Forerunner

The Forerunners were an ancient civilization of technologically advanced beings who disappeared from the galaxy around 100,000 years before the present. Their feats of technology, architecture and megascale engineering are still without parallel, as demonstrated by many artifacts and installations that remain throughout the known galaxy. The Forerunners' interstellar empire was known as the Ecumene and encompassed millions of worlds at its height. Though records of the Forerunners are few and at times contradictory, surviving archives indicate that they based their society and way of life around the Mantle, the belief that it was their duty to hold stewardship over all other life. The Forerunner civilization came to an end after they encountered an extragalactic alien parasite known as the Flood; after three centuries of desperate war, the Forerunners activated a galactic network of superweapons known as the Halo Array as a last resort, wiping out all life in the galaxy. What became of the surviving Forerunners, if there were any, is uncertain.

Though merely one of many long-passed galactic civilizations, the Forerunners are the best-known of them all due to the prominent position they once held. Evidence of the Forerunners' civilization and technological prowess would later be discovered by younger races, some of whom would come to conclude those artifacts could only have been forged by divine hands. Such beliefs eventually gave rise to the alien theocracy known as the Covenant, who based their religion around a partly misinterpreted and highly mythologized reading of Forerunner history. The Covenant regarded all Forerunner technology to be holy, deriving much of their own technological base from Forerunner artifacts, and most notably believed the Forerunners had ascended to godhood through the firing of the Halos; by repeating the process, the Covenant believed they could follow in the Forerunners' footsteps. United under this promise, the Covenant flourished for over 3,400 years, converting multiple species to its cause before being shattered by a violent civil war.

History
Though little is known of the Forerunners themselves, a fair number of individuals have been identified by name or title in surviving records. The Kandonom Codex, for instance, names the Didact, the Librarian and the Master Builder as individuals of note in the Forerunners' final days. Numerous other names are also recorded; these would be ended up codified in the Covenant pantheon (specifically the pluralist doctrines, which emphasized the individual personages of gods) as greater and lesser Forerunner deities.

The Forerunners existed in a spacefaring status for at least 70,000 years, based on the dating of various sites conclusively identified as being Forerunner in origin. Differences in architectural styles are evident between sites from different eras, which likely indicate changing fashions as well as different subgroups of the Forerunner civilization. The Forerunners are believed to have held a preeminent status within the Orion Arm (and likely significant portions of the entire Milky Way) for at least twenty millennia, until their activity abruptly ceased in 97,445 BCE in what is now known as the Halo Event. Remnants of their civilization can be found on numerous worlds, including number of entirely artificial worlds of Forerunner origin found throughout the Orion Arm. Overall, the Orion Arm and specifically the neighborhood of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex appears to have been the center of their activity and the site of their oldest worlds, even as they established colonies throughout the galaxy at the height of their power.

Since the Forerunners' fall, various younger civilizations have come across the relics they left behind. While the Forerunners once controlled millions of systems, many of them highly built-up with artificial worlds, stations and more, a scant few of them survive to the modern age. It is known with relative certainty that in their war with the Flood, the Forerunners used scorched-earth tactics to deny the Flood access to their technology and even entire populations. Systems doomed to become fodder for the parasite would be systematically sterilized and entire artificial worlds dismantled by nano-viruses introduced into their self-repair systems. Another factor to explain the relative scarcity of intact Forerunner technology in the present is simple decay: while advanced, even Forerunner technology decays over tens of millennia without a self-replenishing supply of sentinels to repair it, which is the case on the vast majority of sites.

By the time of the rise of the Covenant, other civilizations active in the Orion Arm prior to them — the Jehioi, the Optem, and potentially others — had already stripped many relics clean of useful technologies. Consequently, intact and functioning Forerunner technology is exceedingly rare, especially on a large scale. Particularly in the regions near the Orion Complex, there are worlds with entire Forerunner megalopolises that now lay cold and dead, free of anything but a scant few artifacts. Most examples of Forerunner technology encountered by the Covenant are mundane items found in ruins of what are usually civilian sites and drifting starships or long-abandoned stations; this has not stopped the Covenant from making use of such technologies, however. Intact military technology is rare, but is found at times; the Covenant did discover less than a handful of shield worlds in their history, though only a pair of them were fully and consistently accessible. Another risk on installations of any importance are native defenses, which are at times so aggressive and powerful as to stymie any attempts at incursion.

Prior to the Human-Covenant War, humanity only had circumstantial evidence of the Forerunners; various vague artifacts and a handful of astronomical oddities hinting at ancient megaengineering. A small number of larger discoveries were cordoned off by the Office of Naval Intelligence as black sites over two centuries of interstellar exploration, though there was no consensus whether these findings were the works of one or more civilizations. The UNSC first learned of the Forerunners as a distinct culture through the second-hand knowledge of the Covenant, though it would not be until the final months of the war that the human scientific community was able to start building a more complete picture of the ancient civilization through data from various operations on Forerunner installations.

Biology and appearance
Due to the extreme scarcity of intact records and data, the exact anatomy of the Forerunners remains a mystery. Most Covenant sources agree that in their most common biological forms, the Forerunners were upright, four-limbed bipeds with a humanoid body plan, though it is commonly agreed that they could alter their forms at will, either subtly or extensively, to suit different roles, preferences and habitats. According to Covenant doctrine, such transformations demonstrated the Forerunners' divine mastery over mind, body and soul: they could sculpt flesh as a sculptor does stone, each individual being shaped to perfection according to their station. Cross-referencing of the original Forerunner sources has led human scientists to conclude this indicates Forerunners had developed very advanced biosculpting and neural enhancement techniques.

It is known that the Forerunners wore personal body-assist armor for much of their lives, with the armor having enormous cultural and social significance to the extent that no representation of an unarmored Forerunner survives. Likewise, no detailed depiction of a Forerunner face has ever been uncovered, as the few images of Forerunners depict them with what appear to be visors or energy fields covering their faces; it has been theorized that the Forerunners may have had a cultural taboo on showing their faces in public, or simply did not regard them as important. A few abstract or artistic representations seem to suggest the presence of two to four eyes, two nostrils, and a mouth. However, the exact arrangement and proportionality of these varies greatly by source, as do the head shapes; this is attributed to either creative interpretation, extreme ethnic variety, or changing fashions in biological modification throughout different eras.

The Mantle
A handful of records procured by the UNSC on the Ark have shed some light as to what appears to have been the Forerunners' guiding philosophy. It seems that the Mantle, or the Mantle of Guardianship, was the preeminent belief system or ideology in Forerunner society, based around the core belief that it was the Forerunners' moral duty as a culture to hold stewardship over other life. This involved interference in the development of less advanced cultures and species they encountered, incorporating those budding civilizations into the Forerunner Ecumene as protectorates in which their material needs were met by the Forerunners' superior technology. This policy was notably criticized by the Librarian in her final transmissions to the Didact, stating that the Forerunners' belief in the Mantle had artificially stagnated galactic civilization by stifling healthy competition and diversity, instead making species dependent on the Forerunners and powerless against the Flood's onslaught.

The Covenant knew of the Mantle, though they initially believed it to be a physical artifact which granted the Forerunners their supreme power. Upon it becoming clear it was instead a philosophy, it was for a time emphasized as something the Covenant collective should strive towards. However, this was downplayed after they began to discover increasingly critical opinions on the Mantle by individuals of note, most prominently the Librarian. Later, the Mantle held a position in the Covenant faith that could be described as ambiguous at best; some interpretations went so far as to paint it as a facet of Ruination, which allowed corruption and complacency to set in within Forerunner society, and made them vulnerable to the Parasite.

Other Forerunner beliefs remain cryptic. A pair of references suggest some degree of veneration toward a long-passed precursor race; these precursors were believed to have acted as mentors to the Forerunners in their infancy as a culture. Forerunners also appear to have believed that their own race could one day "follow in the footsteps" of these precursors, though the specific mechanics of this remain shrouded in mystery.

Language
At their height, Forerunner languages were numerous. They had the software for individuals to generate and tailor entire synthetic languages to their taste, and learning a new language was as simple as accepting a minor mutation or downloading a software package. These were often designed around specific professions and use cases like highly-specialized tools. They were also a popular form of artistic expression; as well, many guilds, consortia, cliques, and secret societies had their own unique languages for internal communication, usually imprinted on members upon initiation. However, the Forerunners did utilize a standardized archival language so that their databanks could be read by generations that came long after their own.

In addition, the higher-form psychology of their species also influenced their linguistic strains. Specialized or even artistic languages used by mature Forerunners could be highly esoteric, tailored to weave together artful conceptualizations of higher-dimensional mathematics, alien directions of space and time, and individual viewpoints with multiple shifting frames of reference. This sophistication, as well as the vast number of languages they possessed at their height, were the leading cause in the Covenant's difficulty in translating their documents.