Forerunner temporal manipulation 1

The Didact hesitated for just an instant, as if trying to understand, but anger overcame him. He made a swift gesture like swinging a sword. The controls flared, then vanished, and the mesh around the Captive’s platform spread between them a far more intense, blue-green glow.

“Let your life race ahead,” the Didact said. “You were made to survive deep time, but now it will arrive all at once. No sweetness, no more lies! Let a billion years pass in endless silence and isolation. . . .”

He choked on his fury and doubled over, contorted with his own agony, his own awareness of a great crime about to be committed—and another crime avenged.

The mesh held the inverse of a stasis field, the perverse of a timelock. Above the platform, the light assumed a harsh, biting quality.

The Captive’s mouthparts vanished in a blur, and then, abruptly stilled. Its gray surface crazed with thousands of fine cracks. Limb after limb fell away. The torso split and collapsed, puffing out a much larger dusty cloud—all contained within the perimeter of the mesh and its field.

The head split down the middle and the two faceted eyes lay for a moment atop a pile of shards and cascading gray dust, then slumped inward until only broken facets remained. They glinted in the dead blue light. The dust became finer and finer, and then—everything stopped.

We watched in silence.

Total entropy had been reached.

The Didact knelt and pounded his great fist on the pathway. It is never easy to judge and execute a god.

[...]

For the Didact, the ultimate meaning of upholding the Mantle was never to accept defeat. I sensed that the Primordial had expected as much and as it decayed over the artificial fleeting of millions of centuries—as its extraordinary lifespan played out in blind silence—it had gloried in it.

All was sweetness for its grinding mill.
(Halo:Primordium; Ch.41)