Author’s note: This story takes place ten years after the events of Transformers: Twilight of the Golden Age.
From The Legacy of Sentinel Prime: the Rewritten Chapter of Cybertronian History by Cryptex of Kaon:
It has long been the practice of scholars and historians such as myself to look at our people’s deep history as a book: an ancient, ever-expanding record chronicling our storied existence from the moment Primus and Unicron first came into being, to the dawn of the Second Golden Age, not unlike the original Covenant of Primus of lore. And for just as long, we had been forced to reconcile with one irrefutable, inescapable reality. That being: that this tome was woefully incomplete. Entire chapters were absent, either burned away by the fires of war, or torn out by the hand of one conspiracy or another. Pre-Exploration Age society. The disappearance of the Knights of Cybertron. The Omega Lock. The vanishing of the Tomb of the Primes and the Matrix of Leadership, prior to the Great War. A thousand thousand people, places, and events, wiped from the pages by blast waves, or erased by the Thirteen themselves to hide powerful artifacts and even entire worlds.
I use the past tense, of course, because over the course of the last twenty million years, almost all of these missing chapters have been re-discovered. Where once pages of the chronicle were blank, brave heroes and adventurers have filled in the empty space. The voyage of the CFC Salvation proved the existence of the Omega Lock, along with discovering several “stronghold worlds” on which the Knights hid weapons and cultural artifacts, to save them from being destroyed in the War of the Primes. The contributions of Axis Prime and the rest of our most recent band of unlikely heroes to the historical record are far too great to summarize here- simply look at a holo-map and find the twelve new colonies in our New Imperium, among them the moon on which our Creator was born from an ocean of light. Listen to one of Liege Maximo or Firestorm’s lectures on their many battles with Unicron and his Heralds, millennia before the first opening of the Matrix of Leadership. At last, the secrets of our concealed past have been unraveled in full, and the threads woven into the tapestry of cybertronian history, once incomplete, now proudly waving in the winds of time as a finished masterpiece.
…At least, that is how it appears, at first. In reality, there is but one more chapter that eludes us. These pages were not torn out, I am afraid, but rather, rewritten. The story they tell is still there, in the ten thousand years leading up to the Great War, but their events have been edited, altered in a desperate attempt to keep Megatron and his Decepticons from discovering the secret of the Prime Colonies before more worthy sparks would come to seek their treasures for noble ends. Sentinel Prime hid the Matrix away within the Tomb of the Primes in the Great War’s early decades, so the story goes, and somehow all knowledge of the tomb’s location within the Hydrax Plateau was lost shortly after. I implore you to ask: how could that be the case? Records from the reign of Sentinel’s predecessor, Septimus Prime, show that the tomb’s location was common knowledge, just ten millennia before, and Sentinel himself visited the tomb to pay his respects to Septimus upon his interment there. How could a race as long-lived as ours suddenly forget one of our peoples’ most sacred sites in the mere five centuries the Great War endured? What could explain the sudden collective amnesia that befell an entire generation of transformers?
. . .
“Uh, hey, Wastebasket?” Bootleg calls to his reluctant manservant, a rusty, red-clad junkion who stood by his President-Czar-God-King’s side, “Do I have to, like, pay for this? I mean, I’m the big cheese now, ain’t I?”
“I’m fairly certain you would have to fork over such an insignificant percentage of your frankly absurd presidential salary, sir,” Wastebasket snarks.
“What salary?” Bootleg retorts, genuinely having no idea what his butler was talking about. “I thought I was broke after I fell for that Quintesson Prince scam an’…”
“Primus, save us from the queen,” Wastebasket asides as Bootleg continues to recount that particular misadventure. “Please.”
“Of course you have a presidential salary!” he then snaps at Bootleg, the yellow minicon jumping back a bit in shock. “Have you even read the terms of office since you were elected?”
“Uhhh… no?” Bootleg answers, looking around the room guiltily. “Ain’t that your job?”
“If my job was to lead the people of Junkion and represent them to the galaxy at large,” Wastebasket deadpans. “Unfortunately, however, it is not.”
Bootleg groans and turns back to his datapad, the excerpt from Cryptex’s latest book still glowing on its cracked screen, its burning questions demanding to be answered. With a shrug, he presses a finger on the “download” button.