BACKGROUND: As promised, here's another piece to go along with it! You can view the original here on DeviantArt (remove the spaces): the-chronothaur/art/Hork-Bajir-Arbiter-Commission-939080390

(And, again, for those of you reading it here on FFN, go over to AO3 to see it embedded!)


The Hork-Bajir Seer shouldn't even be walking around free and uninfested, but here she is.

From a very young age, her parents knew that she was a seer, that one special Hork-Bajir who only comes along once in a generation, supposed to lead their people to better things. She never saw her parents again after they helped her escape from the Yeerk Empire, before the Yeerks could infest her and put one of their own in her head and control her.

And somehow, she had been rescued by yet another conglomerate composed of multiple alien species... this one calling itself the Covenant.

But these other aliens did not enslave people; oh no, they offered salvation for all. She must have spent countless hours among their prophets, entranced by their teachings about the Great Journey, and about the divine "Halo" rings scattered throughout the galaxy.

She wanted to help fight, and after talking to the three San 'Shyuum Hierarchs who led the Covenant - the Prophet of Truth, the Prophet of Mercy, and the Prophet of Regret - they agreed to help her liberate her people, and in return, she would then get the rest of the Hork-Bajir to join the Covenant and follow the path of the Great Journey.

But they also taught her about another race of aliens, those calling themselves "Humans," who had apparently turned away the chance to join the Covenant and now deserved nothing but annihilation. The war between the Covenant and human civilization, what the latter called their "United Nations Space Command," had already been raging for years, starting well before this one Hork-Bajir Seer had ever been born.

She also learned about the Arbiters, those disgraced Sangheili warriors who were offered a chance to go on impossible missions so they could die with some semblance of redemption. One of the Prophets had graciously loaned her a replica of the Arbiter's armor, and because of the similarities between Hork-Bajir and Sangheili physiology, it only needed relatively minor modifications.

She went into several battles alongside Covenant troops, gaining experience and also allowing herself to undergo some augmentations. She proved to be quite good at fighting and killing... perhaps too good.

But as time went on, and she saw how the ruling class of the Covenant treated some of those under them, and to say nothing of their ceaseless war against the human race and their UNSC, she had to wonder: Was this truly the path to salvation, or had she merely exchanged one set of all-controlling overlords for another?


AUTHOR'S NOTES! So, how did you like all of this?