Boundless had persisted in her studies throughout her long life, in defiance of Warrior orders. The reason why Warriors wanted this particular star left unstudied was never explained. Perhaps they didn’t themselves know. She was finally prosecuted for her defiance—I assume by Juridicals.

Perhaps you know of her case. No? Conveniently lost or forgotten, I suppose. Those millennia were harsh times indeed.

Her studies were suppressed, and she herself forced to enter a Cryptum that turned out to be defective, perhaps sabotaged. A thousand years after she entered, her Cryptum was opened, her death discovered, and her remains quietly disposed of by a small group of former students.

There is an odd story that for tens of thousands of years after her death, Haruspis kept finding her suppressed information floating to the fore in Domain studies. The Domain was favoring her, some claimed—but those tales are now considered legendary.

Still, I have always wondered.

A century before the Didact entered his Cryptum, I found a hard copy of Boundless’s studies preserved in the collection of a former Theoretical on Keth Sidon. Reading this copy, I was curious as to how all the odd facts Boundless had compiled about Path Kethona seemed to fit into a hypothesis emerging from my studies of human genetics.

Humans very likely originated on Erde-Tyrene. But they long ago abandoned that world and moved outward, setting up population centers around two other suns dozens of light-years away, then stringing outposts across almost thirty thousand light-years, out toward the margin of our galaxy.

Forerunners were aware of humans, of course, and tracked their growing populations, their predatory colonial habits. At that time, our boundaries did not merge. Humans were likely to be very troublesome, many thought—but not then. Not yet.

In just a few centuries those human outposts became very populous indeed and would later, during the following conflicts, absorb the brunt of early attacks by the Flood.

But who else had been aware of humans long before the Flood—of humans and perhaps also of Forerunners?

* * *

Keeper approached me and said, in a low voice, “We are on the lookout for neural physics architecture, true?”

“True enough.”

“We’re assuming that Precursors also reached out this far.”

“Assume nothing,” I said. “But search … yes.”

We now made six closely spaced jumps of a few light-years apiece. At the last jump, Audacity opened a small portal from which we might later choose, at will, a wide conical selection of future jumps.

In case we needed to depart Path Kethona quickly.

For many hours, we drifted in and out of the shock wave of our chosen star’s plume of ionized plasma, waving and furling over ten billion kilometers like an immense candle flame dancing in a soft breeze, as it intersected the more diffuse but steady output of a local cluster of suns.