Liara: Blue Mind Oracle by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Liara-Blue-Mind-Oracle-1312372192?file=1

Liara: Blue Mind Oracle ANIMATION

Mirror of Ashes

Liara T’Soni had always distrusted ruins that looked too eager to be found.

The beacon lay beneath three layers of broken stone on an unnamed moon beyond the Attican Traverse, half-buried in a vault no map had marked and no salvage team had claimed. Its surface was not the clean geometry of Prothean design she had studied in museums and databanks, but a fractured lattice, as though some giant hand had squeezed the relic and left it cracked along invisible fault lines. Pale light leaked from the seams in slow breaths.

Commander Shepard stood beside her in the dust, one hand on the grip of the pistol at her hip, the other shielding her eyes from the beacon’s glow. “You’re staring like it insulted you.”

Liara gave a small, thoughtful smile. “I am trying to determine whether it is a beacon, a warning, or a trap with excellent taste.”

Shepard stepped closer. “You make it sound personal.”

“On occasion,” Liara murmured, and her tone carried that private warmth Shepard had come to recognize—the warmth that made even a derelict tomb seem briefly habitable. “Prothean artifacts are often personal in the sense that they want something from you.”

The excavation chamber answered with a low crack. One of the fractured plates along the beacon’s crown shifted, not outward but inward, and a whisper of blue static slid through the room. The air changed. It thickened. The broken Prothean glyphs etched around the device began to shine like wet teeth.

“Liara,” Shepard said, quieter now. “Tell me that’s normal.”

“It is not,” Liara said.

She had barely finished speaking when the beacon sang.

It was not a sound meant for ears. It entered through bone, through old injuries, through memory. Shepard stumbled. Liara’s hand shot out to steady her, but the contact was enough. The fractured light lanced between them like a blade.

Then the future arrived in pieces.

Shepard saw the Citadel burning in a sky black as oil. Saw Garrus standing on a bridge of glass, his visor cracked, saying her name with a voice full of static and grief. Saw Liara at the foot of a throne made of bones, her hands stained silver, her eyes empty as stars that had gone cold.

Liara saw oceans on the moon they stood upon, though the moon had no atmosphere and no water. Saw herself walking through the flooded halls of the Normandy, her reflection moving a heartbeat late. Saw Shepard kneeling in a field of white ash, turning into a monument before Liara could reach her.

And beneath those visions, beneath all the terrible splintered certainties, there was another shape moving—something vast and patient, watching through the broken beacon as if the relic were not predicting the future but trying on masks for it.

The light snapped off.

Shepard was on one knee. Liara’s breath came thin and sharp. Around them, the chamber had changed.

A thin line of frost crawled over the floor in perfect circles. Prothean glyphs, moments before inert stone, now blazed along the walls. In the center of the room, a shape had appeared that had not been there before: a chair, elegant and ornate, carved in a style no Prothean sculptor should ever have chosen. It looked like something from Liara’s childhood imagination of monarchy and decadence. Something too human. Too intimate.

Shepard stared at it. “Did that chair just manifest?”

Liara swallowed. “I believe so.”

“That is a sentence I never wanted to hear in a Prothean ruin.”

The chair dissolved into mist before she could answer, but the room was not finished with them. A line of figures stepped out of the far wall, as though the stone had briefly forgotten itself. One was a turian soldier with both mandibles torn away, bloodless and calm. Another was a Salarian scientist whose skull gleamed under transparent skin. Then came an Asari child with Liara’s face at four centuries younger, smiling in a way that made Liara’s stomach tighten.

Shepard raised her pistol.

“Don’t,” Liara said quickly.

“They’re not real?”

“That is not the same as harmless.”

The child tilted her head. “You are late,” she said in Liara’s own voice.

Liara flinched. Shepard looked at her, then back at the apparition. “Okay. That’s creepy.”

The child’s smile widened. “You will both fail to decide which future is true.”

Then she was gone. The others followed, thinning into the chamber’s sh
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