Fourteen centuries and more after it was all over and the greatest battle the galaxy would ever know had played out its final iteration, Nyeti Jove Tkashi purchased for a princely sum a singular work of art.
It was a metallic sculpture, over ten feet high and eight in diameter at the widest point in its chaotic tangle of figures and motifs, beings with their limbs raised in poses that shift from exultation to despair depending on the viewing angle, their countenances at once alien and terribly familiar. It came to be called "We Did Not Want To Die," and it was the sole work of art produced by the most important figure in the history of history, Commander Sora Shepard.
Nyeti Jove Tkashi expended half of a considerable fortune acquiring the piece—"purchased" is the wrong word—and counted it a bargain.
It is only after Saren's reanimated corpse is vaporized and after the shards of Sovereign's detonated hulk are pried out of the Citadel's superstructure that Sora Shepard finally sleeps.
Not well, of course; her dreams are haunted ones, Liara can tell. Liara, for her part, doesn't know what she can do to help Shepard, but in the meantime, she has a serious talk with Udina and Anderson and the personal assistant they've hurriedly assigned the suddenly-busy-and-famous commander, and tells them in no uncertain terms that Shepard is not to be bothered between 2300 and 0800, and that she will be sleeping in her quarters on the Normandy. Liara further emphasizes will brook no argument on these points unless they want her to call up Al-Jilani and give her an exclusive about how the Alliance is mistreating its heroes.
And so there in the captain's quarters of the Normandy, Shepard sleeps, fitfully. Liara is there; during one of several interminable debriefings in front of a parade of Council affiliates and Alliance brass, Udina clears his throat and questions the public-relations wisdom of Shepard's choice of companion. Shepard tells him to go fuck himself.
In private, Shepard confides to Liara that she is worried this throwing-around of her heroic weight cannot last, but in these chaotic weeks, Shepard does not know what else to do.
"Shepard…" Liara says, finding the woman in her quarters one morning, sitting on the edge of the bunk and weeping, body bent over. Liara has never seen her like this or even close to like this, but without an immediate crisis requiring immediate response, Shepard's diamond-hard composure has finally shattered.
"They were billions, Liara. The… songs, I guess, I hear their the songs they sang or maybe it's just their language, and bursts of color in my head, I think it's their art, I don't know, and the words from stories—"
"Sora—"
"They fought, Liara, they struggled and they fought and they tried to live. They wanted to live."
Liara sees the strange look of chagrin on Shepard's face, as though she's actually embarrassed to be saying these things, admitting to any sort of emotions save grim determination. But Liara, too, has felt the echo of the Prothean beacon in Shepard's mind, and can easily imagine the toll it must be taking, hearing the voice of a people she's never met, at once utterly alien and now part of her own self.
"They didn't want to die," Shepard adds, desolate.
Nyeti Jove Tkashi's fortune was made in materials, and it was with materials, the matter of construction, that he remained in love. Raised mostly on Thessia by a human-human-asari triad of parents, his "blue mom" (as he called her in childhood) was hyper-conscientious of her son's developing intellect from a very early age, and campaigned fiercely on his behalf. Nyeti became the first human to obtain the University of Serrice's famously difficult Prime Scholar endorsement, founding Tkashi Metamaterials the next year and providing the Systems Alliance with flexible pseudocrystal in sufficient quantity to construct the the Spire, the Alliance's answer to the destroyed Citadel.
Like all sapients of even modest education, Nyeti knew well the history of the Old Machines (the term "Reaper" had fallen out of favor over the centuries, with the Geth terminology taking hold with that culture's gradual integration into galactic society), how they held sentient organic life in the Milky Way hostage to a constant cycle of shepherded development and violent extinction. For much of his life, the story was largely an abstraction to Nyeti. Even the youngest Asari from that era was dead by now, surely, and the damage from the great war fully repaired despite the hundreds of worlds it left wounded.
With his company's products used so prominently, and in such enormous quantity in the Spire, Nyeti's fortune was assured by the time he was 30. At which point, he began to consider questions of legacy, permanence, and place-in-the-galaxy. And so, perhaps inevitably, he dove into what was known of the great civilization that preceded his own: The Protheans. And it was then that he felt the weight of the atrocity and tragedy that the Old Machines had imposed again and again. Because the inescapable truth was that the Prothean extinction was so complete that very little of substance was left behind, and there was nothing to be done about it. The fact of their existence was all that could be known with surety, Nyeti's contacts at the university informed him. Who they were as a people remained a mystery, and always would. Very little of material substance was left behind.
But the best remains were on Ilos, they told him, so Nyeti chartered a ship to commune with what Prothean matter remained, perhaps to calm his inexplicably grieving soul.
He corresponded with his university acquaintances often; each of them had their own story of visiting Ilos (for it was a pilgrimage every Prothean scholar made eventually) and it was during one such correspondence that dear old Lanya unwittingly dropped a fifty kilo tungsten rod on him at 1% of c.
"It's a shame Shepard wasn't much of a scholar," she wrote. "She could've at least written something down, you know? All we got was that sculpture or whatever, and that's only if you believe the stories, which who does?"
Shepard's breakdown puts a fire in Liara's belly. Once almost pathologically self-conscious and awkward, the Council's mistreatment of Shepard inspires Liara to let her love for the woman off its tight leash. She strides into the Council chambers mid-session and gives them a fist-shaking dressing-down whose vid record immediately goes viral with conspiracy theorists on the Cidatel, and quickly comes to be known as "the How Dare You speech." Only Anderson supports her; the two a normally at a total loss to understand the other but now finding themselves united in their support for a woman each of them loves deeply, albeit differently.
The Council is silent as Liara strides out just as furiously as she entered. She hears Anderson mutter "I told you so," as the doors close behind her. She will have to thank him later.
Liara returns to the Normandy. "We need to get you out of here," she tells Shepard.
Shepard is still in bed, having slept only fitfully after her utterly uncharacteristic crying jag. "Oh, Christ, you didn't tell them, did you?" she says, voice hoarse with exhaustion.
"Tell them what? That they were dishonoring the greatest hero in a generation? That history would not look kindly upon their cowardice and ingratitude? You bet your big swinging quad I did."
"…I meant about the, uh… crying."
"No, I left that part out, love."
"I, um… appreciate that. And have you been hanging out with Wrex?"
"I've booked us passage to Illium. My mother had a home in one of the enclaves in the south, and it's mine now. I hate the place, but all they care about on Illium is whether you can pay, and I can. So that's that. Get your toothbrush."
"But my—"
"I'm not listening."
"My clothes aren't—"
"Goddess, Shepard, I'll buy you new clothes."
Shepard's shoulders sag. "Okay. Okay. Let's go."
Nyeti Jove was instantly obsessed with finding the sculpture, calling it "The Piece" in any conversation where there was the slightest call to make reference to it. The only reason it wasn't already the crown jewel of the Council Museum of Art, Nyeti Jove decided, is that whether or not it ever existed at all was a matter of no small debate. To the extent that the literature discussed The Piece, it was split between Prothean scholars who very much wanted it to exist, and the Reaper War historians who insist that Commander Shepard had neither the time nor the inclination to produce a significant work of art. Shepard was a woman of action, not reflection, the psychohistories said, and could never have been bothered to engage in the level of introspection necessary to produce the rumored sculpture.
After spending the better part of a year reading contemporary arguments on the subject and its ancillaries, Nyeti had gotten nowhere. And so he started looking back.
For months he found nothing, spending hours taking notes on dissertations that were centuries old, zigzagging across the the galaxy to visit a site here, a library there. And despite the thousands of hours Nyeti's ship's drive core racked up, in the end there was nothing to show for it.
When an invitation came in from the University of Serrice to attend the opening of a new library collection one of his donations had facilitated, he was very nearly disregarded it, having only a vague memory of making the donation in the first place. But ultimately the prospect of some distraction—any distraction—from the futility of the search proved too appealing to resist, and so Nyeti went.
Liara spares no expense in chartering passage to Illium, and despite living aboard spacegoing vessels most of her life, Shepard has never personally experienced the kind of luxury that galactic civilization can offer when its advancements are deployed in service of pleasure, rather than war.
The vessel's crew—four, all Asari—are eerily discreet, and after being shown aboard by the captain, Shepard only ever sees the hospitality officer, and then only when meals are served.
Transit time to Illium is not terribly long, but Liara has the captain take a roundabout route, so she and Shepard end up spending several days aboard the yacht. Shepard spends most of the first day fretting about hypothetical duties she could be neglecting.
"I shouldn't have left the Citadel. There's cleanup to be done, and the Geth could strike while the station's vulnerable." The words sound wooden in her mouth, the pro forma worrying of the habitual overachiever, and her awkward posture makes it obvious her heart's not really in it.
Liara nods in mock-amiability. "Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what you think you're supposed to say. Fortunately for you, I'm not concerned with whatever front you seem to continue to need to put up. And we're on our way already, and the crew will only take orders from me, so like it or not, we're on vacation."
Shepard sighs. "Okay… okay. Can we at least, like, watch a vid?"
In a moment Nyeti later recalled as being at once glorious and utterly maddening, what he assumed would be a tedious distraction from his search turned out to be the key to everything.
It was not just any addition to the University of Serrice's library that Nyeti's donation has helped fund—it was in fact the Liara T'Soni collection, a meticulously organized and catalogued archive of nearly everything Dr. T'Soni ever wrote or created, finally made available, nearly half a millennium after her death. Journal entries, publications, rejected drafts, family holos; it's all there—including anything she ever saved during the course of her lengthy romantic relationship with Commander Sora Shepard.
The yacht's entertainment facilities are, for Shepard, its biggest surprise. The Normandy's main tactical interface is the largest, fastest, highest-resolution holodisplay the Alliance knows how to manufacture. It costs more than Shepard could conceivably make in her entire career as an alliance officer.
The one aboard the yacht Liara has chartered is twice as big.
The entire volume of the central lounge is enclosed with high-resolution holoprojectors. Any conceivable visual illusion can be displayed in three dimensions anywhere in the room, with detail finer any organic eye can resolve.
They watch vids, they play strange Asari games of shifting sound and color. They sleep. Twice they make love; once Liara's way, and once Shepard's. They sleep more.
And in the middle of the "night," Shepard awakens from the same alien dreams that have plagued her since Eden Prime. Her stirring awakens Liara, who opens her eyes and sees her lover standing lazily in the room's center, painting with light.
Shepard has called up a drawing and painting tool, and as the holoprojectors track her body's motion, she draws golden trails in the air with her fingers. They linger, and she pushes them around like solid objects, molding them like so much luminous clay. Liara remains silent.
After an hour or two has passed, Shepard stands back from the figure she has modeled. It is a creature, though none Liara has ever seen before. Nonetheless she is sure it is meant to be a sapient. It is bent over in a pose evocative of defeat and despair.
Liara knows what it is, but does not say the word out loud.
The Piece was of course not in the T'Soni collection, but there was a tantalizing hint—a single holoimage. It was indexed in the "maiden" section of the catalogue, subcategory "art: misc" and included only the label "Untitled Figure, Sora" with a date.
But it was enough to convince Nyeti that he was on the right track.
He spent three weeks in the collection. Nyeti wanted to read it in its entirety, but an Asari academic's lifetime output was no small amount of material. Ultimately he constrained himself to her first two centuries, and even that period, which covered the entirety of her early career as well as the whole of her relationship with Shepard, yields less than he would have expected. He discovered that Liara had been almost pathologically protective of Shepard's privacy, and what she did record was frequently obscured by a layer of indirection or obfuscation.
Finally, he found a terse journal entry.
"Last day on Illium. S. wants me to destroy it, and I've promised I will, but I don't think I can bear to. Exploring options."
An hour later, Nyeti was en route to Illium.
The yacht spends only a few minutes parked in Illium's orbit before receiving clearance to land. Liara and Shepard step out and walk directly to an already-waiting shuttle, which flies them to what was once Matriarch Benezia's estate. What of the Matriarch's assets that[1]remain within Citadel jurisdiction have long-since been frozen, of course, but before her indoctrination Benezia was a canny, well-prepared woman, and the bulk of her estate is sequestered well beyond the reach of the Council. Her preparedness has made her daughter quite wealthy.
The Illium estate is in the southern polar region of the hot world, where it's cool enough to live comfortably on the surface. The residence's VI and automation systems are ready for Liara and Shepard's arrival. Acting on Liara's directives, it orders a variety of terran foodstuffs, along with supplies of a rather costlier and more exotic nature. Liara has a hunch, and she wants the residence to be prepared.
It took Nyeti a month of wheeling-dealing, cajoling, and outright bribery to make any progress on Illium. And yet—as he put the clues together (Liara's southern estate had been left in the trust of a holding company identified only by a number and maintained by very recalcitrant investment VI, which in turn was monitored by a notoriously tight-lipped wealth management firm, whose client-relations representative was a Krogan female uninterested in Nyeti's quest until he assigned the management of a significant slice of his own net worth to the firm) he couldn't help but feel that Liara had wanted the piece to be found eventually, that it was hidden, but not entirely and not permanently. That it was all a puzzle meant to be solved.
There was only a single piece of Liara's estate the management VI was authorized to liquidate, after all—indicated only by a serial number, and available only for a truly outlandish sum. Whoever bought item 2884438D825C would have no idea what they had purchased until they entered the high-security storage unit where it was being kept.
But Nyeti knew this had to be it.
Shepard and Liara have lunch in the bright front room. It's a light meal. There's little to talk about; it's summer in Illium's southern hemisphere, and the 25-hour day has only has a few hours of darkness. The smart windows of the house tint to simulate a longer night, but it is mid-morning, and Tasale's light is in full, glorious effect as it streams through the silicate meta-transparent material.
On the small table around which the couple eat, is a small lump of—something.
Shepard points at the greyish lump, about the size of her fist. "What's this?"
"Hm?" says Liara. "Oh—it's just a sort of toy." This is a lie. "Asari children play with it in school."
Shepard picks it up; its pliable consistency means it deforms under her fingers. "So it's like, what, clay?"
"A bit. It's smarter than clay, though. if you make a gesture like this, you can change the texture and consistency." Liara demonstrates the little twirling motion with her thumb and forefinger.
Shepard mimics the motion, and the lump becomes near-liquid, flowing through her fingers. "Aah—" She holds her hand out in surprise and dismay. "I broke it!"
Liara laughs—seeing evidence of any sort of emotion in Shepard besides despair or worry brings the smile to her face unbidden. "You didn't." She makes the gesture in the other direction on the liquid surface of the material, and its drippy-plastic shape rapidly stiffens. Liara places it back on the table, the formerly-liquid drip-shapes of the material now forming the legs of some strange multipod form.
"Can I—" Shepard hesitates before picking it back up.
"Of course."
Hours later, Shepard asks Liara if she has any more of the stuff.
Nyeti typed a lengthy code into the electromechanical keypad of an anonymous storage vault. Here at the strange intersection of high security and anonymity, the technical solutions employed in service of those two goals were strange ones. Among them was a willingness to deploy ancient solutions like intricate mechanical linkages and physically-machined keys at certain security junctions, simply because they could be guaranteed to resist certain types of attack.
Not even the cleverest semi-sentient attack VI could do anything against a really good padlock, after all.
Nyeti finished entering the code, then pushed the large enter key. Servos whirred and tumblers clunked, and the armored door—thinner than he would've guessed—swung up and out of the way.
And there it was.
It wasn't covered. It was just sitting there.
It took a few moments for the storage unit's lights to flicker on, and when they did, the hulking enormity of the piece was its most striking feature; strangely elongate alien figures modeled in a dully metallic grey material with gracile limbs flung skyward, some almost dancing while others seemed to stagger. It was a civilization's grief-spasm given physical form, a choked sob of a sculpture.
Nyeti wept.
At this sound, a palm-sized holoprojector left on the floor between the piece and the door glowed to life. The head and shoulders of an Asari woman floated up, flickering and slightly out of focus—unsurprisingly, given the little device's age.
"Hello there," said the figure in the scholarly dialect of the Asari. "My name is Liara T'Soni and… Commander Shepard made this."
Nyeti found himself nodding.
"I'm not sure what to say, except that we're only just starting to understand the truth of what happened to the Protheans, and of what may well happen to us. Shepard says she will fight. I believe her. I will fight, too.
"But this is not a battle simply for our own survival. Shepard wants vengeance, too, for with her has been vouchsafed the final memory of those who came before us. I don't know how she can bear it. Somehow she does, though.
"I brought her here for rest, but before she could rest she made this. She's embarrassed by it. I think she thinks art is not for a soldier to make. She made me promise to destroy it, and I told her I would, but… I couldn't do it. It's beautiful, and it's important. I've put it away, and if you've found it and are seeing this, I can only assume we're long-dead. I hope we won. I hope we survived.
"But if we didn't, if we—if we fell like the Protheans, know this: They did not want to die. And neither do we. They fought. We, too, will fight."