[The following is a transcript of an intercepted message found fragmented in raw junk datapackets within an Alliance comm buoy in the Sol system. The contents of the message had been heavily tampered with and data decay had partially corrupted the message after it had been repeatedly bounced around buoys to prevent full decryption of the message. Forensic investigations uncovered the partial message eleven years after it had initially been sent. Revelation submitted to archives and given Top-Secret classification.]
Transcript Participants:
- Codename "Archpriest" – Unknown Individual #1
- Unknown Individual #2
ARCHPRIEST: It is done, my lord.
UNKNOWN: The Alliance has responded to the signal?
ARCHPRIEST: They found the artifact, as planned. Already they have set up an outpost in the Bahak system to study it. All is proceeding as per your design.
UNKNOWN: And you have ensured that they have underestimated their latest acquisition?
ARCHPRIEST: To the letter. They insisted on installing sub-wavelength dampeners to protect them from the threat of indoctrination. I altered the calibration of the sensors that would allow the signal to break through without being noticed. It will take longer than average, but full control is expected to be acquired within a few weeks' time.
UNKNOWN: I am pleased with your efforts, Archpriest. I will see that Admiral Hackett is kept closely monitored on the project's progress. He will then have no choice but to contact Shepard the very moment he is alerted to any setbacks. You have taken steps to place the beacon in the nearby belt, yes?
ARCHPRIEST: It is in position and will go off within a month—a buffer to allow the indoctrination to settle. The nearest batarian patrol will be in the sector soon after it fires. They will eagerly make a push to expel the invaders from their system once they locate the project's origin in the belt.
UNKNOWN: Excellent. I would now advise that you withdraw yourself from the Bahak system—the Reapers are en route and, if the project succeeds, there will no longer be a Bahak system to go back to. Return to Sol. There is a task that needs your attention.
ARCHPRIEST: I am your servant, my lord.
Elsewhere
An explosion of color—
Fast, rapid beats of light, stuttering in tremendous pulses—
Contours and lines shifting off balance, inverting cells against their natural shapes—
Heartbeat in throat, on tongue, as if all her blood has pooled to her head—
Sclera bleeding throughout her eyes, mercury streaks scarring her pupils with silver veins—
She's flying apart.
Roahn's mind had no chance at comprehending the magnificence of what lay before her. Subluminal and coruscating bursts slammed into her brain, scorched her skin, twisted her body beyond recognition. Fractals upon fractals repeated endlessly, like mindlessly looped galaxies all souped by a gigantic blender. Half of the quarian's unconscious thoughts, which were still unmoderated and free, briefly found connecting threads to a past psychedelic trip she had undergone when a friend had smuggled in some edible compound that had made her see floating multi-sided graphics bombarding her body as the light from the nearby desk lamps had exploded into supernovas, sloughing off her flesh to peel free the glistening bones just underneath while she floated in a pool of what used to be her bedspread.
The other half of her thoughts felt this was nothing like that experience.
She tried screaming. That didn't work. No noise escaped from her throat. She could still breathe, so at least she had not been thrown into a vacuum. But Roahn was flailing about, supported by nothing, as though as she was falling through a well of infinite depth. No—floating. There was no resistance to indicate that she was moving at all. Perhaps everything else was moving around her.
Everything seemed to glisten and undulate around her in neon hues. Organic stirrings. It felt like being housed in a womb. Spheres of dark origin spiraled about her—she became the sun for trillions of beings in a glorious second. Falling icicles of unknowable energy scythed down and around her, impaling her with cosmic glory as her blood became the asteroid belt that swirled from her punctured wounds. Her hands came to her abdomen to stem the flow—her uncovered palms met bare flesh. To her surprise, she discovered she was naked. This is odd, was her only coherent thought, even as coils of her intestine were poking past the gashes in her belly, spilling out in wet hoops to form sashes that twirled about in cloying whirls.
Chartless, she tumbled in her painless agony, watching as her body continued to unfurl before her eyes. As she blazed through a cloud of vaporous xenon, her teeth began to chatter as her limbs stuttered and vibrating to the point where it looked like her fingers were multiplying. With loud but distant cracks, her bones shattered as her arms and legs folded in all the wrong directions. Her wrists peeled backwards and whitened spears suddenly burst through her skin at the joints. Her legs rotated at ninety-degree angles and her knees were destroyed in an instant, becoming dark storms of blood as the cartilage and bones were obliterated from the violent actions. Her ribcage had a sucking sensation impart upon it, and in the next second, it had crumpled inward upon a singularity that had housed itself in her chest. The molecules that made Roahn Roahn became liquid, transforming her beyond her original proportions.
As grievous as her wounds were, there was no pain. She could see everything unfold behind calm eyes, despite the chaotic nature of the universe folding in over itself before her. Portals among portals among portals ripped tears in the fabric of Roahn's reality, sending her shunting through wormhole after wormhole. Electricity embraced her like a blanket. The throbbing starfields left burn scars in her vision. Her skin bubbled and burst and dripped off her face to reveal the hellish skull upon which a sudden rush of dark filtered over, the same shade as her empty eye sockets, revealing the twisted boneplate locked in its eternal and hideous scream—
Roahn suddenly found herself on all fours, her hands sinking deep into a layer of snow several inches deep. She took in a deep breath—cold, wintery air flooded her lungs. Her body was untouched, unscarred. Her suit was back upon her, shrouding her body with its deathly white hues. Her breath fogged the cold visor that layered over her eyes. An inferno raged right next to her heart.
She had no idea how she had ended up in this place—she continued to stare as her fingers made canyons in the powdery snow that dusted her limbs. The wind whipped at her with a rage of angry knives, blowing searing cold snowflakes about her, some of them embedding into her sehni.
Then a voice that was not hers spoke.
"So. You're finally here. Come before us on your knees like the animal you are. How… utterly delightful."
Roahn lifted her head to view a world on fire.
She was in a forest of dead trees spaced wide apart from one another. Every single branch of the trees though, was alight. Bright yellow flames snaked across the canopy, pluming as they were held amongst the brambles like massive torches. The snow turned orange before her, long shadows loping in every direction. Snowflakes twirled amongst swirls of ash, mingling together to form a gray sleet. Just past the scalding haze, Roahn could barely make out the cuticle-shape of two distinct moons struggling to pierce the smoke layer, while the rest of the starlight had been smothered out from the magnificent conflagration.
The inferno raged coldly, never progressing past the trees it touched. The night had turned to day, an unearthly clash of light and dark waging against one another that smeared pastels of red and black upon Roahn's white trappings. The outline of her face could be glimpsed in brief flashes through the smoked glass of her visor as the flames occasionally flickered close to her person, but never close enough to burn her.
Then her panic subsided and she managed to hone in on the shape of a turian, the source of the voice, silhouetted darkly before her, as the fire raged above his head. A blot amidst the brightly storming sea. Then, faint swirls of embers brought caustic illuminations to his face, revealing faint glints of metallic implants lining their mandibles and deep electric-blue eyes. They were clad in a gray and utilitarian armor, the contours violent and oppressive.
Hands bunching the snow between her fingers, Roahn slowly stood, her eyes never leaving the figure. She did not reach for her weapons, instead clasping a hand at her side as her mind finally clicked into place.
"Sorry I'm late," she growled, head held high, the words flowing effortlessly through her mouth. "Saren."
The turian stepped into view, the light from the flame now bringing his face into further detail. His boots left gouges in the snow behind him. A faint chuckle escaped his throat.
"Late? No, you're just in time. In time to see the plan through. To its inevitable conclusion." The turian's voice was deep. Ragged, as if the words had to traverse a plain of shattered rock before they could find their voice.
"Where's Aleph?" Roahn interjected.
But the turian just shook his head. "An immaterial question," Saren dismissed. "Knowing his location is not of pertinent interest to you right now. It holds little weight towards your destiny."
"And you know what my destiny is?"
"We would have thought it was obvious, commander," a new voice joined them. Roahn turned to see a new individual step out from behind a screen of burning shrubs—they were walking through the flames though the immaculately designed clothes they wore were not getting scorched. A lit cigarette was wedged between two of their fingers and the man—a human—took a quick drag on the object. Their salt-and-pepper hair was perfectly coiffed, and their eyes were exactly the same shade of simmering blue as Saren's. "That's because it was given to you from the start."
Roahn's eyes tracked the Illusive Man as he walked over to stand beside Saren. The human had a slight smirk upon him, one that mimicked his cohort's posture.
"You don't know anything about me," she hissed. She then gestured to the glimmering hellscape around them. "I'm not about to let phantoms decide my fate. I'm not here for you. I'm here for Aleph. To finally kill him. You're just mirages, standing in my way."
"Is that what you think?" a gravelly voice rasped behind the quarian. Roahn froze as the crunching of snow underneath designer shoes came to her ears. In the next few seconds, another human, this one bearded and imposingly built, now stood at Saren's right, their hands folded behind their back. Raynor Larsen coldly regarded the quarian, trying to pull the similarities into his head. "For who are you to dictate whether this is real or not? Better yet, why should you be the one to question it? You think you could consciously control all of this? That's not how this is going to work, Shepard. It was only a matter of time until this came to pass."
The three assembled in front of her, blackened against the backdrop of the wildfire, callously appraised Roahn with their impassive fronts. Roahn felt herself shrinking as she flicked her gaze across all their cold faces, finding constitutions that appeared impermeable to her. Demons from a past unavailable to her. Rage locked behind the veil of time now unleashed to bare their fangs. A twinge of fear impaled her and she almost edged a foot behind herself in preparation to break out into a run. But where she would run to, she had no idea.
A sudden gust billowed snow around the quartet, dusting their frames. Saren angled his head downward by a fraction as he glowered, steam curling from his nostrils.
"Still trying to figure it out, quarian?" he mocked. "The confusion on your person is obvious. All this time you had the drive to impose order upon chaos. Do you now understand that you've undertaken a fool's errand? No. You just were unwilling to sacrifice everything to achieve your precious order. The Reapers never had such scruples—they knew the hardest choices required an inorganic will. A logical will. Order is an entropic system, after all. It requires a vanguard to keep it in check. Prevent it from destabilizing. With the Reapers gone, it was only inevitable that something else become that vanguard of the newborn cycle. A new apex predator."
"A role that was not filled in by a Council race," the Illusive Man picked up, "but by something more. Previously held back by the existence of the Reapers, now unleashed to impose his own order. Though, it is a more benevolent presence that has shaped the path of this galaxy and its inhabitants. Destruction is no longer the end goal, but an equilibrium, shaped along a model of declining conflict. It is a relationship not defined on subservience, but on commensalism, and we're the ones who benefit."
"So, who are you to refuse such an offer?" Larsen finished. "To stand in the presence of one so monumental and declare your opposition? If resistance is only met with destruction, then what would be the benefit in such rebellion? Is it for the principle of the matter? Do the lives of billions not resonate as concerns to you? Or could you honestly imagine that your life would be radically changed underneath such stewardship, even if your antagonism gets others hurt in the process?"
In the background, the flames blurred into featureless blobs as Roahn found herself unable to tear her eyes off the three men that were now castigating her. She felt a lump in her throat that pained her greatly as she swallowed.
She looked away for a moment, privately seething. The logic tried to affix itself to her mind in a parasitic fashion. But she fought it, tooth and nail, within her mind. Possibilities and implications raced past her, forced underneath a metal boot as she struggled to turn her head back upon the wraiths.
"Amazing," she murmured, a dry smile cracking across her face. "The influence of Aleph has spread to the dead, it seems. Just parroting the same nonsense, no matter the mouthpiece. You think that's going to work on me now? I know my destiny, and it does not involve servitude."
"It will if you continue on this path," Saren emphasized. "Your father was told the same thing several times over, and his ultimate decision unleashed Aleph upon the galaxy, no matter if he did so unintentionally. I once asked him if submission was preferable to extinction and he gave the same answer you did. It delayed his destruction, yes, but not once was it in any danger of being stopped."
Roahn screwed her eyes shut for a moment. Her father's bloodstained face, held within her arms, penetrated the mental fog quite unexpectedly. She nearly gasped out loud. But the sensation—the memory—still lingered. It was as if she could feel herself back on that beach, the broken body of her father crumpled amongst the receding waves.
She blew air out of her nose to keep from making an unintentional sound. "And if I'm prepared to live with my consequences?"
The Illusive Man gestured with his hand that held the cigarette. "Then you open yourself up to the unknown. Perhaps something far more sinister than Aleph is out there, waiting for their chance to strike, and his removal would only allow forces greater than you imagine to fill that void. That is… if you are even capable of such a thing."
"Then we'll overthrow whatever comes at us. We'll do it as many times as we need to. Again and again. We've done it once before."
"Once," Larsen pointed out. "After how many cycles? Thousands? Millions? We were the fluke, Shepard, that slipped through the cracks. Perhaps another cycle simply started anew when we threw off the yoke of the last one. Maybe the battle you swore to fight was lost long ago. That you're trapped in a cycle of your own, always meant to lose as the forces against you pile up. The true reason, perhaps, that you have failed to understand is that we were never meant to be the masters of our fate, that to push against the path chosen for us was tantamount to madness. Is this not the universe's method of correcting the aberrations that stray from its design?"
"Doesn't matter," Roahn shook her head. "It won't stop me from fighting."
The flames that jumped from branch to branch above them seemed to all combine in a single, writing mass. The aloft inferno churned and simmered like staring at a wave from underneath the water's surface. The moiling fire billowed into searing hues of yellow and white—miniature shockwaves that were carried throughout the incinerating forest. Embers rained down upon them, but did not scorch their bodies as they hit.
The image of Saren began to vibrate and suddenly he had appeared at Roahn's right, hands folded behind his back as he walked in a semicircle around the quarian.
"I was once plagued with visions, like yourself, quarian," he said. "Warnings of extinctions from a long-dead race haunted my mind, alerting me to a future foretold. I sought to avert that future for myself—to ride out the approaching storm. My destiny had always been leading me to the Reapers, it seemed. It had been my hope that the Reapers would have seen the worth of organic life in this cycle if we had cooperated with their mandate, to serve instead of being exterminated."
The turian stopped in place and twitched his head subtly in Roahn's direction, mandibles flaring in the form of a hideous smile.
"If you had simply stepped aside," he rasped, "don't you think that many more lives could have been saved?"
"Or… you could have taken Aleph up on his unsaid offer," the Illusive Man spoke before Roahn had a chance to respond. He had now popped up at Roahn's left, the cherry tip of his cigarette brightening as the well-dressed man took another drag. "Do you think he intended to make himself the permanent steward of the galaxy? Wouldn't it make sense for him to pass on his knowledge, his grip on the Monolith, to another equally deserving of the role? It might have been a prudent choice, commander, to have integrated yourself alongside Aleph, to have learned his methods of control. You might have even escaped the experience without your values, as you currently know them, having been corrupted. Imagine, the power to manipulate matter, to take life, in the hands of someone decidedly more benevolent. He might have always intended to position you as an heir, of sorts. Anyone would find such a prospect tantalizing."
Roahn was back in her dream again, with her staring into the chromed mirror with the shadowed image of Aleph standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. A carefully crafted fantasy. Had that truly been what he had been manipulating for her benefit? Did he see himself as a father figure to her? The thought was so disgusting that a full-body shiver wracked its way through the woman.
Larsen was now pacing in front of her, the immediate space empty now that the other two had taken up positions at her sides. "We've simply dealt with the devils that we knew, Shepard. We were each given a choice, and we took the one that we thought would save the most lives. Aleph is a powerful ally—the amount of support behind your decisions can be… humbling, in a way. With his influence, no institution or man can stand in your way. Bureaucracy becomes a formality. The words you speak instantly become law. Even without his Monolith, he still maintains authority, far greater than you or I could conjure. Think about it, Shepard. Submission is not what Aleph deals in. It is only allegiance he asks that you pledge. A mindless robot is of no use to him. Spirited thinkers like yourself—that's something that holds more value than a slave, wouldn't you agree?"
The three specters had Roahn evenly surrounded on all sides. Their voices then all came at her at once, each one a vibrant attack.
"There is only one way that this galaxy finds peace…"
"…by breaking the cycle that your father merely continued…"
"…for you are as fetal and weak as anything that stands in his way…"
"…as you fail to realize your path only leads to ruin…"
"…just like the ones that came before you never understood."
She staggered in place, hands on the sides of her helmeted head, as though that had a chance at drowning out their words. Roahn screwed her eyes shut, feet wide apart, and nearly fell to her knees again as her brain swam with the intruding taunts.
"Even now, you doubt yourself, your abilities…"
"…because you wonder if you are merely an obstruction to his design…"
"…where he is faultless, you are tainted. Broken…"
"…and your victories have only ever been illusions, paling in comparison to the actions of a ghost…"
"…their ashes cling to you, forever reminding you of your inferiority. Which you always will be—"
"ENOUGH!" Roahn screamed. She stamped her foot once upon the ground, hard, and spread her arms wide. As though an incandescence had peeled from her soul, a conflagrating ripple burst from Roahn in a violent phlogiston, a savage storm that had ravaged from nothingness. The devouring blaze swept from the quarian's locus—the fire that tindered the forest also pulsed in time to the exact same event. The combustion caught the figures of Saren, Larsen, and the Illusive Man, resetting them all back into their original positions in front of her after the firewave had died down. Patches of fire spikes chipped from holes in the snow-layered ground. Roahn simply stepped across them, her suit miraculously untouched, yet her body continued to drip fire as she plodded determinedly forth.
The smug faces of her foes had been wiped clear, she noticed. Now, they looked upon her with blank visages, partially dumbfounded as they gazed upon the burning quarian heading their way. She narrowed her gaze, imagining that she could rush right at these phantoms and tear them to shreds with her hands.
Then it hit her. They're afraid of me.
"I… will not let any of you lecture me about finding peace," she nearly roared through a clenched throat. She lifted an arm, dimly noting that it was consumed by flames. Erratic flickers revealed her curved bone structure as blackened ossein, yet her skin and suit remained intact within the next blink of an eye. "None of you ever found it. Nor did you ever try to fight for it. That's what all of you had in common—you took the path of least resistance to save yourselves. You're going to try to convince me that you did this for the greater good?" She paused a beat, waiting for a rebuttal. "No… you can't. Because while you might not know who I am, I know who you are."
She shifted herself, placing Saren squarely in her sights. "You're the bastard that tried to kickstart the Reapers' cycle and doom trillions of lives, knowing exactly that they would be harvested, despite your so-called 'best intentions.' You fought to make such a future happen… yet your submission cost you your life in the end."
Saren tilted his head, the blue in his eyes glowing to a deeper indigo. The turian reached up to touch his forehead after feeling something weeping down his brow. His palm came away slick with blood. The hole that now protruded from the corner of his skull patiently oozed his life down his temple, as did a tinier bore in the lower corner of his jaw that dribbled fluids down the side of his neck.
The flames around Roahn grew in height, now spreading to her shoulders as she took a step closer to the Illusive Man. "You only sought control so that you could further your own twisted ideals. You think you would have been righteous with such power? Do you believe I could be definitively uncorrupted as well? You weren't ready. I'm not ready. And Aleph… he assumed too much when he placed himself in his position. I will tear his responsibility away and crush it between his eyes. Our destinies will be controlled by our own will, not from another's."
The Illusive Man's mouth flattened and he lifted a hand to take another drag of his cigarette, but the object had already been roasted to a crisp and disintegrated between his fingers in a thin stream of ash. The human then realized that his skin of his hands had cracked and peeled away, exposing veinous blue circuitry that had become his flesh, shunting aside the epidermal layer and burrowing deep into muscle. The synthetic sprawl had crept to his face up from his neck, shattering his sculpted features. Delicate meshes of alloyed wiring poked from his lips, carved canyons from his cheekbones, bled his eyes until they were a dulled sheen of beryl.
Roahn's sehni had now become alight, wreathing the quarian's head in a crown of golden fire. She made a slight gesture towards Larsen, sparks glistening wetly from her fingers and palms as they sprayed in wide arcs with the frozen wind. "You used the veil of Aleph's will with impunity, like a weapon in the hands of a child. You shirked the responsibility that came with it and sought only to further your own ends in the name of power and profit. Can you truly stand before me and claim you've benefited more lives than you've helped end? If you had known, all along, that you were only furthering Aleph's true purpose, then shouldn't you have felt the responsibility to act against it? Or, like your compatriots, did you think that by pledging your allegiance you could somehow prove your own singular worth, thus saving the only life you thought of significance… yours?"
Larsen merely gave a shuddering rasp as an answer. He coughed again, wetly, and paused as he realized that blood from his mouth was now flowing over his chin. His nostrils had also deluged a sickening flow and his eyes had filled with a dark crimson color. Larsen's skin had paled to the color of milk and he seemed to sway in place, as if held there by strings.
The quarian squared her stance and she was then quickly cradled by smoke as the flames that enveloped her were immediately extinguished. Her eyes glowed in tandem through the gaseous veil, cutting through like a diamond carbide saw. Slowly, she appraised each of the men before her, whose fatal wounds had settled upon them in malady-like fashion.
"None of you are capable of even standing against me," she spoke, her voice echoing across the frozen hell. "You never tried to destroy the cycle that has governed us all. You only perpetuated it, ensuring the continuation of violence and the subsequent holocausts that were to follow. My father helped crack that cycle when the choice was finally given to him. Today, I'm going to shatter it." A few sparks snapped at Roahn's fingers and she took a breath. "Try and stop me if you wish. But I'm going to ensure that my destiny resides in my own hands before I leave here. That, I know, is more than any of you ever did."
The crackling of burning wood was allowed to permeate the stillness. The fires that whipped through the trees continued to pulsate and thrum with an unearthly energy. Miraculously, snowflakes continued to fall through the inferno, unscathed, to dot the ground at Roahn's feet, filling in the ditches her boots had made in her wake.
The light ran red and liquid across the faces of the stricken men. Shadows made deep tendrils that permanently scarred the expanses of their features. Blood dotted the snow around each of them, freshly dripping from their wounds. They silently stared at the quarian, golem-like, while silver speckles of snowdrift cascaded in the air like filaments. They remained in their totem state, as if awaiting to be burned by the very darkness, consumed in all the glory not from the storm that enveloped them at this moment, but from the woman who stood before them in open defiance.
Fearless borne of confidence. Of hope. Shielded from pessimism and regret. A stance not crafted from some primal indulgence, but a finely crafted edifice chipped and slaved away by a master's hand.
Before them, the quarian radiated a power of her own.
Saren then lifted his head, his mandibles performing a slight curl.
"Perhaps it might not be too late after all, Shepard."
He then took a step backwards and, with a sizzle of ruby lightning, a furl of caged energy wrapped around the turian and seared through armor and skin until he was nothing but ashes.
The other two did not seem to acknowledge their cohort's departure. The Illusive Man merely patted the chest pocket of his coat, as if he was looking for another cigarette. Failing to locate one, he sighed in disappointment.
"It was only ever about forestalling the inevitable, commander. If you can break the hold… then it might be worth it to try."
The human gave a sad smile and then the same red energy consumed him in seconds, just like it had done for Saren.
Now Raynor Larsen was the only one who was left. He simply straightened the cuffs of his jacket, as if preparing for the same fate.
"If it's worth anything," he said, tendrils of sizzling power already sparking upon his shoulders. "I hope I was wrong, Shepard. I didn't learn, in the end. Perhaps you will."
With a dignified nod, the gruesome pallor of Larsen wafted into tender flakes of flame and heat before the snow-filled air took hold of his remnants, dispersing him into the swirls of ice and ash high above, leaving Roahn alone.
The forest then took on a subtle heartbeat, as if the trunks of the enflamed trees all groaned together in one sonorous tone. The noise deepened, tuned to the sound of the throbbing cadence of the fire—a gentle symphony of crackling wood and quick furls from flaming fans mingled with the blanketed zero of the surrounding snow. A tenor with dry acoustics. The sound of Roahn's private hell.
She slowly looked up, into the white-hot core of the trees where sparks rained down like snowflakes. She watched as a powerful resonance began to build, a singularity deep within the magmatic heart of the forest.
"Take me to him," she whispered, electricity sizzling on her lips.
Raising her arms, she reached out to grab a pillar of fire that had extended itself to her like an offered spear. As soon as her fingers grasped the glowing object, the air around her oxidized and she was engulfed in the next instant in a cauldron of blue flames. The forest around her disappeared and was whisked away, the falling snow becoming stars as the ground left her feet. Blinding streaks of matter moving at incomprehensible speeds stormed past Roahn in pillars of blue-white light. Antimatter ripped at the edges of her body—she curled up in a fetal position as she fell forwards, towards the light that had called her, but the tightness in her chest had not returned. She did not scream. There was no reason to. She felt as calm and clear as she had ever been before and as she gazed upon her growing destination—a mote swimming in the vibrant dark—a song deep within her soul began crying out eagerly.
She was Commander Shepard. There was nothing to fear.
Citadel
The last of Aleph's mercenaries filled the hall as they rushed through the opening at the far end, near the elevator. They were all clad in the Dark Horizon armor, the final legion of adjutants who could show no greater zealotry. Worshippers who followed the lead of the Aeronaut—standing by their contract holder until the very end. It was, after all, the principle of the matter that counted.
Stun grenades sailed into the open corridor, bouncing off the polished tiles before they detonated in clouds of chaff, bright enough to fry any unshielded optic nerve. Gunfire crackled about the walls in a clamorous echo. The shields of the mercenaries sizzled as they passed through the crackling screens of smoke, the fog around them blossoming with each muzzle flash and pulsefire report. Superheated metal zipped through the air, blowing off strands of branches from the dead trees that had pillared the hall, which disappeared in clouds of woodchips.
As the final adherents to Dark Horizon's dwindled crowd split up into their separate strike squads, they were beset by a cavalcade of suppressive fire from the top of the series of staircases. In position on the high ground, Korridon fired a scuffed rifle in short bursts, occasionally yanking the secondary trigger to unleash swift concussive bursts that impacted armor into flesh, cracking bones. The planter wall above his head angrily rang as bullets ricocheted against it. Korridon threw himself prone and switched to disruptive rounds as he saw a couple of crowd-control troopers vault the barriers of overturned benches near the bottom of the steps. Electricity cracked across their shields, the barriers now effectively killed. Korridon switched back to armor piercing and shot the onrushing mercs before their shields could recharge. He had ejected his spent thermal clip before the bodies had finished spasming.
In the center, directly blocking the mercenaries' line of sight to the anomaly, Sagan had two defense drones that were arcing shockwaves of chain-lightning as rapidly as its batteries could charge. These jolts fanned out and shot through shields and armor, cascading directly into flesh to roast the hapless victims from the inside out. Flanked by these dutifully electronic helpers, Sagan calmly waded into the morass of beings, shotgun held at the hip. He whirled to face a privateer as they stepped through the smokescreen—he fired, and the man's armor became punctured with a dozen holes. Sagan turned again and the barrel of his weapon erupted once more. A Dark Horizon merc's arm flew away, spewing a twirl of blood as it broke into pieces. Sagan smoothly drew a heavy pistol from his mag-holster and pulled the trigger—a corner of the helmet of the man he had just shot simply disappeared, revealing a pink chunk of brain.
Then Kasumi also came into play, her tactical cloak sizzling in and out of existence as she swooped and dove amongst the tangle of bodies, a suppressed machinepistol in one hand and a curved kukri knife in another. Like a savage pitviper, she got up close to the unshielded flanks of the mercs and used her pistol to fire several automatic bursts into the backs of their heads, slashing with her knife at those she had no time to bring her weapon upon. And before any of the Dark Horizon soldiers could get a bead on her, she would tap her cloak and she would be gone. The only sort of calling card she had ever had.
The mercenaries all dove for cover where they would get better fire support. They had the advantage in numbers, but their tactical positioning was poor. They ducked behind embedded gardens, behind the dried-out trees, huddling in groups in their black-clad armor.
Korridon picked up his rifle as he maneuvered to find a better firing position. Something clattered next to his feet—it was a grenade. Instinctively, he kicked it away. The next moment, he was lying on his back, blinking dazedly as the ceiling tripled before his eyes. He felt arms around his shoulders, dragging him across the ground. He screwed up his eyes to gain additional focus and looked backwards—Kasumi had come over to help evac him.
"Sorry to keep making this a habit," was all he could say, which in his head, sounded rather suave.
To her credit the woman just chuckled. "You're not dead yet. This can be something I can get used to. Now, get up."
To his surprise, he obliged. His muscles still had a ton of strength locked in their reserves. He had to use the barrel of his weapon to steady himself as he slowly rose—the red-hot barrel hissed as he embedded it in a pool of blood that had spread from a merc he had shot only minutes before.
The turian felt the woman press something into his hand. He lifted the grenade she had just gifted him.
"Contacts behind the first installation to the left," she spoke to him. "On your lead."
He clutched the grenade to his chest. "Then get ready."
Marksmen were now firing upon the trio, making smoking holes into the floor and walls as the powerful rounds obliterated the air in their wake. Korridon swore he could feel the fluid of his eyes ripple whenever a bullet passed too close. He fired his rifle one-handed, aiming to dissuade than to kill—two Dark Horizon mercs ducked behind a balustrade.
The turian then turned, bent his arm, and released his fingers as he let the grenade slip from his grasp. The oblong object bounced down the stairs heavily, making dramatic clangs as it hit. It rolled to a stop near one of the planters. There were a series of yells and then there was a spray of black smoke tinged with red. A crisp core of orange flame licked the sky for a split-second and all sound pulsed from the air for a solid heartbeat.
Three troopers had been ripped apart by the grenade's blast instantaneously, now little more than smears upon the deck. Four times that number had been completely discombobulated, having had the misfortune to be within the device's radius. The soldiers staggered out from cover, all their tactical training, their swaths of maneuvers, their devotion to techcraft all having departed from their heads. Enough time for Kasumi to surge out of whatever hiding spot she had been utilizing for the moment and to drill several holes into the heads of the mercs with her weapons.
Sagan also strode into the fray, his shotgun now exchanged for a Spitfire. The rotary barrel was a blur as a steady stream of plasma wept from the muzzle in aquamarine bursts. The geth made several quick sweeps of his weapon—scores of the mercs were cut in half, the pieces of their bisected bodies falling in opposite directions while their cauterized waists smoked with the charred scent of burning flesh.
Then Korridon clambered onto the central planters, giving him a clean view of the cramped killzone. He had a moment to himself as he took a quick glimpse at the assembled force before him. He could see how the Dark Horizon mercs were erecting barricades to offer new zones of cover. How they were carting in tripods for their heavy weapons. How they refused to yield, even after they had lost so many of their own, just to make a point to whom they perceived to be the enemy. They were carving the Citadel Tower up, sloughing gouges into the tilled soil, uprooting the trees for them to groan as they toppled over, and setting fires in several corners of the room, causing the ceiling to disappear behind a flowing cloud of smoke.
He had always known that this was going to be a losing battle from the start. Perhaps he only had minutes left until some lucky trooper shot him in the throat. The plan had been flimsily constructed from the start. They were never going to win. He was exhausted from the battle on Rema—his eyes threatened to droop for good. His vision periodically grayed out. Breathing was difficult. He was still bleeding from a dozen cuts. He was held together by what felt like tape and glue.
Yet somehow, he found the strength to push that all aside.
Korridon gripped his weapon and took in a breath. Everything else was a distraction. Maybe it did not matter if he was about to die. It was not like he had any interest in solidifying a legacy or becoming a martyr. They had all earned their glory today—if no one else remembered their deeds, then so be it. He would at least join the spirits knowing he had embraced their ideas wholeheartedly, at the end. That had to count for something.
It was all about the love for their friend, their desire to protect her, to make sure she accomplished her mission. Korridon would do everything in his power to make sure she would not fail.
"I promised you time," he whispered, right before he stood up. "You're going to get everything I have."
With a roar, Korridon jumped into the fray, becoming rage itself, and met his destiny.
Beyond…
Roahn floated upon her back, a buoyant sensation bobbing her up and down as a thin current drifted her along a liquid surface. Her legs were together, ramrod straight, while her arms were spread wide apart, saltwater encrusting her sehni. High above, a sun flared down through a cloudless sky. If she was not wearing her suit, she would already have garnered a sunburn from those powerful rays, judging by how polarized her visor was right now. It was peaceful in this position. Weightless and in the grip of tidal forces, a comforting gravity exerted upon her. She felt she could stay like this for a very long time. Until she fell asleep, she imagined.
But she was awake as soon as she felt her back brush something soft. The quiet churn of waves were now apparent to her. The current then gently deposited the quarian upon the sloped bank of wet sand, foam collecting between her fingers and her booted toes. A ragged white boundary sluiced past her head, beading her suit with seawater. Still she continued to lie there, breathing deeply, the last vestiges of tiredness slowly burning away underneath the sun's gaze.
Slowly, her strength gathered, she sat up, her back encrusted with sand while the rest of her body dripped from being doused with the sea. A hand resting on a knee, she sat where she was and craned her head to get a look at her surroundings.
It all clicked in a matter of seconds. This was not the first time Roahn had been spit out at this exact spot, on this very world. For she intrinsically recognized the long stretch of beach that ribboned underneath sheer cliff faces that hung with hardy vines. Quick squalls seeped curves of desert dust in scotch-colored waves near the lip of those cliffs. The delicate mapping of mountain ridges off in the distance, guarded by a maze of canyons and mesas, acted as an imperial wall that influenced the continent.
Roahn roughly sighed. She watched the waves lap at her feet and at the clear sproutings of bubbles they left behind when they scrambled back across the soaked sand into the mass of perfect blue. She watched the tufts of mist seep across the surface of the morning tide, the wind tugging at the folds of her suit.
She looked out into the breadth of the horizon that stretched before her and settled into the comfort of her world. She wrapped her arms around her legs as she sat there, thoughtfully.
"How long?" she wondered out loud. "How long has it been? Months? A year? It's… why ever did I leave?"
Remembering where she was, she turned to her right and immediately locked onto the sight she could remember in the clearest detail in her dreams. There would never be a point in her life where she could forget the sight of her stately family home, sitting upon that cliff that jutted out towards the ocean, light sparkling off the glass windows.
"Everything's the same," she whispered as she got to her feet. "Just the same. Huh. Keelah se'lai."
As she walked across the beach, Roahn bristled as a gust of wind buffeted against her frame. She imagined that she was trudging past the spot where her father had died, right here in the sand, with his blood leaking into the waves. She could never forget that horrible day, how she had held him in her lap as his breaths had quickly faded. As he had stared up at her with glassy eyes, forgetting who she was, only seeing a mask instead of a face. Roahn had to keep staring forward lest her heart would wrench apart. A grimace nicked her mouth, but only for a moment.
There was a path cut between the cliffs, where a tight valley was wedged, barely over a dozen meters wide. This hid the route that led back to the house. As she climbed the timeworn steps, pebbles crumbling down the path, boots embedding prints into the dried dirt, Roahn looked up to the lone slash of sky that manifested as a rip between the rock walls.
It was only now did Roahn realize that this place—Rannoch—was not entirely the same. An odd filter had been set upon the entire scene. Bright colors were amplified while the darker ones were more muted. Crimson starbursts made ghostly burn scars in her vision, dodecahedral and glimmering. She lifted her hand and found the white of the fabric that wrapped at the back of her limb was gleaming like fresh snow while the black material had become a nearly textureless and matte hue. Was her visor malfunctioning? Or was this something entirely different?
She ascended the final steps and pushed through a crowd of dried branches coated with thin, waxy leaves. The quarian then strode through a field of zhan grass, the stalks browned and plump, close to bursting.
Straight ahead was the entrance to her house. Just to her left was a gnarled and ancient onosho tree. She remembered the tree well, for she had climbed almost every branch when she had been young. Her mother's calls for her to be careful during her rambunctious outings still rang clearly in her head. It was a tree that had been alive when the Morning War had started, no older than a sapling around that time. And here it now stood, thick leaves glistening and hardy. Dark trunk wind-scarred and full of moisture.
Several objects had been placed underneath the onosho. Roahn was now headed in that direction anyway. She had always sought out the tree in her youth, being that it was one of the few objects in the vicinity that provided any measure of protection from Rannoch's sun. A perfect resting place for all who sought refuge. The deviating phenomena diffracted radiating lines of deep red that speared through the trees, generating seismic star patterns about her, mingling with the words of her parents' names that glowed from the twin rock formations that she had now found herself in front of.
Roahn now stopped, hands folded respectfully in front of her, as she looked upon the headstones of her parents. She was close enough to read their names clearly, the holographic inscriptions gleaming beautifully against the shattered-pillar shape of the obsidian graves. She tipped her head downward, letting nothing but the sound of the sea overwhelm her, carrying her along amidst the gales of her loss.
John and Tali Shepard. So close that she could touch them, if fate had not gone in its chosen direction. Powerful memories threatened to stir forth, to burst through the primordial soup that was her consciousness.
"Luckiest girl in the galaxy."
"Because she's ours."
Roahn's eyes opened. She looked heavily at the headstones, wanting to say something. Perhaps she could regale the graves with tales from her childhood, how she could still remember Tali sliding a circuit board across the dinner table for her to practice upon, the moment that had jumpstarted a lifelong fascination. How she could still remember her father teaching her the basics of swimming on the beach, with Tali watching nervously from the shore.
She wanted to tell them so much, of what she had done. Her hopes. Her dreams. She just wanted to talk to them, to let them know what a good job they had done, and that, despite all their fears, she loved them as fiercely as a daughter could.
All that was not to be, for Roahn ashamedly turned around, walking back into the sunlight, a heavy lump embedded in her throat.
The house now loomed in front of her, the distance having been closed without her even realizing it. The play between the shadows and the light from the outside seemed to now noticeably throb. Roahn looked back up towards the sun, her visor polarizing again. Already, the surrounding desert seemed bright. Too bright. The luminescence, despite it being the morning, had been dialed up to a degree that not even midday at summer would bring. Was Rannoch's sun heading into the throes of a cataclysmic phenomenon? Was the star… dying?
Eerily calm, Roahn forced herself to put the oddity out of mind. She reached the double doors, twisted the handle, and stepped inside.
Everything was the way she had seen it last. Polished stone floors. Gleaming picture windows. Hand-built furniture populating the rooms (her father had picked up woodworking, but her mother chose the placement of the accoutrements). Not a speck of dust had dared fallen upon even the flattest of surfaces, it seemed. To prove that point, Roahn ran a hand along the closest counter. Her fingers came away spotless.
"Hello?" she called, even though she was certain of the futility of the action. "Anyone here?"
Having received the response she expected, Roahn was left to roam the rooms to her heart's content. She spent long minutes staring through the windows that separated the family room from the outside deck, remembering how she loved to sit next to the railing, feeling the wind and heat upon her unmasked face while she watched the waves crash against the rocks many meters below.
The kitchen of the house was as pristine as the rest of the rooms. Roahn even opened a few of the drawers, finding all of the appliances to be in place. The stoves were stainless steel, gas. Custom-made, too, which meant they had to be imported halfway across the galaxy, along with the other cooking devices that were less rudimentary in nature.
One thing that all of the rooms had in common was a complete lack of art. Her father had repeatedly stressed that he had absolutely no taste in interior decoration, which had left the job up to Tali when they were first getting items to put into the house. Tali had shipped over a few modest sculptures at the outset but, being unused to spending money so lavishly (as she was in for a shock when she first tried to purchase a few elaborate paintings through the extranet) she was uncomfortable with the thought of her efforts going toward mere decorations when she could spend her time and money doing things that were more decidedly worthwhile. And her father had respected her decision wholeheartedly, so the house remained barren in that department for as long as it would remain standing. Though it was not ever intended to be permanent—Tali had once tried to pick up painting, but apparently the results were so disastrous that she had quipped to Roahn that "a geth would have been more creative."
Roahn walked over to the corner of the family room, where a dark wood bookcase had been placed. She felt around the underside of one of the shelves until her fingers found a small button. She pressed, and a small passageway swung forward with a dull thunk. A dark shaft was now revealed to her, but only for a moment, as a singular lamp soon flickered, throwing light upon a skeletal elevator held in place by pulleys and locked gears.
She smiled, but did not proceed inside. Instead, she gently closed the passageway back up, a part of her mind now eased. To think, she had lived in the house for nine years without even realizing that her mother had installed such an addition. Tali had been a fan of spy movies, once her father had introduced her to them, and she had been utterly obsessed with the idea of having a secret passageway that led to a hidden room in her house. It may have seemed like pure ostentation at the time, but when the Legionnaire had come calling all those years ago to burn their house down, neither Roahn nor her father felt that the passageway had been a waste of money.
Heading further into the house, the quarian hooked a left into a hallway, deviating from the more open chambers. Here, a series of several rooms branched off from the corridor—an office, a bathroom, and a few bedrooms. The master bedroom was straight ahead, but Roahn did not enter. She could see the outline of a bed, just behind the ajar doorframe, a half-moon window situated above it—dim light filtered through to fall upon the bed and its smoothened covers.
The room closest to her was shut closed. Roahn laid one hand upon the side of the threshold, looking towards the master bedroom for one last moment, before she pushed the door open and went inside.
It was like stepping into a memory. Back to a time where she had been just about to leave her home to go to university on Earth. A queen-sized bed with a patterned duvet of her favorite bioti-ball team was embedded in the corner, a stainless-steel desk that held a console and a cup full of assorted tools next to it. There was a small rack of weights over to the left, right in front of a large digi-mirror screen almost as tall as she was. The carpet on the floor held a subtle motif of winged ships from her favorite science-fiction vid franchise. A small nightdesk included a stand for her omni-tool, and on the shelving underneath, was a holographic board game.
Struck by a thought, Roahn walked over and knelt down to one of the drawers at her desk. She opened it and reached in to grasp the first thing she saw.
The Garrus action figure had been immaculately crafted by the best toy production lines in the galaxy. Standing at ten inches tall, the detail and paint was vivid and exquisite, as far as action figures went. Roahn had spent four months of her allowance to purchase this particular model, which was part of the legendary "Eezo" line of Normandy Crew models. Premium articulation and posing, as the packaging promised. This one of Garrus featured his Archangel armor, complete with the gouging around the collar as the result of a rocket attack. His face was depicted as half-bandaged, with some raw sinew poking out from the sloppily-placed dressings that adorned his head. Yet, those painted eyes held no pain, only determination, as he gripped his sniper rifle with steady hands, looking to score his next kill.
Holding the figure in her hand, Roahn could only think back to the time when she had been practically bouncing off the walls of her room when she was young, going on imagined missions with Garrus as an action figure squadmate. They explored many distant worlds together (the kitchen and the front yard), forged bases in the name of the Council (plastic box forts), and held back any invading alien forces that dared cross their path (her hapless parents if they ever entered her room without knocking).
"You always were my favorite," she said as she set the action figure back in the drawer, alongside the other members that comprised the complete set of the Normandy crew. All three generations, collected over a period of eleven years. Garrus had a spot next to Tali's action figure, who stood next to Shepard's. She wistfully smiled as she closed the drawer back up, now feeling far clearer than she had been before.
Heading back into the family room, Roahn stood in the middle of the house, feeling oddly small within the confines of this place. Being back home was admittedly a bit of a relief to her, but a point seemed to be lacking for the entirety of this experience. Why would the Monolith spit her out here? Here, of all places? Did Aleph not promise that he would provide her a way to bring her to him? Why go through this whole song and dance—clearly it was not meant to torment her.
Then, if not to wound, what was it all for?
Feeling profoundly stupid that she had not done such a thing earlier, Roahn activated her omni-tool and tried to check the time. For some reason, it was blinking 00:00 at her. All right, that was strange. She then opened her map and attempted to place her location within the local system, but all her display was giving her was "NO SIGNAL AVAILABLE."
Almost laboriously, she closed her tool. She paced back and forth in the family room, making a moat in the carpet as she pondered. Heart aflutter, she then sank back down upon the couch, hands tightly clasped in front of her as she hunched forward, staring out into nothing. Only thinking of reasons. The whys and hows forming just tangles of mush in her brain, the fog of chaos preventing her from seeing the thread of logic hidden within.
The portal that she had walked into. Who was to say that it led to a zone of purely Euclidean space? The fact that the tiny details did not add up—the strobing of the sun, her tools not syncing to the net, the odd emptiness of the house, not to mention her initial encounter in that blazing forest—all pointed to the fact that she was in an area not governed by the laws of relativity and spacetime. The dimensionality of this place had been skewed, very much resembling her own, but the subtle differences all added up to a resounding whole. Whether she had been placed in a Lebesgue covering, or a Hausdorff dimension, or anything not adhering to the standard laws of physics was beyond her realm of comprehension right at this moment.
What mattered was finding a way out of here. If such a thing was possible.
Sagan had said the portal had been comprised of a tachyonic field and that imaginary particles of mass. Korridon had then made the connection that the field was similar to what was contained in the core of a mass relay. Roahn tried to work the details out in her head. She knew that relay speeds were a subset of what constituted the admittedly broad standard of FTL. Matter underwent strange properties while in FTL, due to the still-unknown consequences of breaking the laws of physics to transport objects from one place to another faster than the most naturally occurring phenomenon in the universe. It had been theorized that objects in FTL were placed within a tunnel of sorts that bridged separate dimensions, providing a means for an object to exist in theoretically more than one place at a time.
If that was true, Roahn realized, then she was in one of those tunnels right at this moment. A harbor where time was infinitely accelerated and dilated at the same time. And her childhood home served as one of those harbors.
So, this was the true power that the Monolith was able to create. Realities in which memories possessed weights like file sizes, taking on quantum effects.
To even imagine it all…
Roahn shook her head in wonderment. If what she theorized was true, then that meant that infinite Monoliths could exist via the realities that FTL made possible. Could Aleph access them all?
Infinite Monoliths… infinite superweapons.
Infinite Roahns—
Infinite Alephs—
"It doesn't make sense!" she groused to herself, now holding her head in her hands.
Why? Why would Aleph show her all this? Was it to make her revel in his assured victory across multiple timelines? Was he trying to hint that there were so many different ways in which he could defeat her?
But, despite all that, nothing explained why she was back in her house right now.
A slight noise, almost as delicate as a whisper, flitted into her helmet. Coming from elsewhere in the house. Instantly, Roahn raised her head and then stood up, a hand brushing the grip of her pistol. She did not call out again, rather keeping herself stealthy quiet to avoid anyone pinpointing her location. She rolled her boots upon the carpeted ground, slowly maneuvering through the spare family room. She flicked her eyes over every corner of the place, staring as intently and long as she would into the dying embers of a fire, musing over grave portents.
A locus of bass thrummed in her ears. A warning. Roahn's breath slithered to a crawl. A sensation of pale cold overtook her, driving through her body to the bones within. Something was in this room.
Behind her.
In a fluid motion, she turned, pistol half out of her holster already.
But the weapon never made it fully out.
Across from her, standing half-shadowed in the hallway entrance, a diminutive figure stood where a slash of novalight parted them with ease. In that moment, the interior of the house seemed to come alight with sawing flames, a core of deep white surging in their depths. The individual moved forward, towards the frozen Roahn. Now the light fully fell upon them, illuminating another quarian. A girl. A child. An unremarkable enviro-suit. A visor the color of a hollowed-out iceberg. A sehni of an even deeper cerulean, swirled with the cascading fractals of a galaxy in disarray.
"It… can't be," Roahn whispered, or perhaps thought it loudly within her head, as she automatically slid her pistol back into her holster, her entire body numbing all in that one moment. Her heart was pounding in her chest and her extremities went cold. She took a step forward, legs trembling. Then another. And then, she knelt down and reached out to the girl, her hand outstretched for the young quarian to take. She was almost as tall as the child was when she was taking a knee.
The girl tiptoed forward shyly, her shoulders forward and hands bunched together in front of her. But she eventually raised an uneasy hand and gently reached forward to take the warrior's offered limb, which dwarfed her own.
As the sky began to unravel just outside the window in terrifying rivulets of white energy, Roahn looked upon the young girl—herself—and took a gigantic breath, feeling a deep tremolo from her heart in the moment. The girl—no, the younger Roahn—raised her head, a twinge of bravery surging through her. They locked eyes, pale through their visors as predawn snow.
No words were exchanged between them. Nor would they ever.
The child's stare was so pure it shook Roahn to her very core. Immediately, she could recall snippets of her upbringing, to times where she had lived as innocuously as one could. She had been swaddled with a raw naiveté back then, only for it all to be ripped away in the span of a few years, the first deep cut occurring when her mother passed away. It scared her with how easily she could relive those moments of being coddled with an intense love, only to be left in an abrupt cold when her father was grieving after her mother's death. To be warm and safe one day, and left directionless and alone in the next.
She had dreams back then. Never in her life had she given a second's thought of being a soldier. She had wanted to be something useful. An architect, perhaps. To build the second generation of Rannoch and safeguard her world's future. And yet, her path took her elsewhere. How would this child in front of her feel if she knew her true future? Would she weep for the fateful turn she had taken? Or would she move forward to face her destiny with a resigned mindset?
For that was to be this child's destiny, if it was already set in stone.
Roahn's lips moved, but only thin breath wafted between them. She wanted to assure this child, to comfort her, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. But she couldn't. It was not the truth. The prosthesis she wore attested to that. For how could she say such things to a little girl, to tell her how monumental her hardships were going to become? How could she possibly describe the things she had seen, the fear she had felt, the people she had met, to one so young?
Though, as they continued to exist in that very room, while the world fell apart outside, Roahn was only compelled to smile. For this girl before her, despite the trials on the road ahead, Roahn knew she would make it out just fine. She would have to grow up a little early, yes, but she would get to see so many strange and wonderful places, meet such inspiring people she could have never imagined, become a hero, fall in love. For those hardships, as terrible as they might be, would only serve to shape Roahn into the woman she was today. She would have preferred to have her life go in so many other directions, but for the one that was selected for her, she figured she had made the best of it.
Ignoring the sight of the splitting sky, of the meteors streaking through to carve white contrails through the spotless abyss, of the ribbons of infinite energy wisping and rolling to the guidance of some unknown painter, Roahn reached out and pulled the child into an embrace. Her eyes closed, breaking her focused gaze. Perhaps, if she could provide this girl a solitary word of encouragement, everything would have been—
Her hands found her own arms. In a panic, Roahn's eyes snapped open. She looked down at herself, feeling dazed, dumb. There was nothing in her arms—she had awkwardly entwined herself with her own hands.
Alone again, Roahn sagged to the floor. The sky beyond was raining with some cosmic hail, the edges of the horizon purpling and growing dark. She could not care less, even as Rannoch was at the cusp of being torn apart, she had no inclination of escaping the coming wave. She hardly knew what she wanted anymore. Nor did she know what was expected of her.
All these details. The vivid clarity of it all. What monstrous hell had Aleph thrown her into? Was she destined to bear witness to her fragmented life, to be subject to her own personal demons over and over again?
Her demons…
Roahn released her arms and held up her hands to face-height, a thought coming to her. She looked at her limbs with a newborn gaze, a parasitic thought taking root in her brain stem.
"Is it that simple?" she murmured out loud. What was it Aleph had said to her before? "The programmatic backdoor to a mind."
On shaking feet, she stood back up. What if… none of this had been forged by Aleph's hand? The accuracy of her memories, down to even the minutia of her recollections, had hardly strayed from what she knew to be her reality. Could Aleph really have reconstructed this fantasy based on his link with her after all this time? Quite possible, but there was a feeling that Roahn had that told her otherwise. That no other mind could possibly parse out such detail, compile and render it, and provide it to her in such a profound facsimile.
The answer was right there, as plain as she could see.
Aleph was not the one using the Monolith this time.
It was her.
"An extension of one's will, huh?" she asked out loud, staring at her own hands as though as she could unleash devastation with nothing but a bare wave. "Then let that will be mine."
Stars drifted across the sky, scattering like grains of sand. Roahn stood in the middle of the room, the centerpoint of the house, clenched her fists, and closed her eyes just as the shrubbed mountaintops at the edge of the continent began to burst into flame, the supernova wave onrushing. The oceans outside steamed and boiled and the atmosphere shimmered as it was warped away.
She felt no different, not in the sense that she had been imbibed with some indescribable power that had integrated itself down to the very atoms that made up her form. Coming through the portal had changed her somehow, granted her this connection. Had Aleph planned for this? Or had he been blind to this outcome for the first time in his life? Nevertheless, Roahn knew what was real and what was not. There was only one possible outcome for her now. One way forward.
To him.
"I am the splinter in your mind," she seethed. "The demon of your attention. Show yourself. I watched your armies burn, your legions scatter. You have nothing left. So, show yourself. Come through the fire to meet me. Or will I have to drag you down myself? There is one thing remaining for you to conquer. And it'll always be coming for you. Show yourself."
Her thoughts turned inward, scrambling down a labyrinth of tunnels to grope for a connection of any sort. All her willpower sought to bring Aleph to the forefront of her mind, to envision his body whole before her, not in shattered and ragged pieces this time. Fire was now raining down outside in golden raindrops—pieces of the atmosphere melting. Within her head, the terrible titan, glinting with shades of alabaster, kept a silent presence, offering only oblique nods, as if he knew her intent.
So many memories began pouring forth, to the point where Roahn was nearly overwhelmed.
Peeking around the side of the hospital door to find her father kneeling by her mother's bedside, his head burrowed into the sheets, while a series of medical displays flashed with multiple alarms. He was making a harrowing sound she had never heard from him before and it soon came to her that he was crying—
Standing within the dark corridor, the shadows housing her in a tight nook, as she watched her fellow recruit tiptoe from Skye's room, his hair tousled and shirt rumpled. Keeping herself there, waiting for Skye to emerge, and when she finally did, beholding the startled and immediately remorseful expression on the woman's face upon realizing that everything had been witnessed—
Sitting upon the beach, the weight of her father seemingly draining as she held her within her lap. Watching his blood-filled eyes slowly lose their focus, while her own constitution buckled and crumpled as she felt his last breath escape from his body—
The searing pain in her shoulder as the metallic rebar dripped with her own flesh and blood, nailing her to the ground, dust and light swirling about her while the Haxan stood several stories up, pistol in hand, a tannic laugh worming from their vocabulator upon seeing the quarian before them suffer—
"No," she said out loud, her voice soft but tough as a blackened diamond from the heart of a comet.
Everything in her head ripped apart, all the bad memories, her phantoms. Everything. There was now only a blank canvas. A chance to start afresh. Roahn in her most pure form.
With everything burning around her, the darkness within her held at bay, everything else came flooding in to fill the void.
Leaning against her mother as they sat upon the bench underneath the onosho tree, Tali's arm about her shoulders, watching the white caps of the waves swirl upon the ocean as the sky bled from orange to purple in a magnificent spectrum, the entirety of the galaxy opened before her—
Her father shouting with joy and taking her in a massive embrace to twirl her about the room, her university acceptance letter bunched in her fist as she also squealed with glee, throwing her arms about Shepard, synched in the revelry of the moment—
The gentle touch of Korridon's fingers upon her cheek, an unassuming look glowing in his eyes as they lay on their sides, bedsheets partially covering them, letting only the shared silence speak volumes, her own fingers lovingly resting upon his mandible in turn—
A muted crack ripped through the room, roots of glowing white fissures having shattered all of spacetime around Roahn. Her entire body screamed out in pain, but only for a moment. Walls of yellow-white fire stormed towards the house, just outside the windows, but before the rampaging force could disintegrate the structure and the quarian inside, the rivulets that had gouged through dimensionality and the cosmos pulsated all at once and the house disintegrated in the next moment—the walls and roof flew away and the floor dropped from Roahn's feet, but she was not falling. Only a blank white expanse was on the other side, like the house had been part of some elaborate set and only now was she getting a peek behind the curtain. Even the surrounding backdrop of Rannoch in flames had been washed away when the house had dissolved, sending her far away from the danger, removing her presence from the equation.
Streams of energy whipped around her body, pulling at her limbs, but if anything, Roahn only felt more powerful. A gasp was ripped from her throat, but her lungs immediately flooded with clean air, almost alpine and pure. It felt like she had just been given the breath of life.
Tiny shimmers of unspent energy sparkled around Roahn. The sensation of static electricity nipping at her skin, there was a terrific throb and suddenly all her aches vanished. She was left alone in this plain of white—this endless room or abyss that stretched on beyond comprehension.
She was not left in the dark for very long—or in this case, the light. Just as Roahn began to turn around in confusion, she could see partial details start to seep in. Light gray shadows, making basic yet undiscernible shapes, almost like she was in a land of ghosts. But very quickly, not unlike the phenomena of definition impacting within her retinas after being housed in darkness for so long, the myopia faded and the room became smaller for her.
A whole lot smaller.
The infinite stretch of white was soon replaced by a cold and industrial looking room. Circular in nature, with lobed domes capping the ceiling and floor—a suspended platform hovered in the middle of the room, four walkways radiating from the round center like the four points on a compass. Guardrails rose up along the walkways and edges of the platform—Roahn walked over to the edge, boots clanking upon the metal floor, grasped the railing, and looked down.
The pit before her was endless in an entirely different manner than she was expecting. She was looking through a rounded window that opened up into space, making her feel like she could simply step off the platform and tumble off into the void forever. Instinctively, she glanced upward to find another transparent hemisphere of the same size, exposing her to the same glow of the stars above. In this place, she was sandwiched between the cosmos, giving her an unbridled feeling of dread that she was this insignificant speck in the grand scheme of all things. Leaning back over the railing, Roahn stared down as she now focused upon the light source that warped into this place—this ship—from below, bathing her face with a marbled warmth.
The world that neatly filled her view was not her own. Nor was it Earth. Or Tuchanka. Or Rema. She was hundreds of thousands of miles away from the tender planet, which she could see was ribboned with greens and blues. A life-giving world, drenched with the white of clouds.
Eden Prime, Roahn realized. Somehow, the Monolith had finally spat her back out. To here. Where it all began.
Uneasily, Roahn moved away from the side, darkness churning in her gut. She moved to the center of the platform and she was only now noticing that there was a peculiar object that sat in the middle of the room. She had just completely failed to notice it until now.
At first glance, Roahn thought she was looking at another Monolith, as it was shaped identically to that cursed device, but this one was different. Instead of looking at a purely sable block of the darkest metal, the obelisk was more translucent at its topmost portion. But the closer she looked to the ground, the object slowly became more and more tangible until it seemed nearly solid at its base. Rows of vertical lines reminiscent of circuits on a board, pulsating with a dark crimson color, seethed like iron-hot arteries within the pillar, all racing towards the center, where the fuzzy outline of a coral mass rippled and throbbed. It reminded Roahn of a beating heart. Or a stirring fetus.
The power that ebbed from this thing ached within Roahn's head as she approached. Far stronger than what she had experienced with the first Monolith. She steeled herself with a groan and continued pressing forward, into the invisible field that the device exuded, sending a series of simultaneous scraping sensations to rake upon the bones of her jaw and deep into the roots of her teeth. Her left arm was smarting again—a fresh slew of phantom pain creating tender aches that outlined the shape of her missing limb perfectly.
And… just behind the device, only appearing as a mere framework through the crystalline surface, a shadow grayed into view, perhaps having been there the entire time. Their hands were loose at their sides, the thick flaps of their cloak blanketing their contours. Their helmet glistening like a newly-carved gemstone. Roahn noticed the shadow and lifted her head defiantly, her head feeling light and clear, as if it was made of glass.
Slowly, Roahn stepped around the proto-Monolith, beholding herself to the tenebrious figure. She walked slowly, as if surrounded by a palace of ice, the reverberations echoing in cold and liquid distortions. She did not reach for a weapon, only a chilling calm enveloping her, combating the raw and raging volcano that threatened to erupt within her.
What was past was past. What was to be would be.
All that existed, all that mattered, was the here and now.
Nothing stood between Roahn and Aleph anymore. No obstacle could forestall their conflict. Roahn's body no longer trembled as she just stared at the armored demon. They were both perfect. Two instruments of death. Nameless in their own right.
Eden Prime glowing below their feet, the proto-Monolith surging with a fluid luminosity next to them, the combatants squared off against each other, each brimming with an untold eagerness and a sage prescience that extended beyond their individual spheres. They knew what all this meant. Why they were here. What the stakes were.
No more exhortations. No more vague threats.
This would be a fight to the death.
A/N: A bit late to the N7 Day party, but sometimes things just don't line up. Oh well. But I think it goes without saying that what this entire story has been leading up to will finally happen in the next chapter. Had to go through 400k+ words just to get here, but now we're finally on that precipice. Hard to believe that we're nearly through.
Don't get too relaxed, though. Roahn's journey has not ended yet!
Playlist:
Ascension Theme (Reprise) - Full Chapter
"Tuesday (Voiceless)"
Max Richter
Ad Astra (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Tower Assault (insert)
"Exosuit"
Clinton Shorter
District 9 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)