I WAS NOT always called Lifeshaper. That title came to me just before I walked among the defeated humans at Charum Hakkor, in the company of the Didact, ten thousand years ago. And that is a kind of beginning.

Despite my husband’s triumph over these broken wretches, I felt like weeping, remembering fallen friends, colleagues … family. But not for them alone would I weep. These pitiful humans, wounded and fallen, were also my children. So the Rule of the Mantle instructs.

Forerunners have always thought themselves especially mindful of their responsibility to all living things, even should they bite and scratch and claw—or kill. But threaten us with utter destruction? Humans had fought too well. And evidence of their own cruelty and arrogance was overwhelming.

While pushing back human forces, Forerunners had come upon system after system where humans had wiped out entire species and civilizations, or subjugated them to their own schemes—as they had with the decadent and beautiful San’Shyuum.

The final triumph at Charum Hakkor had brought with it mixed spoils, mysteries, perhaps not so much treasures as curses passed along by the defeated, as if knowing they would distract us, sap our will to fight, drain us of our conviction …

The most important of these was a human timelock, kept at the center of a vast Citadel. Within this device, humans had preserved, or imprisoned—or both—an ancient being found just beyond the last thin star clusters at the margin of the galaxy. They called it the timeless one.

The Didact called it the Primordial.

My husband forced knowledge of the timelock’s workings from a damaged human servitor—a version of our ancillas. The Didact could not unseal the timelock, nor release the occupant, but he did conduct a brief communication with the creature stored therein.

The Primordial was six meters wide and almost as tall, an unnatural mix of ancient arthropod and mammal, head flat and broad and low, overlapping sloping shoulders, wide-spaced compound eyes glittering like raw diamonds, its compressed body that of a many-limbed, corpulent ape, while down its spine crept a segmented, sea-scorpion tail—all packed tightly inside the container.

The Didact’s first opinion was that this time-suspended horror was a clever fake—perhaps a psychological weapon. But it was much more than that.

This encounter changed the Didact. He told me what he saw, ten thousand years ago, but not what the creature said to him. That he withheld from me—or any other. I think he wished to protect us. He could not, of course. Not long after securing the Didact in his Cryptum, I made a journey to Path Kethona and discovered the Primordial’s secret on my own.

More on that in its proper place.

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