Chapter 24

Where All Stars Go

...

The sun was gone, hidden behind black clouds of ash and dust thrown up by the Diomedes' primary beam attack. Yet even without sight of the sky Samus could feel the sun setting, the absence that set the stars free. Those cold bright needles now shone down onto a massive black cloud, already being torn apart by the cold winds sweeping off the vast volcanic mountain range that stood across this dry continent like a wall.

Standing amid the melted shards of rock and shredded Space Pirate ships, Samus summoned a holographic map of the temple's interior into her visor and examined it. The sections of the complex that led up into the mountain and to the site of the great chozo statue were newly constructed compared to most of the imperial era temple. Those halls and chambers near the mountain also seemed to be full of industry rather than contemplative architecture and dusty vaults, so every sign pointed to there as the hiding place of the chozo's secret of apotheosis. However, all the routes that led to the great statue ran through passages with ill-boding names: Trials of Sufferance, Penance for the Bold, Magma Inquisition, and one simply labeled Certain Death To All Who Enter.

The chozo always loved their tests and traps, and the Last would certainly have left a few countermeasures of her own across every one of the paths. She still had a cult of loyal pirates at her side, centuries of scientific knowledge, unquestionable genius, and if Nakamura was to be believed also the command of over two thousand metroids. Samus, by comparison, had a map.

However, it was an interior map.

From the heat-glassed valley floor where Samus stood it was two thousand feet to the canyon's jagged lip and the vast basalt plateau that stretched beyond, slowly sloping up to the stratosphere-scraping volcano peak. With the Diomedes serving as a ramp, Samus made it in two jet-flaring jumps. On top of the plateau, her boots crunched down on gravel debris from the Diomedes' attacks, which now coated the normally windswept plain of dark grey rock and tiny glittering ice crystals. Before her, this landscape sloped upwards, rising higher and higher in a lifeless expanse of tumbled ashy scree and ancient basalt flows, slashed here and there by the deep lava-tube canyons that sat at the foot of the great volcano. From up on the plateau there were only three structures visible, the scorched prow of the Diomedes, the Energy Absorption Spire to the east, and the massive statue of a seated chozo far off to the north, carved out of a massive spur of the mountain itself.

The great statue's eyes now glowed, mysterious yellow slashes drifting through the shadowed clouds of ash representing some fire ignited by the siphoned surge of energy Samus had unintentionally sent its way. Somewhere behind that was the peak of the temple, somewhere there was the Last's goal. The reason for all of this grief and war. The gateway to apotheosis.

Samus began to run, the flat ground side-lit by the last red trace of setting sunlight. Miles vanished beneath her feet as the sun vanished beneath the horizon, outpacing her race up the gradually steepening mountain slope. The stone Chozo looked down in eternal stillness as the tiny figure raced up the path the statue's outstretched arm conveyed. Then dusk swallowed both.

In a dark and dusty chamber of the upper temple reaches, rock and metal screamed as a burning explosion created a door where there had been none before. Night spilled in as Samus stepped through a jagged tunnel newly torn through solid rock, the end of her silver weapon still glowing bright with excess heat. This was the youngest section of the complex, those halls constructed inside the slopes of the mountain itself after the end of the empire and the Last's imprisonment. She had blasted a hole in the mountain side far below the foot of the massive Chozo statue, where her interior map had indicated a temple room drew close to reaching the outside surface.

Samus reached out and ran the golden claws of her gauntlet across the melted and broken walls of her crude entrance, noting the layer of metal set between the natural mountain and this internal chamber, stone paved though it was. Compared to her new armor, engraved and etched with intricate lines until it looked like embroidered cloth, the fragments of melted rock seemed as smooth as glass. The metal in the wall was also strange; it seemed the chozo had chosen to reinforce this specific part of the temple. Why these new, higher chambers and not the rest?

Perhaps they wanted more protection for their greatest treasure. To Samus' eyes the walls here flowed with lines of power, and the floor under her feet murmured with the heartbeat of distant massive engines. All the energy from Diomedes' main cannon blast had been redirected here and something here was using every drop of it, as if the primary cannon blast was just barely enough to ignite a pilot light.

Samus stepped forward into the temple chamber, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. The Last had been in this area for three hours. For someone of her technical skill that likely meant every machine within a mile was now hers. And by Nakamura's final warning that armory would soon be supplemented by an army of thousands of metroids genetically encoded to obey her commands.

The Last had all that. Samus had experience. She had the strength of her will and the touch of her precognitive predecessors against her skin. Of course, she would trade all that for an EMP and a clear firing line but in the meantime she would just have to make due with prophecy.

As she stepped through the doorway into the next chamber her suspicions of this younger temple deepened. Her eyes traced the invisible radiation of thick power lines running behind the walls and she triangulated the reverberations of massive machines. These chambers did not seem built for theoretical research, the ultimate hunt for knowledge that had given the rest of this temple its purpose. Yes, they were still stone flagged and ornately carved, but the Chozo were known to occasionally make wood-paneled starships so for them this was positively utilitarian.

Utilitarian and uniform. Unlike the rest of the eclectic ancient temple, all these chambers were built at the same time with a single guiding vision. Samus catalogued every detail as she moved quickly, access hatches that led to planetary-defense-grade power converters, inactive shield projectors larger than her body, and massive struts of metal leading up through the floor to pass the ceiling with grim purpose. The Chozo had built something here. Something they wanted to last. Could this apotheosis machine really subject the area to that much stress to require all this reinforcement?

Then the next door opened with its unfurling metallic iris and a glowing orange glyph stood sharply carved on the wall in front of her, over a handspan tall.

It read only, "Answers."

In the abandoned shadows Samus felt the pressure of greater meaning. No, it was more than just that. Not just answers: truths. Truths that were worth suffering incredible trials to discover.

A murmur in Samus' ears. "They wait behind your eyes."

The male voice arising unbidden inside her helmet was not surprising any more. It seemed the last echo of her second parents was still with her, even after they had guided her to the new suit. Still waiting for new carefully placed external triggers, still using Adam's voice, still hinting at the path they saw, and still unhelpfully arcane. Honestly, the infuriation it brought was nostalgic.

Samus continued to move, her pace breaking into a jog. She passed another ornately engraved wall of a Chozo seated with folded legs and arms outstretched when the engraved metallic eyes suddenly glowed yellow. Suit scan detected a security system the instant it activated, but that was still an instant too late. An alarm had just gone out. If the Last had managed to reach those systems then she now knew where Samus was.

Then the air itself drew in a breath. It hissed, "What are you?"

It was the Last's voice, and though omnipresent it had a weak and wavery sound. Samus realized that the voice was actually coming from the air vents. It seemed that in absence of speakers in this immediate area, the Last had quickly jury-rigged the temple's climate control system into an an announcement network. And that process seemed to have taken her all of thirty seconds.

The gentle air currents thrummed and reverberated as it gave its own answer to the voiced question. "You are a monster."

That world echoed and swirled around her. The sibilant syllables came from everywhere at once.

The Last hissed from somewhere in the temple, "I see what your presence here means. You destroyed my thesis; my Ultimate Hunter. You destroyed the utgardians. You destroyed the humans. And now you come to me, once more clothed in the plundered skin of my people. You destroy and you steal; there is nothing else in your being. How can you bear it? To have been instructed in our ways and yet descend into this putrescence? You are the worm who brought rot to purest gold."

However, those vents were already speaking to empty space. If the Last wanted to occupy Samus' attention here then it was not wise to remain. Samus broke into a sprint. She darted through the tight corridors, persuading each shielded door-hatch to open with a very convincing blaster shot.

The whispers followed her with the same voice, the breath on the air. "But I will escape. I will escape you. I will escape this existance. For while you have been slaughtering your fellow sentients, I have been reading. I have read of what my people discovered in the centuries after they turned on me. I have read of physics, and astronomy, and of the purest horror. I now know why my kin fled this reality. I know why they turned in desperation to my very research which they had once declared so vile. They found what awaits us all in the darkness of the stars."

Samus felt doubt creep into her purposeful dash. The Last spoke of horror and she truly sounded afraid. But was there actually some horrifying secret, or was this just the splintered mind of a being who had undergone unbelievable isolation and mental stress? Samus did not know, for all the Last's instability she had proved herself vastly knowledgeable and intelligent.

And Samus had long held that same question the Last now voiced. Deep in the past, a girl with long blonde hair clutched her hand so hard her nails bit into her palm. Blue eyes were pressed tight, holding back the dull pain that threatened to burn in her throat. But the question would not be pushed away.

Why did everyone leave?

Samus' running footsteps rang against rock and metal through the cavernous chambers of the upper temple. No. The intent of those departed Chozo did not matter right now. Their secrets would wait. Their prophecy could wait. The darkness of the stars could wait. Samus was here, and she would create the truth of her own future with fire and with force. She would create justice.

Another room and another tall rune carved into the wall.

"Child."

Greater translations again burned unbidden at the edge of Samus' mind. Our child. Our only child. Our greatest, our most beloved. The successor. The one who replaces us. The lesser copy of us. The diminutive offspring. The hatchling.

And with that single word came Adam's stolen voice muttering through Samus helmet. "You will see what we saw. You will see the choice we made. And with perfect certainty we will weep with joy for the path you take."

She continued running. In the next chamber Samus was confronted by another door, this one a strange and heavy thing that made up the ground entire far wall in two great interlocking leaves like a hanger airlock. Symbols flashed in Samus' visor as the suit scan went to work and then the two sheafs twitched apart with a hiss of air pressure. The blasting air carried a searing heat, and by the time the metal walls slid apart Samus could see why.

This door opened half-way up the side of a vast rough-walled cavern, lit from far below with a fluctuating orange light. Two titanic stone statues of Chozo in full armor stood on opposite walls, each a hundred feet tall, and each holding before them a vertical metal column like a soldier's spear at attention. Those metal columns were more than statuary. Suit scan which said they were carrying a constant flow of energy up and through the armor-plated ceiling high above the statues like refueling lines. Samus stepped forward towards the lip above the cavern and saw that those "spears" vanished into a pool of roiling lava that gave entire void a black and burning floor.

She was in a half-drained magma chamber. It seemed the great volcano was still alive, but this machinery was sucking energy from its primal heart. A quick glance down at the walls right above the orange and black lava surface said that the level had dropped a noticeable amount very recently, volume contracting as the magma chamber cooled. There was only one likely answer, Last was waking up the temple. She was gathering energy for her apotheosis.

Samus glanced up and saw that just below the metallic roof, there was another shelf of some sort around the cavern walls, perhaps a landing like the one Samus currently stood on. Samus set her eyes on that destination, took a few steps back, and darted forward at a full run. She burst into the air with a full jets-flaring leap over the pool of lava far below. For a single second she soared, and so had a fantastic view of the massive swarm of twinkling missile launches that suddenly launched out from every direction around her.

Samus twisted in mid leap, taking in the battle map in a single blurred second. Dozens of hostiles across the cavern walls, the heat signatures of their bodies invisible over the lava and at the edge of Samus life-sensor range. But now the trap was sprung and scan said those missiles were of pirate make. It seemed the Last's faithful Pirates were still fighting, even in this blistering toxic heat which had to be slowly broiling alive anyone without a chozo varia system.

Samus' beam weapon flashed out as she spun and a thin arc of the missiles exploded in mid flight. In the same moment she flung out her other hand and the crackling blue grapple energy whipped out, latching its grasping static to the huge stone elbow of the nearest towering statue. Her flight took an abrupt upwards jag, barely dodging the path of the nearest missile. Samus flipped up through the air, summoning a crackling sheath of energy around her at the apex. That screw-attack pulse shredded the explosive envelope of the next two simultaneous missiles, and her drop dodged the next.

However, blaster shots were harder to dodge and even as Samus danced across the statue's titanic outstretched limb several smashed against her shields. Her counterattacks were also stymied, dozens of the Pirate zealots were sheltered by that highest balcony of the lava chamber, only peeking out over the lip to take their very accurate shots. Samus' eyes narrowed at that accuracy, someone was spotting for those hiding in cover.

The air sputtered with invisible transmissions in every direction, bouncing and reflecting across the cavern walls and making tracing very difficult. Then Samus finally neared the massive statue hand that clutched the energy conduit column and a dark savage shape leaped out from a cleft between carved fingers. The Pirate roared, glowing blade extending from its arm with a deadly slicing hiss. Samus jumped away from the statue, easily dodging the attack in the open air, but then to her surprise she met the same Pirate colliding with her. It had also jumped out into the void. This fumbling tackle did no damage to her armor, but the added momentum meant Samus could not jet back onto the statue.

Instead they both fell, tumbling down hundreds of feet towards the burning pool of molten rock. Samus hit the lava surface with a splash that was still a harsh impact; this lake was only slightly less dense than non-molten rock. A moment later she slowly bobbed up to nearly lie on top of it. She was tired, exhausted to her bones and the impact had jarred her breath. Her limbs were leaden and not just because they were wrapped in molten rock.

The suit had no difficulties with these temperatures, by way of tactile feedback it felt like an overly hot bath. Meanwhile the Pirate beside her writhed, beyond even screaming as it burned and died. The fact that a Space Pirate could bear to contemplate suicide at all was strange and as suicides went, it seemed a poor effort to just dunk Samus into thick soup.

Then Samus noted what seemed to be a night sky of constellations above her. Each one was a missile or blaster shot aimed her way from the dozens of remaining pirates scattered in sniper's nests around the upper half of the chamber-turned-shooting-gallery. Ah. Molten rock wrapped around Samus' limbs but gave way under any forceful push and so did make it very hard to dodge. Floating on her back, Samus' face tensed as the stars raced closer. This was going to hurt a bit.

The air rained rock shards and red hot globs as explosions roared against the lava pool surface. Heat and rock fragments mixed with laser-excited force beams and shockwaves, transforming a wide circle of the chamber into a new form of plasma a thundering mixture of air and molten rock. Then the elemental chaos cleared and their floating target was no more, sunk beneath the thick black waves.

The watching Pirates felt dread fill their cores. Bodies float on lava. And as they soon discovered, lava is very good at ablating any attempt to shoot things beneath its surface.

X-ray sensors guided Samus through her burrowing swim until the dense metallic pillar of the nearest great spear materialized in the spectral world of her augmented vision. Then she disengaged her suit's gravetic magnification and switched to a magnetic focus. So it was that she exploded out of the surface of the lava pool at thirty miles per hour and literally climbing, running straight up the energy siphon pillar as if her feet gripped the planet instead of vertical metal surface. Two more Pirates leaped their lives away to try and bring her down again, but their suicidal ballistic dives missed and they died uselessly in burning pain.

This cult of god-painters had named her Death and now she erupted up from hell to give them audience. Samus' blinding golden suit blinked past the upper balcony so fast she flipped and impacted foot first against the armored roof of the cavern. The ceiling rang like hull metal and Samus sprang down to crash among the squadron of hulking elite Pirates who stood arrayed on that highest balcony before a sealed set of massive golden doors large enough for an atmospheric shuttle to fly through without wincing

To their credit, none of them screamed. In fact, as Samus arrived among them, as the battle assumed its rhythm, they seemed to feel it too and they danced along that path with exquisite ecstasy. Their fighting grew in skill and nerve even as Samus methodically tore them apart. The fanatical pirate elite threw themselves on her again and again, battering against shields and burning energy blasts with the strength of a sickening faith.

Their battle danced across a wide strip of metal flooring before the heat-shimmering void of the magma chamber. And more were coming, crawling across the heat seared walls as they fired down on scrum with heedless fury.

Samus' golden gauntlet closed down on a Pirate's blade arm, crushing it armor and exoskeleton, but the Pirate's insectile face twisted not into pain but into delight. The soldier wrenched the damaged arm up, leaving a severed claw in Samus' grasp, and the thick green blood painted Samus' helmet in a splattering arc.

For a single second Samus was blind and as if by cue every remaining combatant fired at her moment of vulnerability. Samus reeled under the impacts, unharmed but watching her shield meter drop precipitously. These god-painters sacrificed their bodies gleefully, trading their flesh or their lived for the least advantage. Before the golden hanger door, they fought with her in the berserker rage of true belief.

The Last's murmured, whispering voice came back to Samus' ear. Not inflected with air this time, but with the memory of times long gone. "They think I will lead then to a heaven. Even if they doubt I will give such a reward to things like them, they imagine an opportunity to steal it. And for the prize of eternity, what is a thing like death? After all, it was the threat of that oblivion that drove my kin in their flight."

By now Samus was familiar with the Last's tactical monologues. Not in this fight herself, the Last was free to interject at the most precarious moments, highjacking precious segments of Samus' attention. And Samus would not simply turn off incoming transmissions or ignore her. The Last was bad at keeping secrets, knew this, and used that flaw of hers to fight Samus.

The Last continued, but now distracted as if she too was splitting her focus. "All the primitive species imagine this same illogical concept of an afterlife. An existence after the cession of existence. Pure gibberish. But my people, with my knowledge they actually created one. They created an afterlife, forged a heaven free of the death that stalks this reality. Amazing. No wonder you worms bow to us like gods, even in our absence."

Samus winced as a charged Pirate blaster shot caught her in the base of the helmet, snapping her head back painfully. The grinning Pirate in her face had offered that shot path to a comrade through his own body, and his blood-caked mouth grinned in satisfaction as he followed that up with a glowing sword swing ignored the limitations of his wounded strength. Samus deflected the strike with her gauntlet, flash of shield energy now worryingly dim, as she followed up with a return shot under her own armpit. However, even in this bloody melee she had breath for her true foe.

Samus said, "There is no afterlife. Not for you."

The Last's delight was clear in her voice, with this confirmation that her monologue had set its hook in Samus' attention. "Philosophy, is it now? A doctrine of 'sins?' Did some primitive religion plaster to your mind during the wallowing since the empire set you wild?"

The white flash of the primary beam strobed, reflected against Samus' helmet, and opponents fell around her even as she spoke.

"Not philosophy. A verdict."

This time the delight in the Last's voice was gone. All that was left was grim fury. "You cannot see. Do not pretend you can influence the future or even comprehend it."

Samus stood up. Around her, none of the closest fanatics seemed able to replicate that feat, though some still writhed and crawled towards her across the blood-boiling floor, gnashing claws or fangs as if those base weapons would do what their technology had failed at. Samus ignored her would-be killers just as she ignored the Last's gathering anger, and instead stepped closer to the great golden doors.

They opened before the brush of her suit scan, inhaling the high pressure of the boiling air with a quickly swallowed hiss. Inside, shining metal statues of chozo luminaries stood on each side of a wide empty floor, vanishing into a dimly lit distance. Emblazoned on that far wall in ever-shining gold five feet high, incorporated into the architecture itself, was a single word set by its builders, just as the Last must have seen it just a few hours ago.

"Light."

With that word once more came the whispers of greater translation, of poetry beyond meaning. Sunlight, we welcome you, desperate for your heat. The first and the last, we stretch for you, though your true might will blind us. Light, without you we will die.

Despite herself, Samus froze. These glyphs weighed her mind down with prophecy. They were speaking to a specific person, and Samus could feel all the jagged edges where she did not match that image, where she did not live up to that legacy. But did not matter, she had to move. The Pirates were already regrouping behind her.

The motion blipped into the edge of Samus' awareness, her suit visor alerting her to activity far behind her. A quick glance back showed a dozen pirates and pirate elites, those who had been stationed in other parts of the magma chamber room, scramble up onto landing. The harsh light of a muzzle flash twinkled out and Samus relaxed to smoothly spin out of its way, but it this time the attack was not aimed at her. No, that hulking armored Pirate elite had instead fired down off the edge of the balcony, into the central expanse of the vast magma-floored chamber.

Clarity crystalized in Samus' mind as she realized what was coming. That entire ambush had just to slow her down. Dozens and dozens of life signatures entered into the range of Samus' sensors, far away down and behind. A sound managed to emerge from beneath the gurgling roar of the lava pool and that sound bore the hungry notes of searing electricity and screaming metal. Metroids.

When the Last's voice returned, so had her vicious confidence. She spoke softly. "You did not have to come here. You did not have to die. But since your time intersects with mine, one must break. I will achieve the apotheosis I created. I will step through the doorway my genius forged. I will join my people as ruler of all and there is nothing your doomed reality can do to overcome that."

For the next few moments Samus did not have time to reply, and the roar of explosions made it hard to make out if the Last was still talking. It took all Samus' skill to push back the Pirate forces, slowing the group just enough for Samus to sprint deeper into the armored corridors. It would be too much to hope they and the metroids would kill each other but at least the tangle slowed the pursuers for a second. Samus was still heading up, still heading to the great statue, but she could hear the sounds of pursuit just out of sight.

In these moments where Samus was only running, the distraction of conversation now aided her more than the Last. So she said, know that the Last would hear her, "The darkness among the stars. What does that mean? What did you find?"

Sure enough, the Last did sound distracted. "The physical universe is dying around us. A clockwork toy slowly winding down. To do anything but escape is suicide."

Samus sprint actually faltered for a moment in incredulity. "You're fleeing the heat death of the universe? Then why are you rushing? Why would you rather murder me than wait through a damn conversation?"

No, there was more to it. That answer was too stupid even for unscripted reality. There was something else. Some discovery that had put a desperate fear in the Last's voice, laid thick behind the anger and loneliness. Something that had led to the exodus of the chozo race.

But the Last only said, "For an immortal all of time is my future; today or in a thousand years are just as soon. If you plummeted from high in the sky, would you wait until the ground was near before you arrested your fall? This gateway out of the material world was the final creation of my civilization, if some savage damaged it such a thing might never exist again! And you are that savage."

Samus nodded her head to the side in agreement as she ran through the metallic corridors. The Last was right about this at least, and Samus was currently cycling through her entire diverse armory onto a shielded door as she charged down this long octagonal hallway. It turned out it was a mixture of super missiles of plasma fire that unlocked that hatch into an ejection cone of half-melted shrapnel.

Still the Last murmured and growled, "Why is it a crime to escape? Who are you to deny me power? Once I step through the gate I will never harm a living creature again, because I would have no reason to bother. Why does it matter if I am punished if I will never commit the crime again?"

Then suddenly an invisible force pressed against Samus entire body like burning needles and she staggered in mid run. She felt its hooks dig into her, pulling from every direction, an instant pain that shot through every cell. She recognized it, life energy absorption. The sensation of being digested on an atomic level was very memorable.

However, Samus' new suit was of a finer make than her old skin. After only an interminable instant the suit modulated its energy fields to, if not repel, at least push back the relentless invisible attack. Arrows blinked into Samus' sight and the white beam flashed four more times as four concealed reaper field projectors vanished into seared and shattered components. Pain-wracked flesh begged to stand there and pant, but Samus once again sprang into high speed action.

That trap had been oddly easy to overcome, as if the reaper field was trying to scan her as well as destroy her. But she could not gift the Last with any hesitation. As if to remind her of that, the heavy footfalls of Pirate Elites began to ring through the halls again, growing closer with disturbing speed. Behind those, the crackle of more pirate transmissions and beyond that Samus map of the temple went black, as if a dark flood was eating the memory of places she had passed. The metroids were coming.

Samus plunged through yet another thick interleaved door that opened with the hiss of over pressured air and slid into the chamber with her eyes already tilted upwards. The floor was bathed in a dim blue light but high above, the wide cylindrical chamber stretched up into the distant shadows of a golden light like the illumination of molten metal. This shaft was over a hundred feet tall, with walls of metal that flowed like they had grown organically, but at the top, where a forest of spiked metal hung down like an upside down gothic cathedra combined with a turbine, up there was her destination. Those tiny shafts of yellow light crawling down the walls through tangled turbine came from directly behind the eyes of the great chozo statue.

Behind your eyes, just as the long gone whispers had said. That was where the Last had made her nest, her last redoubt of plundered power.

A loud hiss rang out around the dark floor and around Samus darted away from the walls of the circular room. Sight shifted in her visor to reveal coiling ropes of energy suddenly cycling behind those wall panels. Scan flashed text boxes of technological descriptions, but as soon as Samus caught the words "life energy" she did not bother reading the rest. Instead she focused on the familiar rippling mirage now spreading out from five equidistant points around this room. Samus' suit drank thirstily of the excess energy bleeding out, but she doubted this display was for her benefit. Dim blue lights marked out the suggestion of an ominous pentagram as five objects began to emerge from behind the air.

"Do you recognize it?" The Last's voice was back in Samus' ears, though she was only now a hundred feet away. "You who claimed to understand the Heart of the Chozo, you use my equation in the most simplistic way, eating and devouring like another hungry beast. But my equation is more than that, it is a description of balance. If energy can be taken, it can be given. If matter can be destroyed, it can be created."

They staggered into reality, five shadows in humanoid form. Sickly blue light rippled around them, as if reality itself was being torn apart and reformed. Samus slowly spun, gun barrel tracking each shadow in turn. As her foot slid across the floor, the edge of her boot caught on something etched into the stone and metal. It was a massive single character chozo scrypt. But she did not have time to read it, for the Last whispered:

"If life can be slain, it can be birthed."

Samus' breath caught as five creatures broke through the final dimensional film and stumbled free into the cavernous shaft chamber. These malformed things were bipedal, but to say humanoid shied accuracy. One was a hairy ape-like figure with drooping arms, long fangs jutting from a heavy jaw, its skin palid like something living underground. A dozen yards away another creature stretched huge hands with fingers like spider legs as limp feathers drooped down across its pallid flesh.

Samus had already noticed the pattern. The shifting blue light stained everything in the chamber, but even through it Samus knew those thin and shaggy feathers were colored blonde.

These creatures were her; a fractured manifestation of Samus Aran's mongrel makeup. Samus recognized five measurements of her exact height, sagging breasts that suggested genender, and fierce hungry eyes all shining in the same shade of blue. One was a monster of primal humanity, another a mockery of the chozo species. The shambling abominations staggered forward, a figure burning with glowing blue scars in the sickening shade of phazon beside another whose bubbling skin twisted and reshaped in constant currents, the echo of the X-parasite. That meant the final figure was not any surprise. It was a living flayed body who glistened with thick transparent skin over red globules and bony crackling fangs jutting forth from the arms and mouthless face. The creature walked forward, each step stronger than the last.

Human, Chozo, phazon, X, and Metroid. All the bricks that built her.

The Last said, "I too have seen the messages scrawled across these bulkheads. I saw the intent they left, the prophecy they built. But I can see more than my hypocritical kin. My mind is stronger than theirs, my understanding more complete. Everything my kin left behind are now tools in my hand. Including you, monster."

The character under Samus' feet rasped again against her shifting boot, tugging at her to be read. No, Samus resisted. This grotesque trap of the Last's was meant as much for Samus' mind as her body, and the speech meant that writing could be part of it. She did not look down, her eyes darting between the monstrous duplicates and the still open door, beyond which advanced the Pirate fanatics and the ravening pack of hunting metroids flowing up from the lower vaults of the temple. High above this dark pit of monsters, the Last chozo continued to lash the temple's power to her will.

For a single instant, a hair of fear pushed through, and for a single instant Samus' gaze flicked down.

The giant character on the floor read, "Self"

A mental trap is instantaneous, and the translation followed. That word meant more than self. It meant what you are. What you truly are. What you are, stripped of all illusion and self delusion, the truth of your darkest doubts and the absence of all comforting hopes.

And Samus did not have an answer. It was a trap made in Samus' own mind, an existential proximity mine, and realizing it was a trap did not do much to lessen its effect.

For only a single fraction of a single second, Samus hesitated, and in that moment all the monsters pounced.

Samus was slammed against the ground, cracking stone and metal as metroid energy absorption raking through her flesh and phazon radiation beat through her shields. Impacts rang as the monsters gripped her leg and thrashed her to smash against floors and walls over and over. She needed to move. But her thoughts were slow, shaken and mired by long chained fears. Her tired exhausted brain that had already fought too much over the last few days. Over the last few decades.

Samus knew the techniques to clear her mind but... Impacts crashed against her head as the monsters' strength battered her like a tornado. God damn it! She was better than this! And she would be again in a moment, she just needed a second to think. She just needed a single second to...

Blows from fists and claws rained down on her out of the darkness with impossible strength, power and matter pulled from out of reality in the pale blue glow of the life-energy materializers. Samus head smashed against the floor, ringing her ears even through the shield and armor. Then her lips parted in unconscious reflex. Every living creature, beset by danger, reaches out for help, for companions to bearing salvation.

Her words murmured in the confines of her helmet, in chozo or in human standard she didn't know. It was just a whisper. "Grey Voice, Old Bird...Adam, if any of you saw this... please. I need just one more lesson."

Then a sound landed in her ears like a bolt of lightning. Even after everything Samus had fought through, through physical pain and sorrow and anger and fear and loss and triumph, this one sound banished it all with clear and fresh surprise.

It was a laugh.

"Ha ha ha!"

The hybrid voice continued, soft and sweet music laid over the searing fire of love. "A lesson from us? All those years, did you think we were educating you? No. Child of ours, precious child. No. We were learning from you. You are the answer, not the question. A being of perfect certainty, an immutable law of justice, the adamant rod around which the path of time itself will curl. Our child, we were students at your feet, for only in you did we find a hope to escape our damnation.

The rain of blows and screeching electric hunger continued to claw at her, but it seemed to dim away. A fire burned and grew within her soul.

"So go forth, Samus Aran! Go forth and instruct onto the universe! Your last pupil awaits your hand!"

Temple's highest chamber was a great elipse a hundred yards long. Warm orange light suffused the air like sunset and molten gold, washing the bronze walls embossed with the images of thousands of chozo. The vast floor was bronze as well, two great circles of broad shallow steps, one ascending to a low dais, one descending to a shallow pit plugged with a large turbine-like mechanism.

Then the orange light of the was broken by flashing needles of white light, strobing from the black depths far beneath the turbine. Then those white flashes became trails of black smoke. In the tangled seam where the machinery met its housing there, a clawed golden gauntlet reached up into the light to grab the lip.

Samus lifted herself out of the pit with a single smooth pull, as the screeches of the surviving monsters echoed from far below. Her feet landed on a burnished floor, gold against bronze, and as her back straightened her suit's pale feathers of light flared from behind her shoulders.

Then she turned towards the far end of the elliptical room. There the point of the curved wall was slashed by two great gaps, southern semi-circles glowing with yellow light. Samus recognized the back of the eyes of the great Chozo statue, just as she recognized the armored figure standing before them, framed by a great tangled arch of thin golden rods like an empty gateway.

Backlit into shadow, the last living chozo faced Samus Aran in the skull of the final chozo temple.

...