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Halo Creation Q&A: Halo: Judgment

    Hello everyone, and welcome to Halo Spotlight. The place where we shine a spotlight on Halo community creations. This piece is a Halo Creation Q&A, so we’ll be asking some questions regarding a specific Halo themed creation.

    The Q&A

    The Halo Spotlight team spoke with Dominik Contigo, a long time Halo fan and creator of the Halo Fanfiction Halo: Judgement. Our team sent over a list of questions and Dominik sent back some amazing responses.

    This is our first ever feature and Q&A focused on a fanfiction creation, so unlike our regular Q&As, this piece doesn’t feature images throughout (Update: As of March 3rd 2026, we have some new concept art we’re able to share. You can find this throughout the piece.) We hope that everyone reading will find this in-depth and text focused Q&A enjoyable to read through.

    Question: To give some background to our readers, could you tell us who you are and your history with Halo?

    My name is Dominik Contigo, and I’ve been a Halo fanatic for 25 years. To give you a sense of cosmic scale, I was eleven when Halo: Combat Evolved came out and fundamentally rewired my brains, and I’m still playing Halo at thirty-five with my own Gruntlings on the food nipple.

    It was all over for me the first time I laid eyes on the Master Chief. A schoolmate brought the print manual of Combat Evolved to recess to show off—and into my prepubescent mind barreled this walking tank, the “last Spartan-II” (whatever that was). I immediately became obsessed with this glib cowboy in a paintball helmet, whose thunderous boots traipsed through the gooey guts of his enemies across the glossy, finger-greased pages of my friend’s manual.

    At the time, I was hooked on StarCraft, the original Star Wars trilogy (courtesy of a set of well-worn VHS tapes), Orson Scott Card novels, and The Fifth Element—anything with aliens, really—so Halo was well poised to sear itself indelibly into my schema of “everything awesome.” I borrowed my cousin’s Xbox to play Combat Evolved, and soon crushing the next mission became all I could think about while languishing in grade school.

    Before Halo 2 came out, I didn’t have many friends with Xboxes (and I was too painfully shy and too wretched a multiplayer to brave Xbox Live) so I resorted to replaying the Combat Evolved campaign on every difficulty in what ultimately accounted for a deeply formative experience. 
    Without meaning to, I practically memorized the story. Combat Evolved is still my favorite Halo.

    From there, my friends and I attended the midnight launches of both Halo 2 (at fourteen) and Halo 3 (at seventeen), and spent hours playing Xbox Live multiplayer together most nights of the week throughout high school. I have countless cherished memories from those years, but conquering the Halo campaigns was always my most beloved pastime.

    Until now, I’ve typically been a quiet lurker in the broader community (having gone into the cryosleep of my boozy twenties before Halo 4 came out), but I’ve done my share of posting on Energy Sword Sunday. I worked nights for many years, so I couldn’t always find time to meet friends in multiplayer, but I always made sure to beat the latest campaign on my own.

    As I’ve begun to explore the expanded Halo universe, I’ve gotten to know some of the most prolific creators in the community, if not personally, then by reputation (some folks might know me better by another alias). Between all the amazing video creators, machinima makers, screenshot artists, toy photographers, render wizards, and cosplayers out there, just seeing all that creativity and generative love for Halo kind of inspired me to join the fun!

    Halo: Judgment is my twisted love letter to Halo and to the indomitable Master Chief.

    “The Arbiter and Rtas ‘Vadum are attacked by the Gravemind’s Emissary (from Halo: Judgment Mission 9, “Cold Silence”)”

    Question: What makes Halo: Combat Evolved your favorite Halo game?

    Combat Evolved remains my favorite of the series because it presents my preferred incarnation of the Master Chief, back before he knew he was cool. I still fondly think of him as the sardonic chowderhead I kept dropping down shafts, or the guy who nearly bumbled his way into firing Halo when he was a bit more hapless, long before he was air-mailing bombs to the Covenant.

    For me, Combat Evolved was the story of a destined journey to right humanity’s wrongs. Despite his super-stats, the Master Chief is the ultimate John Everyman, a lucky lunkhead who had chanced his way into cybernetic augmentation (or “mischanced,” if you’re up on your lore). Yet right from the thaw, Chief’s 21st-century appeal is aggrandized and endorsed by the “rugged humanity” of the 26th-century world around him.

    The computer monitors of the UNSC Pillar of Autumn aren’t the glossy tablets of our day, but chunky mainframes with black screens and green text outputs. The Warthog runs on rubber tires and roars like a gas-guzzling V8. Marines are still pumping the Covenant full of good, old-fashioned lead this many lightyears from Earth.

    Halo was unabashedly implausible, and uncompromisingly distinctive—much like its characters.

    Chief’s dauntless, smart-alecky AI companion, Cortana, coolly destroys frigates while trading repartee with the grizzled Captain Keyes (who then proceeds to low-ride his ship into Halo’s atmosphere manually). His best buddy is a smack-talking, cigar-chomping marine sergeant who snorts at death and pairs grenade tosses with “your mama” jokes. The multitudinous foes of the Covenant ran the gamut from bug-like reptiles and chittering dino-men to lumbering suits of worm-addled armor and adorably smackable beetle-goblins in gas masks.

    What could I find repugnant in those bizarre, colorful creatures or the immortal hero wreaking havoc through their dreamlike world? For me, nothing beats the Master Chief’s first adventure.

    I’m not sure if it was done consciously, but Combat Evolved has all the makings of the first act of a serial adventure, in which we find an unchanging hero adrift in a strange world, solving exactly one mystery. Though its two sequels continue to elaborate that mystery (as the Master Chief unravels the origins of the Halo array and learns the secret identity of the Forerunners), the hero remains relatively constant (despite growing exponentially more badass).

    I think modern Halo writers have failed to understand that, in a serial adventure, the hero is supposed to be the only foundational constant, immune to broad shifts in tone. For him, character development is incremental and incidental to the plot. John Carter learns that the Red Martians aren’t that different from him after all, before zipping to the land of the Yellow Martians in the sequel to learn it all over again. In the “Bungie trilogy,” the same applied to Chief.

    The Master Chief doesn’t really learn anything by the end of Halo 3—at least nothing that changes his worldview. He feels pretty rotten about leaving Cortana behind, and comes to discover the secret of the Forerunners’ identity, but he’s more or less the same guy as he was on page one of Combat Evolved. And Halo 3 is still considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time. There’s a lesson in that.

    “The Master Chief and the Arbiter are startled by a sudden apparition: a holographic record of the hero taking Alpha Halo’s Index.
    From the shadows comes a mysterious voice: “These rings tell tales to those who would listen…” (from Halo: Judgment, page 449)”

    Question: Out of all the types of media you could have chosen, what made you want to create a fan fiction story?

    I love adventure stories. My favorites are militaristic sci-fi novels, Arthurian legends, sea stories, and fantasy tales about itinerant knights. Although I’ve broadened my tastes beyond the realm of science fiction, Halo was the genesis behind a geeky passion for larger-than-life heroism that still persists today.

    We can question the wisdom of allowing an eleven year-old boy to play an M-rated game (though, let’s face it, even StarCraft isn’t exactly Gullah Gullah Island), but I can’t deny that encountering Halo at such a young age started a rapid maturation in my narrative tastes. Combat Evolved set a table with all the sumptuous proxy violence of video games and firmly established my appetite for star-hopping heroes.

    It’s probably obvious to anyone reading that I grew up adoring sci-fi and action movies. Having consequently become a hobbyist screenwriter as an adult (and even earned a few modest accolades in script competitions), I decided to tackle a full “game script” for my version of “Halo 7,” including both gameplay sequences and cutscenes, so I could try and embrace the seminal format that made Halo what it is.

    That proved tricker than I’d first anticipated. Halo Infinite left a lot of unresolved questions, so even a straight “hero vs. bad guy” story needed to tie those threads satisfactorily.

    By adhering to the classic formula of one ring, one mystery, and totally isolated heroes, Halo Infinite does mark a return to form—but its plot scaffolding is so contrived as to be distracting.

    The first act opens six months after the inciting incident, with the main antagonist curiously absent, and its principal characters reduced to exactly one living Spartan and two greenhorn sidekicks.

    Throughout the narrative, sudden and unsupported moments of character drama (e.g., Esparza’s revelation of his true identity, his kidnapping, or the Weapon’s near-deletion) are forced to the fore in order to set up emotional exchanges, when the plot should naturally dictate opportunities for character reactions.

    Without looking it up, can you remember any character assigning a significant emotional response to Escharum the Harbinger—or just to one another? It’s a character drama, in what is ostensibly a game about shooting aliens. (The only exception I can think of is Chief’s “eulogy” for Escharum, and I wrote a whole section of the Preface about why it doesn’t make sense.)

    I think the recent games have tried so hard to “elevate” Halo that they’ve lost a certain simplicity. Being a work of “genre fiction” needn’t be a dirty notion; I personally love tight, linear plots with larger-than-life heroes..

    “Halo: Judgment Thumbnail Storyboards #2 Header Image”

    Question: What was your main inspiration behind your fan fiction?

    Writing Halo: Judgment was sort of a creative exercise. Could anyone actually write a script that satisfied that often-expressed fan desire for a direct sequel, with a minimal time jump between installments, featuring returning characters, and which resolved its plot action “in a game and not in a book?” I wanted to find out—and it took me 465 pages to do it!

    This script is also my mea culpa for not having seen the positive aspects of the later games sooner. Having recently discovered some of the novels and other media I had overlooked, I wanted to try and incorporate some of their plot elements into a game in a way that hadn’t been done before. That meant getting cozy with the parts I didn’t like as much.

    Despite having played all the core-series titles, Halo: Reach, Halo 3: ODST, and both Halo Wars games, I admittedly lost interest in the grander Halo narrative following the so-called “Forerunner retcon.”

    There was an attractive circularity to the narrative as I originally understood it, evident even as far back as Combat Evolved, in which humanity was transported Through the Looking Glass, and managed to find itself on the other side. We were “forerunners” to ourselves, damned to either face the Gravemind’s eternal judgment or repeat the mistakes of the past (that idea plays into the title of Halo: Judgment).

    To me, the Master Chief was a “hero of time,” stuck in the same position as his ancestors, facing the same choice, with the same weapon of mass destruction at his fingertips—except this time, he chooses salvation. He averts the “judgment” of the Flood by choosing to defeat it by some other means than Halo.

    Everyone knows that Halo lifted terms like the “Flood” and the “Covenant” from the Bible, but less attention is paid to the simple, poetic tropes those original stories also borrowed. Even if the scripts didn’t overtly use the nomenclature, the ruin of the Forerunners was a stand-in for the biblical Fall of Man—and that’s the dramatic underpinning you lose with a biologically distinct Forerunner race.

    Of course, whining about human Forerunners won’t change anything. It’s no use foundering in the trenches of Forerunner flame wars on Twitter in 2026, but I do think it’s an important discussion topic for understanding—and possibly restoring—Halo’s foundational charms.

    As far as I know, no one from the Retconner rabble has yet articulated their complaints through the lens of literary criticism. In the preface to Halo: Judgment, I discuss the intrinsic poetry of human Forerunners, and argue for why redeeming a “fallen” Cortana (as I attempt to do in Halo: Judgment) could help restore that missing sense of narrative harmony to the Halo universe.

    I think I did a fair job, though there are definitely places I’ve mussed up the lore, and the script admittedly starts off slowly as a result of picking up right where Halo Infinite ends. The Master Chief is still stranded, so the first mission eases into the action with a pretty standard raid on a Banished base (albeit in prettier, alpine surroundings).

    If you’re considering reading Halo: Judgment, I think it really starts to get good around Mission 3—so please stick with it!

    For Chief, all arrests as, for a moment, everything appears to be someone else’s duty. He permits an idle hand to float to his hip, looks around for something to do, and then allows himself to walk to the solitude of a nearby tree.
    Leaning on the gnarled, alien tree, he traces the contours of the UNSC Infinity, resting like a slain hart in the furling wildflowers. He grips his elbow with his non-dominant hand, flexing and unflexing his fingers absent-mindedly:

    Question: How did you come up with the story?

    The trouble with trying to write a “Halo 7” is that you’ve got a somewhat shaky foundation to build on. The campaigns following Halo 3 constitute a sequence of stops and starts; they’re wildly different stories that demarcate complete resets of the universal order, whereas the stories of the first three Halo titles are linear and interconnected.

    Since the developers could more reliably predict a sequel to Halo 2 than Combat Evolved, the latter two titles are arguably more tightly coupled than the first adventure—but I always loved the connective tissue of having the Covenant disrupt Chief’s awards ceremony at the start of Halo 2. (He’ll never get that promotion, will he?)

    As a sort of homage to that scene, the Arisen Covenant wrecks what should be a “debrief” of Halo Infinite in Mission 3 of Halo: Judgment. There are a few conscious parallels like that throughout the story.

    To write a “Halo 7,” you have to make inferences from what’s already known. What truly “connects” the ideas in Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and Halo Infinite? The galactic order has been reduced to a relatively defenseless state, and an intense war of attrition has the Created, the Banished, and the UNSC deadlocked. Who would benefit from that? Who might have helped it along in the background?

    The obvious answer is the Gravemind. I’m not the only Halo fan to make this connection, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this is where Halo Studios will eventually take the story. Once I had my villain, it was easy to concoct a connection to the Endless from there.

    My love for the original Bungie trilogy helped to inform my outline. As I said before, the hero of a serial adventure is typically the only fixed constant in a world that changes around him. When something new happens to him, it’s often the latest scheme of a familiar villain.

    That framework made the Gravemind the natural choice for the main antagonist, as he’s the only villain to appear in at least two games (besides the Prophets, who are dead, Jul ‘Mdama, who is dead, and Atriox, who appears as a secondary antagonist).

    The Gravemind’s nubby little Flood appendages may appear as early as Combat Evolved, but he doesn’t reveal himself until the second installment, in classic “Emperor Palpatine” fashion—which is why it felt fitting to also provide him a “Darth Vader” in the form of the Emissary, an infested Elite congregant of the Arisen Covenant cult.

    In the canon universe, it’s probably more likely the Endless are humans mutated by Precursor dust, or were created by ancient humans in their first weird, little experiments with it before the Flood got hungry, but I thought it would be fun to turn them into the Primordial’s patient children.

    HALSEY: Trouble.”

    Question: What made you choose “Halo: Judgment” as the title for your fanfiction?

    Throughout the script, you’ll find the dual themes of judgment and redemption. Pretty much every principal character must face the consequences of their own decisions at some point, and choose a righteous course of action that “atones” for their earlier mistakes and helps them overcome a trial unique to them.

    (The exception is probably Red Team, who mainly shows up to kick ass, although they do get to resoundingly whoop the Banished who narrowly escaped them on the Ark).

    The Gravemind is a great baddie because he’s completely unknowable (or used to be, before the Forerunner Saga). We’ve already seen him play two sides against one another before in Halo 2. Why did he really send the Chief to High Charity, unless he wanted to remove the Prophets from the board? In this script, I decided to cast some doubt on the finale of Halo 3.

    Isn’t it odd that the main outcome of that game was the destruction of the Ark, disabling the Halo array’s mass firing capabilities and preventing the creation of further Halo rings? (Halo Wars 2 ruins this by restoring the Ark to its full function, but follow my logic here…)

    It would make sense if the Gravemind had manipulated Chief into destroying the Ark. Now that we know the Ark is merely singed, and perfectly capable of producing new, devastating Halo rings, we must understand that the Gravemind’s efforts failed. What’s his contingency plan?

    In Halo: Judgment, he switches tacks to seek the Endless—a people borne of his aggregate Primordial form eons ago, as the Forerunners eradicated his kind. I figured, if the Primordial can incorporate multiple consciousnesses, then why could he not also divest himself of some? Before his capture by the Forerunners, with the walls closing in, the Primordial squirreled the Endless away for a rainy day—for a later time when the galaxy was completely defenseless.

    To understand how I arrived at this conclusion, consider that the Endless are said to be somehow “more dangerous” than the Flood. What if they’re the key to making the Flood unkillable? In Halo: Judgment, those are exactly the stakes.

    Through the exogenous energies afforded by the Forerunners’ fabled slipspace core, the Gravemind hopes to assimilate the Endless and build itself a new form, thereby becoming immune to Halo and the material weapons available to the galaxy’s current stewards. He returns as a promised judgment to eradicate all life when it’s at its most vulnerable (that plays into the title).

    Because Halo: Judgment was written before Halo: Edge of Dawn’s release, the Weapon redeems Cortana’s memory by taking on her name. I made this choice to invoke something called a “typology,” a term that comes from biblical studies, and which means people and events from the Old Testament are “types” which are later “echoed” in the New Testament, effectively acting as a continuation of the same person or event. What better way to do that as an AI than to download a complete record of your forebear’s memories?

    This script’s “Cortana” functions as two persons in one, dealing with an inherited guilt, and even forms the third aspect of a cheeky “trinity” beside the split personalities of Offensive Bias. The Biased Triumvirate is purposefully modeled on the Aristotelian triad of ethos, pathos, and logos—but logos sadly flew the coop when Pax Cortana nuked the Silent Auditorium.

    It’s up to Chief and Cortana to ally with the cantankerous Vigilant (authoritative ethos, unmoored by empathy or reason) to stop the Flood. Along the way, it is revealed that the Vigilant seeks vengeance against the Criterion, who reduced him from a Contender-class AI cluster to a few measly personalities. In the final act, Offensive Bias is “healed” by Cortana and returned to his noble purpose: the defense of the ecumene, now in the hands of humanity.

    For his part, the Criterion also receives a healthy dose of “judgment,” as do Atriox, Jega ‘Rdomnai, the Gravemind’s infested Emissary, and the mysterious Prophet of Revelation.

    “As soon as the Spartan turns his back, Nash’s smile fades. His face contorts into a recalcitrant, distrustful glare as the Elites point Chief to the gravity lift.”

    Question: If you had to give a short summary to advertise your fan fiction, what would it be?

    Halo: Judgment is an original campaign set in July 2560, six weeks after the end of Halo Infinite, where we find the Master Chief still routing the Banished  and searching for the UNSC Infinity on Zeta Halo before the untimely arrival of the Flood.

    To combat this emergent threat, the fanatical Arisen Covenant, and the relentless Banished, the Master Chief must ally with Red Team and the crew of the Spirit of Fire, the former Arbiter Thel ‘Vadam and his faithful shipmaster Rtas ‘Vadum, Commander Sarah Palmer, Captain Lasky, Dr. Halsey, new friends, and two fallen shades of the construct once known as Offensive Bias.

    Through the 16 original missions of Halo: Judgment, these heroes work together to thwart Atriox, hunt the mysterious Prophet of Revelation, destroy the Flood’s Emissary, redeem Cortana’s memory, and prevent the Gravemind from assimilating the Endless to become immune to Halo.

    Question: Do you have any plans to write any more Halo fan fictions in the future, or a sequel to your current one?

    I totally would! As you can imagine, writing all 530-someodd pages of Halo: Judgment and its supporting essays has left me quite exhausted for all things Halo at the moment, but I do have a few ideas for follow-ups. My dream would be to write an ODST game (or at least a set of DLC missions in the style of Halo 4’s Spartan Ops, and I actually have a story in mind). I’d also love to one day adapt Halo, StarCraft, or Gears of War to film.

    While I’m very interested in screenwriting, I actually prefer to write prose. At the moment I’m working on my own fantasy novel and a few follow-up episodes to an animated sci-fi pilot that placed fairly well in a recent screenwriting competition.

    ELITE MINOR #1: Is it true? Atriox is slain?”

    Question: If you had to give advice to those wanting to write their own stories in the Halo Universe, what would it be?

    I’ve included a few generic writing tips in the “Addenda” section before the script, but the best advice I can give to someone writing fan fiction is to try to see the gold in everything!

    As you’ll see from the Preface to the story, I’m not the biggest fan of the Forerunner Saga (in fact, I’m probably its number-one hater), but I’ve earnestly done my best to respect it as the new fulcrum of the Halo universe—because somebody out there loves it.

    If you’re trying to write within an existing universe, you have to approach it as you would a piece of historical fiction. There are immutable elements to get right, so you’ll need to keep organized notes. (If you’re writing an “alternate universe,” you can naturally take more liberties.)

    I’m sure I’ve violated existing lore in Halo: Judgment (if I had taken the time to read all the Halo novels cover to cover beforehand, I never would have written the darn thing!), but I did my best to read as much as I could before putting pen to paper. The hardest part is knowing when to take the plunge and start writing.

    If you read the “Thank You” section at the end of the script, you’ll find a brief account of a major rewrite I had to undertake because of a gap in my knowledge.

    I hadn’t realized (or had quite forgotten) that Contender-class AI constructs possess thousands of consciousnesses, and are therefore relatively inured from Rampancy. When I ran across this fact, I had already created the Biased Triumvirate, but I then had to explain why Offensive Bias had been reduced from thousands of personalities to just those three.

    That’s where I got the idea for the grudge between Offensive Bias and the Criterion. Whereas I had originally broken Offensive Bias into three personalities on the convenient pretext that it provided a bulwark against Rampancy (in keeping with Dr. Halsey’s proposed consensus triad), he’s now been forcibly reduced as punishment for disobedience.

    It ended up providing a more plausible rationale for the Vigilant’s vengeful eccentricities, and helped lead to a plot turn (Mission 13, “Heart of Darkness”) that consciously evokes the Flood’s arrival in Combat Evolved. (Spoiler: the Engineers are Slugmen! They’ve placed their composed essences in Huragok-like organic bodies in an effort to truly “resurrect” themselves.)

    The deviation proved fruitful, and I think the script is better for it, but it was a difficult obstacle that took lengthy rewrites to overcome—so do your research about foundational concepts before committing to ideas! Writing characters is more forgiving, because you can always adjust or inject a few lines of dialogue to accommodate some trait or backstory element as you revise.

    With your facts in hand, you should keep yourself going by writing whatever animates you, without being overly precious about fidelity to expectation (like I did, by breaking Offensive Bias, turning Genemender brainless, letting Douglas-042 tell jokes, giving Hocus a sister, or fleshing out the Criterion’s blank slate with a tragic figure).

    The act of writing is always work, but it can be made a lot more fun if you know where you’re going, and you’re excited about your ideas.

    Outlining is a very useful practice. The best implementation varies from person to person, but my kind of brain finds it useful to first write out the general story in short, declarative statements before drafting (Mission 2 of Halo: Judgment looked like this: “The Master Chief finds the Infinity. He rescues Palmer. He subdues Atriox. Cortana downloads her forebear’s memories…”). That should free you to write scenes as they come to you in modular fashion.

    It’s also a good idea to keep your scenes in some format that makes it easy to rearrange them. I’m a “pen and paper” person, so I typically like to shuffle a deck of index cards when I’m planning scenes (this also lets you work outside!), but, while writing  Halo: Judgment, I instead chose to use Final Draft’s “Beat Board” because it allowed me to write long notes or even write whole scenes on a “card” without running out of space. Here’s a picture of how that looked near the end:

    Now, coming up with the ideas for your outline is another thing entirely. It’s a matter of “timing your jumps”—making logical departures to exciting, new events based on what’s established. To get unstuck, ask yourself, “If this is true, what else is true? If this character has that established trait, what would they think of these events?”

    The most important aspect of any creative project is an arbitrary deadline. You need to pick a date and an attainable result and sincerely try to stick to it, even if you come up short. Otherwise, you’ll never start working. This could be as simple as “have a decent first draft of the outline by July 11.”

    I had fully outlined and begun drafting Halo: Judgment before the cover of Halo: Edge of Dawn was revealed in late June, when I first became aware of it. (I once thought I had started before the book was announced, but a reader informed me that Edge of Dawn was teased in 2024—which was news to me!)

    I knew my “creative argument” for Cortana’s redemption would be quickly invalidated by that book’s release, so I hustled to finish it in time for Halo World Championship 2025 (and failed spectacularly, only to release it in December a few days before the novel’s release).

    It’s funny—I was trying my best to write a story that could plausibly occur within the universe, but it’s now been shunted firmly into “alternative timeline” territory by Halo: Edge of Dawn.

    That both stories begin right at the end of Halo Infinite is an unhappy coincidence. Halo: Judgment was never meant to be a “retort” to the ideas in that novel, although I fear it must necessarily appear that way now. I frankly didn’t anticipate the “Joyeuese” wrinkle, because I earnestly didn’t believe there was any other way forward from Halo Infinite.

    (It may not have been a popular decision, but I really don’t believe the writers of that game left latitude for the Weapon to take any name but “Cortana.” A few readers have asked me to explain what I mean by that, so I actually added a line-by-line analysis of the final scene of Halo Infinite to the “Q&A” section of my website. I’m jokingly calling it “The Esparza Defense.”)

    Halo: Judgment will sadly never fit into the canon Halo universe, but I hope you’ll enjoy reading a version of events where the Weapon takes Cortana’s name and helps the Master Chief stop the Gravemind from assimilating his lost children.

    Question: For those wanting to check out the full story, where can they read your fan fiction?

    You can read Halo: Judgment at dominikcontigo.com. There are also brief mission synopses, a suggested reading order for the supplementary materials, and a few responses to questions sent in by readers (including the aforementioned analysis of Halo Infinite’s closing scene).

    Thank you so much for featuring my script! It’s wonderful to see the positivity that Halo Spotlight has nurtured among the Halo community, and it’s an honor to appear alongside so many talented creators.

    We may all have different opinions on which games are best, or which character got short shrift in the novels (the Rookie’s on a farm, dear, playing with the other ODSTs), but it’s so gratifying to come to a place where everyone is united in their adoration for Halo. It’s no accident that this welcoming corner of the community is one of its most overwhelmingly positive spaces.

    In many ways, I’m still that eleven year-old boy clutching the monstrous Duke controller as I breathlessly assassinate sleeping Grunts—but it’s nice to have people to play with.

    That concludes this Q&A. A massive thank you to Dominik Contigo for taking the time to chat with us. We really enjoyed learning so much about the fanfiction and what went into making it. If you’re interested in checking out their socials, you can head over to X to see Dominik’s Account, or visit the website for the fanfiction itself.

    If you want to see more awesome fan made Halo creations, do be sure to check out our new spotlights section of the site. You can also check our X (Twitter) account and Facebook Page for updates relating to the site, our Instagram account for some awesome Halo artwork, and our YouTube channel for the latest Q&As and videos.

    We also have a dedicated X (Twitter) account for #HaloSpotlight, where our team manually retweets those that use the tag. Be sure to use the hashtag when posting your Halo creation to be reposted on that account.

    Want to see your Halo content or creation on the site? Check out the post submissions section, which outlines what you’ll need to do to get your piece in front of the spotlight. That’s all for now folks, so I’ll see you all next time.