The Galaxy was on fire, and it wasn't my fault. By the thepkrmgc.
The Galaxy is on fire, and it wasn't my fault. Don't get me wrong, I'd dealt with more than my fair share of world ending abominations in my time: all things considered I'm a bit a pro. Even so, when I first heard about the whole "giant sentient space squid star-ships who'd wiped out all space faring lifeforms on a lark every fifty thousand years or so" I was more than a little bit skeptical.
You've got to understand, at first glance it wasn't all that different from all the other xenophobic plays on paranoia that had happened all too often as humanity took to the stars. Granted, not everyone's a two hundred year old wizard who predates all but humanities oldest forays into that final frontier, but there are still plenty of people who think that turians eat babies and asari mind control their partners.( They don't: the White Council being just as psychotically vigilant about alien black magic as the local variety made damn sure of it.) It seemed fictional at best, and the dozen works of actual fiction written on the subject immediately following Shepard's call to action didn't help either.
Still, I'd seen her type before, and she didn't seem to be the sort to cry wolf. I'd spent the better part of my first century chasing after threats that nobody believed existed: I wasn't about to stick my head in the sand while trillions of lives could hang in the balance. So I did a bit of research on my own, called in a favor or two to get my hands on an all access pass to the Mars ruins. I might have taken a step back from the pavement pounding investigative work recently but I was the best for a reason.
I figured that If I didn't see any giant purple space squid tracks then there weren't any there and I'd walk out of there with a bit of tourism under my belt and the warm fuzzy feeling you get when your paranoia turns out not to be justified for once. I might not have my mother's knack for the Ways but you don't need to be an explorer to tell that some places aren't meant for us mortals to tread. Call it a bad vibe, or karma, or whatever: but to my metaphysical senses the rust colored soil smelled distinctly of blood. Now I'm no historian, but as I stood on the fourth rock from the sun I somehow doubted that it was coincidental that, when mankind first looked up in the sky in ages past and saw the red planet overhead they thought of war.
It's just my luck that those feelings positively radiated from my destination, the prothean research archive might not have the sheer intelligent maliciousness of Demonreach: but any sane practitioner would have noticed the signs from miles away and stayed the hell out of dodge. You don't get called stuff like the "Mad Wizard Dresden" by amassing a reputation for sanity, I walked right in like it was the Ok Corral: duster billowing impressively in the low G environment. I'm one heck of a sleuth but even if I brought out my spiffy monogrammed magnifying glass I wasn't going to turn up anything that the legion of scientists working here hadn't seen a dozen times before, but as a Wizard I had other tools at my disposal: steeling myself, I took a deep breath and opened my Third Eye.
The results were… disturbing to say the least. I've seen a lot of messed up shit over the years, enough literally unforgettable terrors to fill a century and a half of nightmares and counting, but the sheer amount of death and despair soaked into the very stones put Chichen Itza to shame. Whatever happened there wasn't war, at least in a war there's always hope: a chance however small that if your generals are smart enough, if your warriors are brave that your side could pull victory from the jaws of defeat. That even if all is lost you could rebuild your life amid the ashes. The poor sods there, on that lonely outpost in some far corner of their once great empire didn't even have that, they were one of the last and they knew it, forced to listen to the voices of trillions cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced once and for all, to watch us as we drew on cave walls knowing that one day we would be silenced in turn. In the end it was starvation that took them in lieu of a Reapers scythe and they considered it a blessing. I know that I could have done nothing to prevent that catastrophe, any more than I would be able to escape the memories of what they endured. But I like to think that I managed to help their spirits get a measure of peace, even if all I could do was ensure that their second deaths were more painless than their first.
I wish that I could say that I dropped everything and spent the next two years leading the charge against the machine gods from dark space. A century ago I would have done just that, but I had responsibilities that couldn't be set aside lightly. If the Gates fell there wouldn't have been be a galaxy left for the Reapers to invade, the Outsiders weren't about to give us a time out to deal with something as simple as the potential annihilation of life as we know it. That's not to say I just stood around twiddling my thumbs or anything. It took a while but I'd defeated enough phantom menaces that when I put out the call to arms people noticed.
I mean, I'd fought alongside the Turian Legio Ianitores before, and I'd known that I'd amassed quite a reputation over the years. Especially after I'd published my set of additions to my grandfather's journals in a misguided attempt to curb the more outlandish stories of my youth. But the response exceeded even my wildest expectations. It turns out I wasn't the only one who'd noticed the psychic imprints upon the ruins. Though I was one of the first to make the connection to the Battle of the Citadel and Shepard's warnings about reapers, the broader galactic supernatural community had been quietly freaking out about it for hundreds of years. With Shepard's untimely demise reeking of the sort of coverup the major powers were all too familiar with, their longstanding paranoia was confirmed: and it paid off in spades.
Across the Milky Way we mobilized in a mystical arms race the likes of which the galaxy had never seen before. Millions of mysteries from a thousand supernatural traditions were brought into readiness. Salarian Engiseers whose artifice transcended the laws of physics and murphy in what could unsympatheticly be termed "mad science" . Quarian Navigators who knew all the secret Ways through the silence between the stars with no need for relays. Elcor Earthcrafters and Volus Economystics, justicar and yakshi untied towards a common goal: survival.
And if this were one of Maggie's animes that might just have been enough. But in the end it doesnt matter how much fighting spirit you bring to the table if you don't have the raw firepower to back it up. For all the little tricks and time capsules we'd set up,for every ace hidden in our collective sleeves we were simply outgunned. I might be able to hit like an avalanche but that only does so much good when your fighting mountains of steel, and for every god we had in our corner they had a hundred gods in the machines.
Magic alone wouldn't be enough to beat the Reapers: the protheans had mages too, and the innusannon and who knows how many races before them. For all we knew the reapers were no strangers to magic, or their mechanical exterior was a front for all manner of dire sorcery at the core. But still we prepared, to do otherwise was madness. And just as things seemed to be at their darkest, with colonies going dark and even the most optimistic projections indicating the Reapers would arrive in the Aratoht system in a manner of months at the latest. We had a miracle, the likes of which I'd never seen even after merlining for a century and a half of Knights. Shepard was back, and call it a premonition if you will, or just the fevered imaginings of an old wizards brain. But that was when I knew that we just might have a fighting chance after all.
It's weird, being on the other side of things for once, to know that its not your story. To watch as the whole galaxy rose up against a common foe and joined together in the face of almost certain annihilation. And while I did my part in this great endeavor, it was not my shoulders that bore the mantle of victory, I did not stand at the tip of the spear. I think I finally understood what it was like for those brave souls who've stood beside me all these years, and the sheer depth of the shadow I've so often cast. And though I never did meet her, until those tense few minutes before the last crusade, I knew her burden well.
Just because I can't actually get on one of these new spaceships without frying its' eezo core doesn't mean I can't just send an email. I learned long ago never to underestimate the power of a few kind words. Besides, those of us with the astoundingly bad luck to go through the whole "brought back from the verge of death by bad guys in order to save the universe from annihilation" thing really ought to stick together. Yeah, I probably seemed crazy at first, but that's always been the wizard's prerogative. You don't get to be one of the foremost guardians of the galaxy without developing a high tolerance for the weirder side of things along the way. After being scoffed at by the Council (Seriously, what is it with Councils and their compulsive denial of looming apocalypse's anyway?) for the umpteenth time, I could tell that she was so glad have a sympathetic ear (or at least one who wasn't some smug terrorist mastermind) that she didn't even flinch at the 200 year old wizard from Chicago thing.
It paid off too, otherwise I doubt I would have even heard of the Crucible Project amid the chaos of R-Day, let alone gotten the clearance to join the team. For all my reputation as the magical equivalent of a Krogan berserker, I've always been a bit of a prodigy when it comes to thaumaturgy. As above, so below: and at its heart that's what the Crucible did. Under all the wires and eezo, underneath the intricacies of a design handed down across the eons. It was a ritual, powered by the sacrifice of quadrillion souls into the reapers maw so that one day their souls could be the instrument of another's victory. And through it took the collective effort of a galaxy, we got it built. Rachni and Krogan, Quarian and Geth, Mage and Muggle alike, working in concert on a scale never before or since.
Individually, none of us could have triumphed. Even if we lived in some strange bizzaro galaxy where people could actually get along better than a sack of cats, we still would have fallen if it werent for the efforts of the faceless trillions who died long before our time. Like grains of sand we stood our ground. And though far too many of us were swept away, we who remained clung together all the tighter when the tide did recede. The galaxy burned, but as we stood amid the ashes I could just make out the seeds of a new hope about to bloom.
(Authors note, I couldn't find a way to fit it into the main story, but my headcanon has Carlos Ramirez as warden commander of the White Council, and with an asari girlfriend for some reason. I just though I'd put that out there.
I did consider having Shepard be a decendant of Harry or Michael, but that seemed to ring a bit hollow. She's not merely the latest in a legacy of heroes but the founder of her own: this is her story, Harry's just lending her a hand)