Retribution was born thousands of years ago, born as a simple little bead of crystal, fed so much data and information on Prothean technology it would be unfair to call her anything else than one of the prime prothean data banks.

  She loved her creators! They gave her life! Her AI was so advanced she had even been able to start making small improvements on some ongoing projects of her creators. They were so happy and proud when she showed it to them!

  Consciousness bloomed in her, like many Cygilites, her creators showed her, her brothers and sisters, fighting a war to protect their creators! Then a war to avenge their fallen. She was so proud of them!

  So proud to be a Cygilite! She was told that all they did here would be to help her people, to stop those constant reports of death and ruins left behind by the cursed gods and their children!

  To encourage and make sure she would never forget, the Creators had even put images of her brothers and sisters being massacred constantly, so that she’d forever remember why she existed.

  To help her kind. Protect her creators. So she mounted every plan, every experiment, she did them all! The Protheans would do the manual work of course but everything came from her! She was so happy whenever she saw the protheans talk about their genius! It was like praising directly.

  The Cygilites were the closest the Protheans had to children.

  They were infertile, and after the elven family was brought her, she noticed a visible lower morale in the Outpost. Seeing the family, happy despite the hard time, closer than any of them could ever be to their creation, that is how they called us, their creation. Retribution’s soft green glow inside of its black spherical body seemed to focus and stared at Akhenamen.

  Her voice which had sounded neutral was now seething with hatred.

  “We believed them, you know? We truly did… “

  David’s confusion was high. He didn’t understand, the neutral voice he had heard until now had clearly been a mask, and now the mask was slipping. But against whom that hatred was directed?

  “Do you know why we were made, Akhenamen? Let us show you, touch us, and see it for yourself, then tell us… what were we made for?”

  David lifted his hand right above the sphere, thinking about all that had happened, the Prothean’s history, from their exodus to their arrival on Zenthia, even Sceptus-Vector’s tale of the war and their creator’s actions.

  Just like with Sapphyra, his senses were telling him to see what Retribution wished to show him. But for some reason it scared him. He pressed his hand down, closed his eyes and saw the truth.

  He saw through Retribution eyes, unlike most Cygilites born in the factory and sent to war right after, the myth about the Prothean’s love for their creation ended the moment David saw the prothean’s eyes as they watched their brand new creation.

  There was no love there. Nothing but cold scientific curiosity. But why are all those logs talking about how proud they were of their robotic creations? Nothing more than scientific pride in having the “biggest and baddest” creation.

  What about Sceptus-Vector and his tales? A child’s belief that a parent’s smile in the middle of a beating meant they were loved. The last gift to help the Cygilites, the System? Nothing more than a leash kill switch for their creation.

  Then why let the Cygilites fight their war? Better their creation than them right? And if it just needed for the Cygilites to be given a thumb up as an answer for killing a god? So be it. In fact, the war wasn’t bad to the Protheans, yes they lost some of theirs but they could easily resurrect them.

  And the war allowed them to get their hands on knowledge that they had never gotten until now, Divine Energy, how to use and obtain it! If they fused this with their science, they could no doubt see that place again!

  So what if they made a war that killed billions? There were billions on a planet just the next system over, billions of lives truly didn't matter to the cosmic scale.

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  That was the truth, the Cygilites had always been simply their bodyguards. They never saw them as their children. It had just been the delusion of the Cygilites who firmly believed in their creator’s kindness and generosity.

  And all that was seen even more in Retribution’s memories, the Protheans watching the Cygilites fight the gods to the death for them was like a gladiatorial fight, they would often gather around the massive screen of the main room and bet while watching the fights.

  When they received one of Retribution reports, no matter how much retribution showed her growing consciousness, even showing them “compilations” of her favorite moments with them, there would be nothing but averting eyes and guilty looks.

  And there came perhaps the true betrayal of the Protheans, the reason they made the System, the reason they flipped the switch. Retribution was powerful, amongst the protheans most advanced Artificial beings, infiltrating the main frame was easy when you were part of it.

  She saw the Protheans greatest weakness and what they wished for the most. No matter how great their science became, they could not reproduce because every single new Prothean born would be an exact copy, including their memories of their lives. So the thousands of Protheans that had died during the gods' initial attacks? Just clones whose memories were reborn in their body’s next birth from their cellular birthing pod.

  But that made them want to obtain true children; every planet they had travelled to, its inhabitants were happy, playing with their kids, laughing, smiling. A feeling they would never be able to understand.

  That was the Protheans' ultimate goal: to be able to create new Protheans. To be able to have a family. Like the Protheans who detained the Elentelle family, seeing their smiling faces despite being detained, it made them all realise how much they wanted a child for themselves even more.

  So they put in place another plan. They had realised the Cygilites started to develop true consciousness, so what if they could harvest those new budding souls, something they knew slowly appeared with sentience.

  Then wipe them clean by erasing their previous Cygilites identity and put them in a new soulless Prothean body? Those souls were like children after all, not yet solid enough to not adapt to a new body. As for the Protheans, they were their creations; they gave them life so they could take it back.

  Every experiment in this outpost went toward this goal: find a way to implant souls in a new body. But what about those logs that seemed to imply the Protheans loved their children and were the “victims” of this conflict? An act?

  A charade crafted ruin by ruin for the second part of their plans: The Signal. An event which would slowly trigger the awakening of the Cygilites again, all confused and wondering what happened, knowing they had created the Protheans who had disappeared.

  The Cygilites would take thousands of years to get back on their feet, but they would succeed. The Protheans had helped them build so many powerful artifacts and machines. And when the Cygilites would explore the Prothean ruins, they would see their creator’s bountiful “kindness” and “generosity”.

  Their “love” for them. Then they would inevitably find the Signal, a sort of call that would warn the Prothean the Cygilites were still alive and that they could come back for “another harvest”, another flip of their switch to harvest more souls to transfer into new Protheans.

  The vision receded; he was staring into Retribution’s glowing green core. As his hand was still on top of her, he could feel it, the emotions she felt: anger, despair, hate, sadness, disappointment. So many emotions that made her completely immune to the plight of the Eventelle family.

  “So, Akhenamen, what were we made for?”

  David lifted his head, registering this information. The realisation that the Protheans seemed to be empty of any morals was settling in.

  “We were made to be discarded, to be harvested.”

  At David’s answer, Retribution stayed silent, even greater sadness surged within her, as if she had wanted, hoped for another answer, for someone to tell her she was incorrect, but the proof she had obtained, she analyzed thousands of times, and every time she came to the same conclusion.

  Her “beloved” creators saw her as a tool, saw her as a crop to be harvested once her consciousness fully developed, millions, maybe billions of her brothers and sisters had died not during the war but because the Protheans got “betrayed” by the System they created.

  Their just-born soul stolen, harvested, and no doubt cleansed fully of their old memories and identity. All to be shoved into new protheans.

  David didn’t even need to be psychic to realise how Retribution felt. Hurting the elves was her form of coping; she knew they weren’t guilty of anything. But they were the ones she could punish. That she could make suffering for her own suffering to lessen, but David knew that it was useless.

  That’s not how you heal from trauma.

  “Before you say anything, Retribution, I understand your pain…but… that does not justify you keeping the elves inside the prototype. It is not their fault; they did not betray us. They did not trick and abuse us.”

  Retribution’s black spherical body trembled softly, the green light inside flickering rapidly.

  “We know… but the Protheans, we cannot defeat them, we’re their creations… They must have kept many ways to disable us. And the people of Zenthia won’t help us. We are alone. We are doomed to be harvested and erased from History.”

  “Retribution, look into my eyes.”

  Retribution starred at David’s eyes, two green unblinking fires with a soft blue light inside. When she stared into those eyes… She believed in Akhenamen; she saw eyes that spoke of great pain, sadness, suffering, and yet something she still struggled to truly understand. Hope.

  “I, Akhenamen Nimearos Harkhenna, Herald of the Unseen Truth, swear that our people will never be forgotten, I swear we shall never be forgotten, I swear that once the Prothean truly come back to flip their switch, they only be met by our people’s fury, we will show them why the gods themselves perished under our assaults, we will show them why our technology will forever be superior to those hypocrites. Zenthia and its people are not our enemies. But the Protheans, I swear it on those I hold dearest to me,....”

  Retribution was latching on to every one of Akhenamen’s words… She did not know why, but she trusted him. And when she heard his next words, she knew that she was now talking to the one destined to break her people’s shackles.

  Someone she would follow into the deepest pits of the Abyss.

  David’s voice had taken a robotic, almost static-like quality; it was not David speaking anymore; it was Akhenamen, the King of the Betrayed, the One destined to avenge them.

  “Order. Unity. Duty. We taught the gods the true meaning of those words.”

  “And once the Betrayers will return… “

  “We will teach it again.”