Young Writers Society

The Death of Dark Samus

This takes place at the end of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

After the final, angry cry of anguish from the thing, she knows it is over.

The creature descends from its magnetic suspension. The energy fluctuations around it have ceased. Now it limps across the floor, a broken beast, a sundered copulation of her blood and the Phazon.

And what other dichotomy could have been interpreted within that copulation? Light and darkness? Life and death? Right and wrong?

Chozo, Luminoth, Metroid, Ing--who is to evaluate their righteousness? Who is to determine the predominance of one nature over another?

Now the creature is upon her, but she far from fears it now. No; she fears that faint reflection in her helmet, that woman who never found a moral visor, who overlooked a map to her opponent’s soul.

Light pours forth from her suit. The creature’s hand gropes for it, gropes for redemption.

She stands, a statue for the moment. This was the same evil, she reminds herself, that tried to kill her on Tallon, that, transcending death itself, followed her to Aether to sabotage her every move.

It is a beast, she reminds herself. It knows only hunger. It is only a series of chemical reactions giving the appearance of the soul. It is just like all the other organisms she destroyed in order to achieve her goals.

But how, she wonders with a chill, is she any different?

The last particles of Phazon extricate themselves from the creature’s body. With that, it is gone. Silence. There is nothing to mark its actions but her memory. And even there they will not survive; there they will be distorted into crimes.

The room oozes with Phazon. She knows she has to leave. The last, maddened survivors of the Ing are approaching. Do they seek revenge upon her, their angel of doom? Or are they simply trying to preserve what tenebrous life fate assigned them, even if it means burning in the realm of light?

They are headed to her now, but she remains a statue, gazing into the enraged Phazon that coats the walls. It beckons her to join an existence she does not understand, to become part of a nature that had, through the random scheme of fate, been cheated.

She looks at her flesh and sees Phazon. She looks at the Phazon and sees flesh. Could it have been this way?

But this is not reality, she knows. And reality will allow only one nature to survive. So she turns, springs, leaps through the portal. The light is welcoming.

Behind her, the portal closes; and with it, the wronged and embittered Phazon collapses into unreality.