Green.

She'd never seen anything so green in her entire life. The entire planet was swathed in it. They skimmed over verdant forests in the shuttle and she marvelled: at the life, at the bounty.

Her first breath of Sur'Kesh's atmosphere was heady. The air was thick and moist, but invigorating, and carried the scent of all things living. She felt slightly drunk. Giddy, rejuvenated. Young, almost. She grinned and quickened her step.

But even in the midst of life death comes. And death she was all too familiar with now. So she dealt it out of hand, even as some ever-receding part of her mourned the loss of life, the necessity of it all.

Their last foe fell, a dying cry falling flat in the thick air. She shook her head; at some point she'd taken the butt of a rifle to the face, and now her nose was bleeding. She looked down as droplets flew, dark and round, settling on lively emerald leaves in an ominous spray of

Red.

They were in the dark, underground, in the crumbling ruins of an ancient, dying civilisation, and the most striking thing she could see was the red in front of her. A mural, painted to honour warriors, to honour the great beast that even now, centuries or millennia later, made the earth tremble with her passing.

Funny, she mused, red wasn't normally the colour she'd associate with Tuchanka. Other planets - yes. Agebinium. Mars. They were red in hue. Tuchanka was more ochre. More yellow. Dun. But it fit. It was the colour of war, the colour of aggression. The colour of Wrex's head plate and armour. The colour of blood.

Oh yes. It fit.

And then they emerged into the harsh light of Aralakh and even as she squinted and her armour tried to compensate for the heat differential, she heard the sound of water, faint but clear. A breeze wafted cool air against her face and she turned towards it automatically. And there, against the sere Tuchankan dirt, there it was. A glimmer of hope. A flash of the future. A splash of

Blue.

Only it wasn't. Not any more. Her homeworld was burning, burnt. It was the grey of char, the red of death. Broken concrete and shattered glass. There was nothing left.

She looked out over the remains of what used to be one of Earth's greatest cities and mourned. For its loss, the loss of everyone in it, the loss of every other city that had fallen. Billions upon billions of innocent people across the galaxy had been wiped out, dead or worse.

The only blue that she could see now was the blue that came from their enemy. The blue of the beam they were aiming for. Its light sent a steady hum through her, it invaded her mind, made her heart stagger a beat or ten.

She coughed and struggled to her feet, her hearing off, her balance shot. Hot pain dripped down her limbs, mixing with the blood to fall to the burnt ground. Wasn't there an old legend that the blood of war zones made the earth green again? Fitting.

Mustering her courage and shutting out the pain, she hefted her pistol and stepped into the

Light.