Stage 4: Hatred
Dying embers burned along a row of caged torches. The flickering orange light casted long shadows across the vast airy chamber. A domed ceiling was just visible above twin ranks of twisting spiral staircases. Pale moonlight streaked through scattered openings and breaks in the decayed canopy. The light shone down and reflected off the surface of dusty stained glass windows which sent back dazzling sparkles of refracted light.
Samus paused at the threshold of the sanctuary. A gray gloom enveloped the forsaken temple, stifling the air with a heavy sense of stillness and absence. The tyranny of the gray curtain pressed against the faint colors which remained. Stubborn hues of orange torchlight, pale caresses of white moonlight, and the multicolored refractions of the windows resisted succumbing into colorless nothing. Samus felt as if she were standing before a tangible memory engaged in a losing war against forgetful oblivion.
Her progress was resisted by the sense that if she moved the image before her would break, and everything, including Samus, would be pulled into the gray void. It took a stupendous effort of will to walk deeper into the church. Immediately, the spell of stillness broke, shattered by a stain of red that had previously been concealed. Red streaks of fresh blood covered the stone floors. Church pews lay in broken pieces with the bodies of the dead strown over the wreckage.
Samus rushed forward. She recognized the armor of the soldiers: space marines from the Galactic Federation. There were dozens of them, all scattered throughout the chamber. Samus rushed from body to body, hoping to find one that was still alive. Their wounds were fresh, the blood was still wet and slick. However, none of the marines had survived. It appeared that Samus had arrived just a few minutes too late.
What the hell are they doing here? She wondered. At a closer examination, Samus saw that none of the wounds were inflicted by energy weapons. Instead, it appeared that the marines had been cut down by crude medieval weaponry. One had obviously been run through with a spear, another had had his head crushed by a mace or other blunt weapon. Several had been cut down by swords, but most seemed to have been savagely torn apart.
Samus walked steadily towards the end of the sanctuary towards the double doors which progressed up into the twin spiral staircases. A body was left upon the raised threshold. The legs had been torn off and crudely flipped around so that the opposite foot was plunged back into the torso. Samus knelt beside the body and saw the outline of huge claw marks that had been used to disemboil the victim. If the grotesque way the body had been left was not enough, Samus was even more disturbed when she flipped the body onto its back. Its stomach had been opened by the claws, but the intestines within had been chewed.
Samus felt her heart go cold. There was something oddly familiar about this scene. She rose jerkily to her feet and turned around. The church sanctuary and dead marines suddenly changed, morphing into mist and reforming into solid shapes. Samus was now staring at the mess hall of the K-2L colony, the church pews became the broken tables and monitors of the destroyed space colony. The dead marines turned into the dead colonists, cut down by the weapons of the space pirates. Samus exhaled slowly. The air had caught up in her lungs.
She looked down. The faceless space marine soldier had removed its helmet. A woman with light blonde hair lay in his place. Samus closed her eyes. She shut herself out against the image of her dead mother. It's not real. She repeated this mantra a dozen times. When she dared open her eyes, the church sanctuary and the space marines returned.
Samus lurched to her feet. She was out of breath and discombobulated. The worst of all her nightmares had suddenly reified. She staggered towards the double doors. Heedless of possible danger, she tried to yank them open. When they wouldn't budge, she wrapped her grapple beam around the handle. Her left arm shuddered, still aching from being dislodged in and out of place. Samus gritted her teeth and pulled. The doors shuddered and broke open.
Bloody footprints splattered the front rows of steps leading up the right staircase. Samus knew by experience that this was the path to take. She followed the trail of blood cautiously up and up the winding staircase until the sanctuary vanished beneath her in a dim haze. At last she reached a wooden door that was left ajar. Samus tensed up as she prepared to kick it open. She felt a tingle trace down her back. Her nerves stood on edge, her instincts awakened by some unseen threat.
Samus kicked open the door and stormed inside. She had entered a dimly lit solar. Incense candles burned along golden chains hanging from the walls. The wafty perfumes hung heavy in the air, obscuring much of the space. Though Samus could not see anyone, her sense of danger did not lessen. She moved gingerly deeper into the room.
The solar was packed with artifacts and religious iconography. A chozo helmet resided on an altar beneath a lamp of white crystal. The dark metal was stark against the harsh light, appearing somewhat sinister.
As she continued to search, Samus found more and more chozo artifacts. Some she felt she recognized from the ruins on Zebes, and others looked vaguely like what she had seen on Tallon IV. However, there was something nondescript, something impermeable about the artifacts. They lacked specific details, appearing more and more like memories of things seen, and not tangible realities in themselves.
Samus missed her visors now more than ever. She had a feeling that the colored perfumes were meant to obscure some hidden puzzle. Samus searched along the walls and floor, looking for something that appeared out of place. Finally, she spotted a faint splotch of blood. When she came near, she noticed that the blood extended onto the wall ahead of her. Someone had left a bloody handprint upon the blank surface. Samus reached up and placed her hand in that exact spot. Immediately, she felt the wall behind her reverberate. The incense candles hissed as the wall adjacent to her suddenly slid back to reveal a hidden passage.
An ominous wail drifted out of the dark entrance. Samus watched as the fires in the incense burners crackled and then died one by one. She held her arm cannon forward and loaded a super missile. One step at a time, Samus penetrated the darkness.
Beyond her, Samus could just make out a faint greenish light. It grew steadily larger as she approached. The passage turned and Samus entered a wider chamber. The walls were made of a thick glass beyond which was a luminous green liquid. Above her, chains dangled from the ceiling, capped with sharp crescent shaped hooks.
Samus paused. Dead corpses of all manner of strange creatures floated within the strange water. The skeletons bubbled as if the bodies were slowly being dissolved. Her stomach twisted. The marine creatures were horrible to look upon. Their faces were twisted and mutated. Their bodies were deformed beyond function with ridges along their backs. Huge pincer-like teeth protruded violently out of too-small mouths.
At the end of the room was a door made of black rock. An effigy had been erected upon its surface. Withering tendrils wrapped tightly around the body of an almost human-like creature. The bound victim was gored by a series of thorny vines in a manner that was as cruelly violent as it was vulgar. The image made Samus feel slightly sick. An aura of menace, and obscenity radiated off the door.
She stepped back a few paces and prepared to fire a super missile. Samus did not want to even see if the door was locked or not, she wanted to destroy the effigy. Just before she could fire, the shapes upon the door started to move. The tendrils slithered back and forth while the thorns hammered up and down. A horrible piercing scream of pain pierced the silence with such intensity, Samus heard the glass around her break.
The green liquid spilled onto the floor. There was an audible hiss as the acid started to consume the very stones. Samus leapt into the air and seized one of the chains. She managed to hold herself up, but let out a cry of pain as the hooked end stuck into the gap of her armor between her shoulder and arm. Staying vertical kept her safe from the liquid, but Samus soon had another threat to worry about.
The dead creatures who had fallen out of their tanks were suddenly squirming with life. Their eyeless husks turned towards Samus and they began to leapt towards her. Samus blasted them into dust with her power beams. Doing so jostled her chains, causing her to fall deeper onto the hook. Samus gasped as the metal broke through her suit and cut into her skin.
The dead fish continued to pursue her. They leapt out of the poisoned water and snapped onto her feet. She kicked them away and continued to fire. There was a rattle of metal. Samus turned to see that the chains hanging from the ceiling were now moving off their own accord. Two of the nearest swung forward and wrapped themselves around Samus. The sharp ends pierced into small grooves within her armor. They could not penetrate the chozo metal, but they did manage to hold her still.
Samus was flipped upside down and thrusted hard into the stoney ceiling. More chains started to wrap themselves like serpents around her legs and arms. Samus tried pulling herself free, but the metal binds were far too strong. Her helmet was thrust back hard against the wall. She saw a flicker of movement and just managed to turn her head before a metal hook came crashing down onto her visor. The blade glanced harmlessly off of her helmet.
Samus had to do something fast. She directed her arm cannon into the ceiling and fired. The blast of the super missile blasted the chains apart, causing both them and Samus to fall into the green liquid. The metal chains dissolved on impact. Samus was slightly more fortunate. As soon as her suit contacted the acid she felt intense pain, but the chozo metal was harder to break down. She quickly fired a second super missile at the strange door and it burst asunder. Samus raced in that direction and dived out of the acid.
She landed in a wide dark room dominated by tall black pillars. The passage behind her was suddenly blocked by a fat statue that descended to cover the hole of the broken door. Samus remained on the floor. She gathered herself together and inspected the damage to her suit. The acid had eroded parts of her left hand where she had caught herself after falling. The soles of her feet were almost completely gone, revealing the bottoms of her zero suit.
Samus rose and examined her surroundings. The pillared chamber proved to be a kind of mausoleum. However, unlike the priestly solar, these were not artifacts of the chozo. Lamps from above illuminated each of the items in the exhibit. The first Samus saw was a narrow pillar topped with a sharp spike. Impaled on the spike was what Samus could only assume to be some kind of alien infant or embryo.
The other artifacts proved to be just as macabre and twisted. Samus felt herself becoming increasingly nauseated as moved through the room. Much of the artifacts had to do with death or some kind of deformity. The entire exhibit seemed a kind of celebration of death, ruin, and domination. Samus found several devices that were dedicated to cruelest kinds of torture, designed to both humiliate and devastate.
The room seemed to go on and on, until finally, she reached the heart of the collection. Two bodies knelt together beneath a tiny orb of pure fire. The orb spun in a slow circle, illuminating the bodies as if they were in a rhythmic dance. Neither of the victims had a lower half. Their mutilated torsos had been surgically combined, sewn together into a ruined mess of gray, dead flesh. That was not the worst of it. The woman's stomach had been torn open. Her ribs and inner parts were kept separated by the man's hands which had been sewn to the sides of the ripped flesh.
Samus did not breathe. The world around her seemed to have darkened and compressed to a single point. Her parents were still vaguely recognizable. Samus' true memory of them had faded long ago, but she had seen images in the Galactic Federation logs. The sense of forgetfulness, of transparency that had dominated the sanctuary and solar had finally been dispelled. The bodies were full of vivid detail, the gore and stench of death was still fresh. This was no memory, it was as real and solid as Samus herself.
She wanted to turn away, but Samus knew that she had to look. Her fathers hands had been made to split apart her mother's stomach, freeing the creature that nursed within. The metroid was smaller than any Samus had ever seen. It was a feeble creature, curved like the embryo of a human, but gelatinous and veiny like a metroid infant. Samus watched it twitch, and she was assaulted by a savage desire to take it into her hand and squeeze it to death.
Instead, she examined her parents' faces. Despite the torture their bodies had been subjected to, their last expressions had been one of bemused indifference. Idiotic smiles spread across their faces, their eyes filled with absolute ignorance. Samus stirred. Her horror and disgust were now suddenly drowned out by white hot rage. Samus' psyche was not so easily unshaken. Whoever had done this, whoever had tried to subject her to such torment would pay.
She turned around, ignoring the faint cry of the deformed metroid which let out an almost baby-like stifle. Beyond the final set of pillars, Samus saw a golden light coming from the distant end. Before she could reach that light however, she found the last survivor of the church. The priest wore a brown robe covered in silver stitchings. Samus did not recognize the symbols. A huge claw had slashed the priest in the back. Somehow the victim had managed to escape the initial slaughter in the sanctuary and retreat here.
A shadow fell over the priest's body. Samus heard a faint shuffling of movement. She held out her arm cannon and moved closer to the golden light. The pillars drew back to reveal a wide open altar. The backdrop was a huge stained glass window splayed with golden light. Etched into the glass was the image of a tall warrior in dazzling white armor. It was Samus. Her Chozo armor had become white as sparkling diamond, and her helmet a regal purple. She was flanked by the images of two people in white robes. Her mother and father were presented in almost the same position as the bodies, only this time, their bodies were whole.
Samus stepped closer. Even from afar, she could see the looks of anguish on her parents' faces. She was so entranced by this image, she did not notice the hulking shadow that crouched beneath it. Samus took the first step onto the dais, but froze when she heard a crunch and faint splatter. Samus looked down. The last galactic marine's pleading arm fell. A monster crouched over him, its jaws covered in blood and guts. Slowly, the beast turned towards Samus, its yellow eyes glowed with recognition. Ridley rose to his full height and let out a guttural roar. Gone were the cybernetic enhancements he had worn during their last encounter. His body had been restored to the prime of his power. His tail slashed and destroyed the stained glass window. A world of storm and wind opened like a portal behind Ridley. IHis great wings expanded and he leapt into the air.
Samus was quicker though. She snapped forward with deadly intent. Ridley flung himself into the torrent raging outside, but Samus had already caught his foot with her grapple beam. She was pulled out into the open air, hanging desperately beneath Ridley.
The space pirate captain roared, but the sound was drowned out by the storm. Samus steadied herself and attempted to fire a missile at the great dragon. It narrowly missed his head. Ridley dived and rose, attempting to fling Samus off. She hung firm and finally managed to get a hit with her missile. Ridley screamed in pain and soared even higher.
Samus was vaguely aware of the church towers that encircled them. Ridley flew higher and higher, but no matter how high he went there were more and more towers. Samus' arm felt like it might break off at any moment. Her shoulder had been dislodged again, and the pain was moving down into her wrist. Samus willed herself to hang on, and fired another series of missiles. One caught Ridley in the face, a second hit him in the right wing. He cried out in pain and attempted to throw Samus off by slamming her into a tower wall. Samus defeated that strategy by using a super missile to destroy the wall, just before she was slammed into it.
Ridley roared in frustration. He used his tail to try and gorge Samus, but she evaded the strike and fired more missiles. All the while, Ridley continued to bring them both higher and higher. Soon they ascended past the storm clouds. They entered an upper atmosphere that was absent of both clouds and light. A perpetual twilight hung over the world. And yet, the church towers continued to eclipse them, rising to a height beyond possibility.
My arm is going to fall off. The pain had reached a fever pitch. Samus could not hold any longer, but at the same time, she did not dare let go. She fired more missiles and attempted to direct Ridley towards a flat, drum shaped tower. The gambit worked. Ridley soared above the open roof. It was now or never. The fall was far, but Samus would probably survive. Her whole body tensed up in anticipation. But there was no choice to make. At that moment, the grapple beam snapped. Samus' stomach launched into her throat as she fell. Several heart pulsing seconds passed as she plummeted.
Just before she hit the ground, Samus curled up and tried to roll. The acrobatic move managed to dilute some of the impact, however the landing still hit her like a boulder. Her feet twisted in pain and all the air was knocked out of her lungs. Samus collapsed onto the ground. The pain in her shoulder exploded. It seemed to spread across her whole body. Her vision dimmed. She made one desperate attempt to stand, but her body would not allow it. Everything spun beneath her and it was all she could do to curl herself into a ball as a last defense. The world dimmed and became black.