Chapter 20

One Note in the Song

...

Even back within the embrace of her chozo battle suit, Samus' breath painfully rasped and bubbled through her chest. Her implanted medical systems might be doing a surprisingly good job at keeping her alive and conscious but there was still a large amount of blood in her punctured right lung and more on the floor around her. The health diagnostic display showed her entire body as a diagram of blinking red warning signs. An inaccurate diagram, since that humanoid figure displayed in the visor still had her left hand. Samus' lungs twitched again in an agonizing laugh. Ha! Delirium and blood loss had a way of making everything funny.

Then she dizzily remembered the new third-form metroid slowly advancing towards where Samus had collapsed to her knees amid the sludgey ruins of the prototype's dissolving corpse. This creature was twice Samus' size, armored with thick green plates across its back, and was probably not about to die if it took a single quick step. So it had a few advantages on Samus right now. The creature's spear-like legs clicked against the stone floor, each sound curiously askew from its actual position. Oh, one of Samus' ears was completely filled with blood. She tilted her head to drain it and the sounds returned to their correct triangulation. However, Samus didn't have time to notice because that little motion set the world spinning so fast her sense of self blurred at the edges.

The suit was currently the only thing keeping Samus upright and it was not in much better shape than its operator. Emergency release procedures during a limitless overclock session broke as many operating guidelines as it had broken suit components. A technical schematic would look like an advanced metropolitan area after a major bombing campaign. Wisps of grey smoke trickled out between some of her armor plates which was all the more concerning since the suit did not actually contain any flammable components.

A growling, clicking noise echoed through the room and Samus realized her addled brain had forgotten the approaching metroid yet again. It, however, had not forgotten her and still made its way closer, though it seemed strangely hesitant for an omnivorous alpha predator that could equally eat organisms and heavy weapons fire. To molt twice in such a short time, this creature had feasted on a legion of life already. Suit telemetry said it had run at top speed through the vault tunnels but now that it was here each step forward wavered and stuttered like a chameleon. The hesitance was almost comical. Samus would have rolled her eyes if she didn't think that little motion would make her pass out.

The looming metroid advanced, twisting its half-formed head from side to side, the crown of fangs it had for a mouth flexing in and out as if tasting the air. It did not seem wary at the sight of Samus or her gun barrel, so it had been from the first batch of releases, not the ones who had chased Samus out of Aurora's underground chamber. It had not learned to fear her. Samus prepared for the lunge, but then the metroid crouched down, angling its vicious flexing maw towards something on the ground. It probably sensed some kinship in the scattered ruined corpse of its dead progenitor. The Last had expected her control programing to be inherited. And it had, a juvenile had refused to feed on her.

Samus stood up and was instantly surprised that she had managed to do so. She knew she was tough, but she also knew what the First Metroid had done to her, those blades biting deep into her sides, her legs, nearly through the one arm that remained functional. She would be surprised if sixty percent of her long strand muscle fibers were still intact after that. But though the suit was assisting each movement, astonishingly Samus actually seemed to be standing mostly under her own strength. That was strange. One of her many rounds of augmentations had done her more than she thought, or her insane desperate attempt to absorb the First had actually done more than just confuse the monster. Or, more likely, one of the suit's broken parts was its diagnostic system and the suit was just assisting more than the display said.

As soon as Samus moved, the metroid snapped its focus back onto her and let out a low crackling growl like rasping metal and electric sparks. It crouched down on its four long bladed legs and prepared to pounce, armored plates across its back vibrating with tensed energy, but now Samus could see what it had been inspecting on the floor. The ground here was littered with oozing black chunks of the First's disintegrating body, but that one particular dark trickle had a reddish cast. It was Samus own blood that drew this metroid.

Her visor blinked its proximity reminder at the same instant Samus heard a new sound from the vault door. The crouching metroid spun back and shrieked as another just like it pushed forward into the chamber, rearing in surprise as it blared its own crackling challenge at this newly discovered competitor. Oh yeah, multiple life signs approaching, that was right. The suit had shown that during the fight. Drowning in weariness, Samus mentally shrugged. This problem was really just one of accounting, right now a single of these metroids could kill her just as well as a hundred, and this display of their combative territorial instincts might actually open up a single hair's width of hope.

Hope, but only as long as the creatures remained balanced. Metroids could fall into uneasy coexistence as long as they were close to parity in strength, and these two were both third evolution. However, if a stronger member came along, or even just a third equal, then the cold war would instantly end as the lesser faction retreated or were devoured. The only exceptions were the pack's egg laying queen or, as Samus remembered, the Last Chozo herself. Feral metroids had shown her just as much deference as that first prototype had. Chains of genetic memory from the first to the last. And they smelled Samus' blood.

Samus' thoughts were too muddled for anything that could honestly be called a plan but today was a day for stupid long shots. By long drilled reflex, she reached her palm up to tap her helmet. The neck locks easily disengaged and the helmet came away, rocking as it magnetically stuck to her gauntlet palm, which was good since the movement reminded Samus' dazed brain she no longer had fingers inside that glove to grip with. She brought the helmet down against her armored thigh where it stuck with another magnetic clunk, safely holstering itself though she had no idea how she was going to get it locked back on her head without the use of her free hand. She was so tired but she still stood there, skin to air.

Both metroids froze in the middle of their combat posturing with a sudden shiver. Then they both turned her way, clusters of jellied red eyes glistening above nets of foot-long interlocking fangs. Samus stood before them, face exposed, her short blonde hair turned dark in places from blood. Unshielded life-forms were doomed near any metroid, armor was irrelevant and their hunger was uncontrollable. But the creatures did not lunge in a feeding frenzy. Instead they seemed to lift their half-formed mouths and bite at the air, sniffing or tasting.

Samus took a step and the metroids trembled, long legs clicking as they shifted back across the stone floor. Shifted away from her. Samus walked forward and both metroids parted to let her past. She reached the ajar vault door and glanced back out of the corner of her bloodshot eye. One of the metroids had taken a few steps deeper into the vault and crouched down to inspect the black sludge and shattered core of the First. Then the metroid turned and reached out one bladed leg to poke at something else in the ruin. Samus didn't have to guess to know it was her severed forearm, but she also knew she was not about to fight over it. Let the metroid have its toy, it wasn't doing Samus any good right now. Ha, that was a good joke. Ha, blood loss.

She trudged out through the dark tunnels that led to the vault, past other shadowed chambers holding other ancient horrors. Nothing followed. As she stumbled along some corner of her brain mentally recited a list of planets where she could get her arm regrown without waking up in a jail. The fact that she had no way to reach any of those places did not really touch her exhausted mind, but for some reason she did latch onto the memory that she didn't have an insurance provider. At the moment that was really funny and so with a sick smile on her pale bloody lips she lifted her foot onto the first step of the long staircase up to the main Temple levels. That endless stair stretched into the black above her.

Each slow weary step up thudded through Samus' body like mortar fire, blurring together so that each footfall could have been the ten thousandth or the first. But still she climbed because she could not allow herself to do anything else, pushing past the broken rubble of her first tumbling entry to the stairwell, past the cavernous Library of the Winnowers. Then her eyelids glacially blinked and when they opened she had arrived at the top of the stair, into a huge room dyed blue by dim light from tall crystal pillars carved in hard vertical lines. For a moment she wavered there, standing in the center of the floor and unable to remember what she was supposed to do. Then she remembered. She still had a mission.

The Last was hunting for the Chozo ascension technology. Could not let that happen. Hunting. Meant the Last did not know where. Technology created after her imprisonment, only deduced in existence. The Last thought of this place as home, trusted those memories for emotional reasons. Would not think to ask for directions in own house. In the temple for much longer than Samus but still had not found. Not anywhere the Last was familiar with then. New construction. What parts were built after the Last's imprisonment?

Samus' voice was horse and dry in the still air. "Map room. Where."

The suit heard and responded. With the helmet hanging off her hip, it could not show her the plotted course, but haptic feedback along her body nudged her along, directing Samus towards certain doorways by gentle pressure against her skin. Samus staggered on like a leaf on a stream, flowing with the current and behind her died the echoes of her footsteps in empty halls. She had a mission. It needed to be done. So she would do it.

Down at her hip, the inside of the helmet flashed lights to alert and occasionally hazarded a soft beep to grab her attention. It wanted to be worn. It wanted to tell her something. A frown touched Samus' brow. No, the suit did not want things. Something living inside it could want. But Samus was not going to bother to comply. She had already let it loose.

She spoke aloud under the dim temple lights, "Go ahead. You can figure out a way around that."

"You distrust intrusions." The masculine voice instantly appeared in her ears, clear and soft. Adam. No, not Adam. Samus had enough cybernetic enhancements that the ghost in the suit had no difficulty creating sound into her bones or eardrums. Or perhaps it bypassed true hearing entirely with direct nerve contact. And it denied intrusion.

Samus didn't bother responding to that irony. Her footsteps still plodded along through dust and dark, her stride baring a wobbling feeling like she was walking on stilts. Everything below her knees felt distant and numb. She also wasn't going to call that thing Adam. In her time she had known two friends named Adam. He died, and then the echo was dead too, slain in combat amid the stars. She might be able to get him back at some point but this thing just a stolen voice. Until it had something useful to say it could burn along with all the other ghosts.

Set in a thick stone wall, tall metal doors clicked and scraped as they slid apart in overlapping triangles, sandy grit grinding away uselessly in the immeasurable seams. Samus stepped through without breaking stride. The temple was accepting her now, the way opening effortlessly where before she had hacked and punched and screamed her way through each barrier. Now her way was unbarred. That meant something, and in the distant tired corners of her mind Samus felt a familiar anger.

She was broken and bled, severed and stretched, but she had known all these sensations before. Many times. And now this pile of stone and circuitry thought to judge her worthy? It thought she had proved herself? It dared to doubt her?

Samus' staggered on. She had a mission.

Then, finally, she entered a square chamber filled with machines and dust. Chozo metal structures and dim orange lights lay under a tangled root system of human technology, creeper vines of white plastic and tiny blue bulbs. As Samus stepped into the room, the Chozo lights pulsed, flowing up sharp metal trunks as the abandoned device at the that filled the room stirred from slumber. A second later the various human sensors and computers spun up to active states with an imagined sigh of relief, their scientists had being clawing at this door for years. Then, in the air at the center of the room, a web of glowing chambers and hallways bloomed into existence, the entire temple hanging suspended in space. It was a full holographic map from the vaults to the energy absorption spire, from the great entrance door to the far distant great Chozo statue that loomed out of the mountain slopes high above. In the air all around the map, tiny chozo gyphs twinkled in a constantly shifting flurry of ephemeral light.

Only one part of the flurry was constant. A single stable point with a single simple written message.

"You are here."

Then a voice once more chimed into the air and Samus was surprised to hear it was female this time. The bio-computer Aurora spoke out a weak and tinny device, one of the human devices scattered somewhere among the technology in this chamber whose only virtue was that it possessed both a transceiver and a speaker.

"Samus Aran, it is good to have located you. I am happy to report that under my new orders I may once more provide you with full aid. Commander Nakamura had authorized you to receive any and all material assistance. All my information will be made available, without redaction. Urgent notice: the forces loyal to Space Pirate Ridley are preparing for a large scale military ground assault. Extensive weapons supplies are being offloaded from the ships and assembled in their landing valley without concern for secrecy. The target is unclear though with those numbers they could sweep through the temple or overwhelm my own defenses with equal speed."

The electric reverberation echoed off flat stone walls, dry and cheap in its sound. The message: you are still useful, all is forgiven. So familiar. Then a new sound broke through the emptiness so sharply it startled Samus. The sound was painful and harsh and jerked in a harsh rhythm. It was laughter and then Samus realized it was her. Useful. It was all too funny.

The ringing in her ears shuddered with each agonizing laugh until it almost formed a beat. Samus could hear it even when she closed her eyes. With pain and hacking coughs the laughing slowly subsided. Then for no reason she could find in herself she began to sing. She supposed it was only because she wanted to. No duty, no obligation, no right, no wrong.

It was a single rough breathy note, then a few more. The sound was soft and simple, no words only shifting tones. But the notes began to build and slowly transformed, rising and interleaving. Soon it grew to something no human could replicate, constant and unchanging on every note both inhaling and exhaling. It was a song. Not every pass through the Zebes augmentation tank had been for strength. One was just so a young girl could join in the chozo songs of memory and sunrise. She sat pressed back against Old Bird's folded legs.

Soon the empty temple halls filled with drifting sound and dead stone began to wake as it sang back in softly reflected echos. Each carved edge of decoration and engraved grabbed the sound and pushed it back, blurred and transformed by corners and lines, joining the whisper of comfort and of isolation. The song was not an important one. It was not a hymn of battle or discovery, it had no meaning. Samus was not even sure it was a real song. It was just a snatch of melody that she had made up as a child on Zebes, repeated aimlessly until even both Grey Voice and Old Bird hummed it on occasion. They had sung it when she left. Now it once more rose through Samus unbidden and she did not have the strength to resist it. It was just her, murmured out to the empty world.

And then the soft reflected echos transformed to a harmony. From down the long dark corridors, new notes began to join the song.

Aurora's voice suddenly returned in the map room, filled with computerized alarm as her words crackled and faded towards static snow. "Samus Aran, a new source of interference is disrupting communications. Multiple sites across in the temple are transmitting a..."

She faced away out of intelligibility and Samus was left only with the music and her song. Her breath was weak and painful, giving barely more than a whisper, but now the sound rose from her imagination to surround her. It came little by little, drifting down the hallways, as though a crowd spread over twenty miles joined in one by one. But still the music rose. It rose until it filled everything. Soon the long dead air trembled with loss and defiance and the stones trembled like the approach of distant armies, soaring and crashing, chorale melody above a bass as broad and firm as the earth. With her eyes closed and her body numb, Samus could only hear and what she heard was a planet joining its voice to hers.

...

Outside the temple a cold wind blew over the high volcanic plain of the lifeless slopes from the high mountains, like it had for millions of years before. Then that wind chanced to meet another crosswise stream until they twisted and both caught the edge of the deep canyon web below the towering seated Chozo. The wind blew past scattered basalt teeth that jutted over, the remnants of old lava tube roofs. Then, as the wind curled down into the canyons, it met its first stone statue. The statue was made of the living rock of the high canyon wall, carefully formed into the shape of a Chozo body. Here and there the statue was perforated with tubes, carved holes through the body so perfectly placed that that they were nearly invisible to the eye. But to the wind the holes reached out and caught a single breath to transform it into music.

The stone musician began to play and all along the dozen long canyons beside the Temple ten thousand other statues added their own notes to the song. The sound changed as the wind whipped and gusted but instead of random cacophony each note blended together in a perfect symphony. And they took up the beat. The complexity only increased with the volume until the land shook with an unending roar of triumph and heartrending sorrow. Wordless voices sweetly wailed over notes so deep they thrummed the sky. An impossible melody surged from those who had never lived, a stone carved song orchestrated precisely as any symphony.

Hunched under her nest of concrete, metal, and energy shields, the bio-computer Aurora 926 regarded her sensors with confusion. She had access to years of data on this planet, years of observation on the chozo temple and the area around it. The musical statues were well known but they were just stone, an artistic curiosity whistling and moaning dumbly as a breath of air passed by. They could not be programed to make a song, to play their notes in time. They could not be synchronized into a melody, made to follow a beat. There was no programing, there were no moving parts. It was impossible for them to form this song. And yet now they sang in thundering harmony. The Chozo were singing and at that sound even computers huddled in fear.

...

Deep in the temple, Samus opened her bloodshot blue eyes. She had stopped singing, but only because she was about to faint from lack of breath. At least, she thought she had stopped but with the helmet hanging from her hip the sound of music still filled her ears. In her dizzy imagination it stretched across the universe but as her consciousness swum back to reality she noticed it at least filled the the temple hallways.

Then the music slowly faded but a snort of bitter amusement still blew a few flecks of blood across Samus upper lip as she realized what had happened. They always did have a flair for the dramatic.

She didn't bother speaking with any real volume. The sound did not need to travel far. She was wearing the suit. "It's not intrusion if you were always there. Come on out then, and stop wearing the mask. You've had your signal."

Adam's voice filled her head, firm and warm. But behind it was something different, a mind familiar and alien. So very familiar. "Program recognized. The parameters are met. The moment is now. The Path has fallen into clarity, the variance chosen, and the way is set. What is seen has been seen and will come to pass."

Then there was a long moment of silence, with only the fading distant rumble of an endless choir.

The voice said, "Hatchling, we see you."

Samus found she had no need to breathe. She had been expecting this for a little while now, but still it shook her. She had once called the chozo battle suit she wore a Ship of Theseus, upgraded and patched and repaired and replaced until it was almost impossible to tell if anything original remained at all. It was Chozo, and Human, and Luminoth, and Byyronian, and Urtragian, and Metroid, and other things beside. It was all of them and none, but somewhere at the core under the scars and repairs was a single shining seed, the core that was always unchanged. Something set and etched from the beginning. From Zebes. Set by her parents, waiting for a voice to borrow and the time to use it. The sight of a planet, the scent of blood, and the sound of a song.

Samus smiled a smile that would never be seen, and whispered into the past. "I see you."

The voice was still strong and clear, but filled with a sadness that could crush through steel. "Two old fools, we mock ourselves claiming to see. We are so very blind. We do not know what way you traveled to be here. We do not know what you have suffered, what you have gained. We do not even know what words carry our message to you. For this brief moment you exist in shining certainty but even after all our vaunted prophecy, the future is as constellations, dim points of light in impenetrable darkness. For this and endless things besides, forgive us. Forgive us, our stolen child. Our only child."

The dark void of the temple stretched out for miles in each direction, but now, almost imperceptibly, it trembled at something vast slowly shifting. Some distant machinery awakened.

"Across years and the void of oblivion we weep, and yet still we left you and for that we deserve no forgiveness. Now you come through pain and struggle to here, the end of our trail, and hope for guidance. We have none. You hope for aid. What little we can has already been placed for you. You hope for us to give you something, any sight of this vaunted Path we have clearly worked towards, a single star to guide your way. Spit on our bones for in our greatest failure we cannot. Trapped on our own cowardly path, all we can do is say the things you need to hear so that there might yet be a chance. So that our purgation might begin."

The glowing holographic map still hung in the air before Samus, but now the snow of glyphs coalesced on one section in the temple's upper reaches, far away. The Great Statue. The towering mountain statue itself was filled with passages and machines, the most recent in the entire complex. That was the destination. That was the goal.

The voice was now almost a whisper. "You are strong. Stronger than anyone can believe. And you are loved. More than we ever knew how to say. You are Samus Aran and after all our lifetimes, our triumphs, our empire and our penance, all we can do is ease your way."

Then it fell into silence. But the silence no longer felt empty.

Slowly the snow of virtual glyphs around the map hologram intensified, coalescing unfathomable information not just around the high and distant facility behind the Statue but around every hallway and chamber, describing access to every system and secret. But in the center of it all something became clear by absence. A void, a spot of darkness amid the light that drew the eye. And it was nearby.

Samus turned and walked away from the map room, still staggered and hobbled but this time she needed no gentle pressure to guide her through the chambers. Then, too long and too soon, she arrived in a cavernous cathedral space, greeting her on three sides with carvings of dark stone, statues and pillars and flying buttresses in baroque perfusion. In every direction but one, lithe stone Chozo danced and grasped, carved flowers bloomed in rock as thin as paper, forming a confused and tumultuous riot that filled every inch, nearly obscene in crafting before the contrast with the fourth side of this room.

A featureless wall of pale stone rose before her, stretching left right and up into the shadows of infinity. Its size shrank Samus down to a pinprick before it, a glaringly insurmountable barrier holding up the weight of mountains above. It was obviously a secret door. The Chozo loved decoration, carvings, and murals so to imagine that they might spare this vast canvas for anything as petty as structural reasons was ridiculous. But when a secret entrance was this obvious, it meant it was a trap. Every time.

Samus breathed out. Scan said nothing, but then again anyone could scan. The Last, in her hurried search, could scan. Samus stepped forward to meet the base of this towering wall. She slowly exhaled and pressed the barrel of her weapon against the pale stone grit with a clunk. She just hoped the hidden lock was not expecting a handprint.

At first there was nothing, but then that point of contact was outlined by a circle of pale blue light as stone suddenly began to shine, flicking into life without any transition between the states. Then reality blinked again and fine glowing lines appeared on the stone around it, radiating spokes of angular filigree, full of curves and points covering a space wider than Samus was tall. Then another blink and another swath of wall was consumed, filled with glowing lines and glyphs like alchemy and circuitry. And so it continued, chunk by chunk, faster and faster, though beyond the third ring Samus could make out nothing from her perspective other than a reduction in the gloom. The pale wall was a hundred feet tall, two hundred wide, and now every inch was filled with a web of intricate light.

Then the faintest breath of air brushed against Samus' bare face. Wind inside the temple. The wall glowed but was unchanged, with no opening, and the reciprocal pressure from the gun barrel gave no hit of motion. But the air had moved. So with a weary sigh Samus lowered her weapon and stepped forward as if to knock into the wall face first. She passed through the solid stone like a shaft of light through shadow.

First there was darkness and then there was light. Sight returned and Samus now stood on a perfectly flat floor lit in a glow of soft orange light that washed out in a circle barely a fifty feet across until it faded into an endless dark in every direction. Samus turned back to see the pale stone wall and any sign of her entrance were gone. She stood alone on an infinite plane, in the light of a single candle flame.

Yes, that was about what she had expected. Now all she had to do was wait for the tra...

A crash of sound filled the void, the rigid stone floor vibrating like a speaker beneath her feet.

The language was Chozo and the accent was Loud. A deafening voice roared, "ASPIRANT, PROVE YOURSELF."

A tremendous Whmmp! filled the room and Samus staggered backwards, pushed by a blast of displaced air. The chamber void was no longer empty. Before her rose a burning giant, a colossal figure of flame and shadow and yellowed chozo bone standing before an endless wall of blinding fire. A glyph-etched sword was in its hand and the giant glared down with golden points of light from inside dark eyesockets. Then the wall of fire behind the giant flexed and closed before stretching out again. No, not a wall but wings, burning wings of endless flame worn by a giant made of bone.

The giant guardian slowly swung the titanic sword with the sound of a storm building at its passage, and a point larger than Samus' entire body came to rest before her, aimed down at her heart. A terrible radiating heat beat against her cheeks, drying her lips and her eyes and the blood trails on her skin in its fury.

Samus wavered in place, half dead muscles fumbling to keep her standing as damaged lungs spasmed to inflate. Each second was pain and yet the point of the massive sword sill tracked every tremble and sway. By drilled in combat reflex she reached towards her helmet at her hip, but the gauntlet bumped against it and the fingers trailed uselessly, a reminder of her missing forearm. Funnily, that hand was the only part of her that did not hurt, though the missing wrist still screamed its distress in confused nerves.

She looked up at the final guardian and met its empty golden eyes. The giant waited in dispassionate judgement.

"Fuck you, I've proved myself enough."

Samus stepped forward and the giant drew back its sword to swing, to begin and end her challenge in a single bloody second. Samus' footsteps against the stone were drowned by the roar of burning wings and endless fire but in her current state she could not dodge, she could not fight, she could only hope her tired, weakened brain had guessed the test. Then the massive sword crashed down against her head.

Samus opened her eyes to golden light. The giant was gone, as was the infinite black void, new illumination shrinking the space down to simply a very large rectangular room. And at the end of it was a small metal door covered in a faint glowing energy shield. As Samus approached, the shield vanished and the layers of decorative metal on the door smoothly slid apart like layers of feathers to reveal a passage beyond.

Blocks of pale sandy stone made the walls, gridded with concentric squares of inset metal lines. Past the entry passage, the space opened up and the floor rose up in wide shallow steps of the same stone, under-lit and capped with dark metal. The camber spread as it rose, step by step, until a central plinth against the the far wall stood alone, with sheer expanses above it and to each side. But those expanses of wall were not empty, they were covered in writing carved so deep in the rock their shadow stained the glyphs as black as ink. Nor was the central plinth empty. A throne sat on that heavy square platform and on that throne sat a suit of shining metal.

It was a chozo battle suit, but of a sort Samus had never seen before. Compared to the suits she or the Last wore now this was a masterwork to lumps of clay. They were shadows and this was the truth painted in copper and gold. Unmoving on its throne, the true suit stared down at Samus' approach, every inch of the armor plates sculpted in organic shapes was etched with intricate designs. The line-work was so dense and detailed it tricked the eye, creating the impression of softness even as it shone with a metallic gleam stronger than the hardest steel. The suit gave forth its own light to reflect for from behind those swooping, upswept shoulder pauldrons, some compromise between the Power and Varia suits, ephemeral thin bands of manifested light shone out like the memory of heavenly feathers. The helmet bore the smooth hint of points and ridges behind it, flowing down to below the visor if creating the slightest suggestion of a beak. The weapon that surrounded the right forearm was composed of sinuous lines, deadly metal waves condensing down like spikes until they united at the barrel to form a thing that was the terror of nightmares and the dream of salvation. The suit was the greatest weapon the Chozo had ever created, masterwork of centuries, beyond every ambition of its long conquering empire.

It was sized and shaped for a human woman.

Above it on the walls some long gone Chozo spoke through stone words:

Know your weakness.

The mountain stands before you, waiting with cruel indifference.

The sea stands before you, flexing with endless strength.

The storm stands before your, raging across the sky.

The planet stands before you, melting a heart of fire.

The stars, the galaxies, the clusters, and all infinity stand before you, stretching from the first to the last of time; more foes, more might, more terrible power than any mortal mind can compass.

Before those enemies you are nothing.

Before those enemies you cannot win.

But with this, you can fight.

Samus smiled as she stepped forward. As she walked her battle suit unfolded around her, releasing her inch by inch, almost breathing out as those unfolded sheaths then shimmered and dissolved into light behind her. Motes like shining stars flowed past over Samus' shoulders, sweeping ahead towards the throne while bloody footprints marked the pale stone where she passed. She staggered and shuffled, each low step an endless struggle that tore open wounds and let more red streams trickle down her sides. The stump of her left arm hung stiff at her side, but on her lips was a smile and still she rose, step by step. Her sight blurred as the figure on the throne shifted and expanded, unfolding and opening.

Then she sat on the throne and then she was whole.

...