The Caution of Ra-Cazhune

By Ra-Cazhune

CURATOR'S NOTE: "The Caution of Ra-Cazhune," recovered sometime before the Asari invention of spaceflight, is the most anomalous of all the antecedent writings collected within Thessia's restricted vaults. It is the only writing left to us written from the point of view of a Xalanyn, the purported destroyers of the Prothean Empire. For several thousand years "The Caution of Ra-Cazhune" was speculated to be inauthentic, an attempt at satire planted into the vaults by a scribe with an odd sense of humor.

Contact with the Covenant has forced us to discard this theory, for the simple reason that "The Caution of Ra-Cazhune" makes several allusions to the San'Shyuum, whom of course we have learned are no fiction, but the alien race which makes up the Covenant's priestly caste. Perplexingly, "The Caution of Ra-Cazhune" refers to the San'Shyuum as rivals, not disciples, of the "Forerunners," and so, far from confirming the truth of the Covenant religion, the text is deeply offensive to the doctrine of the Great Journey (does the Covenant's "Great Journey" refer to the same event as Ra-Cazhune's "Containment?"). In any event, we must now assume that "The Caution of Ra-Cazhune" is an authentic product of antecedent alien visitation to prehistoric Thessia, although we still cannot say that it was necessarily written by a Xalanyn. It may be that it is a satire, but one written by a Prothean. Where they can be understood, the text's claims are extraordinarily difficult to credit.

"The Caution of Ra-Cazhune" is to be treated as a CLASSIFIED text and is not to be disseminated to the public or to any alien, under any circumstances.

Most of what has existed has not existed.

That is because we Xalanyn, we who are Endless, invented time travel. After we did so, and before we did so, everything else was subject to erasure, for time travel is the one and only thing which may not be erased by time travel. So, all else has been uncertain, is uncertain, and will be uncertain. There is but one surety in this plastic galaxy. That we Endless invented time travel, are inventing time travel, and will invent time travel.

When did we invent time travel? Obviously, a useless question. How did we invent time travel? I have no idea. Why did we invent time travel? That I can answer. We invented time travel to counter a threat. But that threat never existed. But without The Thing Which Never Existed, there were the Leviathans, who were then the threat, who had always been the threat.

And the Leviathans thought to fill our minds with hallucinations, to deceive us, to manipulate us through unreality. But we were not afraid of hallucinations, not afraid of deception, not afraid of unreality. For in that galaxy of thralls without certainty and machines with only false certainty, we always clung to one knowable fact, the only true thing in the universe. That we had invented time travel. And the Leviathans thought to tell us that time travel is impossible! No! Lying mind-squids! Of course we invented time travel! It is only that the lying mind-squids made us forget how it works!

"You are impossible," said the Leviathans. "You are so deluded and full of yourselves that we don't even want to enslave you. We are going to strike you down with killer robots. Of course, everyone else who tries that kind of thing ends up regretting it, but we are smarter than everyone else, and so it will turn out fine." The Leviathans ended up regretting that idea.

Then, there were the killer robot Reapers, and not much else. All those thralls without certainty and those machines with only false certainty were gone. There were only the Reapers, and some terrestrial primitives, and us, and Living Time. "Gah!" exclaimed the Reapers in frustration. "Why can't we boil your species up and pour you into a Reaper?" they asked. We told them it was because we were still loyal to Living Time, even if we had forgotten exactly what it was. We told them about the kalpas. We asked the Reapers to consider their own insignificance in the grand scheme of the galaxy, and even the galaxy's insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. "That is a defeatist attitude," said the Reapers. And the Reapers created Dead Time. And we were afraid, and we ran and hid away for one billion years.

But the kalpas of Dead Time were not like the kalpas of Living Time. They were short and permeable, and did not end properly, and the secrets of extinct races were whispered from kalpa to kalpa. And the Forerunners rose from Ghibalb, and they heard so many whispered secrets that they knew how to destroy the Reapers.

"Hold!" cried the Reapers. "Why don't we work together instead?"

"Are you kidding?" asked the Forerunners, and they blew the Reapers and their Dead Time away.

The Forerunners had done the galaxy and Living Time a great service, but they were also manic-depressives and megalomaniacs, which we could tell because they named themselves that. Nobody else named them that. So, we kept hiding, which we were used to by this point anyway.

Everybody was grateful to the Forerunners for a while, but after only a couple dozen thousand years people started to grow sick of them. Two peoples, Man and the San'Shyuum, tried to do something about it, but the Forerunners slapped them back down, way down, all the way to the terrestrial level back down. That was a mistake, because Man and the San'Shyuum knew something that the Forerunners didn't. They knew that The Thing Which Never Existed was back.

The Thing Which Never Existed set out to eat the universe, again, but for the first time. We kept hiding, naturally. We knew that The Thing Which Never Existed was bad news, worse than the Leviathans and Reapers put together. We invented time travel to counter The Thing Which Never Existed, and if that didn't work, what would? The Forerunners had an almost unspeakable idea.

The Forerunners felt responsible for letting The Thing Which Never Existed grow so large. They regretted striking down Man and San'Shyuum. They entered one of their depressive phases. They decided they would kill the galaxy before The Thing Which Never Existed could. They called this idea "Containment."

After "Containment" there were only a few Forerunners left, and some terrestrial primitives, and us, and Living Time. We thought that at this point it was safe to show ourselves.

"Who are you?" asked the ragged remnants of the Forerunners. "Where have you been this whole time?"

As we explained, they grew angrier and angrier with us. "You've just let all this happen? Not only the Thing Which Never Existed, but the Reapers before that?" We tried to explain that The Thing Which Never Existed had actually happened first, until we made it never happen for a while, but this did not calm the Forerunners down. "No!" they said. "Unacceptable! We did all this work, and we killed so many people, and we had this whole redemptive plan to pass the Mantle of Responsibility down to the Men we wronged, and here you are, still flying around in spaceships like nothing happened, yammering about time travel! Time travel is not even possible! Well, we're not having it. We are locking you away."

We thought they were just blowing off steam, but they went and did just that.

The confinements the Forerunners built for us weren't any more painful than hiding away in Living Time is, but it was a very embarrassing experience. We had to wait until one of the primitive terrestrial cultures the Forerunners had saved invented spaceships, so that they could come and let us out. "We are the Prothean Empire," the primitives said. "You serve us now." We told them that we had heard that before, from scarier people than them, from the Leviathans who ruled the galaxy one billion years ago. We asked the primitives whether anybody had heard from the Leviathans lately. "We are the Prothean Empire," they repeated. "You serve us now."

Sweet little psychic ape, did you catch our mistake? It was the bit right after the Forerunners "Contained" The Thing Which Never Existed, when we revealed ourselves and by doing so allowed the Forerunners to lock us away. We should have stayed hidden. All of us agree on that now. We are almost finished replying to the Prothean Empire, and we have all agreed that after we have made our statement, we will return to seclusion. We do not have this alien fixation on rule. We are not like the Protheans, or the Forerunners, or Man, or the San'Shyuum, or the Reapers, or the Leviathans. For we know that Living Time laughs at all conquests, laughs at all achievements save one, this being the achievement of inventing time travel, and this achievement is for the Xalanyn alone.

But I wanted to leave you with this short record of bygone cultures, this memento mori; because the Protheans have tinkered with you extensively and they have left you caches of what they consider to be their wisdom, and the Protheans hope that you may revive and bear their petty legacy even after we slaughter the very last of them. I wanted to leave you, their pretty blue daughters, with an un-Prothean message to contemplate:

The Xalanyn are Endless. No one else is.

Also, I turned some of you into vampires, as a joke.