Darkness. Cold, numb, empty, abyssal blackness engulfed his sight, consumed him and left him hanging in tranquil, eternal nothing. Thought was meaningless and dead. Questions flitted away into the ethereal void wrapping about him. They should have been asked, should have mattered to him as he floated there, but their weight stood for nothing here beyond oblivion itself. Memories drifted away unheeded until their light flickered and died before blind eyes could even grasp their brief presence. The quickest moment passed in which he contemplated speech, in silence judged too frivolous to be of value, and it too faded and died. There was nothing here. Nothing but the dark, the black, deeper than the most gloom-laden distances of space where light goes to die.

A sharp stab of agony pierced the miasma to bring fiery, searing pain, a gasping breath of spiteful defiance that blistered lungs screaming in objection. A spark of errant electricity, a quick surge of reviving power to force thick, dust strewn air into a body that didn't want it. To this he woke slowly, consciousness creeping back as if in dread, an arduous, miserable crawl from blessed nihility into the suffering of waking life that set his nerves alight with fire, blood pounding through begrudging veins at the whim of a heart not yet ready to rest. His body, battered, broken, dripping with tormented pain and smeared with coagulated blood, fought both to move and remain still, a battle won by a man without the concept of defeat in his mind. He twisted, hearing bones crackle and pop beneath marred flesh, barely able to bear the agony enough to pull himself to his hands and knees.

Where?

Awareness slowly began to seep into the murky haze he had been lost in, forced to fight through the pounding headache throbbing malignance through his skull and the dizziness that set the world around him tumbling in a blur. He wasn't dead. He couldn't conceive of why, but he had survived a calamitous nightmare that no human should wake from, a fact he had yet to grasp. All that he could beckon to his thoughts was the need to know where he was. A bleary eye swiveled about as a heavy head turned this way and that, trying desperately to glean some solidity of his surroundings.

Concrete. Wasteland. Ash. Dust. Ruin.

He had failed, then. They were here. They had annihilated Earth, consumed its people, and left a barren desolation as testament to the hubris of man. Why was he awake? Had they forgotten him? He crawled, painful though it was, on bleeding hands that felt their way through rubble in futile hope of learning their fate. When would they be back?

The ground turned soft and moist beneath his fingers, his sight drooping down to find them sinking into but one of the countless corpses left in the wake of this war. He moved on. He'd seen enough dead in his years, and at the moment, more pressing concerns played through his still dull thoughts. He dragged himself up. He was alive, he was breathing, he felt the implants throughout his body that hadn't fried whirring and pulling his tissues back in line. He wouldn't crawl like an animal into the waiting maw of an enemy. Finally steadied on his feet, a success rewarded with a crippling shock of pain to tell him that his leg was broken, probably in more than one place, he balanced most of his weight on the foot that brought the lesser gout of pain. His sight turned upward to see a black sky of ruinous cloud hanging low over the expanse of destruction, flashes of lightning crackling through the black swirls of ashen smog, a downpour of fire across the bleak immensity lending further to the apocalyptic vision.

Earth. He was on Earth. That couldn't be, though. It couldn't...

He felt a weight in his hand, overlooked in the deathly fog he had been in, and curiosity beckoned the limb to his vision. A pistol, clung by scabbed fingers, helped bring him back around more. Gunshots. The echo of their memory rang in his head, and each served him with a brief flash of memory, pieces that began to assemble into something less mutable than the fetid swamp they had been before. Fire... Explosions of glass and metal... A decision made with a face behind each shot fired... An enemy that could not be beaten.

Reapers.

Panic brought his arm up and sent a jolt through his finger, followed by another, then another, each erupting with another blast from the pistol's barrel, eyes locked on a figure that he could only just make out. Half a thermal clip quickly shot off in succession preceded a lucid awareness of nothing but a shadow lurking before him, a ghost of horrible memories returning to take their toll on his psyche. It was nothing. His gun arm dropped to his side again, though the fingers refused to relinquish the relic tying him to these dawning recollections. Eyes widened, lips moved, vocal chords strained and refused, words catching silently in his throat before finally croaking out the third time.

"Kaidan..."

Where was he? His heart rapidly ebbed into an erratic pulse in his chest, adrenaline like liquid flame in his veins as the dread overcame him. He remembered being with him as they ran, no, charged onward. Breathing heavy, he sought his comrade in the wreckage of twisted metal and devastated concrete around him. No. He had died. They got him. Anger rose in him again, a fury checked only by a body without the might to fuel it. Wait... He remembered... Kaidan had evacuated. He was alive. Injured, but alive, unless...

His vision drifted upwared and fell upon a megalithic, towering shape looming before him, and a deluge of horror brought about a new clarity, thankfully with enough speed that he realized the truth of the smoke shrouded shape. Laying there, perhaps only ten meters away, was one of their destroyers. Dropped on its side, lifeless, the massive Reaper was little more than a poignant reminder of the threat that had shaped his life for years now. And he remembered.

They were destroyed.

Relief washed over his pain-wracked body in a palpable wave that finally let him sink to his knees again, planting him on the cracked pavement. All of the anger, the trauma, the sorrow, and the loss, painted in vicious strokes of blood and carnage over the past three years, held together by necessity and a ruthlessness born of war, boiled within him. Emotions long kept in check unraveled within him. Regret for every failure, for every needless death, for every call he had to make that cost another life, churned with the rage he hadn't been able to escape since the whole mess began, melded with the resentment toward ever son of a bitch that heaped all of this responsibility on his shoulders in the first place. Swelling with the sadness of those he had lost, those he respected with every ounce of his being for everything they were, and bonding with the sudden, liberating realization that it was all over...

In that dead silence of an obliterated Earth, a silence made more potent by the haunting, droning lament of sighing wind, Shepard screamed. A howl resonated from the pit of his stomach and surged forth to drag every buried emotion from its grave, his roar pierced the emptiness around him and trembled through every dark inch of the galaxy, a sound of fury through misery, of triumph bought with pain at too high a price, of victory that tasted of blood and sweat. In that moment, every conqueror in human history cried with him, every thunderous wardrum beat upon a field of battle boomed their powerful tones. In that moment, the deluge loosed from within his heart melted him and trumpeted a defiant achievement into the furthest reaches of oblivion.

Fingers finally released the pistol he had been so reluctant to let go of, the weapon clattering to the ground beside him, and he heaved breath after succulent breath, alive without the remotest concept how, nor the faintest desire to care. He crumbled to the side, giving in, at long last, to the pain of his wounds with a smile on his lips. He hadn't failed. He won.

Darkness shattered with brilliant light like the unfolding of angelic wings that would have sent pain ripping through his head had there not already been plenty there. His eye squinted and strained, and only now did he realize that his sight was so limited. The hum of shuttle engines, a familiar, beloved sound in this purgatorial battleground, reached his ears in a muffled pulse. Voices pried behind the hiss of jets, and with a final struggle to catch a glimpse of the craft, Shepard forsook himself back into consecrated obliviousness, well comforted in the image of an Alliance crest emblazoned upon the hull of his savior.

On wings of light beneath an ashen sky and a tempest of flames, Commander Shepard, the hero of an eon, was brought from despair into a galaxy waiting breathlessly to adore him.