"You went into danger knowing what you were doing. You were willing to die. You were pregnant."
"John." She hardly heard herself that time. The echoes of the heartbeat were too loud, the rush of the wind too chill.
"You killed my son."
Some words, once said, can never be unsaid, never be forgotten, never be undone.
She shook. "John," she said again, although she was not sure to whom she was speaking. She did not know the man before her. The man she knew was dead and had been dead for a very long time.
She wished she had chosen differently. She wished she had turned down the Vorlons' bargain. She wished she had let him die there and then with the memory of his greatness and his love still alive. Anything rather than let him become this dead, hollow figure in front of her. The one who could not even give voice to his anger as he accused her of doing something so abominable she could not even comprehend it.
There were no words. There was nothing he could do or say that would heal the wound in her heart - or worsen it.
She was wrong.
He rose to his feet, ignoring her sobbing, her shaking, her wounds, her ragged dress and her bloody hands. He walked towards the fluttering, writhing shadows at the edge of the clearing. He stopped and turned back to look at her. She met his gaze, and through her tears and her shaking and the light and the shadows and the wind she saw one thing clearly.
There was nothing inside him.
"I was going to ask you to marry me."
Then he was gone, vanished from her sight, just another ghost returned to the world of the dead. She was alone, the last living being surrounded by the dead and their memories and their pain and their echoes.
And their hearts beating.
We granted you salvation from the Shadow. We granted you peace from the war. We granted you security beneath the shield of our light. We granted you an end to fear, an end to pain, an end to misery, an end to uncertainty.
We have protected you from evils in the galaxy that you cannot even imagine.
But most of all, we have protected you from yourselves.
Chapter 3
We are your saviours and your salvation. We are your Gods, your angels, and your dreams made flesh.
You are weak and imperfect. We understand this. It is your curse, the curse of individuality, the curse of fear, the curse of hope. We understand this. We do not hate you. Not even those of you who defy us. We hate none of you.
You are weak, and imperfect. We are strong, and we are perfect.
All we wish to do is to help you.
you
The garden was dark now, and still. The ever–moving plants cast shadows across her face and her soul. She could see them taunting her, mocking her.
There were no words. In any language ever spoken or thought or imagined, there were no words to describe what she felt.
"You killed my son."
The air spoke those words back to her. They echoed around her, each time in a different tone of voice. Anger and hatred and joy and release and cackling humour and sheer revulsion. None was worse than the first time.
Flat, calm, dispassionate. Not a whisper, not a question, not an accusation. A simple, straightforward statement of fact.
"I was going to ask you to marry me."
Everything laughed at her, all the faces from her past and her present.
She was alone.
Alone with the thirteen words that had destroyed her. Killed her more simply and more swiftly than any weapon ever could.
Alone.
One....
heart....
beat....
after....
another.
One....
word....
after....
another....
will
<You are all traitors.>
The Vorlon's encounter suit was white, bone–white, a sickly, nauseous pallor. G'Kar looked at it and felt its shadow fall over him.
In that instant he was transported back an entire lifetime. He was a child staring up at the sky, watching as a fleet of Centauri warships passed overhead. Darkness swamped him, and he felt so very, very cold. He had never seen a live Centauri, not in the flesh, and he had imagined them as monsters, lurking hidden in the corners of rooms, or just on the edge of his vision.
That sight had changed his mind, and imprinted itself in his childish memory. The Centauri were powerful and massive and colossal. They moved in the heavens and they did not care about the insects who withered and died in their shadow.
That belief had changed as he fought the Centauri, came to understand them, and even befriended one. But that one, single impression, that had remained with him.
He felt it again now.
<There is a price for treason.>
Taan and Kulomani had reacted first of course, being trained warriors. Taan had reached for his PPG, Kulomani for his commlink. The Vorlon watched impassively as Taan fired the first bolt. The armour, that now seemed not so much the white of long–dead bones, but the brilliant, infinite, bottomless white of a new–born star, absorbed the impact with chilling ease.
<By your own actions are you condemned.>
The encounter suit began to open.
G'Kar did not bother to look round, in part because he knew he would not be able to tear himself away from that image, but also because there was nowhere to go. This room had only one exit, and the Vorlon was standing directly in it. Kulomani's commlink was not working, as G'Kar had suspected.
If he had thought he could say something, or do something, take any action, he would have done it, but he understood the futility of his position. This had to happen. By all rights he should be dead anyway.
His own words came back to haunt him.
We are all stronger together than we are apart.
Perhaps, if a better world can come of this for everyone, then those who died need not have died in vain. If we can all turn this loss to a greater good, as we did at Kazomi Seven, then we can create something greater than what was destroyed.
I hope for that with all I have, and it is all that sustains me.
But I doubt, truly, in my heart, that it will ever happen.
They were stronger together than they were apart, but that was still not enough.
Lethke moved forward, deliberately placing himself between the Vorlon and Taan Churok. The Drazi swore at him, but Lethke did not seem to notice. G'Kar doubted that his friend could hear anything, standing bathed in that light.
"Please," Lethke said. "Please...." The word was pitiful, a sob, an admission of utter powerlessness. Lethke, a diplomat, a nobleman, a Merchant–Prince of Brakir, was discovering what G'Kar had first learned that one day so many decades ago.
Just what it meant to be helpless.
"Let us try for peace," Lethke sobbed. "It's what I've always worked for...."
The Vorlon's terrible voice spoke, chill and final, although there was now not even the flashing of the eye stalk to give it some semblance of emotion.
<There is no mercy for traitors.>
The light filled the room, and Lethke's body was thrown backwards. G'Kar knew he was dead even before he left the floor. What struck the far wall was a charred, smoking corpse, a twitching heap of ash and blasted bones.
One of Lethke's dead eyes was looking directly at him, but G'Kar could not tell if it expressed pity or blame.
Kulomani reacted next, grabbing his PPG to join Taan. Both of them fired, neither afraid. Their blasts were merely absorbed by the flashing mass of light that the Vorlon had become. It was massive, truly huge, too big by far for the room. One tentacle struck a wall, which shattered with a crack and the smell of burning metal.