Menachite portal complex

The Menachite Forerunner Complex is an underground facility built into Menachite Mountain by the Forerunners to house the Forerunner Crystal.

Layout
The outside of the complex resembles granite rock, with passages allowing access along the wall. The wall has a long stretch of glyphs trailing along the wall that twist into a spiral mosaic and vanish into ever-smaller curls. The glyphs are part of the wall's material, described as being composed of glittering mica inclusions in the granite matrix. The glyphs themselves are a series of squares, triangles, bars, and dots, and blur out of focus when someone looks at them directly.

When SPARTAN-104's blood touched the wall, a transformation occurred. The glyphs began to emit a soft red glow comparable to heated metal. The glow spread outward from point at which his blood touched the wall, and the colors in the center began warming to orange and then to yellow-gold. A single white glyph, a triangle, became visible in the center of the spiral. Despite the emission of light, the glyphs did not radiate heat. When SPARTAN-104 touched this glyph with his bare fingertip, all the glyphs along the entire wall glowed white with brilliant illumination. After a moment, the wall itself rumpled and transformed into a corridor leading into the complex.

The corridor was twenty meters in height, leading inward at a straight line that gently sloped deeper into the ground. The floor was paved with asymmetric blue tiles patterned in a way comparable to waves lapping on a shore. The utterly smooth walls were inlaid with centered four-meter tall gold glyphs made of similar shapes of triangles, squares, bars, and circles. When the glyphs began to softly glow, SPARTAN-104 felt himself attracted to them, but resisted his impulse to approach them on an intuitive suspicion that they were dangerous. His radiation counter briefly pulsed, supporting his hesitation.