"Yet one thing is known: our time is a branching point where the great river of history splits into many currents, an upheaval on a scale which even the philosophers of high antiquity could not predict. No longer shall history be a set of predictable circumstances that define each Age, but a progression from a known past into an unknowable future. And it is the philosophies that emerge victorious in our time that will be crucial in deciding how long this storm will last until the day truly breaks, if it shall. Yet I believe it will. Whether that be an old man's foolish optimism or the perspective of a lifetime of travels, only time will tell. Strange times indeed."
— Ruminations on a Sundered Age
Project: Daybreak is an collaborative (semi-)alternate universe Halo fanon project originally created by Quirel and Eternarch as a response to what they viewed as the limitations of 343 Industries' take on the franchise. As such, the project seeks to establish what its creators view as a more organic development of the ideas and stories from the original Bungie-era games and novels.
However, don't mistake this as a simple turning back of the clock; as indicated by the page quote, Daybreak's vision of the post-Halo 3 universe is one of great change and new ideas, as everyone with even a shred of vision or ambition seeks to make their mark on a world forever changed by the Human-Covenant War and the Great Schism. Indeed, while Daybreak was born out of frustration with the story direction Halo has taken under 343i's stewardship, several aspects of the original worldbuilding done by Bungie have been changed as well, and several elements of 343i-era Halo (including entire characters and novels) have still made their way into Daybreak's own worldbuilding, though often in drastically modified form.
SpaceBattles.com hosts the threads for both Daybreak's worldbuilding
and snippets, and the project also has its own wiki.
Works
- Not all Who Wander (SpaceBattles thread) by Quirel: "At the dawn of the Great Schism, Truth's betrayal pits the Elites against the Brutes, and the civil war is tearing the Covenant's most holy city apart. Dark forces threaten to spread from the Sacred Halo, and the last High Prophet contemplates galactic genocide. This is not that story. This story is about a Jackal merchant, who just wants to save his crew and get out of town."
- Itter Rock (SpaceBattles thread) by Distant Tide: "2546. Viktoria Bradford and her fellow Army Rangers are on routine patrol across a glassed colony world when they're diverted to investigate an overlooked mountain facility. Viktoria enjoys a challenge: the inhospitable landscape, terrifying alien forces. However, there's more at stake for her here than just another deployment."
- Through the Bush, Nothing But Jackal (also posted on the snippet thread) by Quirel: "Harvest. 2526. It's a brand new war against a brand new enemy, and the UNSC is still probing the Covenant's capabilities. A team of intrusion specialists, India-2, are sent to scout a Covenant facility only for the operation to go horribly wrong. Alone, outnumbered, it is up to the survivors to save themselves... and learn how the Covenant knew they were coming."
- Halo: Ten Hours by ThePeteFiles: "An ODST Combat Element Team responds to the Covenant Invasion of Mombasa in 2552."
- Conversations From the Universe: The Turning Points (also posted on the worldbuilding thread) by Quirel: "In 2552, the war against the Covenant ended, and a new era dawned in 2553. Mankind found itself in uncharted territory. The documents contained in this folder tell stories how Humans and aliens lived and learned to adapt as the galaxy passed through the most tumultuous year in its history. There is more going on beneath the surface than even you know."
Project: Daybreak contains examples of:
- Advanced Ancient Humans: Played with; while the ancient human space empire from canonical Halo doesn't exist here, Daybreak's Forerunners were explicitly descended from displaced terrestrial hominids who were at least closely related to homo sapiens.
- Archaeological Arms Race: The Covenant and humanity are actually relative latecomers to the galactic scramble for Forerunner artifacts, as many sites have already been stripped of all useful technology by even older civilizations (with disappointed Covenant relic-hunters usually opting to blame the Opkhem in particular).
- Canon Immigrant: In a sense; a couple elements from Quirel's previous Halo fanfic Isolation have been incorporated into this universe, namely Isolation's protagonist Gui Montag and his homeworld of Siberia Prime.
- The Federation:
- Post-war, the UNSC establishes what becomes known as the Phoenix Initiative to act as a provisional civilian government while humanity recovers and rebuilds; compared with the pre-war UEG-dominated arrangement, member colonies now have much more power and/or autonomy, to the point where the Initiative borders between this trope and The Alliance.
- The Phoenix Initative's primary ally in the post-war years is the Concord of Reconciliation (Daybreak's equivalent to canon's Swords of Sanghelios), a post-Covenant coalition comprised of hundreds of semi-independent polities and organizations loosely organized under the rule of the Arbiter and his inner circle, with one of their main goals being to establish a viable and less oppressive alternative to the failed Covenant.
- Additionally, most of the Concord's member polities (such as the Chikri-Merkaa Conflux and Daybreak's version of the Swords of Sanghelios) are themselves smaller coalitions of different organizations and feudal states.
- Lost Technology: Besides the usage of Forerunner technology by modern civilizations, the Forerunners themselves utilized at least one example of technology created by even older civilizations, namely the slipspace-based Dyson sphere used as the core of the Onyx shield world.
- Multicultural Alien Planet: Much of the worldbuilding emphasizes that in an empire as big as the Covenant, there is going to be a great deal of cultural diversity no matter how much standardization one may try to impose; even just in terms of language, the Sangheili alone have multiple (and not always mutually intelligible) common dialects. Much effort has also been put in to avert Planet of Hats for individual Covenant species; while some cultural traits are definitely much more common in some races than others, there is still a great deal of internal variation. For example, Kig-Yar worlds are described as having "virtually every form of government imaginable", but just "contained in a highly loose, panarchic framework".
- Recursive Precursors: The Forerunners may have been the mightiest known civilization to ever dominate the Milky Way, but they were far from the first, with scattered physical evidence (mostly mega-structures like sculpted asteroids and time-dilating catacombs) and the Forerunners' own records indicating that many others had created great spacefaring civilizations at least millions of years before the Forerunners even existed. In particular, the original "Precursors" may have been the ones responsible for most examples of the "out-of-place biota" phenomenon, including the Forerunners themselves.
- Starfish Aliens: The Covenant classify sapient species along a "Congruent-Enigmatic" scale, with "Congruent" being roughly equivalent to the human concept of anthropomorphic sapience (but using the Sangheili and San'Shyuum as the baseline instead), and "Enigmatic" being this trope. Besides the Lekgolo, Yanme'e, and Huragok from canonical Halo, a number of Daybreak-original intelligent species also fall on the "Enigmatic" side of the scale:
- The Chelukhi are a mysterious species that have evolved to live within gas giants.
- The Xar-Shaa are a ocean-dwelling Covenant fringe species of gestalt intelligences that have to be encased in high-pressure tanks if they want to leave their homes on the seafloor.
- Super-Soldier: Besides the Spartan-IIs and IIIs, the post-war period sees the rapid expansion of the HOPLITE program, augmented adult volunteers who are Daybreak's vastly toned-down equivalent to canon's Spartan-IVs.
- Transplanted Humans: And not just humans! Many worlds across the galaxy contain organisms and even entire ecosystems that have an obvious off-world evolutionary history (referred to in-universe as "out-of-place biota"); Reach's entire biosphere seems to have been transplanted from Earth millions of years ago, while the Sangheili discovered multiple lifeforms originating from their own homeworld during their initial colonization of space. That said, the only known sapient species that seems to be "native" to multiple worlds is the Sharquoi.
- Ultraterrestrials: The Kig-Yar of Daybreak descend from an unknown species of theropod dinosaurs that was transplanted from Earth by an unknown civilization millions of years ago.
- Vestigial Empire: While many post-Schism groups call themselves some variant of "Covenant", the polity that probably has the best claim to the title doesn't use the name at all; the Strewn Shore is a community of High Charity refugees led by a collection of high-ranking San'Shyuum officials who consider themselves the Covenant's government-in-exile (since most of the surviving San'Shyuum officials in other factions have ended up being reduced to figureheads at best). Ironically, the Strewn Shore is actually a founding member of the Concord of Reconciliation (and thus technically an ally to the UNSC), though its leadership does not always see eye-to-eye with the Arbiter and his inner circle.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The Concord of Reconciliation may be united in its goal to defeat the Covenant Loyalists, but its members have deep, deep disagreements on what a post-Covenant world should look like, with everyone from traditionalist Sangheili nobles to radical Unggoy activists seeking to expand their own influence. Indeed, such disagreements end up exploding into outright civil war in the 2570s (with a major point of contention being what to do about humanity's control over the portal to the Ark).
