And so it was that at Charum Hakkor, the Didact and I moved among the captured commanders and warriors and their families, surrounded by those who had fought against us for decades, often bravely, more often still with unique treachery. We could not avoid bitterness—we are only Forerunners, after all. But the cost the humans had paid, and would continue to pay, was horrendous.

The debris of battle lay all around, ruins of human structures but also, visible through the haze and smoke as long slender streaks in the sky, the untouchable and perpetual star roads of the Precursors, placed there more than ten million years before. These gray, eternal whorls stretched to middle orbit, where their rotating bands drew constantly and silently from the neurophysical energy of raw space in ways we still do not understand.

Life—achingly beautiful, impossibly difficult.

What we brought for Lord of Admirals and his last warriors were the Composers. These large, ugly machines had originally been designed by Builders in a failed attempt to attain immunity against the Flood. Composers broadcast high-energy fields of entangled sympathies to gather victim mentalities—essences—and then translated them into machine data. In the original scheme, new bodies were constructed, and the subjects’ essences were imprinted over them—minus any trace of Flood patterns.

The results were not at all satisfactory. In fact, they were horrible. The Forerunner bodies so treated did not live very long. None survived outside of mechanical storage.

But here—Composers were all we had. All we were given. Builders and vengeful councilors made sure of that.

The hundreds of thousands of humans still alive on Charum Hakkor were handed over to Lifeworkers to be studied, probed, analyzed molecule by molecule, thought by thought, down to their very cells—and then subjected to the wide-ranging, rippling fields of Composers.

After the Composers had done their work, draining these last survivors, these exhausted and dying warriors, of their memories and patterns, their remains were reduced to scattered atoms. It was manifest holocaust. Once the second greatest fighting civilization and species in the galaxy, humans were stomped down, reduced, effectively eliminated as a threat.

Throughout, the hardest part was processing the human children. They had been formed into their own cadres, given their own defensive orders. Raised in times of continuous war, they seemed to understand what was about to happen better than their elders. I remember their wise eyes, unafraid, terrible.

CATALOG NOTE: The Lifeshaper’s ancilla transfers sensory data recorded at the time described. What Catalog glimpses of Composer procedures is disturbing. I have never directly witnessed such events. And yet, even this does not rise to the level of a crime against the Mantle.

Not yet.

LIBRARIAN

Despite our feverish preparations, Builders and the Old Council had kept the Flood’s existence secret from the great centers of Forerunner population, ostensibly to avoid panic during time of war.