At any rate, the Ur-Didact is no longer present.

Mendicant Bias has expressed curiosity about my reason for being with the Didact. I will do what I can to gather evidence from this unusual witness. I do not expect to succeed, and I hope not to survive, but Catalog’s work must continue.

MENDICANT BIAS: Do you know what I am?

CATALOG: Yes.

MENDICANT BIAS: How useful are you, half-machine? Are you still connected to Juridical networks?

CATALOG: I am not what I was, and so cannot truthfully answer, even were it my duty to do so.

MENDICANT BIAS: I was able to observe your interaction with the Gravemind. Before we sent away the Didact.

CATALOG: You removed him from the presence of the Gravemind?

MENDICANT BIAS: Not me. The Gravemind.

CATALOG: Why was the Didact released?

MENDICANT BIAS: I cannot know for certain, but the Gravemind never acts without intent. There’s apparently a larger game to be played, a sharply twisted game of revenge, for which my co-creator has been preserved.

Mendicant Bias instructs a pair of monitors that I be brought along on a tour. I cannot move on my own; I am paralyzed. We pass through several chambers to an outer command center. All in the command center are infected by the Flood. Some are unrecognizable, in late stages of transformation. We see a battle in progress, not much of a battle now, more like a feasting after the kill.

This must have once been a heavily populated system of dozens of worlds, likely not far from the Orion complex itself and very ancient. The most likely candidate is Path Nachryma, a tight cluster of over a hundred interlinked suns along Thema 102.

We are entering a ring of icy moons. There is no sign of Forerunner resistance. I am overwhelmed by sadness, for in the time I have been out of touch with my Juridicals, the heart of the Forerunner ecumene has been ripped asunder.

The crew in the command center seems to freeze in place; the very air cools sharply, perhaps because so much of the Gravemind is subject to decay, improperly integrated, bits of its victims littering the deck or floating past …

[TT: Lacunae of some length]

… a noxious mass filling half the command center. I can see that the Gravemind’s integration has proceeded to the next phase, forming a more distributed anatomy, and perhaps that is why it is shedding dead tissue; like a developing fetus, it is undergoing a kind of self-sculpturing. What it may eventually look like, I cannot tell; no more attractive than any other Gravemind. Larger and even more asymmetrical.

GRAVEMIND: We sense a possibility of danger.

The voice is cold and precise, beautifully melodic, pointing to the power of thought of which it is capable, growing sharper by the hour.