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 over a billion years ago, before the first multicellular life evolved on Earth. They either came from elsewhere, or arose from one of the early meta-civilizational continua of the Milky Way. Perhaps ours wasn't even the only galaxy their kind occupied; perhaps there were others much further away that served as the true centers of their meta-civilization, whereas ours was but a remote colony, primarily used as a test site by what could be likened to a small research group. Whatever the case, the Precursors were the first known civilization to arise to long-term supremacy in this eon of the galaxy. If there had been galaxy-spanning civilizations before them, they had disappeared billions of years before their time, and never attained heights as great as the Precursors.

The Precursors were powerful. Perhaps they first 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 grouping you or I in the same category with 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. They unlocked the secrets of matter and energy. To later cultures, this was often incomprehensible, and they reverentially mystified it with evocative terms like "neural physics". In truth, there was no one "neural physics", just various forms of Sufficiently Advanced Technology - quantum computation and storage, matter-energy conversion, space-time manipulation beyond our wildest imaginings. Today, humans might call it Metatech or Clarketech.

The Guardianship

The Precursors were endlessly creative and curious. Perhaps all of them were, or the ones in our galaxy were their equivalents of scientists and researchers. 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; seeded many worlds with primitive microbes, 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. The Precursors relished in life's interaction with the cosmos; the collision of civilizations, the infinite permutations of exchanges that arose as species and groups met. For hundreds of millions of years, the galaxy was their petri dish, and eons were as moments to them.

Sometimes the Precursors, or groups thereof, walked among their charges, like a park ranger walks in a national park. They made construct-bodies, engineered entire species for themselves to view existence through. Maybe such artificial species were completely oblivious to the fact they were Precursors at all, until their brethren in the firmament joined their experiential patterns with theirs. Other species, likewise, may not have even been aware these groups were Precursors. At times the Precursors involved themselves, and for eons they might remain hidden and unknown to the galaxy. Civilizations would emerge and grow and die without ever knowing they had ones infinitely their greater watching over them. At times the Precursors too entered stasis - hibernating for eons to wait for more interesting times.

Many of the civilizations that lived under the Precursors were powerful in their own right - some advanced as the Forerunners, others even more so. But to the Precursors they were but mayflies: fascinating and beautiful, but always fleeting. Though sometimes particularly long-running empires needed a little nudge to know their time had come. This usually happened when a civilization started getting too advanced; in general, that limit seems to have been around the level where civilizations start building large scale permanent astroengineering, like "mass Dysoning", or encasing dozens if not hundreds of star systems in Dyson shells. To the Precursors, this was like weeds starting to take over their garden. One civilization consuming significant amounts of the galaxy's resources would stifle future growth and limit the permutations later cultures could take. And it might, given enough time to grow unchecked, create a challenge to the Precursors themselves. In other words, the Precursors are the answer to the Fermi paradox: while the galaxy has seen countless civilizations rise and fall over hundreds of millions of years, no single culture was allowed to advance to a level where evidence of their activity would be both long-lasting and obvious from a distance.

So one day, the Precursors would step in and take a particularly powerful player out of the game. Maybe this didn't always happen through direct intervention, and instead the Precursors uplifted another group to counter them, or sowed dissent in their midst to make them vulnerable. For no empire has a shortage of enemies. But the Precursors did not destroy - they merely preserved the once-great species, stored them and their collective experiences in their vast quantum repositories. Perhaps some might even continue living on in simulations, blissfully unaware that their corporeal existence had come to an end. But mostly they were kept inert, frozen in stasis for eons. Sometimes the Precursors would come back to these stored civilizations and reseed those species millions of years later to see how different variables changed things. Like a child playing with toys and putting them back to the box, only to return to them later. A species might re-emerge into a galaxy millions of years past their time and be none the wiser as they started exploring and developing once again. Or not, if the kid found new and better toys.

For hundreds of millions of years, the grand symphony of life had a conductor.

The Terror

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, an artifice, a mirage reflected on a surface that did not exist. Reality was also unstable, and could be rewritten on a whim by actors or processes unknown; perhaps this was related to the concept of causal reconciliation that happens as a natural byproduct of any faster-than-light travel or communication, which seems to self-correct any seeming temporal paradoxes that FTL information transfer would otherwise create. For all their power even the Precursors could not see beyond the mirage, or even know when their own reality had shifted (though perhaps they felt evidence of this in some transsapient 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 whatever emerged on the other side, if anything did, would likely be as great of a leap from the Precursors' present state as they were from us. 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 or its antecedents to the Local Group and our galaxy, over a billion years earlier, maybe not. But now, they saw there was something anomalous going on in distant galaxies, and it was coming closer. Maybe there was a known presence by the Precursors or other large civilizations elsewhere in the Local Group, or even further along the galaxy-strings of the Laniakea Supercluster.

And now evidence of that presence was disappearing; or more appropriately, it was changing, homogenizing.

The Precursors had limited means of contacting or observing other galaxies in near real-time, or what amounted to real-time in their timescales; even with their power, the nature of slipspace is such that precision sensing can only be so efficient over long distances. But they could tell something foreboding had been going on in distant galaxies, that something was moving in a pattern, and that movement took it closer toward the Milky Way. This happened over millions of years, but to the Precursors, the development was startlingly fast and unpredictable. It might still take millions of years to reach the Milky Way, or it might be upon them in just a few hundred thousand years.

For the first time in eons, the Precursors were truly terrified. They had thought themselves the masters over life, but they now knew they might soon come into conflict with a peer foe or something worse. And they hadn't fought anything they would call a war in eons, if these particular Precursors ever had. The Precursors had weapons of vast, unimaginable power, and things beyond weapons, bound in black holes and neutron stars, only to be unleashed in extremis. Perhaps some of the Precursors unleashed such weapons against the nearest galaxies to stave off the unknown Enemy, but even they knew would only buy time; perhaps millions of years, but to them this was but an eyeblink. The oncoming tide would survive in some form, and it would find its way to the Milky Way eventually.

So the Precursors embarked on a Great Journey. We don't know where; perhaps into the interstices of slipspace or even beyond; journeyed to the alternate spaces beyond their reality, or simply consigned themselves to oblivion, convinced there would never be anywhere to run. Some may've physically fled. What can be surmised is that 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

After the Precursors' departure, life in the galaxy continued, yet its custodians were missing. There were many species and cultures still inhabiting the galaxy, some of them naturally evolved in that time period, others spirited away from the deep past and reintroduced in the present eon while the Precursors had still been around. Splinter populations relocated from their original homeworlds long ago continued to develop around foreign stars. Some of these splinter groups may've even encompassed species active today; when the Forerunners reseeded life after the Halo Event, they seemingly did so primarily on those species' original homeworlds, so even if those species had occupied other worlds in the distant past we would have no way of knowing - unless, of course, they left signs of their presence on those worlds.

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 actually passed the Mantle onto one of their successors or if it arose independently from the cultural myths of one or more early post-Precursor cultures, but ultimately this is unimportant. Each successor culture had their own version of the Precursors' guardianship, like the blind men and the elephant. By the later years, the Mantle was effectively a fiction — so distorted from what its original predecessor may once have been that it effectively meant nothing to anyone but those who believed in it. Each species sought to assert themselves as the Great Ones' rightful inheritors, yet they were all far lesser than the galaxy's former Guardians. There were some who resisted, but the idea of the Mantle and reclaiming the Precursors' legacy was too powerful, too tempting. In the later days of the Inheritor era, hundreds of thousands of years after the Precursors' departure, many would even question whether the Precursors had existed at all, or if they too were but a mythology created to justify any given species' dominance.

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. We don't know how many Inheritor cultures existed, and how long this period lasted. In most cases, there may not have been a clear distinction between where one species' Guardianship ended and another began, and there were likely cases where the galactic stewardship was contested by two or more cultures for millennia, creating a continuum of successive Guardians rising and falling, punctuated by occasional interregnums. 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, in what were relative eyeblinks next to the Precursors' lifetime.

The age of the Inheritors was a pale shadow of the Precursors' reign, but it had saved its grand bravura for last.

The Forerunners

The Forerunners were the descendants of a population of Earth hominids (perhaps the best and brightest of their time) displaced to a world in the neighborhood of the Orion Complex. We don't know who relocated them and why; it could've been the Precursors, but more likely it was one of their successor cultures. It's also likely that their mentors gave the displaced hominids a nudge to get started on the path toward civilization, along with imprinting the galactic meta-civilization's pervasive Mantle narrative into their cultural consciousness. By the time the Forerunners arose to galactic predominance, circa 160,000 BCE, their preceding galactic overlords were already declining and weakened by internal strife, if they had ever been as powerful. And so the Forerunners took over, as many had before them, imitating and adopting many of the ways that characterized the Inheritors.

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 - likely related enough to interbreed with our ancestors (and perhaps such reunions indeed did happen after the reseeding process). Perhaps the Forerunners, 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.

But the Forerunners could not solve one mystery: that of their origins. They knew they had been relocated, and their tutelage by a superior civilization (mythologized by them as the Precursors) was a well-established part of their cultural narrative. But even as they searched, the galaxy was vast, and so their Cradle of Life was lost to them. For much of their history, anyway. In the twilight hour of their Ecumene, with most of the Forerunners dead or succumbed to the dreaded Flood, the Librarian came across a pristine garden world on her desperate mission to index and preserve galactic life. Perhaps she had been drawn there by a curious concentration of other worlds nearby with a remarkably similar chemical and biological composition. But even on a glance, verified by the most cursory DNA survey, she could tell she had found their species' holy grail, and their long-lost evolutionary brethren. The Forerunners had searched far and wide, journeyed to other spiral arms and to the hazy fringes of the galactic halo, yet their lost Eden had lain undiscovered and undisturbed not too far from their own seed-world near the Orion Complex. And it was a masterstroke of cosmic irony that it should be found only now, at the end of all things.

Over the course of their history, spanning tens of millennia, the Forerunners fought various other 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 Forerunners 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 Forerunners' 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. Yet only the Forerunners themselves could unlock their greatest machines, their biometric identification configured to recognize any member of their immediate evolutionary line. When the Forerunners made plans to return, they would designate themselves with the title "Reclaimer"; this is a not metaphorical or esoteric concept, but a straightforward label for any member of the collective Forerunner metaspecies come to reclaim the Forerunners' empire.

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 networks 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

Though little is known of those times, even [lacuna] after the Ring-Wars, 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 the [lacuna]

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!

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This text, tentatively titled the "Hydaspes Account", 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 the culture of our ancestors. However, more data is required to ascertain its historicity.]