fadewalk

When Kaidan blinked he could see leaves. Apple trees? Or cherries? That was weird. He raised his head stiffly, squinting.

Yeah, those were definitely trees.

For a moment his foggy brain tried to tell him he was home at the orchard, and that he hadn't left for Jump Zero yet, and he'd fallen asleep in the grass and was just now waking up, but the air tasted just as stale and metallic as it had in space, only worse. And the light was way wrong.

He sat up, clutching his spinning, splitting head, and then tried to squint past the stars and tracers, all the migraine halos and the spinning threads of darkness that signaled he was going to pass out again.

Why was the sky the worst color green he'd ever seen? He had to close his eyes to turn his head, and when he opened them he saw something that looked sort of like a turian cruiser, but way sleeker. And past that... was that a god damn castle?

He tried to stand, but ended up tipping forward onto his hands and knees, and the grass in front of his nose looked real as hell, and this was a really weird side effect of metabolic crash.

And none of it answered the question of where the hell was Shepard.