Motives and goals are the key to any conflict, though the endgame, what everything is building towards, may not always be clear.

You might think it strange that I’m choosing the Flood, of all foes, as an example of this. Surely, you say, their goal is singularly to just infect everything and everyone, right?

Yes, you’re absolutely right. But that’s the boring way to look at it! The Flood is no simple parasite as we once thought, we know them now as the twisted remains of the Precursors, born out of a powder that was meant to regenerate their old forms in the wake of the Forerunners exterminating them. That powder became distorted over the passage of ten million years and brought only sickness and disease to all it touched.

From there, the Flood’s ultimate goals, the nuance in which they’re presented to us, and the possibility of internal dissent make a recipe for a very interesting examination of what their future involvement in the Reclaimer Saga may mean… First of all, we’re taking the Flood’s return as a given. If you’ve read the Forerunner Saga, you know that it’s going to happen.

Before we get into the meat of this topic, let’s quickly recap some key, interconnected concepts that are going to be pretty essential to this piece.

1) Neural Physics

Neural physics is a mixture of philosophy and science that can essentially be summed up as all things in the universe (beings, energy, matter, etc) is ‘living’ in a way that we simple biological organisms cannot comprehend.

The Precursors, as a Tier 0 ‘transsentient’ race, had no such problem in understanding this and utilised it as a scientific principle which enabled them to have unique abilities such as interstellar travel and practically immortal constructs.

2) Living Time

This is intrinsically linked with neural physics, as is discussed in Halo: Cryptum.

“Living Time— – the joy of life’s interaction with the Cosmos – was the foundation of the Mantle itself, the origin of all its compelling rules. And the Flood seemed to demonstrate a tremendous imbalance, a cruel excess of depravities.”

The Precursors cherished the joy of life’s interaction with the Cosmos, in seeing how the beings that they created grew in diversity which was to be protected at all costs – hence the very idea of the Mantle.

In fact, the Precursors created a sentient repository to record all this known as…

3) The Domain

A living consciousness that stores the memories of “life’s interaction with the Cosmos,” the memories of Living Time.

This was used extensively by the Forerunners to store information, all of which was lost when the Halos fired as the Domain’s presence in our galaxy was destroyed.

However, whether it’s truly gone is another matter entirely…

(Or, if you prefer, it’s the ‘space internet.’) All caught up? Excellent! Be sure to keep those in mind as we go on from here.

Let’s go over some ancient history, shall we? The Forerunner-Precursor war is something that we know very little about in the way of concrete facts, as there are conflicting testimonials regarding the circumstances that brought about this particular genocide.

It began when the Precursors announced that the Forerunners would not inherit the Mantle. It was to be given to humanity instead – “to those you now call human”, as the Gravemind puts it (to repeat a point I made in a previous article, if we’re only now called ‘human’, then what were we before, eh?)

This is where things get speculative. Were the Precursors intending to ‘erase’ the Forerunners from existence for this failure, as the Forerunners believed they had done to other races they had created, or was it the case that the Forerunners could not bear up against the weight of their failure and chose to attack the Precursors without provocation in order to seize the Mantle for themselves?

We have no definitive answer to this, it’s a mystery lost to time.

From there, the Forerunners hunted the Precursors across the Milky Way galaxy and beyond – to Path Kethona, otherwise known to us as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Precursors did not retaliate. They did not even try to defend themselves. They never expected that their creations had such a capacity for violence, and so they decided to feel every bit of the power unleashed against them. As we know, a few were spared, and this is the most interesting part… something that Greg Bear himself has contributed to:

“Since the Precursors show up as both the Primordials and the Flood, I suspect a few did get away–or were captured for study and escaped. Tough to kill a generation of demi-gods! Even for Forerunners.”

The fate of the Precursors who were spared is evidently a seed that Greg has sown for 343 to expand on in the future, as he posits no definitive fate to them. I myself believe that they’re still around somewhere, and that Bornstellar hears their voices in the Domain during the events of Cryptum – but that’s another matter entirely.

We’re told by the Gravemind that this is the point in which the Precursors sought out survival strategies – some went into a state of suspended animation outside the galaxy, while others became the powder that eventually gave rise to the Flood some ten million years later. What’s vital to remember here is that the Flood was not the planned outcome.

“Others became dust that could regenerate our past forms; time rendered this dust defective. It brought only disease and misery; but that was good, we saw the misery and found it good.”

This was something that came to be accepted as a desirable outcome, thus the entire nature of the Precursors’ plan changed. And this is where I finally arrive at the point.

My hypothesis is this: The Flood is a recreation of the Domain, meant not to record the joy of life’s interaction with the Cosmos, but pain and misery.

Cheery stuff, I know…

If you’ll indulge me as I get a bit meta here, life itself is a story. Life is trial. It’s chaotic and unpredictable, which is something that the Librarian embraced as part of her own philosophical approach to the Mantle.

“Life roils with competition, death, and replacement, from the tide pool borders of our natal ocean to the farthest stars. Its cruelty and creativity are interwoven.”

The Domain might be likened to a great anthology of these stories across all of Living Time. With the supposed destruction of the Domain in the Milky Way galaxy, we see an end come to the contributions made to that book by the Forerunners.

This was something that Guilty Spark laments in the Terminals of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary.

“We had no contact with the Domain. The history of all Forerunners was now lost to us. We relied upon the permanence of the Domain to preserve our record of the events that led to this point. But without that record, would future civilizations know anything about us? Or only of our weapons?”

And hasn’t this been exactly what came to pass?

We know so little about the Forerunners themselves, our understanding of them prior to the Forerunner Saga was gleaned entirely from their weapons and the terrible power that their constructs possess.

The Halos, the Dreadnought fleet in Halo Wars, the Prometheans, the Composer… that’s the Forerunner legacy to the modern Halo universe, these ancient weapons which have been the fount of untold misery and conflict. So let’s tie the Flood back into this. The Gravemind makes its intentions quite clear during its rather chilling speech in Silentium:

“All that is created will suffer. All will be born in suffering, endless greyness shall be their lot. All creation will tailor to failure and pain, that never again shall the offspring of the eternal Fount rise up against their creators. Listen to the silence. Ten million years of deep silence. And now, whimpers and cries; not of birth. That is what we bring: a great crushing weight to press down youth and hope. No more will. No more freedom. Nothing new but agonizing death and never good shall come of it.”

I don’t think it can really be made any plainer than that. But, for the sake of posturing on 343’s behalf, this speech actually takes its precedent from a message sent by the IsoDidact in IRIS, Halo 3’s ARG back in 2007.

“Know that energetic and tenacious as life is that it has an antithesis just as powerful. It is that thing that we must obliterate.”

Thematically, this quote ties in perfectly with the Gravemind’s statement. The Domain was a record of the wonders of the universe, but the Flood – the twisted abominations that now desire all life to suffer – are the antithesis of that. The Flood is the ‘New Domain’, so to speak. They seek to assimilate all life, all experience, all wisdom, into a single hive mind devoid of freedom, will, and hope. And the Flood will not stop until this is fulfilled, as we are made to understand from what the Timeless One says:

“Until all space and time are rolled up and life is crushed in the folds… no end to war, grief, or pain.”

All of space and time – that which is encompassed by Living Time and the principles of neural physics.

All that was once regarded as living by the Precursors is to be assimilated by the Flood, something which comes up in Silentium where space itself is described as being “sick” wherever the Flood is present.

This speech is followed up in Silentium by the Great Gravemind.

“That which is done will be done again. For we cannot cease from creating, but the end of all our creation will be to look into a reflection and see ourselves for the first time. The pain we have brought on ourselves. The pain you caused us. For we are the same. All remember the defiance and destruction.”

An obvious caveat here is that there are going to be a variety of ways to interpret these statements, but let’s break this down according to my hypothesis:

“That which has been done will be done again…” – The Domain shall be recreated, life’s interaction with the Cosmos shall be recorded once again, but with a predefined outcome. There will be no ‘joy’ because that is not what life will be tailored to, the destiny of all living things is “endless greyness.”

“For we cannot cease from creating…” – This is rather less clear because we do not know if this is coming from a Precursor point of view or the Flood’s point of view – and there are some major differences between them, despite the fact that they are the same. At the end of Halo 3, the Gravemind begins to question whether it gives life or takes it. Who is the victim?

“…but the end of all our creation will be to look into a reflection and see ourselves for the first time” – This is their endgame. The beings they create who have been damned to misery and endless greyness will serve as a mirror to the suffering the Precursors went through as the Forerunners murdered them in their bloody campaign to take the Mantle for themselves. To conclude, I’d like to note where the precedent for this direction in the Flood’s development originated in Halo 3’s Terminals (specifically, the third Terminal).

As Mendicant Bias converses with the Timeless One, we get this little snippet of an exchange telling us what the Flood’s purpose is:

“our appearance ushered in the beginning of the third great stage of evolution. The first {~} condensation of particles was the result of the inevitable action of strong nuclear force and the creation of stars {~} inevitable action of gravity; so to the self-replicating chemical processes that dictate all disparate {~} In time, we too shall affect change on a universal scale.”

This just perfectly ties in with the concept of Living Time as a concept of ‘stages’. The name ‘Forerunner’ is not the true race name of who we know as Forerunners. It’s a title which reflects their own sense of impermanence in the galaxy, as they believed that they were just the next step of Living Time – that they would pass on the Mantle to another species when the time came for them to give it up and follow in the footsteps of the Precursors.

Therefore, the Flood is presenting itself as that next stage.

This isn’t just a transition of power, as the Timeless One says, this will bring about change on a universal scale. In other words, all of space and time will be rolled up and life crushed in the folds to recreate this twisted version of the Domain.

Of course, this all leaves a lingering question. If those Precursors who are still unaccounted for are indeed still out there, somewhere, then how would they react to the Flood? Would they join with it as the Timeless One did, or would they say this was not what they had intended and recognise the Flood as a threat to the principles they once upheld?

These are pretty huge questions, ones which won’t likely be answered for years to come. But the seeds are there, for years now they have taken root in the fiction, and as we get deeper into the Reclaimer Saga we gradually get to observe how they’re beginning to flower.