Prologue

How long had it been? It was completely dark, and with the loss of spatial perspective came a loss of perspective on everything else, including time.

Well, almost everything else.

So this is it, then? No complaints. If this is really the end of the road this time, I can at least hit that road knowing that you bastards will be traveling it with me.

At least there was that - the Reapers were well and truly dead. Shepard had seen to that. Parts of it were fuzzy, dancing through his brain just out of reach at the soft edge between dream and conscious thought - a child, the child from Earth that had plagued his nightmares; visions of Anderson and the Illusive Man; a swirling mix of greens and blues and reds and poor choices and false hopes - but he had been clear enough to see through the deception. It wasn't lost on him that 2 of the 3 "choices" he'd been given would have allowed the Reapers to live, and he hadn't gotten this far in his life (either time) by being a fool. The Reapers had been set back on their heels, then brought to their knees, and in the end were begging for their lives.

Ha, all the way back to Eden Prime, I guess I was the vanguard of THEIR destruction. If I have to die for that, and die permanently this time, it's a life well spent.

And the blackness surrounding Shepard grew somehow blacker.

When Shepard opened his eyes again, the crushing blackness had given way to a mix of blacks and blues and ochres, the bloodied Earth before him like a surrealist painting with blue seas and blackened clouds and the burning cities like a thousand campfires in the night.

Is this how war looked thousands of years ago? Did Alexander look out and see the campfires of his enemies and wonder what was to come? Well, I guess it doesn't matter now. Alexander's dead, and so am I. Maybe I can ask him.

The thought brought a chuckle to Shepard's lips, along with a searing pain as his smile crackled through burnt skin and torn flesh.

OK, either the afterlife is a bit more uncomfortable than I counted on, or I'm NOT dead. Not yet, at least.

Shepard couldn't move - not much, anyway - but he shifted himself to get a better view of the Earth before him.

Well, I'm still on the Citadel, and there's still atmosphere, and I'm breathing, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Earth is still there - that's another win. And a bunch of dead Reapers. Gotta love that. And...

No ships. None that weren't destroyed, anyway. The aft section of a Turian dreadnought floated silently by, tumbling across the background of the Atlantic and over Europe towards Russia. The remains of an Alliance cruiser traced a similar but perpendicular path, following a rough north-south line over North America, over Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes and the streets of Pittsburgh where Shepard had grown up hard. Millions of pieces of thousands of ships moving through the vacuum of space in a ballet of destruction. A geth fighter with its alien bug-like profile bounced haphazardly through larger pieces of the debris field, and Shepard's heart sank a bit.

The geth. EDI. All gone. I know there was no other way. I know they knew the risks going in, all of them, but I pulled the trigger. I did it, I and I alone. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. You deserved better, and I'm sorry I couldn't do better by you.

And still, not a single ship moving under its own power. Maybe it wasn't just EDI and the geth. Maybe it was everybody. Maybe they were all gone - Reapers, synthetics, humans, turians and everyone. Maybe in killing the Reapers, he'd killed them all. He felt unconsciousness tugging at him again and fell into it both sadly and gladly.

How the hell long HAS it been?

It was longer this time, of that he was certain. He was definitely out longer this time, because although his vision was now blurry, his mind was more clear. The blacks and blues and twisted debris had given way to white, a soft white that surrounded him. No sound, no stimulus, only a cloudlike whiteness enveloping him.

OK, scratch that. Maybe I'm dead after all.

Gradually, his senses returned and he heard a soft hum, saw movement in the clouds, got a faint scent of something minty. He tried to sit up but couldn't, when an object appeared before his face - another face, still blurred into the clouds but definitely a face. He blinked a few times, and it gradually came into focus.

It was the face of Miranda Lawson, looking down at him with a frown on her lips but with a smile in her eyes.

"Shepard, we've really got to stop meeting like this."