...Only Quintus Prime and I remain. Quintus declared his intention to depart from Cybertron, telling me he wished to utilize the Emberstone to ensure the Dynasty of Primes endures in an entirely separate form.
I did not deny his request.
In truth, I calculated that if there were two of us, we could continue to search the cosmos for energy to sustain the AllSpark, fulfilling our creator's original command. But standing alone, I cannot risk the absolute survival of Cybertron by leaving its surface unguarded.
This ruinous state was brought about by our own internal failures; it is only right that I grant him his choice. If I refuse him, what is to stop him from falling down the dark path to become the next Megatronus?
Cybertron cannot withstand another era of self-destruction...
...The Era of the Great Stasis is approaching. My internal processors can already perceive the shifting currents. I always knew this baseline calculation would eventually manifest, but I never anticipated it would arrive with such terrifying velocity.
...There is no longer enough time to evacuate our remaining sub-factions across the stars. To the Archives, I must go...
Skygnaw sank into deep processing, the historical records he had extracted from Vector Sigma proving to be an immense help. Without the visual context stored inside that neural node, simply reading Alpha Trion's notes on the Great Stasis wouldn't have given him a clear picture of what had transpired.
...I have awakened, but it is not because our creator has mended his armor or opened his eyes.
I have no data tracking how many eons have slipped past into the void. It appears I am the solitary unit to have endured the long winter of the Great Stasis: every familiar life signature has completely vanished from the global network...
...An unidentified interstellar species has materialized on Cybertron. I have chosen not to reveal my coordinates, remaining hidden deep beneath the foundations of the Archives.
I monitored their activities for several orbital cycles, uncovering a truth that made my core circuits run cold. Our creator has not recovered, nor has his consciousness returned. I was awakened entirely by the physical disruptions caused by this alien race.
Even worse, they have uncovered the location of the AllSpark, using its energy to forge a brand-new generation of Cybertronians: they have claimed absolute ownership of the very world we were built to protect!
"The Quintessons arrived," Skygnaw thought, a sharp realization instantly anchoring his mind before he shook his head slightly, continuing to read the scrolling text.
...They are a deeply malicious, dark species who call themselves the Quintessons.
They have thoroughly rewritten our global history, masquerading as the original creator gods of this planet!
They have split the newly born Cybertronians into two distinct classifications: consumer goods for civilian labor and military hardware for security management, ruthlessly plundering the resources of Cybertron while their cursed bio-mechanical leviathans never rest!
"So that is the true origin of the civilian and military lines," Skygnaw mused, a wave of profound clarity settling into his thoughts.
Previously, his databases only held basic records stating that the Autobots and Decepticons traced their heritage back to consumer goods and military hardware models, but the underlying history had remained completely blank. He hadn't expected this deep web of historical manipulation.
Now the reality was transparent: the consumer lines were built to serve as slave labor for the Quintessons, while the military lines were engineered specifically to manage and police those slaves. Whether it was a tactical move to divide and conquer or simply a method to optimize production efficiency, maintaining two naturally opposing populations was a brilliant way to solidify the Quintessons' absolute rule over the world.
...I am entirely too weak, and their military strength is overwhelming, but I refuse to surrender...
...They appear to have calculated the exact formula to utilize the AllSpark for high-tier life creation, forging a generation of exceptionally powerful and intelligent Cybertronians.
They have established a central ruling body called the High Council, appointing these elite units as elders to assist them in governing the civilian and military populations.
...Several more orbital cycles have passed, though my tracking systems can no longer record the precise duration.
I have observed that under the administrative management of the High Council, the structural efficiency of the worker lines has scaled exponentially. Yet, the Cybertronians no longer seem oblivious to the brutal exploitation inflicted by the Quintessons, quietly shifting their hostility away from their peers and straight toward the High Council itself...
...Magnificent! Through my continuous, covert efforts, I have finally established a secure channel with members of this High Council!
How do I expose the true face of the Quintessons and convince the elders to turn? I have a plan...
"Heh, fascinating," Skygnaw thought, his fingers lightly brushing against the metal page of the *Covenant of Primus*. He didn't rush to turn to the next section.
Could a population's systematically rewritten memories and artificial core beliefs truly be undone? To Skygnaw, it looked like an almost impossible challenge.
It was like living your entire life with everyone telling you that a soccer ball was a sphere, a definition that became a fundamental law of your existence. Even if you had never personally seen one, you assumed as an absolute truth that a soccer ball had to be round.
Then, out of nowhere, a stranger steps into your life, claiming that the ball is actually a cube, and uses physical demonstrations to prove his point. Your immediate psychological reaction wouldn't be simple acceptance; it would be absolute terror: *If even a basic truth like that was a lie, what else in this universe is real?*
Standing at a higher perspective, what kind of era was the reign of the original Thirteen Primes? It was a flawless Golden Age.
And what followed the arrival of the Quintessons? It was transitions into a Dark Age.
Yet right before that Dark Age took hold, there was a far more tragic, unmeasured era of absolute silence: the Great Stasis.
The newly forged generations of Cybertronians wouldn't look back to the Golden Age with longing, because they had never witnessed its wonders. Having spent their entire existence locked within the confines of the Dark Age, they would naturally assume that their current life was perfectly acceptable.
During their rare, allocated rest cycles, their processors would calculate that it was the magnificent Quintesson masters who had brought an end to the silent, frozen void of the Great Stasis, restoring energy to the planet to let their civilization endure. Even if the physical anatomy of the Quintessons looked entirely foreign compared to their own mechanical structures, the workers would simply deduce that they hadn't yet evolved to match the magnificent design of their masters.
As for the Thirteen Primes? They might catch a few scattered references to those ancient figures within heavily edited historical archives, but under the deliberate propaganda of the Quintessons, the original Primes were painted as reckless tyrants. Though they were acknowledged as the founders of early civilization, the text claimed their internal civil war had nearly destroyed the world, making them the sole culprits behind the horror of the Great Stasis. After all, the long, shifting river of history was more than deep enough to wash away any trace of the absolute truth.
Skygnaw held the data now, but he felt zero anger or sorrow regarding the era of Quintesson colonization. The past was simply the past; it was a static variable that couldn't alter the present.
"The next phase should record Alpha Trion systematically dismantling their regime," he thought. That conclusion required zero calculation; if the Quintessons hadn't been overthrown, modern Cybertron wouldn't even exist on the map. Given their aggressive methods of resource extraction, no world could survive their gluttony forever.
Skygnaw turned the page of the *Covenant of Primus*, and true to his calculations, the ancient Prime had initiated his campaign:
...Finally, I have exposed the true identity of the Quintessons to the council elders, and they have accepted my data profiles!
They have elected me to serve as the absolute commander of the growing rebel army, and I have accepted the post. In truth, they remain oblivious to their own potential: their collective strength alone is more than enough to crush the Quintessons...
...I have carefully mentored them, instilling the single most critical quality required for a war: unity.
They have covertly assembled the underground resistance networks, and I have chosen a specific moniker to hide my true signature: codename...
...A century of tactical development, a century of relentless struggle: though we have sacrificed countless brothers along the way, our campaign has finally achieved total success!
Skygnaw parsed the journal entries easily. Translating the context to familiar terms, the moniker Alpha Trion used was clearly **A3** (with 'A' representing the absolute beginning of the alphabet as an Ancestor or Prime, and '3' matching his numerical rank as the third Prime of the original line).
Under this rebel identity, Alpha Trion had led the oppressed civilian and military lines in a full-scale revolution, successfully driving the Quintessons off the planet after a brutal, century-long war. Following the victory, the old Prime had retreated back into the deep dark beneath the Archives. However, the political structure of the High Council was retained, continuing to govern the planet right up until the eve of the civil war.
The final sections of the *Covenant of Primus* focused primarily on the immediate reconstruction era following the expulsion of the occupiers. The war against the Quintessons had been catastrophic; while claiming the conflict had completely shattered the planet was a slight exaggeration, the hard data confirmed that over ninety percent of the civilian and military populations had been permanently deactivated.
Whether reviewing the visual memories from Vector Sigma or parsing Alpha Trion's brief notations, one reality was clear: the Quintessons were an external stellar empire possessing a massive sovereign home world.
When the revolution first erupted, the occupiers had certainly been caught off guard, but they rapidly organized a brutal counter-offensive while broadcasting a high-priority distress signal to their home sectors for reinforcements. Cybertron, after all, was merely one of many colonial outposts claimed by their empire, held through an elaborate historical deception. Although Alpha Trion hadn't recorded the day-to-day tactical maneuvers of the conflict, the sheer cruelty of a war fought between two interstellar powers required zero explanation.
By all logic, the planet should have entered an era of absolute security following such a massive war, or at least enjoyed a prolonged period of peace to allow the populations to stabilize. But Skygnaw noted that Alpha Trion's final entries highlighted the sudden, explosive rise of a ruthlessly ambitious gladiator: Megatron.
To placate and contain the gladiator's growing influence, the elders of the High Council appointed him as the supreme general of all military forces. Yet within a handful of orbital cycles, the Decepticon faction was formally established, and the catastrophic civil war tore across the globe.
Skygnaw didn't bother reading any further, because his own databases held a far more comprehensive record of the civil war than anything Alpha Trion had written down. He finally understood that the mysterious, ancient conflict that predated the civil war within Blackout's memory files was the war between the rebel army and the Quintessons.
"What a spectacular legacy," Skygnaw thought, closing the *Covenant of Primus* and stowing it back inside his chest compartment.
He paused for a few moments to systematically organize the historical timeline of Cybertron. The Ancient Era was the Golden Age anchored by the Thirteen Primes. The Archaic Era was the Dark Age ruled by the Quintessons. The Modern Era was the Civil War. The baseline structure was remarkably straightforward.
Yet, looking at the broken, starving state of the modern planet, it was highly probable that the very existence of the Quintessons had been completely forgotten by the remaining populations. Sentinel Prime knew the truth, Megatron and Optimus likely held the data files, and now Skygnaw had joined their circle. That made a grand total of four individuals on the entire planet.
If the Quintessons ever chose to return to this system, the Autobots and Decepticons wouldn't even be able to calculate whether the invaders were enemies or allies.
"I will deal with that variable if it ever enters the system," he thought.
Shaking his head, Skygnaw walked over to Ultra Magnus's body, hoisted the massive commander-class frame (which had suddenly lost all of its previous mystery), and rocketed straight back up toward the surface. Having spent more than enough time within the Well of All Sparks, it was time to return to Iacon.
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