S'wrldpw klpxpk, said the Avatar of Legacy, which in Ancient Prothean meant, So you have returned to us.

The sky was burning over Eden Prime. Shepard could smell the twisted metal of prefabs melted by geth rifle fire. The beacon loomed over her, glowing that sinister, alien green.

Do not heed the corruptions, the Avatar warned. Their messages will dare to inscribe themselves over our own.

The green of the beacon softened into the green of Shiala's eyes. Shepard felt the twist of her mouth, her own familiar cynicism as the asari stepped close and urged her to embrace eternity.

We are many, a chorus clamoured in her head. But we will find space here.

Feros bloomed into a teeming megalopolis, Prothean urbanism spreading from pole to pole. The Empire was glorious. But the shadow of its decrepit future gleamed gray in her memory. Sovereign's brothers landed to perch atop Feros' spires and beam death from numberless baleful red gazes.

You cannot resist, said a voice whose four eyes glowed yellow. They are vermin. The flesh is a machine. Pain is an illusion.

The pain was everywhere, and suddenly it was gone. The silence made room for pain of a different flavour. Less pervasive, but more insistent. More real.

Shepard's diaphragm felt bruised, and she had a wicked headache. She hissed in a breath as she raised a hand to her forehead. Realizing that she was touching skin on skin—her armour was gone—she opened her eyes.

The cool white lights of the Normandy's med bay. Not her first time waking up here.

Now that she thought about it, the first time was actually eerily similar.

She sat up abruptly and looked around. No, this was bigger, brighter, better furnished. Definitely the SR-2.

Shepard heaved a sigh of relief, although for what, she wasn't sure. Perhaps just relief that she wasn't completely fucking nuts.

But she was… something. Something was different. Something was suddenly alive inside of her.

Maybe a whole population of somethings.

She listened to the soft chime of medical equipment, felt the thrum of the upgraded Tantalus core. Heard the easy, unburdened laughter of civilians in the mess.

Shepard closed her eyes.

The SSV Normandy was so dark. A sense of space-bound solitude draped over every shadowy corner. Alliance soldiers were so taciturn. A Cerberus vessel could feel like a pub, where people spoke to be heard. In the Alliance, people whispered.

The SSV smelled so new, on that first mission to Eden Prime. There was a faint metallic tang in the air. Shepard inhaled deeply. The SR-2 was also a shiny, unwrapped gift, but its odour was carefully neutral, as if whitewashed. The new drive core, too, was much more restrained despite its size. The old Tantalus core used to practically scream under the cargo hold's deckplates, but the SR-2 hummed to itself like a benevolent, shackled god. It left a subliminal vibration in the foot bones that was so adult in comparison, almost sexual.

The Eden Prime dreams: she could remember them now. In fact, she could hardly believe she had ever forgotten. They were a sequence of tired images flashing across her forebrain, identical every time, a howling, flickering slideshow. The same stretched meat, the same hideously frozen victim, the same bloody star chart. She suddenly remembered how frustrated she felt when Liara first melded with her. This useless starry-eyed bitch made me relive that again, and has nothing to add? The visions had made her feel like a carousel in a haunted carnival. Sometimes some asari would want to hop on for a ride, but mostly she was just on an endless solitary spin.

But she was never really alone. Not since Feros.

We will make space for ourselves, said a cacophony of Prothean voices in the dark recesses of her mind, spreading out like networked green growth.

Sure. Make yourselves at home.

Where had they been all this time? Dormant, a sleeping geophyte buried in her brain matter, while she enjoyed a few months of blessed quiet?

Why had they come back?

What had they taken with them?


I run until the aqua blue of the mind's eye expands into a vast chamber. The geth map resolves in real space. Impassive Cerberus font reads TEST CHAMBER 001. I catch my breath.

In place of the objective marker, there is pale flesh crucified on Cerberus steel. Eyes stretched wide, unblinking, held open by cruel pincers. Limbs screwed in place, spread eagle. It is a boy. His mouth is stuffed with metal pipes. He cannot help but see me. His scream is stifled into a listless groan.

The acrid smell of Cerberus lab workers, no more than three weeks dead. Blunt force impacts to the face, crushed skulls. Geth bodies twitch here and there, their strings cut. No trace of plasma rifle fire. The geth had gone berserk. Their melee targeted the humans' ocular orbits.

The boy groans again.

Memory recites in Legion's voice: "Please destroy the signal's point of origination."

A chaos of tangled cabling. All of the technology is routed through the boy.

It is the boy, or Shepard. If she awakens, I will not be lucky again. I will die at her hand—or reflex will kill her in self-defence.

I have mastered one art. I know little else.

My voice says, "Spread your matter to the sea."

Precision jab to the cervical vertebrae.

A tear glistens on the boy's cheek as he dies.

All around me, geth platforms whir to life. They rise. I stand encircled by the illumination of their lamp light.

They chirp in mechanical fifths. A new sound to me.

"Krios-Assassin. You have successfully disconnected Overlord. Cruiser 2351 wishes to render aid."

Thane bent his head over his cup of brewed herbs. The thrum of the drive core beckoned through the Life Support window.

Shepard could have conceived of a third option. Thane, acting alone, knew only death.

Arguably it was a mercy killing—but no. Thane knew death, but he also knew himself. As a freelancer, he acted without mercy. He brought death to those who deserved it, and occasionally to those who did not. Sometimes, he felt regret. Sometimes, he felt remorse.

But this time, as most of the time, he felt nothing.

The boy took his place in Thane's memorial of victims, yet another in a line of mental statuary that could never erode.


Shepard found it rather off-putting to have a brain full of dead people. Her head was still killing her, but far more annoying was the background buzz of Prothean patter. She called the debriefing with Legion mostly to give herself something else to focus on. How had she gotten anything done on the SSV after Feros, if this was what it was like?

Less than a minute after she called the meeting, Legion's mission report pinged her omnitool. The words swam in her vision as she tried to read it. Literacy suddenly struck her as a woefully primitive way to convey information, although she had no idea where that opinion came from.

When she entered the conference room, Legion was already waiting there, quiet as guard duty. She wanted to touch its arm, to somehow extract experiential data from it, although the instinct made no sense to her.

They got down to the hard questions: how had this happened, and could it happen again? Legion concluded that the boy's specific neurology had been an integral component, and with him dead, Overlord could not be reproduced.

"Do the geth need assistance with repairs?" Shepard asked, hardly believing such words were coming out of her mouth.

"Negative," Legion replied. "Cruiser 2351 have opted to prolong their isolation planetside. They wish to examine further all records of the encounter with Overlord before returning to the consensus. They believe that the consensus will judge that Overlord weaponized organic thought. Harmful data is archived. Cruiser 2351 wish to study the Overlord data before it is quarantined."

Shepard blinked hard, trying to restore some moisture to her eyes. They still felt so dry.

"They sure were in a hurry to end the broadcast while we were down there," she noted.

"Yes," Legion said placidly.

Something was bothering her, although it was hard to focus with the foxfire of Prothean civilization clamouring in the back of her head.

"So the cruiser wants to keep a secret from the consensus? Are we looking at the next heretics?"

"The heretics wished to destroy organic life. Cruiser 2351 wish to learn from it. Geth were not designed to accommodate the phenomenological dimension of organic thought units. This shortfall caused us to suffer. We must… grow."

"How noble," Shepard said, although privately she thought that she could stand to shed a few phenomenological thought units. Each of the billions of visual memories of Feros had been collected through a set of four eyes. They turned her occipital lobe into a pretzel.

"Shepard-Commander. We find it curious that Cruiser 2351 risk a schism with the consensus to preserve controversial data."

There was often a moment, during debriefings, when discussion would turn from mission reports to offloading moral quandaries. It was startling to see it happen with a geth, but Shepard was seasoned enough to offer her usual reply.

"Think you'd make a different call?"

Legion took a moment to respond. At its rate of processing, it must have been quite a difficult question. "No. The data is unique, therefore valuable. Geth do not feel pain, nor do we experience relief. Overlord successfully transmitted both experiences."

Shepard felt her eyebrow quirk in surprise. "Relief?"

"Yes. Not from Test Subject 001. From you. Overlord's connection to Shepard-Commander's Cerberus endoarchitecture was bidirectional." Legion lifted its arm, summoning a hologram to hover above its mechanical forearm.

Oh, wonderful. Surveillance of her geth-drunk blackout bender.

Video footage shimmered into coherence: an overhead view of the first chamber in the geth ship, displayed in the monochromatic spectrum of a thermal readout.

"Kaidan. Thank goodness," said the tiny holoprojected Shepard into Thane's ear.

Shepard set her jaw. Again, Cerberus junk had left her to wake up in the aftermath of behaviours she could not remember.

Shepard did remember the dream, though. She remembered the warm rush from her lungs to her toes when she had perceived Lieutenant Alenko, coming to her with his dopey, trusting smile. She recognized love of some sort, but it was so different from her feelings for Thane. Kaidan was safety. He was comfort. Kaidan the medic, the sentinel, the Alliance officer. When he took off his armour, his scent, his salt and his sweat, communicated pheromones in a language that her body could instinctively understand. Kaidan smelled like Earth.

Her cheeks felt hot. In her mind, Krios stepped into opposition, a rich darkness at the edges of Kaidan's airy Alliance blue. Thane was danger and passion. Thane, the artist. The killer. The lover. The drell assassin. He was irresistible. He was catnip.

She suddenly didn't know which was more real.

"We speculate," Legion was saying, "that the experiences of timestamp 12.41.39–47 express organic terms, 'love,' and 'relief.' We hypothesize that these sensations may be attributed collectively to emotive subheading: 'the sublime.' The sublime has been the subject of dedicated cultural investigation by 86.67% of known sapient organic species. This is an opportunity for the geth to evaluate the prioritization of such phenomena."

Shepard suddenly envisioned geth troopers clustering thoughtfully around a Rothko, and nearly choked.

"You think the consensus would disagree?" she asked, instead.

Legion cocked its head. "We surmise that phenomenological experiences undergo significant data loss when not observed firsthand."

Shepard heard Kaidan's laugh in her mind, his gentle, breathy chuckle. I think it's saying, 'You had to be there.'

An entire civilization had moved into her head that day, but it was the intrusion of Kaidan that made it feel crowded.

She knew which of them—Kaidan or Thane—would win in a fight.

Somehow, that was bizarre consolation.


Shepard followed her due diligence and took the ship through a few random jumps, just to make sure the newly-installed IFF didn't cook them all inside the hull. The next experiment would be live fire.

It was D-Day for Normandy. Time to hit the Omega-4 relay.

They docked at Omega itself first, to give everyone a chance to pick up any last minute supplies, and offload any personal messages or packages, things that they didn't want to take on a suicide mission. The unspoken instruction was for everyone to get off-ship and have a night at Afterlife, pursuing whatever catharsis was to be found there.

For Shepard, catharsis could be found much closer to home.


Thane traced invisible whorls across the skin of Shepard's shoulder as she lay cradled against him on the bed. He imagined himself painting her body with drell markings, under a canopy in the middle of a wide ocean.

It was death that had given her to him. Shepard had emerged from its depths and met him as he stood on the shore. Perhaps that accounted for the unfathomable closeness he felt with her. No other love had ever superseded his captive relationship with death: either as its servant by trade, or as its thrall, leashed by calcifying lungs.

Now, death was calling in its debts.

He kissed the bare space behind the sensuous white cockleshell of Shepard's ear. She rustled beneath him, shifted under his arms, twisted so that they were facing each other. To have her in his arms was to draw down the flames of a sunset.

Perhaps, just as fleeting.

He pressed his lips to her cheek, to her topography of red-glimmering scars. He inhaled deeply of her scent, and the subliminal memory of her musk.

Each perfectly preserved snapshot of their time together comprised an achingly inadequate gallery, the moments counting out their finite sum.

He kissed her temple, felt the pulse of her heart. His lips printed a soft sequence down her jawline, as he gently palmed the back of her head, slid his fingers through the tousled knot of her hair. Her coo was music to him.

When their lips met, as ever, it was electric. She filled his head with her gasp of pleasure.

Only the intervention of the gods could have joined him with Shepard at the zenith of his life, when he knew all that he would ever know, as he stood just on the cusp of debilitation by his illness.

He would not let her die, no matter what horrors befell them on the far side of that demon relay. He would bring all of his skills, all of his years to bear. The entirety of his life, his training, his experience: it would all have a purpose. He knew this to be true because he could behold his life end to end.

His soul summoned the meditative aura of prayer, to send praise to Kalahira—but his body diverged in intent, whispering instead, "Thank you, Shepard."

He felt the shiver overcome her as his breath ghosted across her cheek, felt her erogenous zones warm against him. Her hands traced along the crest of his head. Her lashes fluttered in a slow beat, like the spines of a lionfish.

"For what?" she asked, gazing at him through heavy-lidded eyes.

For giving me reason to live, came the thought, unbidden.

"You've helped me achieve more than I thought possible. We've righted many wrongs. I've spoken to my son."

Her half-hidden smile was sunlight refracting through waves.

"You don't need to thank me," she chided him, obscuring what he sensed was faint embarrassment. "You're coming with me on a suicide mission."

That was the crux of it: a mission with a chance of death. To everyone else, death was the looming threat to avoid.

To Thane, it had been the draw.

He rolled to lay flat on his back, and contemplated the void through Shepard's skylight. She slid her arm across his chest, anchored him at her side.

He should be at peace on the eve of battle. He was not.

He yearned to be at her side beyond the Omega-4 relay, but also beyond that.

He needed to ensure that she lived to see that Kaidan again, so that someone would always be there–

Tears slipped from his eyes to trickle down onto the pillow, and it galled him. He steadied himself by speaking.

"Shepard. I have known I will die for many years. I've tried to leave the galaxy better than I found it. Should the worst come to pass–"

"Stop," she said, propped on her elbows to gaze down at him, her beautiful dark eyes stern with love. "Don't give me a speech."

They held each other at a stalemate for a moment, before she succumbed and dipped her head to meet him in a kiss. She rolled atop him, curling her legs around his hips, reminding him of other moments when they shared this posture. His lust responded, but halfheartedly.

Had his body already forgotten how to be alive?

The thought struck him with a pang, a wrenching blade. Someday the Kepral's would steal away his ability to make love.

If he lived that long.

His roster of death abruptly scrolled open: the dying gazes of every target perfectly recollected, the flawlessly captured moments when they transformed from being to object. Each in sequence, they became dead weight, posed by Thane's hand in his mind. The horror of his life's work whispered to him. Someday soon, he would be the last person in his body count, joining all his marks in a vast midden of inert flesh. Perhaps someone else would be looking into his eyes when the light in them dimmed, and he would become just another note in their archive of mute observations.

He pulled away from Shepard's kisses. They were unbearably, boisterously alive. She whimpered, deprived of him. She studied his face, the searching, analytical quality of her gaze tempered by an intimate sweetness. She traced his markings with the backs of her fingers.

On any contract, he was ever one reflex shy of death, but the unknown Collector homeworld represented an infinite breadth of possible ways for his existence to be winked out.

Thane Krios had killed his first man at the age of twelve; found his wife's body, ravaged in their own home; lived alone with incurable, terminal disease for years. He had nothing but practice confronting mortality.

He'd worked so hard. Meditated, prayed, done good deeds. Atoned for the evils he'd done. Prepared.

But this time when he considered his body's death, a chill settled in his gut.

There was a time when he clung to the thought of seeing Irikah again. The belief had held him together, a half-aware, patchwork man. But now, "across the sea" sounded so empty and conciliatory. On this shore, he strode alongside the passions of a warrior-angel. The thought of being driven apart from her, to sit out an eternity without her, was an agony far greater than the threat of vanishing into a soulless void.

Yet, caught between unbearable loss and existential annihilation, Thane realized that the naked truth—what he wanted above all else, was what everyone wants, and what none may keep forever.

Thane wanted to live.

He was suddenly afraid, and it shamed him.

Shepard made a soft tutting sound close to his ear, her tongue flicking out to moisten the tip of his cheek frill.

"The Collectors are well and truly fucked, aren't they." Her voice was incongruously seductive.

The comment was a blunt edge to the grinding whetstone of his mind. He rumbled a questioning tone.

"You were already the most dangerous man in the galaxy," she said, as if that were an explanation.

"And now?" Thane could not help but feel a glaze of amusement over his fatalistic mood.

"Now you have something to lose," she said, arching a playful brow. Her fingers slid down his torso to pluck at his waistband. "I can't wait to see you ruin them."

It was true. He had not one, but two things to lose: his son, whose grudging but well-wishing reply sat in his personal terminal, and also the bearer of the deft hands which were doing distracting things to the buckle of his pants.

"They will not lay a talon on you, my love," he growled willingly.

"And you're not going anywhere, either," she said, repositioning herself lower on the bed. "Not for a long, long time."

He had a scant moment to consider the solemn certainty of her declaration. Then he was engulfed in the hot, wet cavern of her mouth, and reason was driven from him.