Brethren Moons

The Brethren Moons, sometimes called Brother Moons or Blood Moons, were gigantic, highly intelligent, space-faring Necromorphs that stood as the ultimate source of the Marker signals. They were the direct result of a Convergence Event and were believed to be the final stage of the Necromorph life cycle. Their goal was the eventual killing and total consumption of every living being in the universe, a crusade that had left entire star systems devoid of even microbial life.

The cycle of Convergence#

The Brethren Moons were moon-sized necrotic lifeforms scattered throughout the universe with a single apparent goal: to kill and consume all organic life. On a practical level this was reproduction by Convergence, but the Moons described their existence as a divine and inevitable force of fate, granting themselves the status of a god. This was echoed by their Unitologist worshippers, who called Convergence a universal awakening, and the Moons spoke of an entire species' death as that race's ascension toward an eternal, undying form. Their written language, the Marker Symbols, emphasized the circle to represent unity and the circle of life.

Each cycle began when a Moon produced double-helix obelisks called Black Markers, possibly grown in the way a body grows hair or fingernails. The Black Markers were ejected and allowed to travel through space at sub-light speeds until they impacted a suitable host world. In the case of Earth, a Black Marker struck the Yucatan Peninsula around 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and clearing a path for mammals to rise. As believed by Unitologists and asserted by victims of Marker Dementia, the Black Marker's signal then guided the evolution of a sentient species, with the aim of producing one intelligent enough to replicate the artifact and build Red Markers.

Once the dominant lifeform on a host world reached a certain level of intelligence and overpopulation, the Black Marker made its presence felt, its signal an alluring source of seemingly limitless energy. The signal severely affected the brains of those who discovered it, manifesting as homicidal or suicidal tendencies in simpler minds and as an obsessive compulsion to replicate the artifact in intellectuals. After a brief period the signal also began to reanimate the dead into Necromorphs. When enough biomass had been gathered, a Marker could initiate a Convergence Event, flinging all the dead tissue within its influence into the stratosphere to coalesce into the biological core of a new Moon, which then absorbed fragments of its host world to form a protective shell of rock. This rise of a civilization followed by Convergence and the birth of a new Moon was known to have repeated countless times across the galaxy.

The dead galaxy#

Dr. Earl Serrano speculated that all life between the origin of the Brethren Moons and humanity's home system had been extinguished by them, their genetic material mixed into the Moons' uniform biomass. This offered an unsettling answer to the question of why humanity had never met another civilization: not because none had existed, but because a vast hyper-predator had already absorbed most of the organic life within the galaxy and beyond, leaving it a dead space. Serrano further discovered that the Moons were linked through a complex telepathic network spanning the universe, which they used to spread the Markers' influence to new species and keep the cycle going.

The Moons also chose their moment. Serrano speculated that they deliberately allowed a species to thrive until its numbers grew unsustainable before beginning Convergence, a fate that had befallen the aliens of Tau Volantis, the humans of Earth, and countless civilizations before them. The limitless energy promised by the Markers encouraged any species desperate for resources to focus on building replicas, and the Black Markers that quietly shaped those species in the first place ensured the cycle would continue.

The Tau Volantis Moon#

Two million years before humanity reached it, a Convergence on Tau Volantis was interrupted when the aliens the Moon meant to assimilate built a machine that flash-froze their entire planet. The act rendered their species extinct but halted Convergence in its tracks, leaving an incomplete Moon frozen and semi-dormant in orbit. In response the Moon used the Markers across the galaxy to broadcast a distress signal to any who could understand it, with pleas such as "Make Us Whole" and "Turn It Off," hoping to lure organic beings to the world so they would disable the machine and let Convergence finish.

During the incident on Aegis VII in 2508, Marker 3A gave the miner Brant Harris knowledge of the Brethren Moons, which he later tried to explain to Dr. Challus Mercer, describing the voices from the Marker as "hungry to be heard, like stars are hungry." The same Marker communicated with Isaac Clarke, with one hallucination pleading with him to "Turn it off," a reference to the alien machine keeping the Tau Volantis Moon frozen. Lacking the bodies of its long-departed makers, Marker 3A instead passed the knowledge of how to build Markers to others, most notably to Isaac himself.

Convergence at Titan Station#

In 2511 the Site 12 Marker on Titan Station attempted to create a Brethren Moon by initiating a Convergence Event after much of the station's population had been converted into Necromorphs. To complete it, the Marker guided its maker, Isaac Clarke, toward being absorbed through a hallucination of his dead girlfriend, Nicole Brennan. Isaac instead fought and destroyed the Marker by battling it within his own mind, which suggested that the architect of a Marker could resist the Moons' influence, at least to a degree.

Awakening of the Brethren#

On Tau Volantis, Isaac Clarke learned that the source of the Marker signal was the incomplete Moon orbiting the planet, and that if it were freed, every location in human space with an active Marker would become a target for assimilation. He and John Carver discovered that the alien machine had been designed to destroy the Moon by crashing it into the planet after freezing it, but that this function had never been properly configured because the species that built it died too suddenly. When the Unitologist leader Jacob Danik set the Moon free, Isaac and Carver raced to reconfigure the machine and managed to kill the Tau Volantis Moon. Their victory was short-lived. Though incomplete, the Moon had absorbed enough biomass to contact the rest of its kind before dying, fully awakening the Brethren.

In the aftermath the surviving Unitologists on Tau Volantis heard a voice from the awakened Moons within their minds, saying "We are coming. Make ready the way," and their faith was renewed; some took their own lives to join the Brethren, while others left the planet. Isaac and Carver reached the CMS Terra Nova and, fearing the Moons meant to follow them home, were turned against one another by the Moons' visions, only to discover the Brethren already knew where Earth was. They installed a salvaged ShockPoint Drive and reached Earth to warn humanity, but found the planet answering only with the snarls of Necromorphs and saw several Brethren Moons rising from the far side of the world, their tentacles scouring its surface as another Moon bore down on the Terra Nova.

Form and nature#

The Brethren Moons were colossal Necromorphs, far larger than any other form, composed of the biomass of countless species that had undergone Convergence. The surface of each Moon acted as a protective casing, much like a mollusk's shell, into which the creature could withdraw so that it appeared to be little more than a rogue planetoid drifting in space. Within that shell lay a body of tentacles that could reach thousands of miles, long enough to touch a world's surface from orbit without the Moon itself falling into the planet's gravity. At the center sat a vast circular maw with five enormous yellow eyes, resembling those seen on Nexus organisms such as the Hive Mind, capable of ingesting huge quantities of matter in moments.

In addition to faster-than-light travel, the Moons were sapient and communicated across great distances through telepathy, the same ability they used to cause hallucinations in lesser minds. When they spoke through their prophet on the Terra Nova they referred to themselves in the plural, each Moon regarding itself as an extension of a greater whole, and described themselves collectively as a god. They appeared to lack any empathy whatsoever, untroubled by the destruction of their own kind or the defeat of their servants, and addressed Isaac with a calm, almost polite manner that stood in stark contrast to their purpose.