“Afore I can tell you what ya want to know there are things ya simply must know. Mainly what a Forerunner is both physically and mentally. These things may help ya to understand, as well as appreciate exactly who and what they were. The Forerunners were close in looks similar to a human being. To start off yeah they had two arms, two legs, two eyes, lil slits for a nose, a brain and had male and female members of their species. That is where the similarities end; they were almost a dull pearl in skin tone. The heads were large and domed as the brain was significantly larger; the eyes were more of a cross in the pupils. The eye had slits as a cat or snake and overlaid upon that a sideways kind of pupil much as a goat has. The arms and legs were much longer and muscled, set firmly in a squat torso, the hands ended in six digits as opposed to our five; also they contained an extra knuckle which gave them a pronounced dexterity. The creatures were as a whole a tall race, usually between six feet for the shortest and going all the way to almost eight feet at the tallest. Their mouths held large teeth with a pronounced jaw and barely any lips with which ta cover them.
The society was fractured to put it nicely. Many families warring with one nother for position in the society, forging fragile truces for the benefit of this or that house to overcome the enemies of another, only really coming together in times of great need. The mentality was very self-centered and self-serving. They viewed themselves as total and absolute Masters of everything they saw, conquering any race that dared to stand up to them often swiftly and mercilessly, enslaving the survivors to be their workforce. To infiltrate other civilizations they used their pronounced mental capacity to dampen the perceptions of others while using technology that projected a solid light hologram about their form. Thus they slipped seamlessly into a newly discovered race, often conquering from within before the newly encountered species ever knew what was going on. Adding any knowledge or technology of a conquered people to their own, this served to make em all the more dangerous to the galaxy at large.
At first they were simply content to flit among the stars utilizing faster than light drives in gigantic star ships. As they encountered and conquered other races they of course added more knowledge and technology to their already vast understanding of things. As a result the more they conquered the more they learned. In a very short amount of time the Forerunners were pretty much masters of half the known galaxy.
Never content to rule just some of what was out there they started to deconstruct their massive ships. Re purposing the technology to their civilizations they held in thrall on conquered worlds. Also not content to just sit still their scientific achievements jumped ahead by leaps and bounds, in a very short period of time they regained the ability to travel between worlds with the creation of gates. It was a simple process use one gate in a conquered sector to jump to another place they did not yet inhabit. Spit a ship out at specific orbiting coordinates containing warriors, scientists and a project manager/overlord. Set up a command post on the chosen world, build another gate planet side to connect with the home base and create a two way street between worlds. Thus many worlds fell in short order to the Forerunner incursion.
In those early days the Forerunners could almost be said to have been unified in one central simple goal, conquer everything. That of course fell apart as gates were established and this world decided that world held more than what the first world had. War broke out on a massive scale. Weapons were devised then used to devastating effect, sometimes reducing a world entire to no more than an asteroid field in less than a day. This is when the mechs were created. Niobium was found and consumed in massive quantities to the point where an entire system may be stripped of the precious resource in less than a month. This is where the story of the Ignis truly begins. The why of it anyway, the when and how of it is so much stranger”…
To be continued
Submitted by Pat Willis #224534