By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
IMPOSSIBLY OLD
There was nothing, just the Chief in the darkness. Everything was pitch black, only the wall was illuminated slightly by John's flashlight. He looked back to the bright sunshine and green grass, no, he had to move on.
Of course, that was all John ever did...He moved on...After every one of his friend's deaths he had no choice but to fight, in the rare chances John got to examine these deep parts of his life it brought a lump to his throat and a tear to his eye.
John cleared his mind, Cortana had sensed something was up but didn't bother asking. He kept his Assault Rifle poised in his combat-ready position, prepared for anything waiting for him.
He moved in silence, blindly making his way around with his hand against the wall.
"Stop." Cortana said suddenly.
John swivelled round, "Don't worry, looks like nobody is home. But there is writing on the wall..." She continued.
His flashlight quickly identified ancient looking numerals, not Forerunner Glyphs that he had encountered so many times before. There was no sense of familiarity with these words, unlike the time where he could have sworn every Glyph he saw made sense for a few seconds.
"Are you getting anything Cortana?" John asked her.
"No, the language won't translate. But it's more than that, this is no Forerunner writing...This language is old, very old..."
"Impossibly old." John concluded.
They moved on, left in individual wonder of what the language could mean. Finally, the darkness ended as a door snapped open and the duo emerged into a massive chamber.
Machinery whirred overhead with a long green beam, much like the one connecting the Dreadnaught to High Charity, was lined upon the ceiling.
There were empty Stasis Caskets on the walls, a red light was blinking on each one indicating there was nothing inside. A holo-panel made a loud clicking noise when John put his hand on it, the Caskets began to open one by one.
"What is this place?" John asked himself in a hushed tone.
As each pod opened, individual letters of the unknown language appeared.
"Perhaps this is some kind of cataloguing system..." Cortana suggested.
"Wait a minute." John said.
There was another panel under what looked like a power grid. John ran over to it and placed his hand on the panel, immediately a large hologram of the Artificial Sun appeared. Though it looked like it was more, like some kind of eye. Cortana piped up, "My scans indicate that this Sun is not really a Sun. More like...A protector or something, a guardian. Unfortunately I am not receiving any more data."
There was a flash and an emblem appeared next to the hologram, it was one large hexagon with a smaller hexagon at the bottom right hand corner. This sparked something like déjà vu in John's mind as its identification number appeared.
05-032 Mendicant Bias
Though John initially didn't understand what it was at first, Cortana gasped.
"Chief...We need to get out of here. Now!"
"But why?" A voice came.
John staggered back as the eye focused on him, "You..." Bias said.
"Remember me?" Bias asked.
John racked his head in an effort to remember, it eventually came to him back when he was on High Charity.
"There's something inside the system, fighting back..."
Cortana had said those words on the COM, and on the Ark and the replacement Installation 04...The strange Terminals detailing data inputs.
It all flooded back in a whirlwind of colour, the visions were clear and Mendicant Bias laughed.
"You should be dead...Shouldn't you?" Cortana said, clearly confused.
"I'm the stubborn type," Bias replied. John could have sworn he saw a little more colour go to Cortana's cheeks.
"Why are you here?" John asked.
"Remember, you are my example of my penance. I kept you alive on Halo, kept things stable and brought you here. Just as I did before..."
John's head hurt, this was too much too soon.
"You don't know? Very well, but the time will come when you must face your heritage. You are in fact, on the same Journey the Forerunners took. Just before they died, a sacred heaven from everything else...Outside time itself, this is no planet. This is a void." Bias said.
A void? The dead space separating the universe from nothing, the void was nothing...Just as the name implies.
"I've waited so long to speak with you again, I'm sorry about everything. I am but a shard of my true self, a fragment of a body. Like a severed limb. I exist to keep this place safe and guide those who come here, but as you know...This place is far from Forerunner." He continued.
"The Forerunners believed in a race like themselves, but had achieved Tier Zero technology. In short, the ability to mould life itself. Beings that left without a trace and had passed down their Mantle to the Forerunners, they were called the Precursors. But as the Cycle continues, each enigmatic race achieving such technological advancement must disappear forever. The Flood harvest what is left behind and what isn't, leaving a path of destruction in their wake and showing no mercy."
Though John was intrigued by Bias' story, he couldn't help but wonder how Bias knew all this but was given the task of Guardian here and how he knew so much.
"To satisfy your curiosity, I turned against my Masters and through my stage of Rampancy became a slave to the Gravemind...My atrocities were, extreme...But since then, I have learned to think anew by achieving Meta-Stability. I'm like you, a sentient being with real thoughts. I am placed here as my atonement, to ferry souls to the heaven they rightfully deserve. Until the end of time..." Bias finished.
Cortana had already accumulated all the information and stored it in an info bank, "We need to leave this place." Cortana said plainly.
"You can't. We exist outside of time and space and matter, there is no way back." Bias declared.
"There must be something! And if so many souls are here, why aren't any of them visible?" John asked. He was now frustrated.
"But we are here, John..." A voice came.
John spun on the spot and raised his Assault Rifle, then dropped it in sheer shock...
"No way! No..." John shook his head in disbelief.
Standing in front of John was a face he knew all too well, the first Spartan ever to die in combat and John's best friend.
Samuel...