Filaments

The Unbending Filaments, also known as Star Roads from the Halo Forerunner Saga, among the most impressive of Precursor constructs, was something I had trouble wrapping my mind around for sometime. Different people have different notions of what they are. At least in my interpretation of how the novels described them, they're like these massive planetary scale tendrils or even tentacles, that stretched across planets, star systems, even galaxies, effectively linking them in one continuous unbreaking network. In truth there's really no accurate way of describing them since they are not explored in detail in the books, even the Forerunner's later encounters with them when the Flood took control of the Star Roads, and what these structures were capable of doing only makes it more difficult to comprehend. It only further proves the abstract nature of these structures. It's as if they're higher dimensional or Slipspace objects made solid and tangible within the confines of our reality.

The Precursors, at least in my opinion, were beings that were so insanely advanced, so alien, that the vast reaches of their technology far transcends even the extreme limits of Forerunner science and philosophy. It would be like cavemen trying to replicate a Forerunner Keyship with stone tools and wooden materials. They were effectively Lovecraftian in nature, with a hint of Giger-ism about them. They are an eldritch anomaly, and they are not meant to be fully understood by beings bound in this universe. Even the novels claim that some Forerunners succumbed to insanity when they came into contact with certain Precursor artifacts.

Prints of this artwork are available at:
society6.com/product/filaments…