It wasn't surprising that Turians thought that they were surrounded by spirits, even if all that was nonsense. Humans invented that kind of thing because it was easier to believe your sky-daddy loved you than grit your teeth and slog your way through the muck.
Turians, though? Shepard could forgive them.
Palaven's weak magnetic field might have made life brutal whenever Shepard wanted to take a stroll, having to inject a shot of something-too-complicated-for-her-to-say right into her throat before stepping out into a minor solar radiation storm and slip on the radiation gear, but that also meant that the world sported some, suffice to say, alien natural wonders.
Heck, she almost believed in spirits. It was just instinct, conjuring forth explanations for something too beautiful and horrible for the species' ancient ancestors to understand in their primal infancy. They lived in a spirit-haunted world, but unlike the boreal forests peopled by ghasts and witches invoking the dead in midnight black sabbaths, the Turian wilderness teemed with the vibrant and the breathtaking.
They didn't even have to leave the city, since power conservation went into effect at the Palaven equivalent of around eight, all the flickering lights of windows winking out, replaced, in only a few instances, with the soft glow of fires or personal datapads. As the lights dimmed and were snuffed out, the laborers who weren't reveling in the bars by candle and firelight, or in the scathing glow of their omni-tools, began pouring out of their homes, just to sit in the dirt on balconies and stoops, no longer cloistered up like, well, cuttlebones accidentally packed into sardine cans, marinating in their own oily sweat.
Every evening on Palaven, the show started early.
Reds always seemed to appear first; Shepard never bothered to ask why. Maybe she just noticed them, saw the red scarring that bloomed in her cheek and throat, fissures opened up and gleaming, or the puckered pink splash of raw flesh on Garrus' jaw, or the thrumming column of radiance that stabbed and shot and burned through her dreams.
This, though? This was almost enough to get her to like red.
Great undulating bands of crimson, ethereal such that the assembled host could see the stars like flecks of gold and white scattering across each fat strip of color, misted across the sky - ten times larger than the auroras on Earth. Curtains of blues and greens in shades that humans couldn't think to name marched in succession, following an emotive logic as the solar radiation, deadly as it was, washed the world in prismatic fire. At times, the strips of colour swelled and intensified to the point that the entire silvery-barren surface of Palaven, even the remnants of its husk city, teeming with Turians like ants on a corpse, looked like it was ablaze. Shepard slid down next to him - her alien. Garrus' talon closed around her bicep and drew her head to his chest.
Bony, but he was warm against the chill night.
Every living thing in this world was a sheet of hard stanics, a result of evolutionary adaptations to the constant low-level radiation. Even the flowers gleamed like burnished silver, but as the sky pulsed, and the bands grew so rich and deep and inscrutable that they washed out the stars behind them, the entire world was glazed in eternally shifting metallic colors. Some nights, at the height of the show, they were enough to blot out the moonshine, casting shadows and shades alike that dappled the ground, but this evening, at least, they were passable.
In the aurora, no longer bombarded by the harsher daylight, the quicksilver flowers bloomed, metabolic processes accelerating.
Still they bloomed amid the ashes, in the remains of the city, through cracks in the ferocrete and broken streets.
"Beautiful." Not something that she'd usually say, getting all misty-eyed, but the whisper came as she craned her neck back, hair sliding and catching against his casual tunic until he stilled her by setting his chin to the crown of her head. Quivers of his mandibles, a slow rhythm like a heartbeat that Shepard always associated with calm, mussed her red hair.
"Yeah," he agreed, his tone breathless, filled with a religious awe, and she didn't have to be able to see his face to know that he wasn't looking to the aurora.
"You're such a sap."
He shrugged with a certain cat-like grace, subharmonics droning warm and deep inside his throat. "You love it."
She did.
And they stayed up for hours, watching the chromatic lights.