So I've realised that crossover readers do not necessarily subscribe to both fandoms! (Silly of me to only realise this now - I myself just read all the crossovers as well)

A summary of Mass Effect events for my LotS readers (primarily those Dragon Age fans that do not know Mass Effect)

Legends: Of the Sky Mass Effect Background

The Shepard

Legends of the Sky is a Mass Effect and Dragon Age Fanfiction Crossover by Eisen. Mass Effect and Dragon Age belong to Bioware.

It is the 22nd century and the entire galaxy is at war. A mere year before it had not been so.

Humanity had first ascended to the stars after discovering the ruins of an ancient civilization on Mars - the Protheans. They used what they learned to make their first forays into the unknown beyond the Sol system. First contact with another species - the Turians - was violent, but peace was established when the Citadel Council stepped in, and Earth soon joined the other worlds in an intergalactic autocracy steered by the most prominent races: the Asari, the Salarians and the Turians.

Humanity, ever impatient and striving, worked to earn themselves a place on the Council, and eventually succeeded. A key figure in this accomplishment was the first human Spectre, Commander Eris Shepard, whose tenure as Special Tactics and Reconnaissance agent was fraught with difficulty and controversy.

The Commander first gained the position after her intended mentor, Spectre Nihlus Kryik, was killed in action while they were investigating an attack on a human colony involving a Prothean artifact. The suspected orchestrator of these events was Spectre Saren Arterius, who, it was eventually discovered, was under the influence of a millennia old sentient machine known as Sovereign, a Reaper.

Spectre Shepard used the influence that humanity gained in the battle against Sovereign to obtain a seat on the Council for humanity. She was then sent on a routine patrol to hunt down any remaining followers of Sovereign - a mission that ended in the destruction of the Commander's ship and her subsequent death.

Two years later the Commander appears, fully reconstructed by the pro-human terrorist group Cerberus. Her warnings of the Reaper invasion have fallen on deaf ears and little has been done in her absence to prepare for their arrival. She moves to try and prevent abductions of entire human colonies on the fringes of civilised space, abductions perpetrated by the Collectors, who Shepard believes to be agents of the Reapers.

Shepard succeeds in destroying the Collector base, located at the core of the galaxy, but in doing so destroys a Mass Relay in order to halt the Reaper advance, causing the death of over 300,000 Batarians.

Her subsequent incarceration is cut short when the Reapers finally arrive and invade Earth. Shepard then sets out to unite the galaxy in an effort to ally all the races, so that they may fight back against the impossible foe.

Their hope falls on a device, one which had its blueprints unearthed in the archives on Mars, a device that is now orbiting over the Earth as the battle rages around it, waiting for Shepard's final decision.