> Doesn’t that powder sound very familiar? shouldn’t we all know what that is by this point?
Yes, I think it’s safe to assume that the Precursors, Primordial, and Flood are all of relatively same DNA.
Not what i was getting at. In silientum it was stated the precursors degenerated into a powder in order to survive but that was turned defective with time.
As the primordial is held captive we see the very powder that was brought up.
> > > > The Timeless One, the one that the Ancient Humans encountered and the one that the Ur-Didact met at the end of hte Human-Forerunner war was the last true Precursor, the last of the ones that the Forerunners rose up against. It would seem that, not long after it was brought aboard the future Installation 07, it merged with the Flood, as is made evident when the IsoDidact encounters the Primordial in Primordium.
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> > > My issues with that is the fact that as a Flood form he wouldn’t need a large disc to get around when he could just create wings or gas sacs. You then have him producing the very powered that was described in all the novels <mark>not to mention having eyes and not being able to communicate with them until it heard them speak.</mark>
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> > I don’t recall this exactly, so I’ll have to re-read Primordium. However, the Primordial described in Cryptum is very different from the one in Primordium. The former only had 4 arms, while the latter had many. In addition, the Primordial was most definitely a Gravemind by the time it was met by the IsoDidact. At some point, it must have merged with the Flood.
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> > The cell contained, in temporal suspension, a genuine monster: a large creature with an overall anatomy like a grossly misshapen human, though possessed of four upper limbs, two degenerate legs, and an almost indescribably ugly head—a head shaped remarkably like that of an ancient arthropod seeded long ago on a number of planets, presumably by the Precursors, and known to some as a eurypterid. A sea scorpion.
> > Oval, faceted, slanted eyes bumped up from the front of its low, flat “face.” And from the rear of the head, a long, segmented tail descended the spine, ending in a wicked barb two meters in length.
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> Doesn’t sound flood like there.
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> > Through the thicket of black rods the head became apparent first: shining grayish brown, flat, jeweled eyes mounted wide, expressing an arachnid’s perpetual watchful sadness—no neck, the head’s broad wings curving down over narrow, leathery shoulders.
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> Still doesn’t, everything that comes up describes this think as looking like an insect of some sort.
I don’t know what you are trying to point out. I am saying that the Primordial was indeed a Precursor, if not the last true Precursors. Then, sometime before the Didact showed up on Installation 07, it merged with the Flood. The IsoDidact makes note that the Primordial he encounters on the installation (not the one he encountered on Charrum Hakkor) is most certainly a gravemind.
> > HAVE YOU FOUND what you came here for?” the Didact asked the Primordial. For a moment, I doubted it had the means to answer in any language we could understand, but the sounds from the symmetrical, vibrating mouthparts slowly began to produce words —something like speech. At least, I heard speech.
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> That was what i spoke of it not knowing how to communicate until they said something.
This doesn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t communicate at all, or couldn’t communicate with Chakas and the IsoDidact until after it heard them speak. It just choose to wait to respond. That’s what I got, anyway.
Either way, whether this was a Gravemind or a genuine Precusors, it had communicated with the Didact before, so it somehow not knowing how to communicate until being spoken to doesn’t make sense.
i just assumed languages would change after 10,000 years.w
> i just assumed languages would change after 10,000 years.w
They may change, but the IsoDidact knew all that the Didact knew, at least in regard to the Primordial. I guess it’s possible that the IsoDidact may not have known the exact dialect that the Ur-Didact knew to understand and communicate with the Primordial, but that feels like a bit of a stretch.
Without reading the entire thread…this is what I believe.
By the time the primordial was captured, it was the flood. It’s mind was the entire flood, and and one particular body was no more important than another. Though the primordial may have had the body of a precursor, it was no more than formality at the point.
The voice that speaks for the flood is the primordial speaking, as the primordial is the flood, regardless of which body it is speaking through.
Wazooty I agree with you for the most part.
The way I understood it, before the Primordial joined the Flood it was more animalistic but still had a guiding intelligence or intelligences. When the Primordial become part of the Flood or perhaps contacted the Flood after the humans found it in its prison, the Flood found a reason for unification with every other sentient species.
Hmm…
I have wondered what the Primordial was as well, especially the revelations provided by Primordium. While I am not that surprised that the Precursors became the Flood, Silentium doesn’t make it entirely clear exactly what the ‘last Precursor’ truly was.
Given that the Precursors had a cyclical, form-shifting existence, my sense of the Primordial at this point is that it was kind of half-way point between the earlier Precursors, and the Flood as we eventually come to know it.
When the Ur-Didact talks to a Catalog about his encounter with the Gravemind, he mentions a distinction between the Primordial he encounters on Charum Hakkor, and what the IsoDidact dealt with on Installation 07.
Halo: Silentium, String 12, Page 167.
“CATALOG: Here is where we have difficulties with your story. In his deposition, the Bornstellar Didact describes how he killed the Primordial on the rogue Halo. He placed it in an accelerating chronological field and forced it through millions of years. In the process, it disintegrated into dust. He was acting on your behalf…under the influence of your imprinted instincts and emotions. So it was not the last…?
UR-DIDACT: this being was not the Primordial I encountered on Charum Hakkor, but something else entirely- though it retained the Primordial’s motives and thoughts and memories. It was a Gravemind- the Gravemind, more accurately. It was the Primordial’s final act of revenge.”
Yet, when the Primordial is discussed in other parts of the book, it is defined explicitly as being a Precursor, despite it being defined as a kind of ‘early’ Gravemind in the previous book.
As has already been mentioned, it could have melded itself with the Flood to become the Gravemind, but perhaps there is another option.
Given that the Precursors could take on so many different kinds of existence, both in body and “spirit”, and the fact that we actually don’t know much of anything about the actual life-cycle of the non-Flood Precursors, leads me to this line of thought.
Perhaps, as the IsoDidact suggested when he spoke the Primordial, those particular kinds of Precursors were in fact “Graveminds”, but not in the sense as they became when attacking the Humans and the Forerunners.
Maybe in that particular form, the Precursors over time became a race that would, later in their life cycles, merge themselves into a larger form, dying but being reborn in the process as a greater entity.
Perhaps that kind of existence, from being initially discrete beings to becoming larger and more unified, was their life cycle. Given that up until this trilogy, we have not learned anything about the biology of the Precursors, it could very well be plausible that they were beings who die, merge, and be reborn in a new existence.
Given that they formulated the Mantle, with its balance of life, death, and rebirth, perhaps this was made manifest in their life cycles in that particular form.
Why did the Forerunners assume that the Precursors were individual biological units in the same sense that they and most other species were?
What is to stop an advanced race like the Precursors or even the Forerunners from becoming an exotic, shape-changing life form that can “die” individually as they merge together, only to be reborn as something much greater and more unified? Why does any advanced race need to stay so locked into such a primitive form, when they could do so much more?
This train of thought also relates to the powder that some of the Precursors became; it was meant to regenerate them in time, but since time and damage to the carrier vessels made it defective, we get the early Flood etc.
But even defective, perhaps it might give some insight into how the Precursors would’ve been reborn. By itself, the powder doesn’t really sound like something that would spontaneously merge into multiple Primordial-like beings. Given that it was applied to other life forms before its effects became manifest, perhaps that is related to the pre-purge Precursors.
Perhaps, as part of their life-cycles, they would imbue this powder into other life forms, be it their younger, discrete forms, or their creations, and over time, this powder would convert their subjects into components of later-stage Precursors. After this, the ‘infected’ life forms would merge together, die, and be reborn as a proper Precursor.
Though this idea sounds far fetched, I think that it is important to note that the powder needed external biomass in order to do its work, even if it was rendered defective.
^It’s not far-fetched at all, Marag. Your arguments are convincing, especially when you consider that the Primordial was shedding dust before it died.