For thousands of years, based on where the Flood struck in our galaxy, many had theorized it originated in one of the smaller local galaxies, Path Kethona, and in particular a huge, filamentary nebula ripe with birthing suns called the Spider [TT: Tarantula Nebula].

According to legend, Path Kethona was first visited by Forerunners during our greatest period of exploration, over ten million years ago. Yet there was substantial doubt that voyage had ever happened. Records had long ago vanished. Not even Haruspis, entrusted with studying the Domain, could access those memories.

In any case, the Domain, in time, converts history into truth beyond the understanding of most Forerunners. To establish the kind of truth we could understand, we would need to recreate that first great voyage.

We would need to go there.

I am not comfortable with the spaces between suns, much less between galaxies. My love and expertise lies in the immensity within—the unbounded inner roil of a cell, the tight-packed jostling of hundreds of thousands of molecules cooperating and competing at once, all unaware that their activities, massed together, open doorways to even greater immensities: you, me, all living things.

The greatest galaxies are nothing without our inner immensity, which opens our eyes to their light, our senses to their warmth, and our minds to their challenge.

Stars I understand. They shed light and give life. It is the emptiness between that haunts me. Space has its own textures and mysteries. Forerunners draw power from the perpetual rise and fall of ghostly particles that have no true existence—until they are harvested. We draw power as well from the interstices of space itself, where space and time form the tiniest little knots of uncertainty and dimension.

But emptiness without sensation, the unobserved vastness between suns, brings me nightmares. I am happiest on a teeming planet, surrounded by aggressions and consumptions and births and all the colliding webs of observation and fixation. Reality for me begins with the small.…

But inevitably it must end with the very large.

Soon after the Didact was safely hidden, I went before the Council with a plan for an intergalactic fast transport, a vessel so extraordinary it would enrich Builders across the Forerunner galaxy.

I had learned well how to play this particular game of Council politics. For Builders, contracts meant everything, and my challenge combined elements they found irresistible: re-creating the greatness of our past, harnessing new technologies, and accessing the immense resources of the ecumene to stuff Builder coffers.

As well, the mission’s goal was direct and compelling. This would be a Lifeworker-sponsored expedition. Neither the Builders nor the Old Council could deny that Lifeworkers were most devoted to preserving and understanding life. However strange, the Flood was a living thing, or mass of things, and so it was well within our purview to study it and try to understand.