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omniblades-and-stars · 1 year ago

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Left to Ashes

I wrote this about one of my OCs, a krogan woman who suffered greatly on Tuchanka somewhere in the nebulous and murky time-line before the establishment of the all- female clans on Tuchanka.

I have put the entire thing under the cut because the first part jumps right into dealing with grief over infertility and stillbirth, which may be quite triggering for some, though it is not graphic and is brief.

Anyways, I hope you'll still read it, and enjoy the origin of how my wonderful krogan found her name and her pyjak.

Stillborn.

It was a word known by every krogan female. The poisoned blade that killed by what it left behind. The krogan people died away slowly, generation by generation they lost more of themselves to directionless rage, stoked by the losses borne on the shoulders of their women, and to the virus let loose upon them because in their might and anger they were a threat. Genocide by a thousand cuts, by the millions of stillbirths suffered by her mother, her sisters, her aunts and so on for generations and spanning the entire planet, the one thing that united all krogan.

That day, Jurgal Kuresh joined her sisters in carrying that burden. At first, she looked over her clutch, still in the incubation shelter, completely numb. The shaman droned on, words that she didn't hear. She had tended them so carefully, using the knowledge gained by her foremothers. How could she have poured so much of herself out, and not even one of her children born?

The intact shells mocked her with cruelty she could not bear. Her shame laid bare before her, witnessed by the guiding hand of the shaman. Heat rose from her chest, until it was flames licking behind her eyes, and smoke pouring from her nostrils. It burned away the paralysis, and her lungs became the bellows that fed her fury. The words that fell from her mouth were tangled, incomprehensible, her eyes blinded by tears.

She stormed away, leaving a path of destruction in her wake. She was not the first, and she would not be the last to take out her grief on the crumbling architecture of their home.

It would not be her last time to take out her grief in that way.

___

“I refuse. I will not suffer this insult, and I will not suffer the indignity of the genophage any longer,” Kuresh crossed her arms over her chest and stood defiant before the leader of Clan Doash. The rich crimson hue of her robes was dulled by the dust from the long journey to Doash territory. Her new home. The home she was given to, as though she were a prized piece of machinery, or an expensive weapon. And not a breathing krogan with family and friends, or a will of her own.

The home she was escorted to because they knew she would not go willingly. It was only by virtue of her “honor guard” being made up of her brothers and cousins that she had not turned to violence. A fight she certainly could not win, but had it been anyone else, she would have taken more than one of them with her to the Void, like an honorable krogan should.

This was not honor. This was disgraceful politicking. And she was nothing more than a pawn.

Doash Baxx stood before her, risen from his great stone throne, he almost faded into the background. His skin and plating were a mottled brown, covered in scars from head to toe. He was enormous, and he was old. A great scar cut deep from the crest of his head down through his right eye, all the way down to his neck. A canyon rent into flesh. His lips curled back in a sneer. “You will do as you’re told, woman.”

Kuresh shook her head back and forth, the ancient coins sewn to her ritual head covering clinked softly together. “I will not. And I defy you to make me, Baxx. You may have the rest of your clan cowed to your whims, but you are old and I am not afraid of you.” He certainly could kill her. Even at his age, he was a hulking brute. But she would not go quietly if he pushed her.

Her own death meant nothing to her.

“Jurgal Henk assured me that you would cooperate,” he growled. Baxx knew that should he harm this female, it would likely end with his own clan turning on him. It would provide a perfect opportunity for one of his sons to have just cause for taking his life, instead of turning to base back-stabbing.

“Then Henk lied to you. Take it up with him. I am no fool, I know I cannot go back. I’ll work, but I am not your broodmare,” Kuresh said and she brooked no argument. She turned her back on the towering clan leader and walked out of the sandy arena that served as his throne room. “I’ll be working on your fucking tomkahs if you need me,” she shouted without turning back, leaving the clan leader boiling with rage and disrespected in front of his own clan.

Removed from her family, and with more than a century of failed clutches had left her bitter and full of white hot anger, and she did not care what they thought of her.

Kuresh removed her ceremonial vestments and set them aflame. Never again, she promised herself.

___

Clan Doash was weak. It’s men destroyed and scattered, and it’s women taken for prizes by Clan Jotarok.

Kuresh fought, she spilled krogan blood using guns, blades, her own hands and teeth, but it was not enough to keep her from capture. In her rage she failed to see the krogan coming up from behind her. They grabbed her arms and incapacitated her with some piece of technology she had never seen before. An electric shock tore through her body before she was rendered unconscious.

When she awoke, she was separated from the clan sisters who had been taken with her. Held prisoner in the shell of some building she could not even have guessed at the original purpose of, it was so destroyed. Kuresh rose to her full height, flames licking at her eyes once more, and she bellowed at the guard standing watch over her. He returned her shout with a rumbling laugh.

He did not live to learn to regret mocking her. Kuresh threw her arm out in front of her, violet light fell from her hand and like a wave, it pelted the ground with energy, knocking her guard to the floor. She rushed him, pulled his shotgun free from his hands, and painted the dust with his blood.

A fresco left as evidence of her wrath.

Kuresh made her way out of the compound, and met little resistance along the way. Most of the clan was celebrating noisily and drunkenly further inside. What resistance she met, she returned with the kind of violence and determination that could only be wrought by a woman at the point of her breaking.

With nothing but the clothes on her back and the gun in her hands, Kuresh headed into the wilderness.

She would find her way to one of the larger clans where cargo and transport ships flew supplies in, and aspiring mercenaries out.

Kuresh was leaving.

___

Days passed as she journeyed through the rocky desert, heading east. She survived on the nutrients and fluids in her hump, and one day she stumbled upon a varren den. She ate well that night.

The light from Aralakh was brutal and unrelenting, but she persisted.

As she walked, alone, surrounded by great swathes of empty desert, her rage faded back to grief. Her own family traded her away all of those years ago. The clan they gave her to didn’t care about her if she was not extending her suffering by trying and failing to increase their numbers.

If this was what it was going to be like for her for the rest of her very long life, she was not going to put up with it. Because fuck that.

Tuchanka was not her home, it was her prison. Let it burn itself away.

Days turned to weeks as she slowly made her way on foot. Mirages played out before her eyes, shimmering and wavering images of an oasis. Another day, the mirage took the form of a crumbling temple, with sandstone statues standing watch over its great mouth. Scant greenery climbed its walls.

She continued her march, expecting the ruin to disappear as she moved towards it, but it did not. Kuresh approached it carefully, and walked beneath the enormous entryway, still standing strong despite the ravages of time and nuclear war. The interior gave way to an open air temple standing around a solitary pond, small, but supporting rarely seen greenery and a small colony of pyjaks.

After removing her boots, Kuresh sat down with her feet sunk into the silt beneath the water. She draped her arms over her knees. With her defenses down, and within those sacred and forgotten walls, Kuresh allowed herself to weep. Not the raging, heated rush of tears, but the kind of quiet sobs that rocked her whole body. She mourned for everything she’d ever lost, she mourned the people and the planet that had failed her at every turn.

“Let it all burn. I’ll leave it to fall away to ashes,” she muttered quietly to herself once the tears faded to bitter heat burning at the edges of her eyes. There was nothing mighty or worthy left of her home in those tired, bloodshot eyes.

Exhaustion settled heavy and deep in her bones. She didn’t bother fighting off the sleep that fell upon her. Kuresh dropped heavily to the side, toes still dipped into the warm water, and she dreamed of nothing. When she awoke, a small pyjak, a runt if ever she saw one, was curled up next to her head, its tail flicked out occasionally and brushed under her nose.

She sneezed. The little pyjak squeaked and darted away in a panic, and watched her cautiously from a shelter of pond reeds.

“Damn pyjak,” she grumbled and then sat up to put her boots back on and continue her trek. By her estimation, she would arrive at Clan Urdnot’s borders in the next few days. Assuming she didn’t get eaten by a thresher maw on her way there. From there, she could catch a ride off world, and start somewhere fresh.

As she left the shelter, the curious little pyjak followed after her. “I don’t have food,” she warned the pest and continued moving.

After an hour of walking, she looked behind her to see the animal in the distance, following her still. The blighted creature left its colony to follow after her.

If anyone had asked her why, on that day, she stopped walking and allowed it to catch up with her and climb onto her hump, she wouldn’t have had an answer she could articulate.

Trobror, she called it.

Cinder.

___

The anger that drove Kuresh from Tuchanka faded into the background as time passed by. She learned how to laugh again. She thrived and lived, and struggled only for the things that she believed in. In those struggles, she found her pride and the things that truly made her a krogan.

Well, that and exploding and setting things on fire. She enjoyed doing those long-standing krogan pastimes a great deal.

Many, many years, and thankfully not as many Cinders later, humanity exploded onto the scene. At first, they were just the boogeymen daring to put up a fight against the might of the turian military, but with the end of the First Contact War, suddenly they were everywhere.

It seemed like a lot of the galactic community was put-off, or downright threatened, by humanity. But Kuresh liked them. They were brassy, tenacious, they decided what they wanted to do, and they just did it. You could put four humans in a room and they’d have twenty conflicting opinions about what kind of breakfast cereal to get. They were often contrarian for contrary’s sake, and she was too.

And the food! The day she discovered that humans competed to breed the spiciest peppers a person could eat without suffering a fatal attack from it, and then they would make sauces from them, Kuresh was sold on humanity. They were like tiny, soft, borderline suicidal krogan.

One day, she was in some shitty bar on Omega. She was ripped on bootleg ryncol joking with some haggard human mercenary when he asked her what her name was.

“Kuresh,” she slurred heavily.

“Crash? That cause you’re so big you knock everything over?”

It took a moment for the confusion to pass, but to her drunken senses, that sounded about right. “You know what? Fuck it, yeah, that’s my name and that’s why!” she shouted uproariously and threw her arms out wide, knocking another patron from her stool, and a glass of liquor off the bar.

Like it was destiny.

Or just a coincidence given meaning by an outrageous number of bottles of ryncol ingested over the night.

Then she learned of a human idiom for failure, “Crash and burn.” It seemed fitting, like a shotgun that was exactly the right size for her hands.

The woman, with a pyjak now named Burn on her shoulder and a shotgun with KRANTT scratched into its side held in her hands, took the scars of failure, her own failures, the failures of her home and people, and carried them with pride and good humor.

She would continue to thrive, whether or not the rest of her people were going to thrive with her.

#mass effect #fanfic #ocs #krogan #daisy screaming into the void #once again a character i came up with to draw as a joke has taken a life of their own #and become so so important to me #left to ashes #Crash and Burn

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