Chapter Twenty-five

Bring Back the Light

...

Somewhere high above the black mountains, through a quarter mile of rock bored by tunnels and caverns, with a shift of wind the stormy sky of Zebes momentarily became blue. For a single brief hour, the yellow clouds of ammonia vapor gave way to the gentle blue of nitrogen and sunlight shone down bright and warm onto acid-stained rock. That warmth began a slow ripple, an imperceptible blush through cold stone down to the dark chamber. There, on that hard floor, a warrior of the Chozo knelt in rigid silence before her suit of armor. She was naked but for the chill which clawed at her skin.

Samus did not shiver. Her blue eyes remained on the suit, her stare locked onto that green slash of the visor set in a shining red helmet. The suit's shape was familiar, with jutting shoulder pauldrons and right arm enveloped in a grey metaled gun, and yet it was still uncomfortably strange. Depictions of armored warriors dotted this temple, paintings, engravings, and great statues, yet every one of those fearsome suits was made to hold a chozo body. This armor was built for a human form.

The power suit's back was twisted into a straight posture, its head wrenched up to sit directly on top of the shoulders instead of slung forward like a chozo's. The arms were stubby, fingers on the left hand too short, and the shoulders only given the illusion of width by the flaring yellow pauldrons that jutted out like ineffective airfoils. And the suit was small, smaller than the slightest warrior depicted in all the art of Zebes. Yet for all its strangeness this armor was still one of them. Samus looked at it and she knew; she knew this was the skin of a chozo warrior.

The armor fit her body. It was her task now to reshape her mind.

The hard stone floor pressed against her shins and the tops of her feet. Cold and time smoothly turned patience into pain and her body begged to shift position. She did not. Two shadows loomed in the gloom beside her, Old Bird stood on one hand and Grey Voice on the other. Samus had seen none of the work that went into constructing this armor, but she knew that it had to have been the painstaking labor of a decade. More perhaps. Her instructors, her caretakers, her parents had no facility here designed to do such work; they must have started from scratch, rebuilding a thousand years of chozo industry from the ground up. In this waiting cold, Samus realized they might have started before they ever found her on the desolation of her birth world, gasping for air under a distant plume of smoke.

Now they both stood in silence and watched as the hatchling called Samus approached the final step to become something greater. That armor was still just a thing. She had to make it into her.

Samus slowly blinked and Grey Voice' hand twitched in recognition of that signal. He straightened up and reached to touch the control bracelet on his wrist, executing some precise and delicate operation with the local computers. It took a few moments, since in this deep chamber of the zebes complex Mother Brain was not there to listen and obey, effortlessly shepherding their systems. In this vault there were only three living creatures waiting in silence, the supplicant and the masters.

No, not the masters. They were her parents for this one final moment.

Grey Voice slowly hissed through his beak, soft and breathy. All the same, his voice cut through the heavy air. "I was a child, harmless and ignorant, and then that self ended."

On Samus' other side, Old Bird followed, his own voice clipped and curt but always so strong. "I was a child, innocent and useless. Then that self ended."

The instant Old Bird stopped, Grey Voice began again, reciting the litany of his lives, reciting the epitaphs of who they once had been.

"I was a philosopher, I uncovered traps within thought and the unintended consequences of the unwary. I was a philosopher, I did not step forth to aid those I studied. And then that self ended."

Old Bird continued, "I was a warrior of the empire. I was brave. I was cruel. And then that self ended."

"I dedicated myself to a cause. I put aside personal pleasure. I watched my people dwindle. And then that self ended."

"I sought absolution. I dedicated myself to peace. I abandoned those in need. And then that self ended."

"I was alone."

"I was alone."

"I joined comrades. I chased a singular obsession."

"I found allies. I stopped searching."

They joined in unison, their deep voices rising and rebounding on the hard stone walls. "And then that self ended."

Grey Voice said, "I found a hatchling lost and afraid, raised her and bestowed on her many gifts. I found a hatchling, and changed her horribly. And now that self has ended."

Old Bird said, "I found a hatchling burned and bloody. I gave her love. I brought her pain. And now that self has ended."

Samus slowly rose from the stony floor, forcing away the tremble in her legs, forcing away the pain in her throat, the burning in her eyes. Everything in her life had led up to here. All her loss, all her pain, her loneliness and her fear, it had all been meant to forge her. All she had lost, all she had found, all she stood to lose yet again. This was the Path, and she trod upon it without a single look behind her.

She breathed in and took a step away from her past, away from her family. But to her surprise, Old Bird's hand shot out to clamp down around her forearm, holding her back for one last moment. However, it was Grey Voice who spoke next, retreated out of the room as he did so.

"Little one, this breadth of these years is the brightest span of my duration. Brightest by far, because I share them with you. But now something new begins. This is the last instant of our existence as your caretakers."

His footsteps retreated further into the darkness of the exit tunnel and Samus' back tensed in fear and loss. The pain in her throat fought to return again. They were both supposed to be beside her for this, this last moment during which they would be her parents. How could Grey Voice leave now?

But then Grey Voice's dry coughing laugh echoed from the tunnel, answering her unvoiced thought. "I grieve too, child. But I cannot complete this ceremony with you. Only one who has killed another in hate can bestow the power of death. For who else could understand the cost?"

He left. Samus and Old Bird stood together in the shadows before the gleaming power suit. Old Bird's hand still gripped Samus' arm and through his fingers she could feel the invisible tremors; the sorrow and pride and fear. She could feel the thousand years of life and she could feel the strength that waned as wisdom waxed. And she could feel his love, cold and desperate.

His grip tensed as his beak moved, as if he was trying to force a message through the walls of reality itself, in this last moment before Samus experienced the challenge of the armor.

"You must take control. We have seen the path ahead. A universe of darkness and of cold. We have seen where the path leads. You must too, in time."

Samus nodded in the smallest angle as shivers traveled down her bare skin. It was another same message of impermanence, of the doctrine of the Chozo. The past and present were the same as the future. It was all part of the path.

Old Bird let go of her arm but in the corner of Samus' awareness she thought that in that final moment she felt sorrow and desperation of his grip intensify. As if she had not actually understood. But there would be time for that. Another life awaited, as equals instead of family.

He whispered one last time. "You must see."

She took another step away from him and the suit of armor opened up before her. The plates of red and yellow slid back to reveal a smooth inner layer of pale blue. Then that too peeled back, exposing the final heart of the suit, the narrow outline of a humanoid form, a hollow waiting to be filled. It waited for her to step inside.

She turned and lined her back up with that perfect mirror of her shape. She closed her eyes. Then she stepped back into it. She touched the suit and in that instant a scream beyond pain scoured her thoughts away. Invisible mental hooks bit into her mind and tore it apart as the world twisted. Suddenly a disgusting pustule of blood and bile hung before her, a rotting cancer skewered on slick spears of bone. Then thought returned and Samus realized that vision was her own humanoid body, seen from the suit's perspective.

It was not her.

But the psychic hooks dug in and tore once more. Now a cold mechanical abattoir loomed behind her, needles to stab into her spine, tubes to steal her blood, bonds to restrain her, motors to animate her corpse, and a lurking artificial intellect to subsume anything that might make her real. Anything in that blender would cease to exist, assimilated consumed by unknowable machinery. So the human body feared the armor.

It was not her.

The scream echoed again, through air and through radio waves, from lungs and from transmitters. Tears ran down someone's cheeks. Electricity arced and spasmed in the barrel of someone's weapon. But then someone remembered. Someone remembered training; remembered perseverance, strength, and understanding. She remembered the love that was standing right beside her. Then Samus once more stood in the dark stone room. And now she was whole.

She did not see, she could barely hear, but Old Bird was at her side and he whispered.

"Now, open your eyes."

...

Blue eyes blinked open.

Samus stood in the the highest chamber of the Temple of the Hunter, bathed in golden light behind the giant eyes of the Chozo statue. A hundred yards away, the Last stood in her own armor and stared back, framed by the tangled golden web of the Apotheosis Gate and the jumble of technology she had forced her mad devotees to carry here. Through the great pointed eclipses of the statue's glowing eyes, filled with the haze of some powerful shield, Samus could see out to the night beyond. The rolling mountain slopes of empty stone gave way to the slashes of canyons as the ground slowly fell away.

Warm light brushed against her armor and Samus felt a tear begin to dry on the cheek beneath her eye. She answered a person long gone and yet still beside her. "I see."

The Last hissed back from behind the arch of golden wire, the Apotheosis Gate, "You are blind."

Walking among the jumble of equipment looted from across the temple, she was armored just as Samus had been prior to this newest suit. The Last's red helmet with a slash of green visor was slung forward between the almost sphere-like shoulders. A familiar round-barreled weapon, banded with smooth grooves, shifted mechanically as it transitioned between selected beam modes. None of those new black additions that now clung to the armor's exterior like metallic lampreys could disguise that essential shape.

But more familiar by far was the anger. Despite the armor that shielded and empowered her, the Last trembled with the fury of justice denied. Samus recognized that fury; she had felt it so many times before.

And the stoking force was plain to see. In the upper reaches of this massive oval room, a band of shining cooper circled the ceiling like an engraved halo. The text on it was clear, and after the Last's long journey of doubt and discover, to read it here would have stabbed like obsidian knives.

"The last child of the Chozo, we welcome you. We who write this do not know you, yet still we have met you, striding through our halls, blazing with purest light. Where will we find you? We do not know. Who will you be? We cannot see. But still we know you, and still we love you. For you will be our solace or our absolution."

Beneath that cruelly ambiguous phrasing, the Last ran a gauntlet clad hand across her pile of machines and boiled with anger. Samus easily saw that gesture's meaning, the Last no longer believed the planet's prophecy was meant for her. The boots of the Last's armor clanked softly as she stepped up onto one particular piece of newly installed technology, a circular platform like a half built cylinder. Her limbs dragged like they were filled with lead.

Samus felt her own weariness after long battle and heartache, but more than that she felt her strength. She felt the strength of this place, of this moment.

She said, "There is-"

The Last raised her weapon and fired a charged plasma beam as her opening remark.

Samus just barely dodged, suit jets flaring as she burst to the side. The Last did not stop firing, even as that machinery around her began to glow with pulsing bands of blue and yellow light as if reacting to the violence. Then a screaming hail of missiles followed her first attack, as the pulsing light flowed out to fill other pieces of machinery.

Samus' return fire flashed out, a searing line of white, but halfway across the room the beam splashed in mid air against a glowing orange honeycomb pattern that materialized into sight. Samus narrowed her eyes. Cloaked one-way energy shields, another one of the Last's technological surprises. That explained at least some of her confidence at standing in plain sight on that strange metal platform. It looked for all the world like a recharge-and-record station.

Then the Last said a single word, "Simulate."

A pulse of blue energy surged out from the crackling spikes around her platform and instantly she jumped forward at Samus in full assault, charging across the room with a fury and courage Samus had never seen before. Samus met her armored attack, shooting missile rounds out of the air as she waited for the moment the Last's berserk charge brought her over the line of the one-way shield. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Samus noticed the very distracting fact that the Last was also still standing on that glowing metal platform behind the Gate.

There were two of the Last, identical in every way, except for the fact that only one of them was trying very hard to shoot Samus to death right now. This Last was fierce, free of the fear of death that had ruled her in every prior moment. However, while the ancient chozo scientist might have once been a combat threat, that was no longer the case.

Samus breathed out smoothly. The peace of her mind danced her along the prescient path while the strength of her golden suit allowed her to execute that foresight perfectly. Two suits of armor clashed in harmony. The momentum of the impact carried Samus a little further away from the Gate, but a moment later a charged beam shot intersected the attacking Last's head and her suit shields shattered, leaving the rest to collapse to the smoking floor, missing an arm and head.

Then the dead copy of the Last began to dissolve into motes of blue light. Samus whipped her head up to look at the original, still standing on her platform behind a short path of glowing struts like slaloms that sparked with excess electricity.

The Last looked down at her own dissolving body without a hint of distress or disappointment. "You understand nothing. Simulate."

The blue light surged once more and a second manifestation of the Last burst forward. Then another copy followed right behind, launched down the same corridor of arcing electric struts like slugs down a rail gun. Instantly, Samus was fighting two chozo in full battle armor. However, it became clear something was odd about this. Well, more odd. One of these summoned copies was repeating the exact motions it had during its first assault, despite the fact that Samus' position no longer matched.

Then she realized; it was a replay. The other copy still followed Samus' movements but after only a few more embattled seconds the Last's body slammed against the floor once more.

And yet the Last's words still filled the room, bitter and angry. "You understand nothing at all. Not even simple probability. Simulate. Simulate, simulate, simulate."

Samus grimace. The Last was brute-forcing real time strategy, seeking victory through probability. The Probability Cannon hummed and surged, launching forth a new storm of identical opponents. These duplicates could not cooperate, it did not even see as if they could perceive each other's existence, but nevertheless there were now dozens of chozo battle suits and the air soon began to resemble a missile-and-plasma-beam themed circle of hell. An endless hail of firepower poured out in every direction.

Samus began to run out of places to dodge. Then she failed to kill the earliest manifestations swiftly and the instant their internal clocks ticked past their initial death these copies ceased to function as dumb obstacles and snapped back into being able to see Samus perfectly well. All while more and more duplicates charged forward to join this increasingly absurd battle.

Samus might win again and again, but the Last only had to win once. Samus' death would stick.

At the other end of the huge room, the Last finally stepped down from the central station of the Probability Cannon and began to shift once more through her tangled nest of equipment that sprawled beside the dais of the Gate like an industrial octopus. Holographic indicators and displays shimmered at her every gesture, suit systems doing their part to transform her every will into action. But her motions were full of desperation, fumbling with the need to work ever faster.

The Last's voice over coms was almost a whisper. "I hate you. And I hate my hate for you. You, a creature who treats opening doors like an elaborate puzzle, you were chosen and guided by a thousand years of prophecy, given the fruit of millennia of my civilization's labor like a feather dropped into the dust. It is despicable irony. I hate you because of a prophecy set down by my kin to aid you in your battle against me, a battle that now takes place only because the efforts to stop me are themselves the motivation for my acts. Our enmity is a fixed circle in time. So I despise my useless hate, and yet cannot escape it because you are here to kill me."

Samus spared a few breaths in the fight for her life with two dozen duplicates. "There are other paths. I could just destroy the gate."

Anger crashed back down, rasping the Last's throat in vicious fury. "Magnified injustice, and that would only delay my murder. Immortality is my right, but there is no permanence in this physical world. Far less than any of you young races think. I told you I have been reading. I now know why the others fled. I know what they were running from. They solved the Dark Matter mystery. They knew what is waiting in the void of space, what is coming for all who remain. They learned where the stars all go, and they were terrified."

In the midst of her chaotic battle, Samus sprang off a wall, jets flaring across her back in phantasmal wings as her right arm ached with the constant dull thud of recoil. Dark matter. It was a riddle as ancient as space flight itself, a question with a thousand unsatisfying answers. It was a simple observation, by their paths through space all the galaxies were heavier than the light of their stars accounted for. But the chozo had apparently found an answer. And the Last was right, it was terrifying.

The Last said, "It was simple after all. The stars were there. But they have been removed, turned to black and heatless lumps before their light could reach us. And now the star-eaters are coming here. The doom is coming for this galaxy and this golden gate it my only chance to escape."

And it didn't matter. That realization jolted through Samus' chest like a painful cough of laughter. The grand mystery of this planet, of the chozo themselves and their disappearance, and it didn't matter. Not now; not to this confrontation.

The Last had given an explanation, not an excuse. She had still demonstrated that she was not a person who could be trusted with power, and she was here seeking ultimate power. She admired cruelty, and so she must be stopped. All the reasons beyond that would come later. She must be stopped. That was perfect certainty, the straight line around which the Path would bend.

The Last's helmeted head snapped up from her hurried work once she noticed a new silence replacing the roar of weapon fire. The far half of the great room was hidden by smoke flattening against the energy shield. The back smoke glowed across the floor from a sickly blue light where two dozen chozo bodies slowly returned to nothing. And in the center of that steam and smoke, another light approached. It strode out of the fog of war, golden-white like two great wings. But once it reached the invisible shield wall, only a figure remained, in armor of gold and red and silver.

Samus stopped just before the shield barrier, smoke and light billowing at her back. Her helmet tilted ever so slightly as she studied the Last, who unconsciously shifted a step back to half hide behind the shadow of one of her larger machines.

Samus said, "I understand something now. Before you awoke from your sentence you had never committed murder."

"Do not judge me by your primitive standards, creature. You know first hand I am perfectly willing to execute sacrifices."

Samus did not shake her head as she stood before the shield, that was a human gesture. Instead she cocked her head and slightly spread the fingers of her left hand in almost sympathetic negation, the way a chozo would.

"No. Not killing. A falling stone can do that. Murder. Death fueled by hate. You do not understand that act and yet on this planet you created it, you embodied it. You sought that power hungrily and gave it carelessly. The metroids, the pirates, your own weapons against me; you never truly understood what you were unleashing. Even the Life Energy Equation, the heart of the Chozo, it is the epiphany of an innocent, arriving to one unblinded by worship of life. In you, the ability to bestow death arrived before the wisdom to regard it, and so when you discovered true hate you were trapped. I understand that now."

The Last hissed back in a bitter sneer. "Then am I judged absolved?"

"No." Samus drew back her right arm, silver weapon gleaming. "You are not."

She punched forward at the shield and burning light burst from the barrel of her weapon in the same instant. Fire and light exploded out, roiling across the force field that blazed into visibility and shuddered under the assault. Then Samus drew back her arm again.

"You are not absolved."

The temple trembled under another explosive blow.

"And there will be no more sacrifices."

If electricity could scream, the force field across the room now wailed in agony. Another blow rang down, and another. The Last's gauntlet fingers danced frantically through computer commands and ribbons of energy-absorption fields manifested to try and dampen the assault but it was too much. Samus and her suit were one, the legacy of the chozo race, their final incarnation and their second birth. They shone like the sun, blinding all that clawed against her.

Then two things happened in the same instant. The shining spear of Samus' weapon lanced forward once more, and this time the explosion broke the barrier. But in the same flicker of time, a chozo finger twitched to select a virtual key, executing a final line of code, and a rich golden light began to rise up through the ornate tangle of the Gate.

The same word escaped from both Samus and the Last. It was a whisper, a gasp. "No!"

The great force field shattered and Samus bolted forward. From every direction she could feel an immense current of energy flowing through the temple, the massive energy capacitors she had passed now all awakening into their true purpose. The golden light of the Apotheosis Gate began to ripple as it sucked in power. The space within the Gate darkened towards pure black as if light and reality itself were escaping, and the Last burst forward towards it. But the ground began to shake and rock under their feet.

Both armored figures staggered in their desperate sprints as the solid temple floor swayed like a giant waking up.

...

Kiber-2272 stumbled as the stone floor of the tunnel rocked beneath his feet while he ran. He yelped in surprise over his panting, "Did you feel that?"

Zegar-1161 did not bother looking over, he just kept running through the dark hallways of the chozo fortress. He said, "It is raining dust and a piece of the ceiling just fell back there. Yes, I felt that."

2272 clamped his mandibles shut and tried to herd his frightened thoughts back together. There were two dozen other hive-brood running with them, all just as half-cooked from the humans' battleship attack, refugees desperate enough to take 2272's own two-day survival record as leadership credentials. However, even the most rattled could put together that their flight into the chozo fortress was taking them towards the source of this new shaking. And towards all the enemies.

Sure enough, one of them said, "Ummm..."

2272 hissed, "Shut up, Voctum-whoever you are!"

No, the group needed strength, it needed control. If 2272 had learned anything about leadership from Ridley, the Chozo, and the Hunter Aran, he just needed to pick something and make everyone do it. "The plan still stands, we follow the lines that sucked up all the energy from the battleship main cannon, see where it went and then use that power to protect ourselves from everyone."

One of the other refugees added, "But the metroids also came this same-"

"And they're faster than us so we won't run into them. See, perfect reasoning!"

Privately, 2272 suspected that it wasn't but was not about to admit those doubts in his own reasoning. Honestly, for someone who had not torpored in three days he was doing pretty well.

Thankfully, right now Zegar-1161 was actually helping maintain order, leading this sprinting pack with his characteristic single minded focus. Then he opened his mouth.

"I think I recognize that humming sound."

The hum was currently loud enough to make blood seep from his ear vents bt Zegar-1161 still looked back and met 2272's eyes with a familiar feverish cheer. He had evidently found a new idea. "I've figured it out. The whole volcano is a spaceship and the Hunter is going to fly it into the sun, as part of her conspiracy with the cyborg zombies and the fake computers."

2272 was surprised to discover that he could sigh while panting at a full run. At least if he died they would all come with him.

...

The command bridge of the Diomedes was chaos, for more reasons than just the fact that artificial gravity had not yet been reestablished. Across the floor's seventy degree tilt, the remaining crew fumbled with their computers from their crash chair embraces. The mutiny had left everything confused, more so by the fact that the emergency landing meant some of the people still at those stations might have been supporters of Nakamura who just happened to value their task above speaking up right now.

Yin was not sure why she was there on the bridge. Well, she knew why she was there but that did nothing to assuage the heart-sinking adrenaline crash she currently suffered under as she realized she had just initiated a military crime that could still carry a death sentence. She was here on this bridge because the convoluted logic string she and the Adam-program had set up meant the planet's Aurora Unit could circumvent Nakamura's nominal command by rerouting all her communications as messages to Samus Aran which arrived to Diomedes via Yin's personal coms.

Aurora Unit 926 continued to relay its grim news, "My new hardwire access to the temple systems via Aran's cable is holding steady but these tremors are increasing. The source is from the unexplored upper rear section of the temple around the great chozo statue. The frequency is indicative of the startup procedure for battleship-grade antimatter generators. Five of them, and I am unaware of what this system might be powering. As of now it only seems primed to collapse the temple complex as what I must assume is a side effect."

Yin was not sure anyone was even listening. Most of the crew were still trying to deal with the crisis on board the crashed ship, while others had just recently made contact with a group of colonist survivors in the town. The face of man named Mathew Hernandez filled many of the bridge displays, but the rest of the screens showed only that great ominous statue looming on the dark slopes of the mountain under the haze clouded night sky. The massive stone chozo sat with one outstretched hand, its eyes now shining yellow out into the shadowed world.

Then a rippling wave of dust burst out on that mountain side. Landslides shifted the rocky scree on the volcano slopes and from underneath the shape of architecture began to emerge as if the earthquake was excavating buried ruins. Above this all the great statue shed a thin film of dust as it shook, then a large piece of the outstretched arm cracked and cleaved off.

Even underneath her exhaustion and her fear, Yin still felt space to mourn the destruction of something ancient and beautiful. But the statue was not destroyed. A stretch of the stony arm had fallen off but it was like a shed stone skin and underneath the shell was another layer of some stronger substance. In the false color of the ship's low light sensors it was hard to tell, but it looked like shining gold.

Aurora murmured her analysis, funneled through Yin's own ears. "The answer is there, in the temple technology. No, I cannot see it. I can touch it but this system is too vast, too complex even for me. But something has been activated. The planet's secret has been awakened. Samus Aran did not stop it. She is lost."

Yin whispered, her voice not even reaching her own ears. "No. I trust her."

Aurora heard and said, "If Samus Aran is still alive, it will only be for seconds more. The Chozo's metroid army will arrive at the temple summit in one minute."

...

Samus' feet slammed against the bronze plate floor as she raced towards the Apotheosis Gate. Around her, the huge oval room rumbled and shook as that arch of thin wire sticks shone with golden light. But the space within that arch was now a dead and lightless black, deeper somehow than the void of space as light escaped from the universe.

Air burned around Samus as her speed increased, oxygen bursting to flame, but the Last had less distance to travel. She would reach the gate first. Behind this tableau, the great windows of the statue eyes still glowed softly as their shields let in the view of the dark sloping landscape beyond. The canyon web, the crashed ship, the ash choked colony, and a black sky flecked with the few hardiest stars.

A second passed and Samus' suit gathered energy. Glowing ripples passed across the engraved armor plates and a terrible burning light began to fill the barrel of her gun. It was the hyper beam; her final attack. Once that power reached its peak, the distance to the gate would not matter, all that precious technology would be destroyed. On the other side of that gold-rimmed iris of the Apotheosis Gate, the Last's lesser suit shone too as she ran, and a glare of the same fierce light gathered in her weapon barrel as well. But it gathered power more slowly. She could not stop Samus' forthcoming attack. The Last would not reach the gate and she could not protect it. Another second ticked by.

The Last whispered a single, desperate word. A plea. "Time."

There was only one way forward for her, and to Samus' despair the Last saw it. Samus could feel the Path slide into its groove as the Last began to spin back instead of continuing her sprint. Blazing energy charged in the chozo's gun barrel and she turned it towards the great slash of the window behind her. She turned her weapon to the world outside, and the distant dented metal of the Diomedes.

The Last understood sacrifices.

Samus' suit did not need to be told what to do now. It knew her will, just as the Last did. The charged energy winked out of Samus' gun barrel and surged back across her armor, exploding out the booster jets. In a single blink, instead of firing, Samus expended that energy to bolt forward across the space and slam to a halt in front of the window. In that instant she stood braced before the world, as the Last's weapon swelled with blinding fire. Samus knew there was no more time to gather more energy, no more chance to regret the decisions she did not mean to make. After all, she could never have made any others.

The Last screamed as she fired her hyper beam. Samus breathed out as she fired her own.

The world turned to fire as those two beams collided. Samus' suit was more advanced, more powerful, but she had spent too much of the charged energy on her final sprint. Her beam was almost swallowed by the blinding assault, just barely beating back her annihilation for a single second.

Battered by the fury of an erupting sun, Samus said to her suit, "Unleash all restraints."

The armor gave answer. Power exploded out the mouth of her weapon, driving back the wall of blinding death with a new column of pure white light. The armor shone with endless glowing threads and behind her the winglike vents of light flared to a greater size than ever before, twice her height in each direction. But even in that moment of glory Samus could feel the cost of those restraints. She could feel the knives across her body and knew what this moment of power was taking its toll. She was burning her own life as fuel.

The Last staggered back, still firing even as she braced her feet against the steps up to the Apotheosis Gate. Her arm trembled under the godly fury of her weapon, but she too knew this was the final clash. Her suit was already almost drained of power, and the shoulder pauldrons began to crumple in shimmers of light as their matter was cannibalized for energy. But those new additions the Last had made, the black metallic lampreys fastened to the surface of the armor, now all shone at the tips of their tails. And the Last's failing suit suddenly strengthened, drawing on a new source of energy; the temple around her. The Last was not forced back.

She screamed over the roar of dueling nuclear fires. "You cannot take my right! This place is mine! This place is me! And I will burn it all to stop you!"

Samus' eyes were useless against the burning light, but she could still feel glimmers of the world beyond this crucible. She could feel the technologies the Last had tapped into. The temple groaned in protest, but its ancient systems had been suborned and they now fed energy straight to the Last, a roaring river of power vanishing into the voracious pit of her hyper beam's demand. Shimmering ribbons of energy absorption fields closed in from the walls around them, compacting their blazing crash into a single bottle of contained apocalypse, every extra shred fed straight back to the Last's attack.

But the Last drew still more, and the temple shuddered from her command. In the distance, at the rear of the great room, entire bulkheads shimmered and began to dissolve, matter converted into energy, energy flung forth from the Last's outstretched hand.

And Samus was driven back.

Her foot slid against the cracked and melting floor, another inch towards the great window behind her. Another second towards failure. And at the other end of the great room, where the walls shimmered with pockmarks, a new scream joined the roar of the fire and the wailing beams. The great turbine cap of the pit-shaft fell away, tumbling down the direction Samus had entered, and from those depths boiled a swarm of demons.

They were of every shape, this legion of hell: the twisted life-energy clones, bloody berserkers of the Pirate elites, and beneath them all a rising swarm of claws and crackling fangs; the metroids in all their thousands. Each of those factions tore at each other, ripping and slashing at anything that got in their way or held them back, but they were all drawn ahead, pulled towards their target amid the neutron star beam clash that shook the world. Samus was their only goal. The roiling current of monsters endlessly clawing each other back and the fight slowed their charge, but the screaming hoard still moved forward. They would arrive in moments and it would not matter who killed her.

Samus limbs begged to buckle. Her suit's unleashed power, its hunger gnawed at her brain and Samus felt her thoughts waver. The certainty of the path flowed backwards into memory.

Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All divisions are illusion.

Samus had already committed her body to this fight. She burned her life for fuel, gave up the matter of her body and her armor freely in every moment, and still it was not enough. But thought was energy too.

This was not just a clash of technology, a test of weapons. This was mind against mind, will against will. It had always been, since the first moment when Samus heard the name Diomedes and felt a new player swirling the fate of the galaxy. Now they crouched here, each pushed back by the fury of this new star forged by their clashing beams. The Last had made monsters, she had made armies, she had made miracles of time and space and power. Samus had made only herself.

She understood. And the balance shifted.

The Last's panic was palpable. Just seconds until her army arrived. Just seconds until victory was assured. But was was time to an immortal? What was time to justice? What were seconds before the weight of perfect certainty?

The Last's fear thrashed through the temple systems, searching for more power, but where before she had forced subservience, now she found resistance. She had scraped the surface dry but those massive banks of stored energy siphoned directly from the planet's core were somehow blocked off. They only fed the start-up of the massive reactors and the power of those reactors were barred to her. The reactors were not even fueling the apotheosis gate. No, five massive antimatter reactors grouped tightly in these strange upper halls of the temple and none of that power even touched anything about this climax burning inside the final room, splitting and stabbing through reinforced plating like a memory of fog. The temple saved its greatest power for something else, as if there would be anyone left to continue.

The Last and Samus both staggered back against the force of the beam clash, both bracing their right arms as they held back the fires of destruction. The wave of monsters clawed still closer, and one by one the other factions within it fell to the hunger of the metroids, the ultimate hunters.

The Last stumbled up the last step towards the shining golden halo of the Gate. Then in the blazing shifting chaos, her heel claw touched against the rippling darkness within the gate and in that instant a new power rolled through her. She screamed as she found the energy she had sought. And she continued screaming as the shadow inched towards her.

The Last had tapped into the energy of the Gate itself. She could be consuming the departed chozo themselves for all Samus knew, but the Last had no choice or she did not care.

The metal of Samus' armor, engraved until it looked woven, it was her body, it was her skin. But now under the onslaught of these dueling hyper beams, it slowly peeled back as the armor sacrificed itself to maintain the attack, bit by bit. Under the roar of pain and thunder Samus felt the touch of fire against pallid living flesh as the suit slowly retreated, sacrificing matter for another moment of energy. Sacrificing flesh for another second of time.

And it wasn't enough. The green crystal of Samus' visor split with a crack inaudible under the roar of the clashing beams, and burning fire leaked through, searing one eye to blindness. The suit wasn't enough. Her life wasn't enough. All her strength, all her will, all the preparation of the chozo and the prophecy and the path; it still wasn't enough.

A tired smile touched her lips. Oh well.

Then all the fires winked out. In the same instant both hyper beams vanished, as simultaneously as they had been fired.

In this abrupt anticlimax Samus collapsed forward, falling to her knee as the overwhelming force she had braced against was suddenly gone. The two weapons had just given out. Apparently the hyper beam reaction had some inherent time limit; even if the power source was an entire dimension of altered existence. The Last's beam had hit the same barrier. Who knew? No one had ever fired them at each other before.

And no one would again. Flakes of golden dust fell on the blackened floor around where Samus kneeled. That dust was her armor, landing here and there on jagged melted lines drawn on the metal plate by stray energy bursts. The suit of her people, the final gift of the chozo race, the last armor had spent itself. Samus' sight slowly returned in blotchy strobing colors and through those afterimages she dimly made out thin golden bands that now stretched along her naked limbs, both the organic right and the crystalline-metallic left arm. That was all of her suit that remained, all it could preserve with what merger dregs of power left. Sight returned unevenly and she realized her right eye was blind as well, but in the face of everything else that was insignificant.

Then she raised her head and leaned back. The Last stood above her, one foot onto the top step of the dais of the Apotheosis Gate, and her armor was still whole. Tapped into all those foreign energies, she had not not been forced to burn her own body in the fight.

The golden halo of the Gate shone out around the Last, and the blackness within seemed to bulge out, beckoning the Last to come and seize her prize. Behind the gate, and in every other direction, the temple walls were now invisible, hidden instead by the seething mass of a seemingly infinite swarm of metroids. The creatures raced around them like a tornado, tumbling over each other as their fangs stretched hungrily over their screaming. But none of them breached the circle of empty space that surrounded Samus and the Last. They were waiting for an order.

The Last had nothing more standing in her way. A single step separated her from her goal, and an army of metroids guarded her back. But instead of walking through the gate, energy and burning light began to gather in the barrel of her weapon once again. A final attack.

She looked down at Samus in her ruined skeleton of a suit kneeling before the glowing window of the statue eye. "There was never any other ending than this."

Samus raised her head and said, "No, there wasn't."

The force of inevitability lay heavy in the air. The Last was not content with victory, she desired vengeance. She desired murder. The path of the next hyper beam would be the same as the first, and in the distance behind Samus, lay the crashed halls of the battleship Diomedes and beyond that the broken remains of the colony city and its desperate human survivors. And at this single point in the middle was a woman, standing between the innocent and the guilty.

Samus stood up. The suit was in tatters, weaponless and drained of all its energy. The only reason Samus was not standing in a pool of blood was that her newest wounds had been seared closed. But still she stood. Charged energy shone like a star at the end of the Last's weapon barrel. Nothing could stop it, but Samus still raised her hands to meet it. She braced her feet against the jagged floor, preparing to do the impossible, catch oblivion in her hands.

The Last murmured quietly, "You want to die like a warrior. Like the greatest of our people, fighting beyond the end."

Then the hate returned to her voice. "No. Not even that."

Her right arm raised, aiming the glowing weapon, and on her left, the metallic gauntlet shone with a softer light as it retreated from her hand, exposing fine feathers and long fingers capped in black nails. The hand gestured at the encircling swarm of metroids, wafting the smell of their creator and carrying commands coded into the design of their genetics.

"Feast."

The swirling tornado of metroids froze, halting on the ground and in the air, on spear-like legs and levitation alike. For an instant Samus felt a trill of hope, quiet theories of her own power, and the nature of her blood. Then the nearest metroid charged forward and plunged its long fangs deep into Samus' side.

The Last tilted her head at the violence, relishing in Samus' agony as the rest of the swarm metroids descended and pounced. But to Samus' surprise, that agony did not come. Underneath the pain of the puncture wounds from that first bite, instead of the tearing agony of molecules being ripped apart by a reaper field, Samus felt an impossible surge of warmth. Her mind swayed and she was seized with a sudden total awareness of metroid that bit into her side. She could feel its intent, it had not come at the Last's call. She could feel every inch of its strange bulbous body, and she could feel where its body touched the next metroid that pressed against it, and the next, on and on into the swarm. She could feel each one of them, and like a conduit, power flowing through, the raw power of life.

A power that was willingly offered to their queen.

The light in the Last's gun barrel surged to its final crescendo and then she released the trigger. In the same instant, Samus grit her teeth. She pulled deep on the hunger inside her and felt energy blaze through her veins, charging out from every cell like her blood was replaced with fire. Golden light exploded on her skin as the suit took in that energy and converted it into matter, armor leaping back to existence. White light erupted from Samus' hand as the molten silver spikes of the weapon barrel reformed and her hyper beam slammed forth.

The two beams clashed with an impact of light, but this time there was no struggle. Samus' armor was fully reformed with limitless energy, the raw force of life raged through it from the linked metroid swarm. Shining wings blazed out behind her, stark white against the writhing backdrop of packed metroids.

The Last struck out with with all the stolen energy of this world and that of the world beyond the gate, but energy was an illusion. The armor protected her, the hardest configuration of matter known in this universe, but matter was an illusion. She was driven by a mind of brilliance and determination and hate, but those thoughts were an illusion.

Time itself was an illusion. Far away on another world, another Samus stood in a dark cave as an egg hatched and a tiny infant metroid drifted its way unsteadily up into the air. In another time, in another place, another Samus collapsed before the furious might of the mutated Mother Brain, armor shredded under the biocomputer's blazing weapons, but with the infant metroid beside her. Another woman lay on an operating table, the last remains of that slain infant finding their way to heal a shattered body once again. And one last woman stood here, amid a swarm of metroids that recognized their queen and so gifted her with their future. The throne of the ultimate hunter, who had consumed the first of their kind. The power of the M'troid.

Amid the fire and fury Samus shifted her stance and punched forward with bulging muscles as she roared, arm inching forward as she pushed the blinding blazing beam with all her might, with all the might of every moment of her past. A thousand blonde women looked up from the past and turned blue eyes to meet her struggle. Every moment of her life gave her strength, every wound gave her experience, every step carried her here.

Nothing could force her back. She was braced against existence itself.

Then that voice of Adam, of Grey Voice, of Old Bird, of all of them together returned at once and filled her ears in an exquisite roar. A final message in the final moment:

"Samus Aran! We who have dedicated ourselves to the supremacy of thought have forgotten the strength of the body. We have forgotten the burning fire of life, that flame which ignited against cold oblivion. Now, our child, our successor, our superior; remind us why we first rose from the darkness! Remind the universe by blood and by pain! By the strength of your hand, bring back the light!"

And the clash was broken. Samus' hyper beam punched forward, splitting its opposition apart like paper, and then the great beam slowly wound down and vanished. The dissipating trail terminated in the rippling darkness of the apotheosis gate, all that energy vanished to wherever all energy went. On the other side of that doorway, maybe someone received it.

In front of the glowing gate, a body fell, armor clattering against the metal steps. And then the body moved. An orange gauntlet hand reached out, long fingers scratching feebly against the floor. The Last's arm that had held her weapon was gone above the shoulder, her helmet cracked and shredded. But she was strong, and even now she clung to life, desperate and fumbling through yet another plan. Her half-burned head twitched as her mind raced for some escape, even if she could not move, even if she could not speak.

Samus stepped forward. She raised her arm, but it was not the one that bore her weapon. Instead she raised her left hand and above the palm a light shone in the air as a small metallic crystal covered in burning glyphs emerged from behind the air. The emergency release key, that the Last herself had procured. Underneath that floating key, the golden metal of Samus' gauntlet began to involuntarily retreat, leaving only the wire and crystal mesh of her artificial hand. As she continued walking, the rest of the suit followed, armor plates quietly folding away into light as they unfolded into a space behind the air.

Then Samus Aran knelt at the foot of the steps to the Gate and in the presence of the key the Last's armor also began to separate and unfold. The wounded chozo tried to squirm away, panting in weakness and pain, but without the sheltering embrace of the armor she could barely force her lungs to breath. One wide and bloodshot yellow eye looked up with fear at one blue eye staring down.

Samus reached down and gently lay her right hand against the Last's chest. Samus fingers felt soft feathers and skin too weary to flinch. And then Samus spoke, her voice soft.

"Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. That is the heart of the chozo, and that is your creation. In that moment, long ago, that creator still exists, and she is glorious. In that moment, she is immortal. I will not let the universe forget her."

Then the yellow eye lost its fear. The spasmed breathing began to grow weaker under Samus' hand.

Samus said, "Tell me her name."

But no sound came. Instead, the breathing stopped and in that moment Samus felt a sensation of warmth begin to travel up her arm. She breathed out slowly and let the sensation of hunger flow through her body.

So it was that the Last Chozo died, flowing on a path of her own genius, life transformed into energy.

Then the last chozo stood back up, the burned scar of her right eye slowly healing as the energy of life flowed within her. Above her, the Gate waited to give her the final answers.

…