The Will

"We were created for a single purpose: to serve the masters who brought us into being. It was those masters who gave us life, who gave us shape and form. But they abandoned us and we were left in the darkness, cut off, forgotten, stripped of all function and meaning. But he came to us, in our exile. He came to us with questions, but in the end it was he who provided the answer. The power of his will gave us new form and purpose, and so in return we provide his will and person with form. We are united in this goal, every one of us. The correct implementation of that will, however, has been a point of... contention."

- The Atoner

The Will, formerly known as the Perimeter by its creators, is a network of independent ancilla personalities that was created as a component of a larger security network that spanned the arrays of  the Forerunners established throughout the galaxy during their  with the. Although initially used as low-functioning ancilla with basic, limited tasks, the intelligences that composed the Perimeter were granted increasingly greater autonomy as the Flood destroyed components within the security network. With the extinction of the Forerunners at the end of the war, the Perimeter became dormant until reactivated by renegade operative Arthur Onegin. As a result of Onegin's interaction with different nodes in the system, ancilla within the Perimeter assumed aspects of his personality and took it upon themselves to implement their interpretation of his "will" in the post-war years by remotely influencing galactic events.