"When peace like a river attendeth my way,

"When sorrows like sea billows roll,

"Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say--

"It is well, it is well, with my soul.

"Sleep well, sis. It's been a long fight, and you've earned it. I promise you, we'll figure out the answer and bring you back. Tellus needs you now more than ever.

"When we wake you back up, you'll hit me for saying this. I don't care: love you, Cass. Never stop fighting."

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

13 Rising Dying, 1886 CE

Hallard

The thinkers among the forerunners called it the Harbinger, but it thought of itself by no name. Names were a human convention, and humans were not the only creatures in the galaxy that could think. Nor did the Harbinger call the forerunners by that word, save on those rare occasions when it needed to stretch its mind to encompass verbal speech in order to communicate with a human.

It certainly never called the forerunners by the human term of "Chimera," for that would have been an abomination to it.

For the Harbinger, scents and sounds and sights contained meaning of their own, and words were a pathetic human attempt to fold infinite meaning into arbitrary and limited vocalizations.

Its identity dwelt in the unique scent that floated from its skin, in the shape of one of its body's claws as it withdrew them from the neck of the mortal guard, in the way that its ever-present Companion melded intentions with it so that its genes shifted, unlocking the door before it.

The Harbinger slipped into the room. The purity of the oxygen in the air burned the Harbinger's nostrils, and the Companion within it hissed its desire for sulfur dioxide. It had been so long since it had breathed free.

The Harbinger could hardly even smell the blood running through the veins extending from the sickly-pale walls. The tiles were so smooth, angular, inorganic.

Humans were truly a scourge on Tellus. If only their biosphere were not so rich!

Besides, the masters could make use of any intelligent species, even humanity. The Harbinger's existence was proof of that; generations before, his stock had come from them.

The masters. Their thoughts pulsed like a heartbeat beneath the Harbinger's own. They always had, rising within the dreams of his bodies, filling him with hopes of silver genomes. Yet always when a flesh awakened, the dreams ebbed away from him, leaving him empty inside.

This body had followed those tattered shreds of dreams to a guarded room in a guarded libraratory in a guarded city called Hallard. By air and by blood he'd crept through the nests of his enemies to reach this isolated chamber and the prize hidden within.

A bald woman, impaled by veins and nerves, twitching on a throne. It was a failed experiment that the Hallardites had infected with fluid stolen from La Table d'Or. It produced the Companion, but it was not a Half-father; its thoughts were broad, but it was not a Master-Mind. Yet it was more than a simple Tool.

It was what the Harbinger had spent many turns of Tellus waiting for. He had done his part, following the dreams and setting in motion the chain of events that awoke Tellus's Master-Minds. Even if they had not foreseen their destruction, the Harbinger deserved his reward.

Indeed, the masters had no choice but to grant the Harbinger what he sought. The enemy was too cunning; she and her pack had slaughtered four Master-Minds, one of which had been the Half-father itself. The masters would need a wise guide to ease their descent on Tellus.

So the Harbinger's body crept up to the throne. It positioned its head underneath one of the open veins in the woman's arm.

Drip, drip, drip. The Harbinger licked gleaming azure fluid from around its mouth, and the purity of the Companion within the substance flowed into its body, enlightening the Harbinger's weak Companion.

A true SOPHIOS awakened within it.

There was no Chrysalis, for that was a thing of humanity. The Companion and the forerunners were as one from birth. But even a human Magus transformed into a forerunner lost all but the vestigial impulses and Synaptic connections of his Companion. Even the Harbinger, wise though he was, needed to spend all of his Companion's attention on the Synaptic connections between his many bodies. No forerunner had ever known a true Symbiont.

Not until now.

Burning with power, the Harbinger's Companion communed Synaptically with its other bodies, exalting the genophage within them to a higher form of life. SOPHIOS flowered within dozens of Harbinger incarnations across Tellus, and they lifted their thoughts in a Synaptic chorus, calling to the stars.

The stars responded, and for the first time in its life, the Harbinger saw its masters clearly. It saw their goals, their strengths, their weaknesses.

Their needs.

As the door to the chamber burst open and the Hallardite humans lowered their weapons at its body, the Harbinger laughed. The beautiful sound, an expression of the true destiny of a human evolved to his limit, scraped echoes from the ceiling, the floor, the walls.

Bullets riddled the Harbinger's body, and it fell. One of the humans came forward and leveled his gun at the Harbinger's injured form. The creature looked familiar.

"That's the one," the human said. It took the Harbinger's pain-wracked body a few moments to understand the words.

"You're sure, Captain Cornartis?" one of the other guards asked.

"Positive."

The Harbinger blinked its eight eyes up at the human Cornartis and laughed wetly a second time.

The gun barked. As the consciousness within the Harbinger's body faded, he heard the human Cornartis say, "That takes care of that."

"Yeah," one of the others said. "But how'd it get in, and why was it here in the first place?"

The Harbinger's body died.

In caves, hives, and nests across Tellus, dozens more of the Harbinger's bodies laughed as one.

Then they rose and set to work.