The light blinds me, a white spike that fractures into strobing waves, drowning my senses in white-hot agony. Pain tears through my skull, my armor's ceramic plates grinding against my ribs, servos whining as I sprawl across a cold, trembling deck. Artificial gravity drags at my limbs, pinning me to the steel, its pull warped, like a comm signal torn apart by hard-vacuum interference. The air reeks of stripped coolant and the burnt-wiring stink of a station bleeding power, fouling every ragged breath. My vision flickers. Red emergency lights swell and fade, casting shadows over shattered consoles, buckled metal slick with grime, and coolant beading in the stale air, dropping whenever the gravity catches up. My omni-tool sputters, its orange glow stuttering, spitting out 2187 CE. A year since I was torn from the Milky Way to the Skyriver.
I dig my fingers into the deck, boots scraping, and haul myself upright, joints screaming. Each step is a lurch through a stillness broken only by the structure's low groan, the sound a dying ship makes when its mass effect core finally gives. Instinct drives me forward, toward a faint glow, a viewport, its scratched glass framing broken silhouettes against the black. I grip its edge, breath shallow, chest tight, my head still swimming. Beyond the glass, chaos erupts, tearing the last of the murk from my mind.
Leviathans, the Thalassians, loom against the dark, their bioluminescent forms swelling with an ancient, alien fury. What I take for a relic resolves into a fortress. Darkened Reaper warships ring its perimeter, turrets spitting crimson beams, drones swarming like locusts. I know those silhouettes. Above Earth, above Palaven, above Thessia. Reapers. Different configuration, same dead eyes. Psychic shockwaves slam through space and scramble the enemy's synthetic minds, the backwash splitting my own skull. A Thalassian barrier flares. Tears through a destroyer's hull. Molten debris blinks like spent thermal clips spinning through vacuum. A capital ship's scarlet eye blazes, then shatters under a psychic surge, its wreckage tumbling end over end. The stronghold crumbles in moments, blindsided by the Thalassians' billion-year defiance, a war older than anything the Skyriver's Force has ever touched.
My gaze drops. Earth. The coastlines are the ones from every briefing map I ever memorized. Everything else is wrong. Its surface pocked with crimson-cored hives, festering like open wounds. The sky boils with indigo lightning laced with eezo sparks, a smog-choked hellscape. Faint green seams fracture space, the same light I watched split the sky over Yavin 4. The same green threads through the hives below, my Synthesis choice etched into reality.
Nausea surges. I stagger, slamming my fist against the viewport, the pane trembling under the impact.
"No!"
I lost Anderson on this station, watching Earth through a port just like this one, his breath fading while he told me he was proud. I lost Tali's trust on Rannoch, Mordin's life on Tuchanka, Thane's last prayer on the Citadel floor. I carried every name, every face, every last transmission that cut to static, and I carried them all the way to the Crucible and made the choice I thought would save them. The Catalyst's ghost has turned that choice into this abomination. My knees buckle, bile burning my throat, and I grip the frame, chest heaving, fighting the urge to retch. The boy from Vancouver burns behind my eyelids.
I breathe.
The Thalassians' invasion rages on outside, some securing the Citadel with barriers that flex like biotics on a galactic scale, others vanishing into the stars. I force my focus inward. Hands steady. Breathe in, count to four, breathe out.
Miranda is out there. She has to be.
"Come back to me, Shepard."
I see her smile in my mind's eye, the one she saved for when no one was looking, the one that said she knew exactly how impossible this was and was choosing it anyway. Her eyes that held me through every war I have fought since she brought me back from the dead.
"I did, Miranda. I'm home."
The words come out quiet and rough, a fact spoken to the viewport and the dead air behind it, the way you report a mission status to an empty CIC, because saying it makes it real. I crossed a galaxy that was never mine, flew through a Relay on nothing but biotics and a promise, and I landed here. In the wreckage of everything I fought for. And I am still standing, and she is still out there, somewhere in the ruin of the galaxy I handed to the enemy, and I will find her the way I found her on every battlefield since Lazarus, by refusing to stop until I do.
My omni-tool flares, its interface a lifeline, and I initiate the call, fingers trembling against the haptic display. The line catches. A monotonous dial tone saws through the quiet, each beep a spike against my nerves. I clench my fist, holding myself still, willing the call to connect. The tone drones on, relentless, and I stare at the orange glow, waiting for her voice to shatter the silence, two galaxies compressed into the space between one ring and the next.
Beep… beep… beep…