<DIV><DIV><DIV><P><I>A long time ago, I was a living, breathing human being. I went mad. I served my enemies. They became my only friends.</I></P><P><I>Since then, I’ve traveled back and forth across this galaxy, and out to the spaces between galaxies--a greater reach than any human before me. </I></P><P><I>You have asked me to tell you about that time. Since you are the last true Reclaimer, I must obey. Are you recording? Good. Because my memory is failing rapidly. I doubt I’ll be able to finish the story.</I></P><P><I>Once, on my birth-world, a world I knew as Erde-Tyrene, and which now is called Earth, my name was Chakas...</I></P><P>In the wake of apparent self-destruction of the Forerunner empire, two humans--Chakas and Riser--are like flotsam washed up on very strange shores indeed.</P><P>Captured by the Master Builder, misplaced during a furious battle in space, they now find themselves on an inverted world where horizons rise into the sky, and where humans of all kinds are trapped in a perilous cycle of horror and neglect. For they have become both research animals and strategic pawns in a cosmic game whose madness knows no end--a game of ancient vengeance between the powers who seeded the galaxy with life, and the Forerunners who expect to inherit their sacred Mantle of duty to all living things.</P><P>In the company of a young girl and an old man, Chakas begins an epic journey across a lost and damaged Halo in search of a way home, an explanation for the warrior spirits rising up within, and for the Librarian’s tampering with human destiny.</P><P>This journey will take them into the Palace of Pain, the domain of a powerful and monstrous intelligence who claims to be the Last Precursor, and who now has control of both this Halo and the fate of Forerunners and Humans alike.</P><P>Called the Captive by Forerunners, and the Primordial by ancient human warriors, this intelligence has taken charge of, and retasked, the Master Builder’s cruel researches into the Flood--which it may have itself unleashed on the galaxy more than ten thousand years before. </DIV></DIV></DIV>