Javik

Javik was the only known survivor of the ancient Prothean race, an Avatar of Vengeance who slept in stasis for more than fifty thousand years before being revived by Commander Shepard during the war against the Reapers. Bitter, imperious, and forged entirely by war, he lent his ancient knowledge and his hatred of the enemy to the campaign of the current cycle.

Origins#

In Prothean society there were many Avatars, individuals who each embodied a single virtue for their civilization. Javik was the Avatar of Vengeance. He was, by his own account, the last of the warriors of the Prothean Empire, born amid the war with the Reapers that his people were losing. The Citadel had fallen long before his birth, and his earliest memories were of his homeworld burning under a Reaper assault.

Javik was to lead roughly a million warriors who would survive the extinction in stasis within an underground bunker on Eden Prime. His mission was to outlast the invasion in sleep, then awaken and lead a campaign to reclaim the galaxy. Indoctrinated traitors among the Protheans foiled the plan, betraying the bunker's location to the Reapers. As the Collectors, themselves once Protheans repurposed by the enemy, slaughtered the sleeping warriors, the bunker's supervising intelligence was forced to purge the facility, and the damage left automatic reactivation impossible. With power failing, triage determined that only one warrior could be reawakened: Javik.

Revival#

In 2186, Javik's pod was uncovered and opened on Eden Prime by Commander Shepard and the asari scientist Liara T'Soni, who were investigating Cerberus activity there. Disoriented and lashing out, he emerged to find his homeworld transformed and the species he had known only as primitives now grown into the dominant powers of the galaxy. Through contact he was able to rapidly absorb human language, and he agreed to join Shepard in destroying the Reapers, vowing not to rest until the last of them was dead.

Character and creed#

Javik's imperious manner sprang from the vast gulf between the ideals of the Prothean Empire and those of the current cycle. He referred to others not by name but by their species or occupation, and openly marveled that the races his people had once studied, the asari, turians, salarians, and others, had risen so far. He held firmly to a belief in survival of the fittest, despising weakness and dismissing mercy as a failing. He spoke of the Cosmic Imperative, an absolute order in which conflict strengthened the strong and culled the weak, and he saw allies merely as resources to be spent against the enemy.

Despite this, he engaged with the Normandy's crew, trading the histories of warfare with the turian Garrus Vakarian, sparring with Liara over the Protheans' guiding hand in early asari history, and clashing repeatedly with the ship's intelligence, EDI, for he distrusted all synthetics and believed they inevitably turned on their creators. He offered the perspective of one who had fought the Reapers across an entire war, recounting how every battle had conjured some new nightmare, and how indoctrination had once turned his own loyal crew against him until he was forced to destroy them himself.

The Reaper War#

Throughout the war Javik provided both counsel and grim insight, weighing in on the krogan genophage, the conflict between the quarians and the geth, and the discovery of the Leviathans whose ancient meddling had given rise to the Reapers. He pressed Shepard toward ruthlessness, urging that weaker allies be spent as distractions and that traitors be dealt with without mercy. Yet over time his contempt softened into a measure of respect, and upon at last setting foot on the restored Citadel he reflected on its place as the former heart of Prothean civilization.

The Protheans' Echo Shard, a device that preserved memory, offered a window into Javik's past. Should Shepard have persuaded him to use it, he relived the trauma of destroying his indoctrinated crew and concluded that war was atrocity committed in the name of survival, a lesson he wished he had never learned. Should he have left the shard untouched, he spoke only briefly of the comrades he had lost, and looked instead toward an unfamiliar peace.

Javik's hopes for the future, and his fate, turned on the path Shepard walked. Where he had relived his memories, he wished to return to the place his comrades had died and join them; where he had not, he spoke of seeing more of the galaxy, of co-authoring a record of his people with Liara, or of living out his days in quiet. In the final battle for Earth, should Javik have stood at Shepard's side in the last push, his survival depended on whether enough of the galaxy's forces had been rallied. Should he have lived to see the war's end, he could be found among the survivors paying their respects at the Normandy's memorial wall.