Canon

Lifeworker beacon

From Halopedia, the Halo wiki

A Lifeworker beacon was a device utilized by the Lifeshaper known as the Librarian to imprint her geas upon humanity.

Design and operation[edit]

The Lifeworker beacon seen on Installation 07 took the form of a great, egg-shaped structure on a platform of Forerunner metal that was fifty meters wide and about shoulder height to a human. The beacon was as high as the platform was wide and was the color of beaten copper laced through with swirls of dusky sunset sky. It was incised all around by smooth vertical grooves about an arm span apart. The device was camouflaged from the humans in the city it was placed in, and they built a market square around it.[1]

The purpose of the Lifeworker beacons was to act as an automated imprinting system, imposing the Librarian's various geas upon all of the humans within its range at birth. To the humans, they always recalled this as the Librarian coming to them at birth when in reality it was the beacons.[2] However, the signal from the beacons could be changed by whoever was in control of them. This would alter the geas a person was following to this new set of instructions.[3]

History[edit]

As part of her plan to free the Didact, the Librarian most likely used her beacons to manipulate the geas of Chakas and Riser to prepare them for the coming of young Manipular Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting. Both began to have very specific dreams of a young Forerunner visiting them in search of treasure,[4] which soon became a reality with the arrival of Bornstellar, who had been manipulated by an ancilla secretly assigned to him by the Librarian, who came to enlist the humans' guidance in finding Precursor relics.[5] Chakas and Riser led the Manipular to the Djamonkin Crater, where the sight of the Didact's Cryptum triggered preprogrammed songs which served as verbal codes to activate the Cryptum. Bornstellar noted that the humans had explored the island at Djamonkin Crater, built walls, laid down trails and kept defying the dazzler and then, as if giving up, departed before suddenly returning in more recent times as if something had changed, following their geas, having obviously been tuned by the Librarian for a particular, very difficult task.[6]

During his odyssey on Installation 07, Chakas found one of these beacons in the ruins of a Tudejsa city and correctly guessed its purpose.[1] By this time, the beacons on the installation had been subverted by Mendicant Bias and the Primordial who utilized them to alter the geas of the Tudejsa and draw them unresisting to the various "Palaces of Pain" located around the ring. After meeting Genemender-Folder-of-Fortune, Chakas learned of this and agreed that conflicting instructions from the various beacons around the installation made sense in the situation they were in.[3]

List of appearances[edit]

Sources[edit]

  1. ^ a b Halo: Primordium, page 88-89
  2. ^ Halo: Primordium, page 374
  3. ^ a b Halo: Primordium, page 184
  4. ^ Halo: Primordium, page 31-32
  5. ^ Halo: Cryptum, chapter 1
  6. ^ Halo: Cryptum, chapter 2