Halo Primordium Book 2 - Prologue & Chapter 1

[Spectral Jester]

In the wake of apparent self-destruction of the Forerunner empire, two humans—Chakas and Riser—are like flotsam washed up on very strange shores indeed.

 

Captured by the Master Builder, misplaced during a furious battle in space, they now find themselves on an inverted world where horizons rise into the sky, and where humans of all kinds are trapped in a perilous cycle of horror and neglect. For they have become both research animals and strategic pawns in a cosmic game whose madness knows no end—a game of ancient vengeance between the powers who seeded the galaxy with life, and the Forerunners who expect to inherit their sacred Mantle of duty to all living things.

 

In the company of a young girl and an old man, Chakas begins an epic journey across a lost and damaged Halo in search of a way home, an explanation for the warrior spirits rising up within, and for the Librarian’s tampering with human destiny.

 

 

 

HALO/SHIELD ALLIANCE 631

 

 

 

Record of communications with Autonomous Mechanical Intelligence (Forerunner Monitor).

 

SCIENCE TEAM ANALYSIS: Appears to be severely damaged duplicate (?) of device previously reported lost/destroyed (File Ref. Dekagram- 721- 64- 91.)

 

Machine language records attached as holographic files. Incomplete and failed translation attempts deleted for brevity.

 

TRANSLATION STYLE: LOCALIZED. Some words and phrases remain obscure.

 

 

 

First successful AI translation: RESPONSE STREAM

 

#1351 [DATE REDACTED] 1621 hours (Repeated every 64 seconds.)

 

What am I, really?

 

A long time ago, I was a living, breathing human being. I went mad. I served my enemies. They became my only friends.

 

Since then, I’ve traveled back and forth across this galaxy, and out to the spaces between galaxies—a greater reach than any human before me.

 

You have asked me to tell you about that time. Since you are the true Reclaimers, I must obey. Are you recording? Good. Because my memory is failing rapidly. I doubt I’ll be able to finish the story.

 

Once, on my birth-world, a world I knew as Erde-Tyrene, and which now is called Earth, my name was Chakas. . . .

 

Multiple data streams detected. COVENANT LANGUAGE STREAM identified.

 

SCIENCE TEAM ANALYSIS: Prior contact with Covenant likely.

 

Break for recalibration of AI translator.

 

SCIENCE TEAM LEADER to MONITOR: “We realize the difficulty of accessing all parts of your vast store of knowledge, and we’d like to help you in any way we can, including making necessary repairs . . . if we can be made to understand how you actually work.

 

“What we’re having difficulty with is your contention that you were once a human being—over a thousand centuries ago. But rather than waste time with a full discussion of these matters, we’ve decided to proceed directly to your narrative. Our team has a dual focus for its questions.

 

“First question: When did you last have contact with the Forerunner known as the Didact, and under what circumstances did you part ways?

 

“Second question: What goals did Forerunners hope to achieve in their ancient relations with humans? . . .”

 

RESPONSE STREAM #1352 [DATE REDACTED] 2350 hours (first portion lost, nonrepeating):

 

 

 

 

 

ONE

 

. . . LOOKED ACROSS THE deck of the star boat at the Didact—a massive, gray- black shadow with the face of a warrior god. He was impassive, as usual. Far below, at the center of a great gulf of night filled with many ships, lay a planet under siege—the quarantined prison world of the San’Shyuum.

 

“What will happen to us?” I asked.

 

“They will punish,” Riser said gloomily. “We’re not supposed to be here!”

 

I turned to my small companion, reached to touch the long, dry fingers of his outstretched hand, and shot an angry glance at Bornstellar, the young Manipular that Riser and I had guided to Djamonkin Crater. He would not meet my eyes.

 

Then, faster than thought or reflex, something cold and bright and awful carved up the distance between us, split-ting us apart in blue- white silence. War sphinxes with passionless faces moved in and scooped us up in transparent bubbles. I saw the Didact and Bornstellar packed away in their own bubbles like trophies. . . .

 

The Didact seemed composed, prepared—Bornstellar, as frightened as I was.

 

The bubble sucked in around me. I was caught in sudden stillness, my ears stuffed, my eyes darkened.

 

This is how a dead man feels.

 

For a time, surrounded by senseless dark or flashes of nothing I could understand, I believed I was about to be ferried across the western water to the far grasslands where I would await judgment under the hungry gaze of sabertooths, hyenas, buzzards, and the great-winged eagles. I tried to prepare myself by listing my weaknesses, that I might appear humble before the judgment of Abada the Rhinoceros; that Abada might fend off the predators, and especially the hyenas; and that his old friend the Great Elephant might re-member me and nudge my bones from the dirt, back to life, before the time that ends all.

 

(For so I have seen in the sacred caves.)

 

But the stillness and silence continued. I felt a small itch in the pit of my arm, and in my ear, and then on my back where only a friend can reach. . . . The dead do not itch.

 

Slowly, with a flickering rhythm, like the waving of a fan, the stiff blue silence lifted, scattering visions between shadows of blankness and misery. I saw Riser wrapped in another bubble not far from me, and Bornstellar beside him. The Didact was not with us.

 

My ears seemed to pop—a painful, muffled echo in my head. Now I heard distant words . . . and listened closely. We had been taken prisoner by a powerful Forerunner called the Master Builder. The Didact and the Master Builder had long opposed each other. I learned as well that Riser and I were prizes to be stolen from the Didact. We would not be destroyed right away; we had value, for the Librarian had imprinted us at birth with ancient memories that might prove useful.

 

For a time, I wondered if we were about to be introduced to the hideous Captive—the one my ancient ancestors had locked away for so many thousands of years, the one re-leased by the Master Builder’s ignorant testing of his new weapon-toy, a gigantic ring called Halo. . . .

 

Then I felt another presence in my head. I had felt this before, first while walking over the ruins at Charum Hakkor, and then later, witnessing the plight of humanity’s old al-lies, the once beautiful and sensuous San’Shyuum, in their quarantined system. Old memories seemed to be traveling across great distances to reassemble, like members of a tribe long lost to each other . . . struggling to retrieve one personality, not my own.

 

In my boredom, thinking this was merely a strange sort of dream, I reached out as if to touch the jittering pieces. . . .

 

And was back on Charum Hakkor, walking the parapet above the pit, where the Captive had been imprisoned for more than ten thousand years. My dream-body—oft-wounded, plagued with aches and motivated by a festering hatred— approached the railing and looked down upon the thick-domed timelock.

 

The lock had been split wide like the casing of a great bomb.

 

Something that smelled like thunder loomed behind me. It cast a shimmering green shadow—a shadow with far too many arms! I tried to turn and could not. . . .

 

Nor could I hear myself scream.

 

Soon enough I lapsed back into a void filled with prickly irritations: itching but unable to scratch, thirsty but without water, muscles both frozen and restless. . . . Viscera trying to writhe. Hungry and nauseated at the same time. This long, weightless suspension was suddenly interrupted by violent shaking. I was falling.

 

Through the filters of my Forerunner armor, my skin sensed heat, and I glimpsed blossoms of fire, searing blasts of energy trying but failing to reach in and cook me—then, more buffeting, accompanied by the gut-wrenching shudder of distant explosions.

 

Came a final slamming impact. My jaw snapped up and my teeth almost bit through my tongue.

 

Still, at first there was no pain. Fog filled me. Now I knew I was dead and felt some relief. Perhaps I had already been punished sufficiently and would be spared the attentions of hyenas and buzzards and eagles. I anticipated joining my ancestors, my grandmother and grandfather, and if my mother had died in my absence, her as well. They would cross rich green prairies to greet me, floating over the ground, smiling and filled with love, and beside them would pad the jaguar that snarls at the sabertooth, and slither the great crocodile that darts from the mud to put to flight the ravenous buzzards—in that place where all hatred is finally extinguished. There, my good family spirits would welcome me, and my troubles would be over.

 

(For so I had seen in the sacred caves.)

 

I was not at all happy when I realized yet again that this darkness was not death, but another kind of sleep. My eyes were closed. I opened them. Light flooded in on me, not very bright, but after the long darkness, it seemed blinding. It was not a spiritual light.

 

Blurry shapes moved around me. My tongue decided to hurt horribly. I felt hands tugging and fumbling at my arms and legs, and smelled something foul—my own scat. Very bad. Spirits don’t stink.

 

I tried to raise my hand, but someone held it down and there was another struggle. More hands forcibly bent my arms and legs at painful angles. Slowly I puzzled this out. I was still wearing the broken Forerunner armor the Didact had given me on his ship. Stooped and bent shapes were pulling me from that stinking shell.

 

When they had finished, I was laid out flat on a hard surface. Water poured cool and sweet over my face. The crusted salt of my upper lip stung my tongue. I fully opened my puffy eyes and blinked up at a roof made of woven reeds thatched with leaves and branches. Sprawled on the cold, gritty platform, I was no better than a newborn: naked, twitching, bleary-eyed, mute from shock. Cool, careful fingers wiped my face clean, then rubbed grassy juice under my nose. The smell was sharp and wakeful. I drank more water—muddy, earthy, inexpressibly sweet.

 

Against flickering orange light I could now make out a single figure—black as night, slender as a young tree— rubbing its fingers beside its own broad nose, over its wide, rounded cheeks, then combing them through the hair on its scalp. It rubbed this soothing skin-oil on my chapped, cracked lips.

 

I wondered if I was again being visited, as I was at birth, by the supreme Lifeshaper whom the Didact claimed was his wife—the Librarian. But the figure that hovered over me was smaller, darker—not a beautiful memory but solid flesh. I smelled a woman. A young woman. That scent brought an extraordinary change to my outlook. Then I heard others murmuring, followed by sad, desperate laughter, followed by words I barely understood . . . words from ancient languages I had never heard spoken on Erde-Tyrene.

 

How then could I understand them at all? What kind of beings were these? They looked human in outline—several kinds of human, perhaps. Slowly, I reengaged the old memories within me, like digging out the roots of a fossil tree . . . and found the necessary knowledge.

 

Long ago, thousands of years before I was born, humans had used such words. The assembled shadows around me were commenting on my chances of recovery. Some were doubtful. Others expressed leering admiration for the female. A few grinding voices discussed whether the strongest man in the village would take her. The tree-slender girl said nothing, merely giving me more water.

 

Finally, I tried to speak, but my tongue wouldn’t work properly. Even without being half- bitten through, it was not yet trained to form the old words.

 

“Welcome back,” the girl said. Her voice was husky but musical. Gradually my vision cleared. Her face was round and so black it was almost purple. “Your mouth is full of blood. Don’t talk. Just rest.”

 

I closed my eyes again. If I could only make myself speak, the Librarian’s imprint from ancient human warriors might prove useful after all.

 

“He came in armor, like a crab,” said a low, grumbling male voice. So many of these voices sounded frightened, furtive—cruel and desperate. “He fell after the brightness and burning in the sky, but he’s not one of the Forerunners.”

 

“The Forerunners died. He did not,” the girl said.

 

“Then they’ll come hunting him. Maybe he killed them,” another voice said. “He’s no use to us. He could be a danger. Put him out in the grass for the ants.”

 

“How could he kill the Forerunners?” the girl asked. “He was in a jar. The jar fell and cracked open when it hit the ground. He lay in the grass for an entire night while we cowered in our huts, but the ants did not bite him.”

 

“If he stays, there will be less food for the rest of us. And if Forerunners lost him, then they will come looking for him and punish us.”

 

I listened to these suppositions with mild interest. I knew less about such matters than the shadows did.

 

“Why?” the dark girl asked. “They kept him in the jar. We saved him. We took him out of the heat. We will feed him and he will live. Besides, they punish us no matter what we do.”

 

“They haven’t come for many days to take any of us away,” said another voice, more calm or more resigned. “After the fires in the sky, the city and the forest and the plain are quiet. We no longer hear their sky boats. Maybe they’re all gone.”

 

The voices from the milling circle dulled and faded. None of what they said made much sense. I had no idea where I might be. I was too tired to care.

 

I don’t know how long I slept. When I opened my eyes again, I looked to one side, then the other. I was lying inside a wide meeting house with log walls. I was naked but for two pieces of worn, dirty cloth. The meeting house was empty, but at my groan, the dark girl came through the reed-covered doorway and kneeled down beside me. She was younger than me. Little more than a girl—not quite a woman. Her eyes were large and reddish brown, and her hair was a wild tangle the color of water-soaked rye grass.

 

“Where am I?” I asked clumsily, using the old words as best I could.

 

“Maybe you can tell us. What’s your name?”

 

“Chakas,” I said.

 

“I don’t know that name,” the girl said. “Is it a secret name?”

 

“No.” I focused on her, ignoring the silhouettes of others as they filed back in through the door and stood around me. Other than the tree-slender female, most of them kept well back, in a wide circle. One of the old men stepped forward and tried to pluck at the girl’s shoulder. She shrugged his hand away, and he cackled and danced off.

 

“Where do you come from?” she asked me.

 

“Erde-Tyrene,” I said.

 

“I don’t know that place.” She spoke to the others. No one else had heard of it.

 

“He’s no good to us,” an older man said, one of the shrill, argumentative voices from earlier. He was heavy of shoulder and low of forehead and smacked his thick lips in disapproval. All different types of human being were here, as I had guessed—but none as small as Riser. I missed Riser and wondered where he had ended up.

 

“This one fell from the sky in a jar,” the older man repeated, as if the story was already legend. “The jar landed in the dry short grass and cracked and broke, and not even the ants thought he was worth eating.”

 

Another man picked up the tale. “Someone high above lost him. The flying shadows dropped him. He’ll just bring them back sooner, and this time they’ll take us all to the Palace of Pain.”

 

I did not like the sound of that. “Are we on a planet?” I asked the girl. The words I chose meant “big home,” “broad land,” “all- under- sky.”

 

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

 

“Is it a great star boat, then?”

 

“Be quiet and rest. Your mouth is bleeding.” She gave me more water and wiped my lips.

 

“You’ll have to choose soon,” the old, cackling one said. “Your Gamelpar can’t protect you now!”

 

Then the others went away.

 

I rolled over.

 

Later, she shook me awake. “You’ve slept long enough,” she said. “Your tongue isn’t bleeding now. Can you tell me what it’s like where you come from? Up in the sky? Try to speak slowly.”

 

I moved lips, tongue, jaw. All were sore, but I could talk easily enough. I propped myself up on my elbow. “Are you all human?”

 

She hummed through her nose and leaned forward to wipe my eyes. “We’re the Tudejsa, if that’s what you’re asking.” Later I would put this word in context and understand that it meant the People from Here, or just the People.

 

“And this isn’t Erde-Tyrene.”

 

“I doubt it. Where we are is a place between other places. Where we came from, we will never see again. Where we are going, we do not want to be. So we live here and wait. Some-times Forerunners take us away.”

 

“Forerunners . . . ?”

 

“The gray ones. The blue ones. The black ones. Or their machines.”

 

“I know some of them,” I said.

 

She looked dubious. “They don’t like us. We’re happy they haven’t come for many days. Even before the sky be-came bright and filled with fi re—”

 

“Where do they come from—these People?” I waved my arm at the silhouettes still coming and going through the door, some smacking their lips in judgment and making disapproving sounds.

 

“Some of us come from the old city. That’s where I was born. Others have gathered from across the plain, from river and jungle, from the long grass. Some walked here five sleeps ago, after they saw you fall from the sky in your jar. One fellow tries to make people pay to see you.”

 

I heard a scuffle outside, a yelp, and then three burly gawkers shuffled in, keeping well back from us.

 

“The cackling ******* who fancies you?” I asked her.

 

She shook her head. “Another fool. He wants more food. They just knock him down and kick him aside.”

 

She didn’t seem to like many of the People.

 

“Valley, jungle, river . . . city, prairie. Sounds like home,” I said.

 

“It isn’t.” She swept her gaze around the gawkers with pinched disappointment. “We are not friends, and no one is willing to be family. When we are taken away, it brings too much pain.”

 

I raised myself on my arm. “Am I strong enough to go outside?”

 

She pressed me back down. Then she pushed the gawkers out, looked back, and stepped through the hanging grass door. When she returned, she carried a roughly carved wooden bowl. With her fingers she spooned some of the contents into my mouth: bland mush, ground- up grass seed. It didn’t taste very good—what I could taste of it—but what I swallowed stayed in my stomach.

 

Soon I felt stronger.

 

Then she said, “Time to go outside, before someone decides to kill you.” She helped me to my feet and pushed aside the door- hanging. A slanting burst of bluish white glare dazzled me. When I saw the color of that light, a feeling of dread, of not wanting to be where I was, came on me fierce. It was not a good light.

 

But she persisted and pulled me out under the purple- blue sky. Shielding my eyes, I finally located the horizon— rising up like a distant wall. Turning slowly, swiveling my neck despite the pain, I tracked that far wall until it began to curve upward, ever so gently. I swung around. The horizon curved upward to both sides. Not good, not right. Horizons do not curve up.

 

I followed the gradually rising sweep higher and higher. The land kept climbing like the slope of a mountain— climbing but narrowing, until I could see both sides of a great, wide band filled with grassland, rocky fields . . . mountains. Some distance away, a foreshortened and irregular dark blue smear crossed almost the entire width of the band, flanked and interrupted by the nearest of those mountains—possibly a large body of water. And everywhere out there on the band—clouds in puffs and swirls and spreading white shreds, like streamers of fleece in a cleansing river.

 

Weather.

 

Higher and higher . . .

 

I leaned my head back as far as I could without falling over—until the rising band crossed into shadow and slimmed to a skinny, perfect ribbon that cut the sky in half and just hung there—a dark blue, overarching sky bridge. At an angle about two-thirds of the way up one side of the bridge, perched just above the edge, was the source of the intense, purple-blue light: a small, brilliant sun.

 

Turning around again, cupping my hand over the blue sun, I studied the opposite horizon. The wall on that side was too far away to see. But I guessed that both sides of the great ribbon were flanked by walls. Definitely not a planet.

 

My hopes fell to zero. My situation had not improved in any way. I was not home. I was very far from any home. I had been deposited on one of the great, ring-shaped weapons that had so entranced and divided my Forerunner captors.

 

I was marooned on a Halo.

[Spectral Jester]

Chapter 2

 

TWO

 

 

HOW I WISH I could recover the true shape of that young human I was! Naïve, crude, unlettered, not very clever. I fear that over the last hundred thousand years, much of that has rubbed away. My voice and base of knowledge has changed—I have no body to guide me—and so I might seem, in this story, as I tell it now, more sophisticated, weighted down by far too much knowledge.

 

I was not sophisticated—not in the least. My impression of myself in those days is of anger, confusion, unchecked curiosity—but no purpose, no focused ambition.

 

Riser had given me focus and courage, and now, he was gone.

 

 

When I was born, the supreme Lifeshaper came to Erde-Tyrene to touch me with her will. Erde-Tyrene was her world, her protectorate and preserve, and humans were special to her. I remember she was beautiful beyond measure, unlike my mother, who was lovely, but fairly ordinary as women go.

 

My family farmed for a while outside of the main human city of Marontik. After my father died in a knife fight with a water baron’s thugs, and our crops failed, we moved into the city, where my sisters and I took up menial tasks for modest pay. For a time, my sisters also served as Prayer Maidens in the temple of the Lifeshaper. They lived away from Mother and me, in a makeshift temple near the Moon Gate, in the western section of the Old City….

 

But I see your eyes glazing over. A Reclaimer who lacks patience! Watching you yawn makes me wish I still had jaws and lungs and could yawn with you. You know nothing of Marontik, so I will not bore you further with those details.

 

Why are you so interested in the Didact? Is he proving to be a difficulty to humans once again? Astonishing. I will not tell you about the Didact, not yet. I will tell this in my own way. This is the way my mind works, now. If I still have a mind.

 

I am moving on.

 

 

After the Librarian (I was only an infant when I saw her) the next Forerunner I encountered was a young Manipular named Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. I set out to trick him. It was the worst mistake of my young life.

 

Back before I met Riser, I was a rude, rough boy, always getting into trouble and stealing. I liked fighting and didn’t mind receiving small wounds and bruises. Others feared me. Then I started having dreams that a Forerunner would come to visit me. I made my dream-self attack and bite him and then rob him of the things he carried—treasure that I could sell in the market. I dreamed I would use this treasure to bring my sisters back from the temple to live with us.

 

In the real world, I robbed other humans instead.

 

But then one of the chamanune came to our house and inquired after me. Despite their size, chamanush were respected and we rarely attacked them. I had never robbed one because I heard stories that they banded together to punish those who hurt them. They slipped in, whispering in the night, like marauding monkeys, and took vengeance. They were small but smart and fierce and mostly came and went as they pleased. This one was friendly enough. He said his name was Riser and he had seen someone like me in a dream: a rough, young hamanush who needed his guidance.

 

In my mother’s crude hovel, he took me aside and said he would give me good work if I didn’t cause trouble.

 

Riser became my boss, despite his size. He knew many interesting places in and around Marontik where a young fellow such as myself—barely twenty years old—could be usefully employed. He took a cut of my wages, and his clan fed my family, and we in turn protected his clan from the more stupid thugs who believed that size mattered. Those were exciting times in Marontik. By which I mean, stupid cruelties were common.

 

Yes, chamanush are human, though tinier than my people, the hamanush. Indeed, as your display now tells you, some since have called them Florians or even Hobbits, and others may have known them as menehune. They loved islands and water and hunting and excelled at building mazes and walls.

 

I see you have pictures of their bones. Those bones look as if they might indeed fit inside a chamanush. How old are they?

 

 

*INTERRUPTION*

 

MONITOR HAS PENETRATED AI FIREWALL

 

 

AI RECALIBRATION

 

 

Do not be alarmed. I have accessed your data stores and taken command of your display. I mean no harm . . . now. And it has been ever so long since I tasted fresh information. Curious. I see these pictures are from a place called Flores Island, which is on Erde-Tyrene, now called Earth.

 

In reward for their service, I can now see that the Lifeshaper in later millennia placed Riser’s people on a number of Earth’s islands. On Flores, she provided them with small elephants and hippos and other tiny beasts to hunt…. They do love fresh meat.

 

If what your history archives tell me is correct, I believe the last of Riser’s people died out when humans arrived by canoe at their final home, a great island chain formed by volcanoes that burned through the crust….

 

I see the largest of those islands is known as Hawaii.

 

I am getting distracted. Still, I notice you are no longer yawning. Am I revealing secrets of interest to your scientists?

 

But you are most interested in the Didact.

 

I am moving on.

 

 

Soon after Riser took charge of my life, following a decline in our work opportunities, he began to direct his attentions toward preparing for “a visitor.”

 

Riser told me he had also seen a young Forerunner in a dream. We did not discuss the matter much. We did not have to. Both of us lay under thrall. Riser had met male Forerunners before; I had not. He described them to me, but I already saw clearly enough what our visitor would look like. He would be a young one, a Manipular, not fully mature, perhaps arrogant and foolish. He would come seeking treasure.

 

Riser told me that what I was seeing in my dreams was part of a geas—a set of commands and memories left in my mind and body by the Lifeshaper who touches us all at birth.

 

As a general rule, Forerunners were shaped much like humans, though larger. In their youth they were tall and slender, gray of skin, and covered nape, crown, shoulders, and along the backs of their hands with a fine, pale fur, pinkish purple or white in color. Odd-looking, to be sure, but not exactly ugly.

 

The older males, Riser assured me, were different—larger, bulkier, less human-looking, but still, not exactly ugly. “They are a little like the vaeites and alben that come in our eldest dreams,” he explained. “But they are still mighty. They could kill us all if they wanted to, and many would….”

 

I took his meaning right away, as if somewhere within my deep memory, I knew it already.

 

The Manipular did indeed arrive on Erde-Tyrene, seeking treasure. He was indeed foolish. And we did indeed provide him with what he sought—guidance to a source of mysterious power. But where we took him was not a secret Precursor ruin.

 

Following our geas, we led Bornstellar into the inland wastes a hundred kilometers from Marontik to a crater filled with a freshwater lake. At its center this crater held a ring-shaped island, like a giant target waiting for an arrow to fly down from the gods. This place was legendary among the chamanune. They had explored it many times and had built trails and mazes and walls across its surface. At the center of the ring-shaped island stood a tall mountain. Very few chamanush had ever visited that mountain.

 

As the days passed, I came to realize that despite my urges, I could not hurt this Manipular—this young Forerunner. Despite his irritating manner and obvious feeling of superiority, there was something about him that I liked. Like me, he sought treasure and adventure, and he was willing to do wrong things.

 

Meeting him, I began my long fall to where I am now—what I am now.

 

The Didact was in fact the secret of Djamonkin Crater. The ring-shaped island was where the Librarian had hidden her husband’s warrior Cryptum, a place of deep meditation and sanctuary—hidden from other Forerunners who were seeking him, for reasons I could not then understand.

 

But now the time of his resurrection had come.

 

A Forerunner had to be present for the Cryptum to be unsealed. We helped Bornstellar raise the Didact by singing old songs. The Librarian had provided us with all the skills and instincts we needed, as part of our geas.

 

And the Didact emerged from his long sleep. He plumped out like a dried flower dipped in oil.

 

He rose up among us, weak at first and angry.

 

The Librarian had left him a great star boat hidden inside the central mountain. He kidnapped us and took us aboard that star boat, along with Bornstellar. We traveled to Charum Hakkor, which awoke another set of memories within me . . . then to Faun Hakkor, where we saw proof that a monstrous experiment had been carried out by the Master Builder.

 

And then the star boat flew to the San’Shyuum quarantine system. It was there that Riser and I were separated from Bornstellar and the Didact, taken prisoner by the Master Builder, locked into bubbles, unable to move, barely able to breathe, surrounded by a spinning impression of space and planet and the dark, cramped interiors of various ships.

 

Once, I caught a glimpse of Riser, contorted in his ill-fitting Forerunner armor, eyes closed as if napping, his generous, furred lips lifted at the corners, as if he dreamed of home and family…. His calm visage became for me a necessary reminder of the tradition and dignity of being human.

 

This is important in my memory. Such memories and feelings define who I once was. I would have them back in the flesh. I would do anything to have them back in the flesh.

 

Then what I have already told you happened, happened.

 

Now I will tell you the rest.

 

 

THREE

 

 

THE HUTS STOOD on a flat stretch of dirt and dry grass. A few hundred meters away was a tree line, not any sort of trees I recognized, but definitely trees. Beyond those trees, stretching far toward the horizon-wall and some distance up the thick part of the band, was a beautiful old city. It reminded me of Marontik, but it might have been even older. The young female told me that none of the People lived there now, nor had they lived there for some time. Forerunners had come to take away most of the People, and soon the rest decided the city was no longer a safe place.

 

I asked her if the Palace of Pain was in this city. She said it was not, but the city held many bad memories.

 

I leaned on the girl’s shoulder, turned unsteadily—and saw that the trees continued in patches for kilometer after kilometer along the other side of the band, for as far as the eye could see . . . grassland and forest curving up into a blue obscurity—haze, clouds.

 

The young woman’s hand felt warm and dry and not very soft. That told me she was a worker, as my mother had been. We stood under the blue-purple sky, and she watched me as I turned again and again, studying the great sky bridge, caught between fear and marvel, trying to understand.

 

Old memories stirring.

 

You’ve seen a Halo, haven’t you? Perhaps you’ve visited one. It was taking me some time to convince myself it was all real, and then, to orient myself. “How long have you been here?” I asked her.

 

“Ever since I can remember. But Gamelpar talks about the time before we came here.”

 

“Who’s Gamelpar?”

 

She bit her lip, as if she had spoken too soon. “An old man. The others don’t like him, because he won’t give them permission to mate with me. They threw him out and now he lives away from the huts, out in the trees.”

 

“What if they try—you know—without his permission?” I asked, irritated by the prospect, but genuinely curious. Sometimes females won’t talk about being taken against their will.

 

“I hurt them. They stop,” she said, flashing long, horny fingernails.

 

I believed her. “Has he told you where the People lived before they came here?”

 

“He says the sun was yellow. Then, when he was a baby, the People were taken inside. They lived inside walls and under ceilings. He says those People were brought here before I was born.”

 

“Were they carried inside a star boat?”

 

“I don’t know about that. The Forerunners never explain. They rarely speak to us.”

 

Turning around, I studied again the other side of the curve. Far up that side of the curve, the grassland and forest ran up against a border of blocky lines, beyond which stretched austere grayness, which faded into that universal bluish obscurity but emerged again far, far up and away, along that perfect bridge looping up, up, and around, growing thinner and now very dark, just a finger-width wide—I held up my finger at arm’s length, while the female watched with half-curious annoyance. Again, I nearly fell over, dizzy and feeling a little sick.

 

“We’re near the edge,” I said.

 

“The edge of what?”

 

“A Halo. It’s like a giant hoop. Ever play hoop sticks?” I showed how with my hands.

 

She hadn’t.

 

“Well, the hoop spins and keeps everyone pressed to the inside.” She did not seem impressed. I myself was not sure if that indeed was what stuck the dirt, and us, safely on the surface. “We’re on the inside, near that wall.” I pointed.

 

“The wall keeps all the air and dirt from slopping into space.”

 

None of this was important to her. She wanted to live somewhere else but had never known anything but here. “You think you’re smart,” she said, only a touch judgmental.

 

I shook my head. “If I was smart, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be back on Erde-Tyrene, keeping my sisters out of trouble, working with Riser….”

 

“Your brother?”

 

“Not exactly,” I said. “Short fellow. Human, but not like me or you.”

 

“You aren’t one of us, either,” she informed me with a sniff. “The People have beautiful black skins and flat, broad noses. You do not.”

 

Irritated, I was about to tell her that some Forerunners had black skins but decided that hardly mattered and shrugged it off.

 

 

 

FOUR

 

 

ON OUR SECOND outing, we stopped by a pile of rocks and the girl found a ready supply both of water from a spring and scorpions, which she revealed by lifting a rock. I remembered scorpions on Erde-Tyrene, but these were bigger, as wide as my hand, and black—substantial, and angry at being disturbed. She taught me how to prepare and eat them. First you caught them by their segmented stinging tails. She was good at that, but it took me a while to catch on. Then you pulled off the tail and ate the rest, or if you were bold, popped the claws and body into your mouth, then plucked the tail and tossed it aside, still twitching. Those scorpions tasted bitter and sweet at the same time—and then greasy-grassy. They didn’t really taste like anything else I knew. The texture—well, you get used to anything when you’re hungry. We ate a fair number of them and sat back and looked up at the blue-purple sky.

 

“You can see it’s a big ring,” I said, leaning against a boulder. “A ring just floating in space.”

 

“Obviously,” she said. “I’m not a fool. That,” she said primly, following my finger, “is toward the center of the ring, and the other side. The stars are there, and there.” She pointed to either side of the arching bridge. “Sky is cupped in the ring like water in a trough.”

 

We thought this over for a while, still resting.

 

“You know my name. Are you allowed to tell me yours?”

 

“My borrowing name, the name you can use, is Vinnevra. It was my mother’s name when she was a girl.”

 

“Vinnevra. Good. When will you tell me your true name?”

 

She looked away and scowled. Best not to ask.

 

I was thinking about the ring and the shadows and what happened when the sun went behind the bridge and a big glow shot out to either side. I could see that. I could even begin to understand it. In my old memory—still coming together, slowly and cautiously—it was known as a corona, and it was made of ionized gases and rarefied winds blowing and glowing away from the nearby star that was the blue sun.

 

“Are there other rivers, springs, sources of water out there?”

 

“How should I know?” she said. “This place isn’t real. It’s made to support animals, though, and us. Why else would they put juicy scorpions out here? That means there might be more water.”

 

More impressive by the moment! “Let’s walk,” I suggested.

 

“And leave all these scorpions uneaten?”

 

She scrambled for some more crawling breakfast. I left my share for her and walked around the rock pile, studying the flat distance that led directly to the near wall.

 

“If I had Forerunner armor,” I said, “I would know all these words, in any language. A blue lady would explain anything I ask her to explain.”

 

“Talking to yourself means the gods will tease your ears when you sleep,” Vinnevra said, coming up quietly behind me. She wiped scorpion juice from her lips and taunted me with one last twitching tail.

 

“Aii! Careful!” I said, dodging.

 

She threw the tail aside. “They’re like bee stingers,” she said. “And yes. That means there are bees here, and maybe honey.” Then she set out across the sand, dirt, and grass, which looked real enough, but of course wasn’t, because the Forerunners had made this ring as a kind of corral, to hold animals such as ourselves. And it cupped the sky—a still river of air on the inside. How humbling, I thought, but I don’t think my face looked humble and abject. It probably looked angry.

 

“Stop grumbling,” she said. “Be pleasant. I’ll take back my name and stitch your lips shut with dragonfly thread.”

 

I wondered if she was beginning to like me. On Erde-Tyrene, she would already be married and have many children—or serve the Lifeshaper in her temple, like my sisters.

 

“Do you know why the sky is blue?” I asked, walking beside her.

 

“No,” she said.

 

I tried to explain. She pretended not to be interested. She did not have to pretend hard. We talked like this, back and forth, and I don’t remember most of what we said, so I suppose it wasn’t important, but it was pleasant enough.

 

I could not avoid noticing that the angle of the sun had changed a little. The Halo was spinning with a slight wobble. Twisting. Whatever you call it when the hoop….

 

Precesses. Like a top.

 

The old memories stirred violently. My brain seemed to leap with the excitement of someone else, watching and thinking inside me. I saw diagrams, felt numbers flood through my thoughts, felt the hoop, the Halo, spinning on more than one axis…. What old human that came from, I had no idea, but I saw clearly that based on engineering and physics, a Halo would not be able to precess very quickly. Perhaps the Halo was slowing down, like a hoop rolling along…. When it starts to slow, it wobbles. I didn’t like that idea at all. Again, everything seemed to move under me, a sickening sensation but not real, not yet. Still, I felt ill. I dropped to my haunches, then sat.

 

I hadn’t earned any of this knowledge. Once more, I was haunted by the dead. Somebody else had died so that this knowledge would be left inside of me. I hated it—so superior, so full of understanding. I hated feeling weak and stupid and sick.

 

“I need to go back inside,” I said. “Please.”

 

Vinnevra took me back into the hut, away from the crazy sky. Except for us, the hut was empty. I was no longer much of a curiosity.

 

I sat on the edge of the platform of dried mud-brick. The young female sat beside me and leaned forward. “It’s been five days since you arrived. I’ve been watching over you ever since, to see if you’d live or die…. Giving you water. Trying to get you to eat.” She stretched out her arms and waggled her hands, then yawned. “I’m exhausted.”

 

“Thank you,” I said.

 

She seemed to be trying to decide something. Her manners and certain shyness would not allow her to just stare. “You lived inside . . . on Erde-Tyrene?”

 

“No. There’s a sky, ground, sun . . . dirt and grass and trees, too. But not like this.”

 

“I know. We don’t like it here, and not just because they take us away.”

 

Forerunner treachery . . .

 

I shook my head to clear away that strange, powerful voice. But the existence of that voice, and its insight, was starting to make a kind of sense. We had been told—and I still felt the truth of it—that the Lifeshaper had made us into her own little living libraries, her own collections of human warrior memory.

 

I recalled that Bornstellar was being haunted by a ghost of the living Didact, even before we parted ways. All of us— even he—were subject to deep layers of Lifeshaper geas.

 

Even though it looked as if I had fallen out of somebody’s pockets, I might still be under the control of the Master Builder. It made sense that if Riser and I had value, he would move us to one of his giant weapons, then return later to scour our brains and finish his work.

 

But there was no Riser. And no Bornstellar, of course.

 

I had an awful thought, and as I looked at the woman, my face must have changed, because she reached out to softly pat my cheek.

 

“Was the little fellow with me when I came here?” I asked. “The chamanush? Did you bury him?”

 

“No,” she said. “Only you. And Forerunners.”

 

“Forerunners?”

 

She nodded. “The night of fire, you all leaped through the sky like falling torches. You landed here, in a jar. You lived. They did not. We pulled you out of the broken jar and carried you inside. You were wearing that.” She pointed to the armor, still curled up on one side of the hut.

 

“Some sort of capsule,” I said, but the word didn’t mean much to her. Perhaps I had just been tossed aside. Perhaps I did not have any value after all. The people here were being treated like cattle, not valuable resources. Nothing was certain. What could any of us do? More than at any time before, my confusion flared into anger. I hated the Forerunners even more intensely than when I had seen the destruction of Charum Hakkor….

 

And remembered the final battle.

 

I got up and paced around in the hut’s cooler shade, then kicked the armor with my toe. No response. I stuck one foot inside the chest cavity, but it refused to climb up around me. No little blue spirit appeared in my head.

 

Vinnevra gave me a doubtful look.

 

“I’m all right,” I said.

 

“You want to go outside again?”

 

“Yes,” I said.

 

This time, under the crazy sky, my feet felt stable enough, but my eyes would not stop rising to that great, awful bridge. I still wasn’t clear what information any of these humans could provide. They seemed mostly cowed, disorganized, beaten down—abused and then forgotten. That had made them desperate and mean. This Halo was not the place where I wished to end my life.

 

“We should leave,” I said. “We should leave this village, the grassland, this place.” I swung my arm out beyond the tree line. “Maybe out there we can find a way to escape.”

 

“What about your friend, the little one?”

 

“If he’s here—I’ll find him, then escape.” Truly, I longed to start looking for Riser. He would know what to do. I was focusing my last hopes on the little chamanush who had saved me once before.

 

“If we go too far, they’ll come looking and find us,” Vinnevra said. “That’s what they’ve done before. Besides, there’s not much food out there.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

She shrugged.

 

I studied the far trees. “Where there are bugs, there might be birds,” I said. “Do you ever see birds?”

 

“They fly over.”

 

“That means there might be other animals. The Life-shaper—”

 

“The Lady,” Vinnevra said, looking at me sideways.

 

“Right. The Lady probably keeps all sorts of animals here.”

 

“Including us. We’re animals to them.”

 

I didn’t know what to say to that. “We could hunt and live out there. Make the Forerunners look hard for us, if they want us. At least we wouldn’t be sitting here, waiting to be snatched in our sleep.”

 

Vinnevra now studied me much the same way I studied the distant trees. I was an odd thing, not one of the People, not completely alien. “Look,” I said, “if you need to ask permission, if you need to ask your father or mother . . .”

 

“My father and mother were taken to the Palace of Pain when I was a girl,” she said.

 

“Well, who can you ask? Your Gamelpar?”

 

“He’s just Gamelpar.” She squatted and drew a circle in the dirt with her finger. Then she took a short stick out of the folds of her pants and tossed it between two hands. Grabbing the stick and holding it up, she drew another circle, this one intersecting the first. Then she threw the stick up. It landed in the middle, where the two circles crossed. “Good,” she said. “The stick agrees. I will take you to Gamelpar. We both saw the jar fall from the sky and land near the village. He told me to go see what it was. I did, and there you were. He likes me to bring news.”

 

This outburst of information startled me. Vinnevra had been holding back, waiting until she had made some or other judgment about me. Gamelpar—the name of the old man no longer wanted in the village. The name sounded something like “old father.” How old was he?

 

Another ghost?

 

The shadow racing along the great hoop was fast approaching. In a few hours it would be dark. I stood for a moment, not sure what was happening, not at all sure I wanted to learn who or what Gamelpar was.

 

“Before we do that, can you take me to where the jar fell?” I asked. “Just in case there might be something I can find useful.”

 

“Just you? You think it’s about you?”

 

“And Riser,” I said, resenting her sad tone.

 

She approached and touched my face, feeling my skin and underlying facial muscles with her rough fingers. I was startled, but let her do whatever she thought she had to do. Finally, she drew back with a shudder, let out her breath, and closed her eyes.

 

“We’ll go there first,” she said. “And then I will take you to see Gamelpar.”

[Choot 'em]

Thank you Jester!!! I was really hoping they would release a little preview of Primordium like they did with Cryptum!! I'm loving it so far!! Release date January 3rd!!

[Ardent Prayer]

im so getting this

[UrbanGrafix]

You guys will love it more when you get it. TBH those excerpts although good, dont even begin to explain how great this book was.

[Choot 'em]

You guys will love it more when you get it. TBH those excerpts although good, dont even begin to explain how great this book was.

I'm curious, how could you "claim" to already know, as if you already have the book? It will not be released until January 3.

[UrbanGrafix]

I'm curious, how could you "claim" to already know, as if you already have the book? It will not be released until January 3.

 

I've had it since Dec 28 http://ebooks.readings.com.au/product/9781743294468

[Choot 'em]

I've had it since Dec 28 http://ebooks.readin...t/9781743294468

Cool, thanks for answering my question. Didn't know you could get the e-book pre-release. Getting the hardcover tomorrow!