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nova-igniting campaigns against the Forerunners, the devastating battlefronts that sprawled across dozens of light years and left a smouldering wreckage of worlds in their wake. Then there were the bold acts of demolition that the Legion inflicted on Forerunner allies down in the dissolute tiers of hyperspace.
    In its long and glorious history, the Legion of Avatars had fought and defeated many enemies both honourable and treacherous. The worthiest was the last adversary in the dying universe from which they had fled an age ago. The Izalla were a species whose control over organic life was so encompassing and profound that inorganic mechanisms were never required. After aeons of expansion from galaxy to galaxy the Izalla encountered the Legion of Avatars, whose own empire was an embodiment of the principles of convergence, the melding of flesh and metal, of machine and mind.
    The Legion had never met an enemy like the Izalla, but the Izalla had previously encountered a machine race and utterly defeated them. And for a time that experience seemed to aid them against the Legion. But the Legion held to its eternal principles: they possessed the intuitive adaptability of organic thought as well as the might of the machine and soon the tide of conflict turned in their favour. After several centuries of bitter, savage war the Izalla found themselves facing complete obliteration, inexorable, inevitable. With no hope of survival, their leaders triggered a string of black continuum fissures that tore through their universe, devouring galaxies whole.
    The Legion Knight’s memories dated from that period, when thousands of converged civilisations had already perished and the Legion of Avatars was assembling an armada of armadas in readiness for the time when they would have to flee to another universe. Like all his most important data, these memories were stored in the most secure, best shielded of his biocrystal chines and as he reviewed their denotators he noticed something attached to the oldest recollections, sequence markers linking back to data clusters … in his organic cortex. Uneasy, he paused – the old blood-fed cortex might be the seat of his awareness but the biocrystal augmentation supported the transcendent level of his essence, the crucible of thoughts and actions faster by far than those permitted by organic neural synapses. Thus he had long ago copied all relevant data into biocrystal storage and used the organic memory as a backup for essential schemators …
    One of those old memories showed images of his cyborg form post-convergence, so he followed the sequence marker back to a particular highly compressed multicluster in his cortical storage. He hesitated a moment then flowed it into his awareness …
    Motion … he was in motion but not from the use of drives or attitude thrusters … he had limbs, long, stiff … four? Six? … with grasping, fleshy digits at their extremities … he was moving through, walking, stalking through a high-ceilinged series of hazy chambers … plants grew from the wall, tiny lights moving among them … another long-limbed creature like himself emerged from an adjacent room and came up close … slender tentacles tipped with sensitive palps reached to touch and stroke his skin … Stay, she said, we love you, we need you with us, go not to join with the cold … others entered the room, proclaiming the same song, but he shook off the intrusive touches … what did they know of convergence, of the wonders that awaited him? … in haste he rushed towards the exit while they called out to him in grief, called out his name …
    Abruptly, he broke away from the memory flow, thoughts gripped by panic and a primal fear. Why had that memory been left intact? There were others in the cortical storage, records sequentially tagged to the early one in biocrystal – did they also contain memories from before his transformation? Clearly he had cached them in the organic cortex shortly after the