Eve followed Wrex back into her tent, plopped down and gathered up her furs to wrap around herself. The terror of seeing her name made her whole body shiver and shake while a cold chill to run down her spine.
"That wasn't the reaction I expected." Wrex said as he sat down opposite her. "I take it was a mixed bag?"
"It was more convincing than anything you could have ever told me. The kind of proof only the Gods could have provided. How did you find it?" Eve said.
"When I woke up, there were two, uh, beings sitting on either side of me. A blood red one with two black horns and the other looked like a bloated rotten corpse, smelled like it too, one eye and horn. The red one did most of the talking and told me they represented the powers that brought me here. It handed me the axes, pointed me in a direction and said 'I should walk that way and I would know when I had arrived at my destination'. The rotten one gave me the scroll and told me it would help 'when the time is right'. Then they just stood up and walked away, they faded into nothing in five steps." Wrex said and saw Eve's eye twitch in annoyance.
"Seriously? I get dumped naked with nothing but these furs and a sword. Tali gets dumped with her suit and omnitool. But you get your own clothes, weapons, your omnitool, a welcome and a task." She threw her hands in the air, dropping her furs. "How is that fair?"
"Beats me." Wrex says with a shrug. "Now do want to hear about home or not?"
Eve grumbled for a bit then waved her hand at him to continue, before rewrapped herself.
"I'll keep to the highlights, a lot of stuff happened. So after the crucible fired every reaper touched by the blast wave just shut down, the husks disintegrated, and anyone indoctrinated went into seizure and died. But it also effected the relays, the whole network was wiped out. If it wasn't for the alliance handing out so many q-comms before the war no one wouldn't have found out the battle was won for months, maybe years. The picket force managed to track the dispersal pattern for the Sol relay and it took a little over two weeks to put it back together, while the Geth fleet headed to Arcturus to rebuild that one. That became the game, the Geth would head to a system at an FTL speed that would have liquefied an organic and rebuild the relay, then the fleets would move in re-secure and provide assistance to any nearby systems. Food was never really became an issue, with everyone onboard the citadel dead that left a lot of food and water for the fleets and any planet in need."
"It took about eight months to reconnect most of alliance and council space. Well former council space now. With the citadel now anchored above Earth and no way to move it, the ruling groups of almost every star nation came together and created a new galactic government. A seat for everyone, peace unity, blah blah. You get the idea. Before I died we were still arguing over calling it the confederation or coalition, bloody politicians."
"Anyway after that, I had been back on Tuchanka for about four months, Bakara had given birth to our first brood and was pregnant again when it happened. Remember I said almost every star nation, well the Salarian union were pissed not only were the Krogan cured, but we beat the reapers without them and then formed a new government without their input. Of course a seat was ready for them to sit down at the table with everyone else, but they refused and cut all communications with the new body. But Salarians being Salarians they had to poke at the new thing. Don't forget the treaty of Farixen said they could have three dreadnoughts for every five the Turians had and they didn't commit anything during the battle for Sol."
Wrex got a far away look in his eye.
"The Salarians jumped an armada into Aralakh. Six dreadnoughts with their full fleets and their attendant support ships. We, the Krogan that is, were focused on rebuilding our society, despite the demilitarised status being lifted we hadn't built any warships for defence. So we only had an alliance taskforce of three heavy cruisers and twelve frigates in system verses as close to a five hundred ships as makes no difference. They managed to get a message down to the planet to let us know what was happening before going out to meet them. The Salarians didn't even open communications they just fired when they entered range, the taskforce didn't last three exchanges. Our long range sensors picked up the fleet firing on escape pods too. I managed to get a q-comm connection to the citadel and asked, well actually I yelled at them, for help and sent them all the data we had."
Then Wrex looked Eve dead in the eye. She saw behind his red iris an inferno of rage. Smoke trickled from the corners of his mouth as a fire built at the back of his throat. Wrex carried on.
"I thought they they had some updated version of the Genophage they were going to unleash on us. Instead, they fired their main guns at the planet." Eve felt her eyes widen and her mouth worked soundlessly. "Yeah I know. At the range they were it would take around ten minutes before the first round struck, then one every five or so seconds. The planet would have cracked in half in under an hour. And there was nothing anyone could do, even the ground to space cannons didn't have the range or power to stop them."
Eve watched as his eyes were literally lit on fire and cherry red molten metal started to drip from his mouth, she watched as the liquid metal pooled on the gravely dirt between them. Slowly Wrex brought himself back from the rage, blinked a few times, then took a deep breath and released it along with a plume of smoke.
"Sorry, that's been happening ever since I, heh, convinced the former chieftain of the trolls to do as I said. The look on his face as I burned him alive was priceless." A broad grin split his face, before he got serious again. "Time froze and I sort of stepped out of myself. I'm going to do a lot of paraphrasing here, as lots of insults and demands were made by someone. Two floating orbs appeared and told me they had the power to stop the attack and save Tuchanka, 'at a cost' they said. So I told them that I would be the only one to pay the cost or there would be no deal." He gave a shrug and continued. "I didn't think it was possible for an orb to smirk, but I heard it in the voices. 'Your life here will end and you shall be made anew in our realm. You will bare my mark, fulfil the tasks we demand of you, and slay our foes. That is our price.' " Eve nodded, thinking of her own deal. "I think you can guess the rest. I accepted, my life for Tuchanka was a small price. They dragged me out to near the the incoming shots and they just vanished as we passed them. When we reached the relay they did something because three Turian, two Alliance and an Asari fleet came through, I saw them fire once. Then I woke up here with those two beings."
"They offered me a similar deal to destroy the reapers." Then Eve went on to tell her tale.
"Damn Eve, you really do find a lot of fights. Ha!" Wrex said once she had finished, which took quite a while as he kept interupting. "Really though where was this Eve back home, Tali too, we could have carved out a kingdom for ourselves!"
Eve let a smile grace her lips as she remembered Jack suggesting something similar.
"Any power we had back home wasn't real Wrex, here it's in the air itself just waiting for us to claim it. My tribe live by a simple creed which Tali and I have have adopted. The strong eat the weak. So maybe we'll try making a place for ourselves here, but I want to head south before we try anything like that." Eve said and they both grinned. "Also if I had this kind of power back home I wouldn't have talked you down on Virmire, I would have shot you."
That set them both off laughing and they spent a while reminiscing. Raising a toast to their old home, new home and their patron Gods.
"Now then onto the future. Morg has found another tribe moving into the area, they're about three days out, the morning of the forth we plan to attack. If you're willing to lend a hand and follow orders you're more than welcome to come along, I'll even be generous and cut you in for some of the loot. You interested?"
"Yeah, I'm interested alright." Wrex leaned forward a grin now threatened to unhinge his head. "Think Tali would make me a shotgun?" Gods she had missed the old battlemasters cheerfully destructive nature.
The two days it took Tali to make Morgs armour flew by and the whole tribe was present when it was given to her. Eve was surprised to find it looked like pictures she had seen of Roman infantry armour, long bands of metal plates overlapped one another down Morgs front and back with a nanocarbon reinforced leather skirt that stopped just above her knees. The front of each of her legs was encased in a single metal greave from hoof to knee. It was made in the same way as all the other armour Tali had forged, layered steel and nanocarbon, it had a black base colour with highlights of dull bronze, shot through with a verdigris patina. Morg had declined armour for her arms and a helmet as she believed nothing could reach that high. Eve privately despaired at her sisters short-sightedness but said nothing, Morg would have to learn the hard way and hopefully survive the experience.
Wrex was introduced to Nafar when they took part in the final strategy meeting before they set off. With the inclusion of him and his trolls their fighting force was now nearly a hundred fifty strong. The battle against the new tribe went as they all expected, short and brutal. The chief, shaman and their closest followers died in the opening volley, pandemonium followed, maintained by Eve and her sharpshooters targeting anyone who tried to rally the enemy tribes warriors. Then came the war cries as the combined forces of two tribes lead by Wrex, Nafar and Grita poured out of the woods pinning and crushing their remaining foes against the cliff wall. The anticlimactic battle was over in less than ten minutes. Bodies were devoured, loot gathered and true to her word, Eve split the loot with Wrex's tribe. Who then spent the return trip trying to convince Tali to make him a shotgun, who only agreed after getting a nod from Eve.
The following days passed fairly uneventfully as Tali worked on her armour, after she made a shotgun for Wrex. She had kept her work secreted away inside her own tent, emerging only to eat or gather more materials. But near early evening of the twenty first day Wrex tapped Eve on the shoulder.
"Tali just sent me a comm, says it's ready and for everyone to gather outside her tent." He said, then wandered over to the tents.
She gave a nod and the three doe's she had been playing dice with stood to spread the word. Eve stood a moment later and wandered over to Morg to give her the news. She had no need to tell anyone else once Morg moved to the cleared area near the tents and sat down. Everyone, including the mother doe's and their babes, came over to watch the show.
Then a gauntleted hand moved aside the flap and Tali stepped out. Eve was sure that the tribe was making all kinds of appreciative sounds, but she could only stare in bewilderment at Tali's armour. The only thing it shared with Morgs armour was it's colouring but in reverse, verdigris patina covered almost half the surface and made it look far older than it was. Staring hard Eve thought she could see an underlying pattern to the patina but she couldn't make out what it was. Morgs amour looked like it came from Roman times, Tali looked like she should be pillaging a medieval European town. From the neck to hoof she was wearing plate mail armour that made almost no noise as she shuffled about, a small amount of the old Tali showed through. Each separate piece of armour bore the tri-circle or tri-insect symbols of father Nurgle, and Eve realised that they were in the exact locations of her tattoos. The purple and cream cloth that had been wrapped around her body for as long as Eve had know Tali, had been torn to shreds and now hung around her neck as a tattered scarf.
Yet it was the helmet that held most of her attention. It looked like a fairly standard medieval helmet as far as she could tell, until she came to the faceplate. Over the last six months since the tribe had arrived at the cave, they had killed in excess of a thousand 'people', looted them of their belongings and eaten anything that remained, including their marrow. They had piles of hollow bones throughout the cave which they now used for crafting trinkets, like the dice she had been using earlier. Tali had fused the front half a humans skull directly over her faceplate and it's surface was inlaid in gold, with the written, in dark tongue, version of the tribes benediction to Nurgle. Her glowing silver eyes stared out though the eye sockets, while around the air filter teeth of all shapes and sizes had been attached in a ring like a lampreys maw, and the little white light at it's centre had been changed to green. But it was Tali's horn that truly drew her eye as, for the second time in her life, Eve Shepard saw a part of Tali's body not sealed within her suit. A white horn about fifteen centimetres long pierced through the the joint between metal and bone peeling back both.
Eve knew her face must be a picture of absolute shock, if she had any blood left in her body it would have drained away. Her eyes sought out Wrex for of all the people here he would most understand the momentous occasion this was. His eyes found her at the same time and they both shared a smile.
Tali reached up and slowly slide her helm up her horn until it popped free. She held the helmet in both and looked around at the large crowd around her tent.
"So what do you think?" She asked in a small voice.
Her answer came when everyone began to roar and chant their praises to the nameless tribes Forge-mistress.