Three accounts, actually. Otherwise, I agree.

: For a start: Joe doesn't name the gas giant. Te could have been a large,
: rocky, 4G, moon of the gas giant.

: First contact could have happened in the rings, the moon could have been
: investigated later. It may not have had any artifacts so may not have been
: of interest initially. Later surveys could have shown its great mineral
: wealth.

: The strip mining and fighting could have happened on the rocky moon. The
: threat of glassing or orbital bombardment could have persuaded the Lekgolo
: to listen to terms.

I'd have the rocky world be a planet in the same system, rather than a large moon. I mean, if you have a moon that masses four Earths in orbit around a Jupiter-sized gas giant, would that prevent rings from forming?

I think that, at one point, both Lekgolo and Kig-Yar were stated to be spacefaring before they were discovered by the Covenant. The population in the gas giant's rings could be a space colony.

: Origins

: Lekgolo were found in the rings but it appears that those rings were not a
: natural formation. They were the remains of a Forerunner orbital.

: The Lekgolo couldn't have evolved there so it is NOT their home world.

: So what is the origin of the Lekgolo? did they evolve elsewhere? were they
: Forerunner constructs like Hugarok?

Not like Huragok. The Huragok are explicitly stated to be artificial in nature. They're made of organic and inorganic nanomaterials, which makes me think they were originally a gift from a high-ranking Builder to the Lifeworker caste. It's just a gut feeling of mine. If they were designed by a Lifeworker, they'd be completely organic beings with cells, genetic material, the whole works. But a Builder would have looked at nature, decided that he could do better than that, and designed the Huragok like an engineer.

: Story Opportunities

: What are the story possibilities of all those different options?

Every time you killed a Hunter in the games, you didn't kill all of it. The death of a Hunter probably occurs when enough individual eels have been killed to make the colony as a whole lose cohesion. Individual eels survive, extract themselves, and seek each other out. Wherever a warzone escapes the Covenant glassing (and let's be honest: what you call glassing, radiation-eating lava worms would probably call terraforming) surviving Lekgolo band together to form new colonies.

When salvage hunters and colonists return, what will they find? Feral, hostile colonies with no collective memory of how they arrived on this hellhole? Silent, territorial colonies that just want to be left alone? Lonely , hopeful colonies willing to trade service for transport back to Te?

: What if there was a Lekgolo home world? What if they built their own ships,
: went exploring, and found our worlds?

Imagine Covenant ships taken over by Lekgolo. For their own reasons, these worms have banded together to crew massive starships and ply the starways. Certainly, they would be explorers. But maybe they are mercenaries. Maybe they are traders. What would they want for payment? What would they trade for?

What would talking to them be like?

I think that talking to a sufficiently large colony would be like talking to a crowd without individuals. As the conversation played out, eels would band together into blocs to ponder your questions and formulate their own. These blocs would merge and shift and split as the eels followed different conversational threads, until you are talking to one bloc about the weather while another bloc has progressed the conversation to the topic of, say, whether Thel 'Vadum will seek peace with the Ul'Tao tribe.

: They would be a political threat and
: opportunity. How would the known species react to them? What would their
: agenda be? Would it split ex-Covenant Lekgolo from their former allies?

Can we even speak of Lekgolo as a single entity? Maybe every faction out there would have Lekgolo colonies as vassals or partners.

: If Lekgolo are useful for mining and since the war is over... would humans do
: deals with Te Lekgolo, could they do deals directly or via ex-Covies on
: venezia?

Depends. They might actually be closer to us than Sanghelios, depending on where they are positioned in Covenant territory.

: Could they have a mutually beneficial, Horta style, arrangement?

*Googles, knowing that it's probably that one silicon monster in Star Trek*

That would be pretty damn neat.

: What would the Sanghelios Sangheli think of losing their special
: relationship with Te? How would they react?

Thel sends a telegram to Te that simply reads "I can see your house from here."

Lekgolo negotiations with Humanity are immediately terminated.

: I think Nightfall could have been better.

In every single way.

: I duuno, I just want to see more Halo universe stories that aren't artifact
: based and that tell us more about the universe.

: Is there anything that you want to see?

With the Hunters?

I just want them to be played as Starfish Aliens to the hilt. The Elites and the Brutes are very much Star Trek aliens, basically humans with exaggerated character traits. Hunters are distributed colonies of lava worms that form collective consciousnesses. Their priorities, even some of their basic desires, ought to be completely different from that of a human. Perhaps even incomprehensibly so.