She would not collapse.

They were hiding, shielding each other against the hideous light swallowing them up.

She would not.

Images frozen in time of a people long dead, frozen in their pain.

Would not.

And now that figure silhouetted against one of those burning planets was clear.

It was the ship. It was Saren's ship. He wasn't just working for the Reapers, he'd brought their ship here.

"Commander, you're hurt, let me get Dr. Chakwas." That was Kaidan.

"No." The colonists were the ones that were suffering and the doctor was doing all she could to help them until help arrived. The Thorian had apparently tried to take them all along for the ride when it had died. Bastard thing.

She paused in front of a pile of crates that needed to be opened. She just needed to catch her breath and give her brain a moment to rest from those damned images burned into her brain. She was still reeling, wondering how she could have been so stupid not to match up that half seen form...she'd had a sketch of it for God's sake...to the monstrous ship.

"Shepard." A strong grip took hold of her arm as she tried to pick a crate up. She looked up into Wrex's red eyed glare.

She made a futile effort to pull free. "Don't you start, it got you even worse and you're not crawling off to the med bay."

"You stubborn bitch," Wrex said with perhaps a hint of admiration.

"I'm fine." Okay, the gunshot in her side was burning a bit under the medi-gel and one of the zombie things the Thorian had created had caught the side of her jaw and she had aches everywhere but she'd suffered worse. Akuze...the Thresher Maw's venom burning into her neck and shoulder; just a few thick drops and a couple days alone and it had eaten away at the flesh and started to rot it by the time they'd gotten to her. That had been suffering. This was nothing. Nope.

"Commander." Dr. Chakwas's voice brought her gaze from Wrex and she shook her head. "No. The colonists..."

"There's a ship arriving, Commander."

"ExoGeni? Motherfuckers, I'll..."

"No, it's an Alliance vessel. That Jeong and the asari are going to represent them. The colonists are going to be fine."

"Oh." The world swam suddenly and she fought it. "Fai Dan..."

"I'm sorry, Commander, he didn't make it..."

Shit, shit, shit...guilt clenched her stomach. And they'd come so close to saving all of them. The gas had worked like a charm. But Fai Dan...

"Commander?"

She'd thought they had gotten them all. She'd set her gas grenade launcher aside for just one minute. Just a minute. Just long enough it was out of reach when the colony leader had lurched into view, a gun in his hand, his face twisted with agony as he fought the Thorian's will.

"Commander."

She hadn't been able to reach the launcher before he'd taken matters into his own hands. Had put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger rather than submit.

"Someone has to...make sure they know what he did. Fai Dan."

"That I can promise you, Commander," a quiet voice said. Shiala.

The world tilted and her mind was suddenly bombarded with images again.

"Hold her up! Get her onto the Normandy."

She wasn't going to collapse, no...she thought that even as her world became fire edged darkness.

"Oh, hell..." Everything faded away.

The scent had hit her first. Like a swamp, like black mud made up of dead things, like stagnant water and rotting vegetation. But with something else. Something old and alien she had no word to properly describe.

That, more than anything, even more than the grip it had on the colonists, even more than the human shaped creatures with their claws and empty eyes that it had sent against them, had shown her she hadn't given the Thorian the consideration she should have. She'd been so angry at what it had done to the colonists she'd allowed herself to underestimate it.

"Commander? Can you hear me?"

Hazy voices broke through the fog of memory and faded in and out.

"Damn, this is worse than when she got hit with the beacon."

The central shaft of the ancient Prothean tower had been transformed to suit the creature. Long thick stems branched off from it. Flexing tentacles of plant matter dangled everywhere around swollen nodes of strange material that dotted the walls like boils ready to be lanced.

And even as she'd thought it, there it was. Hanging beneath the colony in all its bloated glory. The huge, sick, pulsing heart of Feros.

"What the hell is that?" Wrex said from behind her.

"That should really be our motto..." she said, numb.

"I think she might be suffering from the beginning of the spores' infection, she didn't have a helmet when they went down to kill it. It couldn't have gotten to her quick enough for control but..."

"Combine that with the Cipher getting shoved into her mind..."

"I want anyone who isn't a med tech or a patient out of here now."

How much intelligence did a creature need in order to have an ego?

The Old Growth had plenty of that. And yet it had no voice of its own to speak it. It couldn't even make a voice through the creepers it created. It had to use an asari...the clone of one though she hadn't realized that at the time...to speak. To call them meat. To demand awe. To speak of some kind of trade with Saren.

Unsurprisingly, Saren had tried to kill it once the deal was through, which made it less than willing to cut the same deal with them. It had no intention of letting them go.

The fact it had paused to speak to them in the first place instead of killing them outright made her wonder exactly how much of its personality...if it could be called that...had been absorbed from the 'meat' it showed so much disdain of.

"This isn't like when she got hit with the beacon. This brainwave activity isn't being caused by dreaming. I don't know what the hell it is."

"She's going into spasms again!"

"We're going to have to restrain her."

It threw everything it had at them, waves and waves of creepers, asari clones, thin vines from deep in the cracks in the foundations trying to trip and sting them.

One caught her and sent her stumbling so she was bowled over by a stunning attack by one of the asari. She heard Tali yell. Saw Wrex go down under a writhing pile of the creepers while those damned tendrils tried to pull his legs out from under him. He threw them off with a roar, scattering them everywhere, hefting his gun and firing on the Thorian's bulk.

She'd seen Wrex's gun take out two legs of those huge geth armatures with one shot and blow another krogan into bloody chunks with a few well placed ones. It didn't even scratch the surface of the Thorian.

It was the geth and Garrus that saved them. If it weren't for the fact they'd been running around trying to dislodge the damned geth ship, she might not have taken note of those thick stems branching out from the Thorian.

Anchor points...

The chaos of the battle narrowed down to a search and destroy mission. Wrex's gun worked fine against those stems holding it to the walls but it was Garrus who figured out the weak points and focused on them, his rifle blasting away at them with deadly accuracy.

With every anchor point that fell, she felt a buzzing in the back of her head that grew worse and worse. The Thorian giving voice to its panic as it sank toward oblivion, unable to hold its own weight up...

"No way! Doc, you can't allow her!"

"If she knows the Prothean's language now, I can help her reconcile what she now knows with the vision. It might help her!"

"It was that kind of asari mumbo jumbo that did it to her in the first place! I can't believe she let that bitch live!"

"She's suffered just as much as Shepard. Shiala knew no one would trust her to meld with Shepard again, that's why she told me what she knew and what the Cipher was so I could!"

Her name was Shiala and she'd been one of the Matriarch's followers. Shepard thought maybe Liara would be relieved to know her mother had joined Saren with the intent of guiding him off his path. Instead she'd been dragged onto it. Persuasive bastard, Saren. With a little help from his damned Reaper ship. Sovereign. She had a name for it now. Whatever technology the Reapers had, it filled that ship, dominating the minds of his followers.

She could deal with death. She could even deal with destruction. They were horrors in and of themselves but she'd seen both before. But what Shiala was talking about...not just control like the Thorian but utter dominance, the systematic rape of a person's mind and soul, filled her with a horror it would take her more than a few minutes to steel herself against.

It turned the Reapers from a threat to an utter perversion.

Not just the loss of your life, the loss of yourself. It turned a good woman onto an evil path against her will. Allowed a strong willed asari commando to calmly allow herself to be fed to a monster, sacrificed so she could use her abilities to gain and pass on the ancient knowledge it possessed from consuming and studying the Protheans: the Cipher.

Lucky for them, it obviously hadn't occurred to Saren that Shiala still possessed that knowledge. She was supposed to die with the Thorian when he sent the geth to attack them. Instead she was free of both the Thorian and Saren, and free to pass that knowledge on to Shepard.

"Brace yourself, Commander. Keep in mind this is the entire language, history, and society of a race all at once, it's not exactly pleasant." Her eyes went dark. "Embrace..."

"...eternity."

Liara didn't need to touch Shepard to make the connection but she did this time, more to give herself a focus than anything. Her fingertips rested lightly on Shepard's temples. Connecting with someone when they were unconscious had wildly varying results, it could be much easier or much harder. Luckily for them both, she didn't have to push hard.

Again she brushed along the commander's memories. Those brief images of wild violence that repulsed her for the most part...and yet she found herself intrigued by the woman that possessed that violence, which left her frightened.

She focused and winced as she met that chaotic jumble of images and thoughts that had been forced into the commander's mind twice over, using her own knowledge and mental discipline, honed over several centuries, to soothe and carefully help put those images in order.

It was a different kind of violence. She shuddered, watching Protheans die by the thousands. This time she could make out the faintest of noise entwined with the images.

"Systems isolated..."

"No response to surrender messages..."

"Make it go dark..."

"Warn them, warn them all..."

Shepard now understood the Protheans in a way no one else besides Saren did and it was fascinating to see things filtered through her mind. It took everything she had not to press, to simply help Shepard's mind sort the message out. She so wanted to see more. The images were still random but they were clear. They could get the gist of the warning the Protheans were trying to pass on. And realize what terrifying plague Saren was trying to unleash on the galaxy. To help the Reapers. To start...

...start...

"...start the cycle," Shepard murmured, her eyes flickering open.

Liara nodded silently.

Shepard sank back onto the cot, her eyes closing again. Liara frowned, alarmed. "Shepard?"

"It's all right." Dr. Chakwas leaned over the cot on the other side and breathed out a soft sigh of relief. "Her brain-waves are stable. She's just sleeping now."

The first thing Shepard noticed when she woke up was she felt more mentally clear than she had been since the beacon. The fuzziness that usually accompanied her when she woke was gone. The images were there but she could file them away in the back of her mind now. Nice. She probably had Liara to thank for that one, and she would. If she could sleep without nightmares now, she'd fucking build her a monument.

The med bay was dark and quiet. It must have been late, she didn't even see Dr. Chakwas around. She sat up in bed with a grunt, wincing a bit as she pulled her bandaged side. A shuffling sound to her right made her freeze and squint through the dim light of the room.

Wrex was sitting in a chair next to another cot. The scratches and bites that had managed to pierce the softer parts of his exposed skin when that wave of creepers had fallen on him were already healing, that amazing krogan metabolism of his patching him up better than the doctor ever could.

"Wrex."

"Shepard. Looks like the asari saved you from going crazy." He paused for a moment. "Crazier."

"I'm not crazy," Shepard muttered in token protest.

Wrex just looked at her.

"Not that crazy," she amended petulantly.

"Sometimes crazy's the best way to go," Wrex said, his tone matter-of-fact.

Shepard sighed and rubbed a hand through her hair, then blinked in realization and looked at the krogan. "What are you doing here, Wrex? I've never seen you in here for more than five minutes before." Her voice sharpened with concern.

Wrex flexed one of his big hands. "Damndest thing, something felt off and the Doc finally figured out I got burned under the skin. Either the geth or one of those damned asari freaks did it probably."

"Glad you let her take care of you, then, you took some serious punishment out there."

Wrex just grunted dismissively. "It was worth it. We're alive, they're dead."

The Tao of Wrex. Shepard chuckled and glanced around at the clock. She winced when she saw how long she'd been out. She did some quick math with the time difference and judged it too late to make a report to the Council. Actually...making a report directly to them this time was probably her best option. Anyway, there were very few places better than the Citadel to restock and she figured everyone had earned a break. "Damn. I wish we'd found out more about the Cipher."

"You didn't see anything in that vision of yours?"

"No. I understand a bit more about the things backing Saren up but nothing more than that."

"We should have wounded that idiot at the VI and questioned him."

It took Shepard a moment to remember who he was talking about. "Oh, yea, the krogan. No...I don't think that would have done much good. You guys are hard to interrogate. And I mean that as the highest of compliments."

"I wouldn't have minded taking the time to try. Idiot."

"He was probably indoctrinated. You heard Shiala, anyone who spends time around that damned ship of Saren's loses their mind."

"He couldn't have gotten indoctrinated if he hadn't joined up with Saren in the first place. At least I had the sense to get out when I saw him."

Shepard had no reply for that one. Wrex had offered up that particular story when she'd asked him why he hated Saren so much he'd be willing to join up with a complete stranger. He'd been on a job for the turian but got a bad feeling and left, which proved right on the money since every other merc that had been working for him had ended up dead.

"I doubt he even had to offer the krogan working for him all that much. The promise of a war against the rest of the galaxy would have been enough for them. It's killing us faster than the genophage ever could." Wrex fell silent for a few moments, probably thinking about genetic infection killing off his people. When the krogan had rebelled against the galaxy, their amazing breeding capabilities had been one of the worst threats. The salarians had created the genophage to counter it, and the turians had used it. Now their birth rate was so low, it was getting hard for the krogan to keep their numbers up. "Have you ever seen the Krogan Monument, Shepard?"

She looked over at him again, surprised by the question. "Yes, a couple of times."

"That represents what the krogan used to be: a proud, fierce nation. Now we're just brutes for hire to the highest bidder. We've forgotten our roots. Instead of trying to overcome the genophage, we go out looking for a fight. The fact so many krogan joined up with Saren is just a testament to how we're killing ourselves off. Not a one cares enough to even try."

Wondering where this had come from, Shepard watched him silently, not wanting to break the spell. Such candidness from Wrex was a rare thing. She'd made attempts to get to know him, mostly because she was nosy and interested, but he usually rebuffed questions with a sarcastic remark or a suggestion to 'talk to the quarian if you want stories'. Most of what she knew about Wrex had come in increments. "You care," she finally said.

He shrugged. "I gave up on the krogan long ago. Nice of you not to point out I'm right out there with the rest of them working for the highest bidder," he said sarcastically.

"I was never going to make a crack about that, Wrex. If I sat here and tried to lecture you from the moral high ground, the sheer hypocrisy of it would kill us both," she said with complete honesty.

Wrex let out a surprised bark of laughter. "You're all right, Shepard. Crazy and naive as hell, but all right."

She smirked. Coming from Wrex that was a high compliment indeed. She hesitated and then dared to ask, very curious: "Have you ever considered going back to Tuchanka? I bet if anyone could rally the krogan to get beyond the genophage, it's you."

Wrex shook his head. "A few times, maybe, but I doubt it'd work any better now." His tone was final, discouraging any questions about that odd statement. The moment of openness was gone, Shepard just hoped it wasn't the last.

She stretched. "I'd better see how many people want to yell at me."

"Plenty from what I've heard. Alenko said the Council sent a message, probably to scold you for not asking permission before you killed off the damn Thorian."

"Well, that's my own fault." She smiled serenely. "I was told on no uncertain terms that the phrase 'It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.' no longer applies to me. But it's such a convenient method."