- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
It's from an unformatted terminal in Marathon 2, on the level Kill Your Television. Here's the full text:
"I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh.
I have been called a hundred names and will be called a
thousand more before the world goes dim and cold.
I am hero. She has been nameless since our birth,
a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin,
a sword drenched in my blood forever, my greatest and
only love. She is the dark. O Lethe, enemy and lover, without
whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar!
Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world
and, unaware of our twin destinies, we matched stares
across a dry fountain. And I recall her smiling at me before
she devoured the lawn and trees with a translucent blue flame
and tore flagstones from the path and hurled them into the
sky, screaming my sins. I powder a granite monument in a
soundless flash, showering the grass with molten drops of
its gold inlay, sending smoking chips of stone
skipping into the fog. She splinters an ancient oak
with a force that takes my breath and hurls me to the ground.
She lea% [leaves?]"
There is no indication who the two people in the text are, but there's been a lot of speculation over at marathon.bungie.org/story and the HBO Halo story page. There's some Halo connections in this terminal - namely, "she splinters the ancient oak", which has been thought to be the Pillar of Autumn. I can't claim any credit for this; I'm just pulling out stuff that I remember from reading the Halo and Marathon story pages.
Btw, I found the terminal that uses the "friend of a friend" quote in Marathon: Infinity. Durandal uses it to refer to the player who is jumping through parallel dimensions, trying to find a way out of the near-catastrophic situation that he's in. The "friend" that Durandal is talking about is, I think, Thoth, who's the one moving the player across possible universes. I don't know why 343GS would be using that, or even how he would know of it - which leads me to believe 343GS was around during Marathon 2, when you woke up Thoth to begin with.
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Tartarus, I'm glad you asked - after finding the full terminal text, I realized that the KYT terminal mentions Gilgamesh, which ties in nicely with the text of the Enkidu transmissions.