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"Hurtled into chaos, you fight... and the world will shake before you."
-Flemeth, 9:30 Dragon Age
Shepard looked down to the luminescent projection of the Catalyst unflinchingly as the AI explained to her what choices she had. Destroy the Reapers, control the Reapers, or generate a synthesis to fuse the organics and synthetics. She would die, said the Catalyst solemnly.
If breathing had not been hard enough, Shepard would have laughed. Instead, she opted to grin lopsidedly at the AI's avatar. "Of course I would die."
The Catalyst tilted the head of its avatar. "You do not seem to fear the end of your survival."
"I fear a lot of things," answered Shepard, limping forward, "but no, I don't suppose I fear dying."
She looked at the towering beam—the best choice, though still imperfect—then down at the edge of the precipice. She turned around, facing the Catalyst. "In fact, I am looking forward to it."
Shepard closed her eyes. One last breath, then—meet you at the bar—she fell backwards.
It was raining.
The trickles of water dropped on her face, her hair, her arms, seeped through the absorbent material of her under-armor. The fabric clung to her skin. Has it been raining for long?
Shepard opened her eyes, slowly, and water trickled down to her eyes. She blinked several times before her eyes were cleared, then she noticed something.
She was in a forest. Which forest, she could not tell—she would check her omni-tool nav app, but her arms felt so heavy. Her whole body felt like that one time she made the mistake to have a full contact spar with Grunt. The brat was worse than Wrex; unlike the latter, Grunt had no idea what restraint meant.
With a groan, Shepard tried to dig her elbow down to the muddy forest floor and push herself up, but she barely lifted her back several inches before falling down again with an unceremonious squelch. No, it did not seem like she would leave the forest anytime soon. She sighed. Why could dying not be a little bit easier? She had thought dying at the Crucible would be a good ending, if a bit heroic and dramatic for her tastes. Dying a slow, painful death on a garden planet she somehow found herself in, on the other hand, was not nearly such. Garrus would have called it less stylish.
Shepard choked back a dry sob.
Slowly, she rolled to her side and curled up as tightly as her aching body allowed her. At least now the rain would not fall on her face. Her fingers felt numb, cold. Soon, she thought, and let her thought linger no further.
Footfalls. Fast, brisk.
"Mother, I think you would like to take a look at this."
Fingers, light at first, then firm and methodical. A touch on her neck, then skimming on her temple, and last pushing her body to lay flat. It was no longer raining.
Someone else was coming, the steps more deliberate than the first. She wanted to turn, to see, but her body refused to comply. A hand pushed back her hair from her face, different than the first.
A low chuckle. "Well, well, what have we here?"
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A/N: Andaran Atish'an! Perhaps this plot is overused (I have seen several with similar premise), but I hope to at least make this different. While it will follow the major storyline of Dragon Age: Origins, it might not be a precisely by-the-book retelling, considering this is Shepard and not the playable warden we usually get. This is still a prologue (hence the brevity), but I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me what you think so far.