Just Like Old Times

Just Like Old Times by silvermittt on deviantART is a depiction of a very important scene from my Mass Effect fanfic, Ghost in the Machine. But it’s more than that. It is, first and foremost, a beautiful piece of art that I will often come back to for inspiration. It is also a reminder: of promises to keep and chapters to write.

Thank you, Silver, for painting it so perfectly. And thank you, my dear Logsig, for dedicating it to me.

Signal to Noise

The priest intoned the First, and one by one, they were to join. It was just like during the rehearsals, only now it had to be perfect. Zero margin for error. The eleven voices, all wearing the ceremonial whites, stood around the priest in a wide circle under the gaping spire of Tricabili, a seventy-stories-high wind pipe that amplified their voices many times over until the entire city, and presumably, the Spirits above, could hear the Chant of Unification.

Nihlus was the Sixth Voice: the voice of air, of purity, of freedom, the voice of turian spirituality. Of course the priest hadn’t assigned him the role for some mystical criteria, like actually fitting the description, but only based on the colors of his voice: the easy baritone of his normal speech, codified as cloud white, the crisp tenor overtones of excitement, codified as pure white, and the husky contrabass undertones of emotion, codified as bone white. All white, and air it was.

Scars

Saren stood in front of the door to his Citadel apartment. He couldn’t remember the entry codes. It had been two years since he’d last slept here; he’d changed omni-tools several times in the interim and each iteration brought about some loss of data. He liked his storage clean. Too clean. He relied on his memory too much, but that was supposed to be safe. It had never failed him so far. He could remember the file, now. He’d called it something like, “Center in the void” and probably deleted it while cleaning, thinking it some rubbish. He’d never call it “Entry code Citadel” or “Key to my apartment,” of course. It had to be a riddle only he could answer. That was the way of a Spectre. And this Spectre would never delete files before opening them to see what’s inside again.

Color

Nihlus went through the airlock, kicked his shoes off, and initiated the cycle by hitting the control panel with his elbow. The hangover hadn’t been bad an hour ago but it got worse on the way. Water. He needed to drink lots of water. If only he had time to stop by the pool and swim it off; if only he had a nice, deep bathtub with the…

About Art

“Can’t you just enjoy it for what it is? Why do you have to analyze everything to death?”

“The only question here is how you can claim to appreciate something if you don’t understand it.”

“It’s art. You’re not supposed to understand it. You’re supposed to feel something about it.”

“What feelings could I possibly have when I don’t even know what it is, let alone what it means?”

“If you would just relax for a minute, let your mind drift off, and listen to your heart instead, you’d see the meaning.”

Saren takes the challenge and stares at the contorted sculpture for a good couple of minutes.

“My heart rate hasn’t changed. And I still don’t see the meaning.”

Nihlus rolls his eyes in despair.

Final Update: Last Days of the Third Era

I decided to post the remaining articles on Last Days of the Third Era in a single, probably final update. It’s no coincidence that I stopped writing these at the point in the chronology where the Daedric invasion finally comes to focus; this is where the vague political background was meant to meet my heretical retelling of the Oblivion storyline. Perhaps only another day or two would be enough to make this piece stand alone, but it’s been such a long time since it was written. On the plus side, it’s always been an exercise in departure from my voice and style and into the supposedly impersonal newspaper reporting. I won’t make any promises, neither to myself nor to the hordes of eager readers (yeah, that was sarcasm). Some hope remains, though, and a painful WIP tag to remind me of the times when I was consistently unable to bring things to an end.