The Reunion

Chapter 3 of The Precedent

Nihlus almost had an out of body experience watching Saren approach with the kid.

He walked at his fastest pace, taking long strides and his long black robes—the same attire he had worn to the embassy reception last night, a lifetime ago—billowed behind him like smoke from a raging fire. The large bag strapped over his shoulder bounced off his hip. In the cold Citadel morning light, his face seemed even paler and harsher than usual, grim and tired, with browplates set low and murder in his eyes.

The kid looked impossibly small and frail next to him. Even running, she could barely keep up. With one tiny hand she gripped Saren’s index talon, and with the other, some vaguely familiar, pointed object that looked like anything but a child’s toy. Her eyes, dark and huge on her little face, hungrily drank in the surroundings, staring everywhere, at everything, the people, the ships, the terminals and benches, like she had never been in a starport before.

The Wait

Chapter 2 of The Precedent

Five standard hours later, Saren was beginning to tire from pacing through the lifeless rooms of his Citadel apartment. It had dawned soon after Nihlus had left, but Saren had been unable to focus on his usual daily paperwork. It took all his willpower to not check his omni every minute. By the calculations he had made earlier, the trip to the rendezvous point should have taken no more than two standard hours. Assuming Nihlus wouldn’t wait until he was back at the Citadel to report, he was still on Cyone. Fighting? Negotiating with those lunatics? Captured, or worse?

Saren hated being in the dark.

The Reception

Chapter 1 of The Precedent

Nihlus was swaying on his toes to the rhythm of the quiet music, rolling the azure brandy inside the impossibly thin glass. The human dignitary, a tall, white-haired man with a wrinkled face and extremely limp lips, was speaking incessantly, occasionally spraying him with spit. At first, Nihlus had been trying to keep up in earnest, cocking his head at odd angles in the attempts to catch the human’s name-tag, but after a while it became clear that the human was perfectly satisfied to supply the conversation on his own and Nihlus settled for giving random smiles and nods. There was no hope for escape; the human had locked his gaze with a focused intensity and to look away even for a second in search for salvation would probably constitute casus belli.

The Precedent

Two years before Eden Prime, Saren enlists Nihlus’s help to get an old friend out of some serious trouble. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg. How far will he go to ensure the success and secrecy of his misguided quest?

Rename Retcon

One of my shortest and probably least well-known stories, Directed, features an original asari character named Olte, in the role of young Saren’s biotics instructor. She also appears in Sound of Silence, where, after the blowout in Unnerved and Unnerving and before the catharsis in The Candidate, Saren, now adult and already in service of Sovereign, seeks her company and council. Lastly, she is mentioned a couple times in my latest & greatest work, Thinker Traitor Soldier Spectre. It’s not much screentime, relative to the volume of my Saren/Nihlus verse, but she steps in the spotlight in a couple of important stories I’ve been nurturing in my mind for years, just haven’t written yet.

Well, one of those stories is getting written now, and in it, Olte will go by a new name: Elethea. I’ve already retconned all her past appearances to reflect the change.

Why do I want to rename her, you ask? Because, last year, my good friend Gladius, who is not a fan of asari, pointed out that Olte sounds a lot like the German word Alte, which means old. While Elethea is, in fact, quite old, at least by the standards of the humans, turians, and other short-lived sentients of the Mass Effect setting (well within the matron phase, which is upwards of 350 years of age), old is not the association I have for her, and I don’t want my readers, German or not, to have it either.

So I looked for something similar, but with a different sound, and different connotations, and found the word Elete (Greek: Ηλετη, meaning either “Grinding” (aletos), or “Prayer” (litê)). As most asari names end with an “a” (and because it’s easier to pronounce), this evolved into Elethea. I can still imagine a contraction that might sound like her old name—and that’s good enough for me.

What’s the new story about, you want to know? Shockingly—it’s about love and betrayal. Working title: The Precedent; current word-count: circa 8000; ETA: unknown.

The Suicide Mission

I always wanted to know what the other fire team was doing during the attack on the Collector Base at the end of Mass Effect 2. This is a nine-chapter retelling of the suicide mission, from Garrus’s point of view.

It was written so long ago that I remember almost nothing about the process or the circumstances. I know I wrote it quickly, with minimal fussing, and I was pleasantly surprised by how solid it is when I read it recently. Apart from one other story, which has only ever been posted on the Mass Effect Kink Meme, this is the last of my creations that has not been published here till now.

Read it here and enjoy!

Image: Scars by Shade-of-Stars

Category: Fanworks