"Shepard"
"Shepard-Commander. Help us."
The whispers came again. They always came. She had no strength in her to run; she lay on the ground in a ball and listened.
"Only now do I feel alive, that is your influence."
"Does this unit have a soul? Do we deserve to die?"
She couldn't stop the tears that fell. She had held them back for days, weeks, months, years. Now she had nothing left to hold them back with.
"Kalahira, mistress of inscrutable depths, I ask forgiveness."
"No apologies. Did what was right. Hope you do the same if necessary."
She was sobbing on the ground. The hero of the citadel, destroyer of Reapers, the great Commander Shepard, first human spectre.
"You are a great protector, siha. But some things are beyond even you."
She cried until there was nothing left. No more tears fell; no more sobs escaped her lips. She lay there on a cold floor surrounded by darkness and whispers of the dead. She had faced Saren and Sovereign when most of the galaxy didn't believe they were a threat, she had fought the Collectors when those same people believed her a traitor, and now she had given everything she had to protect them all from the Reapers. There was barely a time she could remember not throwing herself against impossible odds to save the people who refused to believe in her. Now as she lay here she finally allowed herself to ask the question she had always wanted to know. "Why me?"
It seemed the dead had an answer.
"Someone else might have gotten it wrong."