These Golden Skies
The skies were glowing.
Every time she came here it was the same, the same heavy cloud cover partially obscuring the sun (or was it suns? she couldn't remember) and protecting the planet from a devastating radiation overload. And yet at the same time, they couldn't lock out such light, and thusly vibrated with the radiance of it all. It was always daylight here; so very many surrounding stars lit the world in a fierce grayscale that, somewhere along the way in the atmosphere, morphed into various earthen shades of color. The space all around her was lit up in smooth yellows and whites and creamy oranges, peppered with breezes that shoved at the clouds uncertainly, as if they couldn't make up their minds what to do with such a mass of vapor. Sometimes they took the liberty of visiting her as well, brushing and poking and prodding and tasting whatever new, similarly butterscotch object had found itself within their realm.
Although, she mused wryly, these days she was more of a blue something. Yes, an unnatural little sapphire suspended in the amber ocean that was Elysia... a place she didn't belong in anyway. Unlike Skytown's peaceful little robot inhabitants, she had no way of flying, despite having over a thousand methods at her disposal to, say, kill something. One misstep and there would be quite a long way down to solid ground.
Did Elysia even have a surface? She couldn't remember that either. Maybe it was just a swirling ball of mist surrounding its core. She could spend one moment too long gazing out at the cloudy sky, forget where she was going, and that would be that. An end to the galaxy's savior, lost somewhere in the blinding glow of an airy heaven.
Ah, but she wished. The only thing standing between Phazon and its corrupting this gem of a world was her, naturally. Not to mention the universe itself, but it was never more than one step at a time.
If the universe expands forever, does that mean that corruption is infinite?
There was no answer to why she had to be the one to save the worlds, only the knowledge that apparently fate had tossed its dice and declared her some galaxy-renowned goddess of death and mercy and brutality and protection... sometimes the lines between them became too blurry to tell one thing from the next. It made her wonder if such power had fallen into exactly the wrong hands - namely, hers.
I remember knowing that the path to corruption leads ever higher.
The idea and possession of "power", she knew all too well, was a dark gift - one that she quite happily wielded in her arsenal. But of course, the more of it one had, the more prone one was to making mistakes. Samus Aran could not afford to make mistakes. Better than anyone, the Hunter knew that one split second of hesitation or a single second-guessing on the battlefield was a great way to attain injury. Not usually of the physical kind, of course, being that she did possess a suit of armor. One that rendered all intended harm against her person null and void (this, however, was often where the acute difference between 'harm' and 'pain' came by to say hello). Injuries in other ways, to be specific. She'd lost enough time before to learn how vital it was, spent long enough staring at dragon jaws to learn that they wouldn't hesitate to snap at her. And thus the rule followed that she couldn't afford those things either: she always had to be moving and oftentimes never thinking - her body did all the hard work while her mind sat and watched in bemusement, unable to keep up with the senseless carnage and number of bodies it was capable of completely wrecking. Never mind that, it couldn't even keep track of the distinct separation between 'knight in shining armor' and 'merciless entity on a mission', which in turn usually led to various alien carcasses bearing more lethal wounds than truly necessary.
Oh, what a dilemma.
That was exactly why Elysia was her favorite place to be: nothing else lived on it, it was just her and a world so immensely old that it knew very well how to keep any secret.
Secrets are the bane of knowledge, don't you know?
And she could, of course, entrust herself to a voiceless world that knew not how to speak but knew very well how to listen. Normally so quiet and reserved, here Samus could talk to nothing and no one but the wind, rambling utter nonsense or painting the most vivid of pictures with her voice until her throat was raw and her mind couldn't think of any more words that held any meaning. Her tales would be swept away on the currents of the sky, whispered in perfect repetition into the clouds until the planet had them perfectly memorized, hidden somewhere within its swollen depths.
She told Elysia stories of everything she had ever known, the beauty of Tallon IV and its striking diversity, how its entire being seemed to be alive, teeming with every little thing she could not see and thundering with the music of more creatures than she could comprehend as sharing the same world. She told Elysia how, even in its ruins, shy little beings that to civilization were little more than pests thrived within the ruined remains of the Chozo civilization. Whose people, then, had guarded and treasured them for so very very long. Recalling perhaps another, different memory, she would spin the story of how they left relics and guardians and useful items and love for her in their wake, would describe the perfect bowl-shape of a statue's hands in which the Morph Ball fit so perfectly, just so that they could cradle their Hatchling in their hands even beyond death.
Other times she would share the story of other worlds, the hazy feeling of embraces she couldn't remember because she'd only been an infant, the kindness that had existed on Zebes that was the closest thing to a family she could ever truly remember again, the respect she had earned by simply doing what she did. Sometimes she talked about the things with lesser importance, the chirping and chattering cries of billions of things she could never put a name to, the silence of endless deserts and the boiling rage of magma that hissed and churned explosively underground, the eerie quiet of places she knew she shouldn't be in in the first place.
All the while, Elysia silently listened and committed to its thoughts in some unspoken vow and remembered...
Or so she would have liked to believe.
Don't keep secrets, that's so rude.
Believing was exactly what she did sometimes, hoping that maybe Elysia really could hear her and understand. A far-fetched and confusing notion that her logic-driven mind would quash if only it weren't so enamored with the prospect, that was. Whole worlds just naturally capable of translating sounds into comprehensible information, that would be a feat.
And yet the fact still stood that she could always hope.
Samus speaks! ...Only not. Well, this started out as a prose-test that sort of evolved. Then it turned into this, and... Yes, philosoSamus can be awesome. Or so I would like to think.