- OrderedComa
- |
- Noble Member
Posted by: Wolverfrog
In all honesty it was probably something so vast and alien that their minds could not comprehend, and so it drove them to suicide through insanity.
Now, I only just finished Cryptum and wasn't exactly committing every word to my eternal memory, but from what I could see the Prisoner and the Gravemind are linked, but not in the way we imagine.
Have we ever really considered the meaning of 'Gravemind'? Sure, the Flood are dead and the Gravemind is their centralised hub, per se, but what if it means something else?
The Prisoner could have indeed been the last Precusor. Until Charum Hakkor was cleansed with Halo, at which point he might have likely been destroyed.
However, a fragment of his mind could have lingered, much in the same way the Forerunner store a portion of their personality before death in their armour. Bear in mind Precursors would be far more adept at this, perhaps being able to preserve their entire being aside from physically in their 'armour' (or the Precursor equivalent.)
And so the Prisoner remains, a mind in his grave. The prison he is kept in is opened by the Halo blast, and he escapes on Mendicant Bias' Halo ring.
In order to regain physical form, the Flood bring biomass to him (I'm assuming there is a connection between the Precursors and Flood, there's too much coincidence for it to be otherwise. The Flood's appearance didn't seem to well explained in Cryptum, I had been hoping for a chilling first encounter on G617.)
And so with time, he becomes what we know as the Gravemind; a prisoner within flesh not of his own.
Sure, this is pretty much pure conjecture (like all my theories) and I'm not even convinced myself by it, but I'll leave you with this quote from the Gravemind:
"Silence fills the empty grave, now that I have gone. But my mind is not at rest, for questions linger on."
It's a thought, at least.
Nice theory there, Wolverfrog, the Gravemind and Prisoner are definitely linked in some way, and are most likely the same entity, imo, there is just too much evidence pointing to it for it to not be true (unless Greg Bear is throwing us a massive red herring).