MENDICANT BIAS: Under normal circumstances, what remains should not be capable of reforming a significant combat force, yet somehow they have found a way. What danger could there be?

GRAVEMIND: Forerunners surprise even those who created them. Their treachery is matched only by their resourcefulness. One of them, the Master Builder, arouses our interest. Tell what awaits us in that mess of moons.

MENDICANT BIAS: A portal, always open, stretches far outside the ecumene to a shadow fleet of technological monstrosities—no doubt led by an inferior metarch, Offensive Bias. This fleet guards the Ark, the last bastion of Forerunner resistance and the final repository of all sentient life.

GRAVEMIND: Then we must find the Ark.

The Gravemind focuses on me. I cannot move, cannot flee. A mass of tendrils sprouts from what I perceive to be its center, arches out over the few meters between us, grabs hold of my carapace … Worms through to my biological core. I am pulled from my carapace, all but severed from system and memory. The pain is excruciating. My sense of self fades with alarming speed.

Again I am in the thick of Gravemind thought processes. But our connection moves in both directions. I am surrounded by Gravemind—enormous spaces of memory and will as slow and deadly as thick lava, scorching all resistance, then covering, molding over … I can barely even hope to conduct an interrogation from within, but that will be my last impulse.

I will not give up!

Vaguely, the Gravemind becomes aware … but my persistence is rewarded.

During our debate, the Gravemind hinted at a vast reserve of rules accumulated more than half a billion years ago, a huge library of experiences and disputes codified into the total wisdom of the Precursors.

I am there. I can see it, judge it! It floods me with case history.

The High Juridical was correct! Those who created us, who formulated the very concept of the Mantle, were themselves rich with distilled precedent. I can see their rules written in our genetic codes! We are creatures of Precursor law down to the very chains of molecules within us.

Precursor hatred of Forerunners is central to establishing motive. They say Forerunners rose up, unprovoked, and destroyed them. The Precursors did not defend themselves. They marveled at the power of destruction, of reorganization. Their law includes the necessity of violating the very nature of law … And so they created the Flood to allow themselves the pleasure of watching, at a later date, the progress of their most violent and aggressive creations …

I detect deliberate contradiction.

How can this be? Can such sublime mentality be so distorted?

And yet … So rich! So infinitely deep in meaning and broad in scope, I am overwhelmed. The Gravemind studies me, loves me so intensely it will eat me, absorb me into its very center.