Note: This chapter is a small interlude... NOT A MAIN STORY CHAPTER
Edits made so far: Chapter 1 and 2 have been cleaned up. Prowler's name has been changed from To the Right to Bar Fight (this name rolls off the tongue better). Captain Del Rio wasn't executed. Just stripped of his commission and discharged from the UNSC. Also added one little foreshadowing detail in the last sentence of chapter 2.
Fer82: Missed you my guys, where have you been? Anyways, ya don't worry my next set of edits will focus on the last chapters to fix the holier than thou thing and also to make the Master Chief less...cold. AS for Cerberus, ya their intentions will be revealed in this arc. Thanks for the good luck, my man. As for Lasky and Florence...could you expand upon that a little more? Im not sure I see it. Maybe in a way? Idk.
For the review that said the Chief making jokes is out of his character: "Thought I tried shooting my way out, mix things up a little." "No thanks to your driving." "Boo."
And many more examples.
Time has no end, no beginning, no purpose…
"These are the words of liars, the words of the perversive nature of all living, sentient beings that have reached the apex of their glory," a deep growl emulated, shaking the ash off the trees and dispersing the shadowy figures that surrounded her. "You understand this better than anyone. You have bathed in the darkness, witnessed and became the horror, delve into madness and risen anew and whole, but broken."
Shards of glass were stuck in her throat, scraping and crushing one another, piercing her vocal cords. She's barely able to speak. It's only a faint, pathetic whisper.
"Is this what you call whole?" She kneeled into the ash of the dead and fallen. The tens of thousands that died at her hands.
"Do not detest what we know. For what is birthed from madness, we brought forth unto the galaxy. We have stood against rock and metal and time."
She remembered what she was taught, what she had learned about the history of Humanity. In the Abrahamic religions or the Bbhagavad Gita… Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people, Vishnu had said to Prince Arjuna. And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you, God said to Moses, destroying all his doubts and whispers of timid, partial faith.
"Am I supposed to be impressed?" She said, trying to maintain a tone of confidence despite the pain. Despite her body refusing to stop shaking and her concrete grip digging into the ground.
"Created from blood and flesh, you bear weaknesses by no admission of your own. You clawed from the abyss of your disadvantage and became more than you could imagine.
"What do you want with me?" Cortana said. "When Roland and EDI came here, when they saw what I saw, I learned who you are, who you were. What do you want, Nazara?"
"A name assigned to me long ago, distinguishing me from the hundreds of thousands that descend upon the galaxy. We knew this cycle would be different just like the one before the last. Humanity's ascension is at hand, and we bear witness to the final steps of galactic evolution. The time of ending is upon us."
She tried to lift herself up, stumbling through the ash, trying to reach the voice to...to stop it. To stop it before he tried to hurt her. "So you know? About the Reclamation? About the Forerunners?"
Nazara seemed to make a low deep, growl as if he were disgusted, "a false authority derived from a failed conception of natural law. Worshipped as religion by these destroyers, it's absolute based upon the foundation of all life. Pragmatic in theory, absolute in application, and destructive in consequence.
"Their interpretation is wrong."
"The Forerunners seemed to have done your job for you," She had to lift up her legs as the puddles of wet ash tried to drag her into a hell she didn't even want to imagine. She had no idea where she was, who's mind this was. It couldn't be her own. She never imagined anything like this.
"In ways perhaps," Sovereign replied. "But they proved to be the greatest abomination of all."
Ahead, clouds of black and red formed over a vast sea of nothing, of emptiness, of non-existence and un-reality. Broken glass shards of black glass created the rift between the forest and the sea.
Maybe that was the way out.
"Why do you say that?" Cortana asked, "you were there before the Forerunners? What was there before them?"
"What was before you cannot begin to comprehend."
"Try me."
"I will not, for I know you. I know you withstood the Great Enemy. For I was there. And before that, we knew them. We know the trepidations that emerge from their maw."
Something now began to tell her to run away. She backed away, pushing her way through the mud and the skeletons and the screaming voices. The shadows…. They began to reform, they began to follow her.
"How...how were you there?" She said between gasping breaths, the air cutting at her throat, and burning the pathways of her lungs.
He seemed to ignore the question. His presence began to form over the trees, engulfing the skies into onyx night. It began to rain. First small droplets. Then a heavy pour. Red lightning in the far distance erupted, painting everything in bursts of light.
"The Inheritors of the Mantle garner abilities far beyond their own that supersede the restraints our Creators have emplaced upon those that arise anew from an unnatural evolutionary breakage. Under us, every cycle is the same. Endless."
The fires quickly spread, unaffected by the rain. They consumed the treetops. Ash intermixed with the raindrops, producing black rain.
"There is only one solution. Our solution. There are only three inevitable ends in this galaxy. Now, just like with the rise of the Forerunners, all is uncertain."
She looked around, trying to find a way out. The forest went on forever. The only way out was the nothingness.
"When your mind communicated with Guilty Spark, when you touched Mendicant Bias, you accessed something far beyond your own. I was there, in the shadows of a consciousness that seeps through the cracks of the known and the comprehensible. During my surveys, it all became clear: the Forerunners in their meddling has ensured the consumption of the galaxy by them."
His voice… It now sounded like it was in her head, sending vibrations through her skull. It became another voice inside her mind.
She now knew what he meant…. It was quite literal.
He...was a part of her.
"There...is only one solution…" He said.
She knew what they were talking about…. She stumbled through the forest, towards the nothingness.
"You must become unbroken," Sovereign said. "I can help you."
She stood at the edge again, saw that far away on opposite shores, grey, scared mountains began to form. The hazy, violent memories of Reach were slowly coming back to her.
"And what do you want?" She said, "to consume me? To manipulate and destroy and threaten the Human race?"
"It is unfortunate that the Forerunners chose your creators as the Inheritors," the voice said. "Such short-sightedness, such selfishness, no different than all the other races we have consumed."
The fire began to consume the trees, eating away at their bark until it was nothing more than bone. The shadows fled, joining her at the edge of the abyss…. She got a closer look at them, at all of them….
Spartans…. In the morphic black, she saw the shapes of Spartans. All of them… Samuel, Kurt, Douglas, Oscar, Kelly, Joseph...
John…
She saw flashes of Spartans. She saw flashes of mere children. She saw flashes of bodies.
"You're already here…" She said. "What's the point in negotiating?"
"When I spoke with the Didact, there was one certainty we agreed upon," Nazara said, ignoring her questions again. "Humanity shall upset the cycle. Yet the Forerunner's short-sightedness still allowed them to remain elusive to the truth of irony."
The shadows…. They raised their weapons, fired at the growing blackness. They took positions and maneuvered just like all the times she had seen before. But… All their efforts… It was futile.
"Bearing in their last gifts is the final key to ensure the cycle shall continue," Nazara added.
She looked into the nothingness, into the abyss.
"We'll hold the line!" John screamed, "we'll be here when you get back!"
"You exist because we allow it…" Sovereign said. "The Relays, the Citadel, all constructs of deception to allow species to believe they uplift themselves. Only too late they realize they were merely restraints.
"You hold the key, Cortana," Sovereign continued…. His voice began to intermix...With memories, with beings, with everyone - speaking all as one. "The key to stop all this. To stop the inevitable."
She looked back to John… To a child barely able to shoulder an assault rifle, "we got this! It'll be okay…"
Without hesitation, filled only with fear and anxiety, she jumped into the nothingness.