Prologue

San’Shyuum-Sangheili War
Skirmish of the Planet of Blue and Red
Circa 860 BCE
The First Age of Conflict

Mken ‘Scre’ah’ben, a San’Shyuum High Lord of Sacred Relics, floated toward the open hatchway. He paused his antigrav chair at the door and listened, fascinated by the discordant singing of an alien world: the screeching of the planet’s endlessly churning winds.

“The enemy is just beyond the ridge, High Lord,” warned the Steward, his military advisor and—theoretically—his bodyguard. “There is no need to leave the pod. It would be wiser to observe from orbit, using the Eyes. The Sangheili are fierce and cunning.”

High Lord Mken gave a dismissive gesture. “I have never been here before, and I will see this world firsthand. I am not without experience in combat. But if you are anxious, Steward, I shall be wary. My chair is weaponized—and I have you at hand. Stay close, but do not distract me.”

“Your orders are a joy to fulfill.” The Steward held back, adjusting his antigrav belt and noisily checking his pulse rifle. He seemed a trifle annoyed about being put in his place. The Steward was no doubt aware that, with his chair, Mken was better suited to protect the Steward than the reverse.

Still, Mken was indeed wary of this world, in spite of his bland bravado. He was not terribly comforted by the emplaced force field projectors set up near the pod—they moderated the wind, but would they protect him from attack? He scanned the sky for Sangheili fighter craft as he drifted his chair out the drop pod’s air lock. Here he paused, his chair hovering over the blast-scarred stone the pod had landed on, and swayed his long, gold-skinned neck with sinuous aplomb as he gazed curiously about, taking in the striking color contrasts, gust-flailed dunes, and rocky outcroppings of the planet’s principal continent.

The constantly shifting, shrieking winds were partly a product of the celestial objects that also gave this world its dual coloration: the blue dwarf star hanging in the sky to Mken’s left, the much larger red-giant sun to his right, both just forty-five degrees above opposite horizons. As per the High Lord’s orders, the pod had set down right on the Purple Line so he could appreciate the contrasting views. Hierarch J’nellin had been right to note in his monograph on the Planet of Red and Blue that the remarkable duality of hue, along either side of the Purple Line, was one of the wonders of the galaxy. On the left, the outcroppings and dunes were all gradations of blue, the sand lighter blue, the rocks darker; on the right, rugged landscape was entirely red, muted or emphatic, but all the way to the horizon. Only the relatively narrow Purple Line mixed the colors. The two suns in the binary-star system, one closer than the other, were always at the same angle, with respect to this motionless world, for there was no night on this side; the planet was prevented from spinning by the interlocking gravitational fields of the two stars. They played an eternal game of push-and-pull that would someday rip the planet apart. But until then, millennia from now, this world’s placement in the galaxy made it of strategic importance to the war effort; perhaps more important, there were Forerunner relics here in