Preface

Hey everyone, HWPD here. I've been working on this rewrite for just about ten years now; I seriously underestimated how much time I'd have to write after graduating from High School, and it's clearly shown. If any of you have been here since the start, then hats off to you, this has been a really slow project. The last three years have only seen three chapters, two of which were in 2019, and the last was May 2020. I focused a lot on The House of Mist at the time, but even that has taken a back seat to everything that's happened. I have ideas for original work, and other Halo stories I want to tell, but I can't just abandon a project, that's bad.

I gave a lot of thought to where I want the story to really go in this rewrite and what I wanted to do after it. I came to the conclusion that things needed to change. I no longer liked how the story started, and what characters were. So I started over. This is it, the definitive, final, and complete version of LoRC that will exist. The first half of the Act One is being completely replaced, while all the other chapters will be getting slight revisions. It's going to be the same story, but with some changes, a few major, but mostly minor. I even have added some scenes inspired by bits cut from the 2009 version!

I have most of the complete rework chapters finished already, but will be uploading them as I finish the other revisions. This time, I won't take ten years to finish.

Hope you enjoy

The Life of Ryau 'Cinotee: Beginnings.

Origins

November 4, 2012 1329hrs
Sumner Washington, Earth
[Civilian] Nick Walker

The early afternoon sun barely drew through the clouds and slowly drove away the last of the moist fog that had persisted since the morning. The weather was cool and damp; a typical Washington day and it was perfect for playing video games. A close pair of seventeen-year-olds sat together on a couch in a dim basement, blissfully unaware and uncaring of the weather outside.

A large gray pattern blanket covered them as they battled through the virtual icy canyons of Halo: Combat Evolved. They had met because of their mutual enjoyment of the series, a chance question before class a few years before, and the two went on to create one of the rare high school romances that would likely make it beyond graduation. The mostly silent teamwork they managed to employ came from years of regular co-op play through the original series. Together Nick and Michelle just enjoyed the game.

As soon as the Pelican touched down in swamps of the next mission, Nick's mom called from upstairs. "Nick, do you or Michelle want anything to drink? I just got back from the store."

"No mom, we're fine!" Nick shouted back and took a sip from the can he had left from last night. Michelle had a mug of coffee she had swiped from the kitchen before they had begun this segment.

The game was un-paused, and the duo returned to complete 343 Guilty Spark. Halo 4 was due to release tomorrow night, so they were playing all the games in chronological order on the Legendary to hype themselves up. Michelle and Nick had begun the night before and finished the Reach campaign before starting CE this morning. There was a slim chance that they would not be able to finish all of them in time.

A few missions later, they had just finished fighting through the tight frantic canyons of the desert plateau and taken the gravity lift into the Flood infected Truth and Reconciliation... when suddenly static washed over the TV's speakers and the screen faded in and out for a moment. When the screen returned, the split screen had merged into one. They had no control of the game, and the view was still in first-person as the Master Chief looked around the grav-lift room, but something was off. Everything looked... real. The sound coming from the speakers was still distorted, but Cortana began to speak her normal lines of dialogue for this scene in the game. The two teens sat there utterly confused.

The view on screen twisted around and expertly swept the room, then moved down a brightly lit Covenant corridor. The path was the same as the game, but the camera moved as if there was a real person clearing corners.

Cortana's line in the middle of the corridor began as normal, but then something off script slipped in. "The Covenant Battle-net is a mess. I can't access the ship's schematics... wait something just pushed me off the network... that's strange..."

"What is it, Cortana?" The Master Chief spoke.

"Some massive burst of data just brought down what was left of the Battle-net, and even caused some interference with your armor systems. I was not able to intercept anything except for-"

Unfortunately, neither Nick nor Michelle would find out what Cortana was talking about. The screen froze up and broke up with digital artifacts until it was just a bright green.

"What the hell was that?" Nick sat there, stumped.

"No damn clue." Michelle replied. "Are you sure we're playing with an original disk?"

"Yeah, I've had that one since the original Xbox."

"That looked totally awesome though, maybe they slipped it in an update on the 360 emulator. Tease for a Halo movie?"

"Well, whatever it was, it fried my console." Nick shrugged and waved at the screen. The console itself flashed the classic three red rings of death.

Nick stood up and pressed the Xbox's power button and the light went off, however the screen continued to display the bugged code. He groaned and pulled the plug from the console's power brick. There was no way that electricity was making it to the console; but yet, the code remained. As a final attempt to fix the issue, Nick switched off the powerstrip to the entire entertainment center and everything went dark.

"Uh, that was strange... I hope it didn't break anything else." Nick said, waiting the usual thirty seconds before powering everything back up. "Think we should just skip the Maw and move to Halo 2? Or do you want to see if there are any more added scenes?"

"Yeah, let's skip, we were close enough to the end anyway." Michelle said, stretching out her limbs from under the blanket. "Someone is bound to upload the scenes to YouTube by the time we're done."

Flipping the powerstrip back on, Nick ejected Halo and placed Halo 2 into the tray. He looked at the Halo disk and saw it was fine, no scratches, heat marks, or any real defects of any kind. With a shrug, he put it back into its case.

Hours passed and once the sun had set outside their window, Nick and Michelle decided to take a break from co-op and play against each other in custom games on Halo: Reach. They loaded up Nick's Forge World map he had quickly named My base. The location they happened to spawn was on the pillar; next to a small house-like structure one of Nick's friends had tastefully dubbed: The Bang Shack. The name was rooted in an inside joke relating to a bed-like platform he had put inside that took up all the space.

Nick's accidental ODST clad Spartan and Michelle's Green Minor Elite, dueled it out for a little while and waited to see if one of their friends would get on and join the game. But after an hour and no responses from anyone, they ceased hostilities and just jumped around the rocks.

In the down time, Michelle got the chance to ask; "So why are you a Spartan, I thought you loved Elites?"

Nick shrugged, "Eh, I was taking some screen shots of the Spartan for drawing reference. I didn't change it back afterwards, I guess."

Michelle laughed. "Yeah, it doesn't make sense for a Spartan to be called Ryau 'Cinotee."

"Pfft, yeah, I'll change it after the game; it's about to end." Nick said as the game clock ticked down to zero.

Suddenly the screen glitched and static once again filled the speakers. But instead of returning to the loading screen, the TV went dark, and words scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Attention: Generation Complete. Inserting targets to acceptable locations. Connection Established. Lines of alien text and code scrolled across the screen. It became apparent to the two lore fans that some of it resembled a mysterious script from the Halo universe.

Nick and Michelle looked at each other, not sure what to say. Out of nowhere blue rings started to form around them and the air rippled in the room. They were speechless. The couch vanished from their vision, and the rest room began to fade to black. They reached for each other, trying to make contact to prove that this was not happening. For a moment their fingertips brushed against one another, and then they were torn apart and thrust into the black void.

As he was adrift in the void, time was meaningless. Nick was not sure what was happening or how long he had been in there. He was not even sure if he had a body anymore. There was a pinprick of light somewhere off in a direction. It then began to grow brighter, and larger; Nick could feel some sort of sense of motion, at least before pain tore his body to pieces. He tried to scream, but not a sound was made in that void.

xxx

January 22, 2525

Nick sat up out of bed suddenly and felt his head spinning round and round. The memory of the void was fading fast and just leaving a field of confusion behind. Where was he? He did not remember going to bed. He had been on the couch with Michelle just seconds ago. His eyes shot around the room; the walls were white, and the monotone beep of a heartbeat monitor quietly went off from somewhere nearby. Was he in a hospital? Nick was lost in his own mind with so many questions.

He needed to calm down. Taking a moment to reposition himself to a more comfortable position, Nick took a few deep breaths to bring his breathing back down. As he did, the heartbeat monitor began to slow back to what sounded like a normal pace. To his left sat a table with a glass of water on it; his mouth responded to the sight by suddenly becoming painfully dry. He grabbed it and downed the glass in seconds. With his thirst sated and mind calmed, Nick took the opportunity to examine the room and himself more thoroughly.

He had a few bruises and scrapes here and there, but nothing serious. Pulling the blanket away he saw that his calf was wrapped in what looked like a plastic bandage; in truth it was a rigid cast, only as thin as a normal wrap. Moving it gave a wave of discomfort, although not too much. Glancing about the space, it just appeared to look like any other hospital room. There were a few chairs milling against a wall, a window to his right, a door directly ahead of him, and then another to the left. One of those doors was probably a bathroom he figured. The design of everything was a bit off putting though. It was too sleek and modern looking; hospitals he remembered always seemed to be a decade or two behind in interior design.

Another strange addition was a plate of glass that was mounted to the side of the bed. He tapped it with his finger. It was an unusual item he was not familiar with in hospitals. All of a sudden, it responded to his tap like it had haptic feedback. The glass flashed and a display materialized before him. It showed his name, heart rate, and some medical jargon he did not know. The glass display was actually quite interesting; it had been a while since he had been to a hospital, so new technology was expected. But then his eyes went down to the date in the corner. According to the small line of text, the day was the Twenty-second of January, twenty-five-twenty-five.

"Wh- what?" Nick shook his head. "That's bullshit, someone's just playing a joke on me." Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he attempted to stand. The cast gave enough support for him to hobble over to the window, but he could not find any drawstring to open the blinds. Actually, upon closer inspection it almost looked like the window had been frosted. There was a small press button that glowed off to the side of the window molding. He held his breath as he pressed his finger against the button.

The window defrosted and gave him a view that was most definitely not anywhere close to Seattle that he knew. The forest outside the window was tropical and it overlooked a populated valley with a crescent beach at the bottom. At Least he thought the trees were tropical. They were familiar, but different than any he had ever seen. The heart rate monitor's steady cadence increased equal to Nick's concern.

A voice spoke out of nowhere; it was cool and plain with barely a hint of automation. "Mister Walker, please return to your bed. You should not be on your leg this soon."

Nick whirled around, a bit faster than he should have and tweaked his leg the wrong way. He caught himself on the table beside the bed and shuffled closer to it. There was no one else in the room. "Hello? Who's there?"

The voice came from an unseen speaker on the ceiling. Nick could not find it. "I am Ruthai, Administrative AI of the Krabi General Hospital."

He had never heard of Krabi, and even the most basic artificial intelligence would have been at least a decade away last he heard. "What the hell is going on...?" He muttered.

The voice from the ceiling misunderstood his question as why he was in a hospital, not why he was supposedly five hundred years in the future. "You were in a vehicular accident one week ago. Injuries were minor yet you slipped into a coma. There was no detectable brain damage. I have alerted the nurse on duty"

"I was in a car accident...? I don't-" A sudden wave of intense vertigo passed over him, causing him to painfully drop to his knees. It was like a faucet had been opened, and memories poured into his head and layered on top of what he thought he knew already. Some were the same only the time period was off; growing up and living just outside of Seattle, his parents were functionally different but similar enough to have the old memories just be coma dreams. The memories continued on to his family moving to the colony of Hat Yai for business and culminating in a flash of riding his bike down one of the jungle roads.

Slowly, he shook his head and carefully brought himself back to his feet. The door to the hospital room slid open and a person came to his aid. Nick could not focus on their face; his mind was just spinning. The pain flared further with each movement, but he managed to make his way back onto the hospital bed with help from the nurse.

Thanking the Nurse, Nick took the glass from the table only to remember too late that he had already finished it off.

"So how long will it be until I can get out of here?" His head was still spinning and trying to reconcile the two different lives that he remembered. Was it all just a coma induced dream? That was what made the most sense at the moment in time. He was trying to think through a paradox, and it hurt.

"Your family has been notified of your change of condition, and the doctor will be in briefly to perform a checkup. So, you may be discharged as soon as tonight." The nurse replied. He took the glass and walked over to a seemingly blank wall. When he approached, a section of the wall rose up to expose a small sink station with a few other medical tools mounted in the recess.

The nurse offered the glass back to Nick and he took it graciously, then downed the water in one go. "Thanks..." He was lost in his own mind and the heart rate monitor continued to beep rapidly. Everything he remembered from the other life seemed so real; almost more so than what he was experiencing now.

Setting his head back down on the pillow he closed his eyes and let the rhythmic beeping settle his nerves. He ended up drifting back to sleep.

Nick brought that up to the doctor when she came in to visit, the double life and memories. She had assured him that some people experiencing a coma reported living entire lives before waking up in the hospital, though they should start to fade after a few weeks. The doctor checked him out and did not find any further cause for alarm; however, they would keep him in the ward for a few days before letting him go.

When his parents showed up it reinforced the belief that this instance was real, so Nick ultimately accepted reality as it was and went along with it. It had to have all been just a dream, there was no video game alien invasion, nor was there a woman named Michelle. She had probably been just a face he had seen in a crowd at some point. Life for him should be going back to normal in just a few short days, once his injuries were healed. What was more likely, getting pulled into another reality, or crashing a bike into a tree.

xxx

One year later, Nick stepped out into the light of his home star... Sol... the sun. It was nothing really special, he had grown up on Earth originally, but it felt good to be home. They had moved to Hat Yai back in 2518, he had been away for seven years. His parents had made the decision to move back to Earth after rumors began to circulate about colonies going dark. There was something going on in the Outer Colonies, but most everyone thought it was an increase in Insurrectionist action. They, being natives to Earth and the inner colonies, did not want to be caught up in whatever events were starting to hit the outer worlds.

However, some of those rumors set off warnings in Nick's head. The real world was beginning to make connections to the memories of his coma dream. It might all be a coincidence, so he tried his best to brush it off as one. Though the nagging feeling never quite went away.

He stretched his arms and then grabbed the handle of his luggage. His parents were over by a silver Überchassis sports car they rented from one of the nearby stations. It had driven up automatically to pick them up at the curb. Their actual car had to stay on Hat Yai; it had been too expensive to bring it back to Earth with the rest of their belongings on such short notice.

"Home sweet home," his mother said with a sarcastic tone. "I miss the tropics already."

"I set the climate control in our offices to thirty-two degrees, so it'll be nice and warm for us on Monday." His father chuckled and they both climbed into the front seats. Nick hopped in the back and connected his Chatter to the local net.

"Monday? What about the rest of the weekend? Work is too far away for comfort now."

His parents worked for Thorp Telecom, a comparatively small communications technology company that started out on the other side of the Cascade Mountains from Seattle a few hundred years ago. They were both specialist technicians and had originally been sent over to Hat Yai because the colony had purchased a local network setup upgrade from Thorp Telecom. They had made decent money but moving across the galaxy without company support cost a lot.

"I'm sure that we can get you a couple warm coats tomorrow. At home I'll get the fireplace working." His father replied.

"The fireplace? That burns wood. I don't want open fire in my house." She exclaimed. "Where are you even going to get the wood? Are you going to chop down a tree, Mister Bunyan?" Laughing, she pulled out her own Chatter and began to browse.

"As a matter of fact, I will." He said smugly.

With that settled, his Mother turned to face Nick. "So, what are you thinking about doing now that we're back home?"

"I'm not sure..." He had finished Secondary School before leaving Hat Yai. Was he supposed to go to college and learn some skills? He did not know; he never had any real understanding of what he wanted to do in the future. If he did not give her a clear answer, she would keep asking more and more questions, so he lied. "I think I'll go to college for a technical degree... then get a job at Thorp like you guys."

"Oh, that's nice, maybe you can come out and job shadow one of us later. Once we get more settled here." She smiled and went back to her Chatter, her curiosity settled.

On the ride over to their new house, Nick leaned his head against the window and continued to think about what he was supposed to do after he got settled. One idea did appeal to him; maybe he could get a job at one of the space elevators, and then maybe catch a position on a starship. There was a hard interest to get out there in his core, something that was not so common across the twenty-sixth century with all the open mundane space travel. Unbeknownst to his conscious mind, that drive originated from the old memories of the other life; the yearn to explore. But those old memories worried him; what if he had actually seen the future?

The Überchassis pulled down a long driveway in the middle of nowhere. This was the old grandparents' house on Nick's Father's side. It had been a family inheritance, and they had saved the house for their inevitable return to Earth. It just was not expected to be used so soon; renovations outside of the house were still unfinished. The house sat on twenty-five hectares of forest land but most of it was rocky hillside. They were probably twenty kilometers into the mountains from the nearest metropolitan center. That was the advantage of the mountains; it was hard to build there.

"Alright everyone, here we are." His father said. "Let's get unpacked and I'll get the firewood, then start cooking. Groceries should have been delivered this morning."

"Good luck, honey." His Mother laughed and pat her husband on the shoulder.

"Well, I'm gonna head to my room and get unpacked... then maybe do some exploring. See you for dinner." Nick climbed out of the car and looked around.

The air was cold, very cold compared to the tropical weather of Hat Yai that he had gotten used to; but inside him he knew it was home. Movers would bring the rest of his belongings as soon as they cleared planetary customs, so for now his suitcase was all he had to carry inside. He headed over to his room on the first floor and tossed the suitcase on the bed. He had laid out the new furniture on a Comm-pad before leaving and the movers managed to get everything just about the same. Unpacking his bag, there was a crashing sound from down the hall. The house did not shake, so his father did not knock a tree into the wall.

Nick hurried out and to the living room. A shelf had been knocked over, and all the books that his mother had been stacking were scattered across the room. Both of his parents were transfixed on the Holoscreen that was emitting from above the fireplace.

In big bold letters the headline scrolled across the top. "BREAKING NEWS: Harvest, Second Base, and Green Hills destroyed; an estimated Two-point-five million dead. UNSC reports Aliens behind colony wide devastation."

Images of smoldering planets flashed across the screen, but Nick was not paying attention to them. On the other half of the screen was footage from some system on the ground. A group of aliens were waddling down the street with strange glowing weapons. However, they were not strange for him... and he recognized the orange triangular backpacks they were wearing.

They were Grunts... from his dream.

It had not been a dream.

It was real, all of it.

The Covenant, Halo, Forerunners, all that time he spent playing games based on this reality. Thousands of thoughts raced through his head at once, but one cut through. What the hell had happened to Michelle?