First there were eighteen.
Molly. Alec. Eli.
Shane. Addie. Marcus.
Rana. Theo. Jacob.
Dustin. Jay. Tarah.
Jason. Mai. Roman.
Kim. Damon.
And herself.
Eighteen lost, frightened, angry children, none older than six. All rounded up and bundled together and called “X-Ray.”
It was chaos from Day One. They quibbled and jostled and fought over everything, from who got which bed to who got meals first to where they stood in the shower line. Alliances formed and cracked and broke apart on an almost daily basis.
But there was one thing they all seemed united about, and that was their dislike for Jeanette.
In typical child fashion
The deserted streets she walked were strange, and yet familiar all at once. The still air smelled like rain and ozone, and a thick, silvery fog hung over the town, leaving a glistening sheen on the pavement and cloaking the houses and buildings in a soft, featureless haze.
Where am I?
Puzzled, but unafraid, Jeanette wandered through the unsettling emptiness; every now and then, she could hear the sounds of muffled conversation, or the distant laughter of children... but when she tried to locate the source, there was no one. No one that she could see, anyway. There was no one else outside, and all of the houses' curtains were drawn shut, the
Koa had taken no pleasure in the killing; it had been a grim thing, to be tasked by the Prophets with the cleansing of worlds. Grim, but necessary. These people had committed the ultimate blasphemy, and the Prophets had called for the ultimate punishment - cleansing in blood and fire, on a scale never before seen.
None were to be spared. They were to be shown neither pity nor mercy, the Prophet of Truth himself had expounded; they were to be slaughtered down to the last squalling babe. The gods demanded it, and the gods were never to be denied.
He had not joined in his brothers' righteous pontificating, their cruelty, their revelry... he ha
Though the place was long-empty, it still called to him.
Sometimes it happened on the highway, while turning onto a different road or coming off an exit ramp. Sometimes it happened during a dive, just as he breached the surface. Sometimes Corona was with him. Usually, he was alone.
Whatever the situation, there would be the familiar subtle shift, and Umbra would find himself there.
And so it did, and he did.
The building was, for the most part, just as he remembered it... although in a certain, sad state of disrepair. The little drones that had cleaned and repaired the place and maintained the grounds had long ago powered down, never to c
"Aegis, love, it's only snow. It's cold, but it's not going to hurt you."
"NO! NO! NO! NOOOO!"
Hera and Theron exchanged exasperated glances as their daughter wailed in distress at the top of her little lungs, clinging onto her mother with surprising strength as she cried. So far, this had been the result of every effort they'd made to get Aegis to walk through the snow on her own, and they were resolved to simply carrying her across the tarmac at this point. They'd expected her to respond poorly to the cold and snow - it was her first exposure to such things, after all - but they hadn't been expecting this.
"Wouldn't it be nice if childre
Aegis didn't remember how she'd gotten home.
All she remembered was the door closing behind her. The sturdiness of the barrier at her back as she collapsed against it, sliding to the floor with her head in her hands. The way it was cold and unfeeling and uncomforting as she succumbed to bitter, wracking sobs.
She's dead. Hera's dead.
Somewhere before the blank stretch of nothingness, there was a window... no, not a window, a vid screen, and footage of the latest attacks, all presented in hyper-realistic definition, color and sound and pure, unadulterated horror as the hapless reporter fled along with the last group of refugees to escape wh
She wasn't ready for this.
The Reapers' hulls were barely cold, the worlds they'd ravaged still slowly-cooling embers, and she wasn't ready for this.
Most other turians her age were still in the military, having orders barked at them and clawing their way up the ranks. But her? She'd just learned that she had inherited ownership of one of the largest private armies in the galaxy, catapulting her from nothingness into a position of formidable authority almost overnight.
A warm, scaly muzzle bumped at her hand, interrupting her train of thought, and Aegis absentmindedly reached down to pet Charis' head - forgetting, for a moment, how much sh
It had all gone to hell so quickly, Augustus mused.
Things had been going so well. For a while, it even seemed as if they might win. Cyrene had been hopeful... she'd wanted to raise their children on a free world, free from the overarching influence and crushing arrogance of the Hierarchy... It had been her dream. Their dream.
Perhaps they'd been too hopeful. Or, perhaps, simply unwilling to believe that there had never been any real hope of victory to start with. That there was never any real escape, nor hope for freedom.
Perhaps they'd simply been unwilling to believe that their fighting - for their children, their colony, their very wor
All around her, the world burned. Searing eddies of dry air and smoke scorched exposed skin while airborne embers blurred her vision and left tiny pinpricks of pain wherever they touched.
And the sound... the sound those towering monstrosities made... was deafening.
But through it all, Hera Valroma had not wavered, had not flinched, had not even so much as thought of retreating. She and her men had pressed ever on, systematically gunning down husks while extracting what survivors they could from the wreckage of the city. There were precious few left, but every one saved was one more life that the Reapers did not claim, and that was all that