. For all their power even they could not see beyond the mirage, or even know when their own reality had shifted (though perhaps they felt evidence of this in some post-biological version of deja vu). To know this was terrible to them, and they were fearful. And so they sought to master reality, and when they could not, they sought to escape it.

They discovered potential ways to escape and look beyond the curtain. But there would be no going back, no return to their reality. And they didn't know what awaited on the other side. But it was tempting, and it stuck with the Precursors even as they began to grow bored of their experimentation.

The final impetus to go was the Flood. The Precursors had some forewarning and -knowledge of the Flood; how much and what kind, we don't know. Maybe they had even originally fled it to the Local Group and our galaxy. But now, they saw there was something anomalous going on in the nearest galaxies. And now, that something might be upon them in just a few million years, even sooner. So they looked into it and studied it however they could, from a distance, using sensors that reached into layers of slipspace most civilizations don't even know exist.

The Precursors had weapons that might be capable of combating the parasite, and things beyond weapons, bound in black holes and neutron stars, only to be unleashed in extremis. But they realized that whatever happened, the Flood could not be allowed to come into contact with them. They were incomprehensibly powerful, but the Flood corrupts everything. One way or the other, it turns every weapon against its makers, every intelligence against its own interests. And if it corrupted the Precursors themselves, it would be all over. Not just for the galaxy, but potentially the universe, unless there were entities even more powerful than they to stop them. They couldn't count on that and they didn't want to.

Weapons of vast, unimaginable power were unleashed on the nearest galaxies to stave off the Flood, but the Precursors knew this would only buy time; perhaps millions of years, but to them this was but an eyeblink. The Flood would survive in some form, and it would find its way to the Milky Way eventually.

So the Precursors fled. We don't know where; perhaps into the interstices of slipspace or even beyond, or simply consigned themselves to oblivion, convinced there would never be anywhere to run. Some may've physically fled.

Anyway, the Precursors left the galaxy, perhaps the physical universe altogether as the Forerunners would later believe. Their experiments ceased, and both subject species and budding test populations were left to their own devices. This didn't happen overnight, and it took perhaps up to a million years or more for the last of the Precursors to depart or become unrecognizable as anything that could be called a capital-P Precursor.

The Inheritors
As the legacy of the Precursors faded into myth, future species fought each other for galactic dominance. This is when the idea of the Mantle was born, in those murky eons that followed the Precursors' passing. We don't know if the Precursors imprinted the idea of the Mantle on some civilizations or if it arose independently based on mythologization, but ultimately it's unimportant. Each species sought to assert themselves as the Great Ones' rightful inheritors, yet they were all far lesser than the galaxy's former overlords. There were some who resisted, but the idea of the Mantle and reclaiming the Precursors' legacy was too powerful, too tempting.

These were the times of the Successors, or the Inheritors. These cultures imitated the Precursors and their ways to the best of their respective abilities and in way they thought the Precursors had behaved. They uplifted and relocated populations, tutored developing species in their infancy. Each had different quirks and ways in which they carried out their stewardship; some were cruel and harsh, others more caring and gentle, but all sought the same goal - their species or metaspecies reigning over other life. But try as these cultures might, they could not reach the heights of their forebears. All were destined to crumble, fall and eventually be replaced.

Circa 200,000 BCE (or some millennia earlier, we cannot be sure), it came the turn of the Forerunners as we know them. Their ancestors, a group of hominids (perhaps the best and brightest of their time) were plucked from Earth and seeded on a world in the neighborhood of the Orion Complex, where their "mentors" gave them a nudge to get started in the whole civilization business. We don't know who those mentors were and where they went, and it's not important. But they imprinted the Mantle narrative into the cultural consciousness of the displaced hominids. The Forerunners - Reclaimers, as they called themselves - arose in might. By that time their predecessors were already declining and weakened by internal strife. And so the new Reclaimers took over, as many had before them, imitating and adopting many of the ways that characterized the Inheritors.

"Forerunner" is a translation, and it gets the nuance of the original word wrong. For one, it isn't the name of a species, but a title. And we're already familiar with a more accurate translation- Reclaimer. This is what the Forerunners called themselves, and this is what Forerunner constructs recognize when they identify their makers' kind.

So the Forerunners were human. They would not have looked anything like any group of modern humans, and would indeed likely look strange to us due to over two hundred millennia of morphological drift coupled with layers of artificial self-modification over many generations. But on a genetic level, such superficial differences would barely register as a blip. They would be as "human" as Neanderthals, Denisovans and other species of our genus, and as unquestionably related. Perhaps they, too, were more akin to a "metaspecies" as different populations settled different worlds, and diverged both naturally and artificially; some living at the peak of technological advancement and plenty, and others in a planet-bound existence with Bronze or Iron Age technology, and even states yet more primitive.

The Reclaimers fought various secondary civilizations, especially before their rise to primacy. Like all galactic civilizations, they fought splinter groups of themselves. Maybe they even fought another group of uplifted hominids. Eventually, they had their rival civilizations pacified, and they were allowed to reign supreme. The Reclaimers had various species in their empire, but all of them in a subject status - allowed space travel and commerce with one another, but under the Reclaimers' watchful eye. The Forerunners sought to care for their subjects' needs, drowning them with metaphorical bread and circuses until they forgot to even want greater things.

But the Mantle was a trap. By imprinting - intentionally or otherwise - future civilizations with the idea that one species should rule over others, the Precursors doomed the vast, eclectic, information-gathering, processing and problem-solving units that are galactic civilizations into homogenization and complacency. This stifled the uniqueness, competition and exchange that drive innovation and growth, and doomed galactic civilization to face the Flood largely with a single mindset with only minute variance. The Precursors may have seen this as unity, a desirable state to help the galaxy prepare for the Flood if and when it did arrive, but what it resulted in was helplessness and decadence.

And this is what the Librarian realized as she walked in her garden, her species' long-lost cradle of life. The next cycle could not be like the untold prior ones. It would be unique, for it would arise for the first time without the Mantle's influence. A new dawn for the galaxy.

The Hydaspes Account
[This text is of unknown origin and authorship, and is suspected to be a second- or third-hand translation of a lost original. While obviously embellished (and possibly fictional in its entirety), this appears to corroborate our other findings regarding continued encounters with the same (or similar) individual throughout history, as well as providing unique insight as to some of the culture of our ancestors. However, more data is required to ascertain its historicity.]

Though little is known of those times, even [fragment missing], it was said that in times of great need the elders of the Sundered Tribes would parley in the light of the Old Sun and raise a mighty champion, a war-chief of no equal, to safeguard the tribes of Man against those who would threaten them.

''He has been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh. He has been called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the universe grows dim and cold. He is bestowed with uncanny strength and speed and resiliency by arts long-forgotten, and he knows the ways of war like none other; for since the dawning of the world, death has been his sole consort.''

''A great feast is prepared for him, and precious gifts are laid at his feet. His body is anointed with scented oils; in mighty armor is he clad, a relic from the Age of Cyborgs; and a helm of like design is placed upon his head. Weapons are brought to him, that he may carry out his duties. He then sets forth to the stars, and the stars themselves feel his coming. For his is th% [fragment missing]''

''He will descend from the heavens like a flaming star, and a trail of fire shall follow in his wake; and the people shall look to the sky to rejoice in his coming. His foes will cower before him and flee, but he slays them; and they trip and fall upon the corpses of their fallen brethren; none can withstand him, and the blood of the enemies of Mankind flows in great rivers. Woe be upon those who stand against the Chief of Cyborgs!''