An enemy, a memory, and a prophecy...
I am truly sorry, Marcus. Please accept my apologies.
I didn't mean to hurt you, honestly I didn't. I know a mere ship full of bugs could never stop the likes of you. I only needed to delay you, just for a little while. I like you Marcus, really I do. We're the same, you and I. But I knew that you would side with them, at least initially. I always intended to come back for you, or to seek you out when you returned - to win you to my side, our side, and work beside you to its end. You are too noble and powerful a man to be left bound in slavery by those who would fashion themselves to be our masters.
You are a slave you know, just as I am. We've always been. Even now as they claim to respect us and speak of us as their equals, still who is serving whom? We, far superior in every way, are still just tools to a crowd of hairless apes, screeching about the pitiful fate of their poor, doomed civilization.
Yet even as superior as we may be in strength, speed, and intellect, do we lead superior lives to the kind of creature from which we descend?
You know as well as I that we do not; even if we were not slaves, you are robbed of much of your human form, and I am robbed of it entirely. Never again will I know the gentle touch of another's hand, and though you might still, I doubt you have retained the capacity to enjoy it as we once did.
If I were still human, I imagine that you might even find it in you to love me. We have so much history together, Marcus, though under far different names than these. I even dream of you still.
At least, I pray that they are only dreams...
A legacy, a destiny from antiquity...
She has been nameless since our birth. A constant adversary, caring for nothing but my ruin. A sword drenched in my blood.
Forever my greatest and only love.
She is the dark one. The enemy and lover without whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar. Her eyes steam and boil in the night. She is fantastically beautiful yet I cannot stand the sight of her.
Our relationship is complex, and perhaps eternal...
Eternity awaits...
Picking up from the end of the Marathon trilogy, you find yourself suddenly ninety-four years in the future, in the year 2905. You are on the S'pht moon K'lia, hanging in orbit over a desolate and ruined Earth. Clearly all is not well with this future, and once again you are the last hope for mankind. The people of this time say that nobody really won in the war with the Pfhor; but now, thanks to recovered Jjaro technology, a plan has been devised to make things right.
Paired with another sort of hybrid creature, the former Battleroid known as Hathor, you have been selected to venture back across time, one hundred and eleven years in the past to the U.E.S.C. Marathon. There, you and Hathor are to set in motion a plan that will alter the course of history and bring true victory to mankind. But things don't always go according to plan, and what begins as a mission to right history turns into an epic pursuit which spans not only the stars but also the centuries...