VOID OF LOVE
1.
Don't look, don't look
the shadows breathe
whispering me away from you
don't wake at night to watch her sleep
you know that you will always see
this trembling, adored, tousled bird-mad girl
The dream was always the same… He was engulfed in darkness. Alone as usual. Terrified as he rightfully should be.
An unnatural coldness devouring his own flesh and soul… Utter Solitude and Despair were the key words.
Trapped in this infinite loneliness, he felt his inner emptiness even more deeply…
Try… Try as you might… Try to escape, little boy… Try to fill your soul with feelings…
It was all useless. The only emotions he had left were the ones who caused his namesake pain in the first place…
The sickness became a cancer… And for this illness there wasn't any cure…
No Happiness.
No Love.
Just… Pure… Nothingness.
But still… Something was about to happen… A light came out of nowhere and suddenly, the Darkness was gone…
It wasn't just any normal source of light… No… It was a flame… It was a blaze… A blaze of Passion… A blaze of Life…
Was her name… Hope?
And the flame was changing form… Becoming Her, once again.
His blazing princess… His desperate object of desire… His lifeline.
The sour being known as Void, tried to reach her… To hug her… But he couldn't…
She was always too distant…
Do not leave him again, oh Queen of Flames… Do not depart from him, oh Cat princess… Legendary creature of fire… Burning beauty of sadness…
He needs you… In order to fill his inner hole… In order to live…
In order to love.
And now she faded away… Leaving him all alone… Once again.
Only this time… Someone else was there for him.
The Seedrian slowly turned his head towards his guest… This mysterious God who claimed to be this planet's very soul and will… A creature who defied the inter-dimensional barriers and who could be everywhere and every time… A creature that could reach his wounded mind thanks to a rather unwilling vessel… A certain black hedgehog who, somehow, someway, found himself to be this demon's messenger.
His new master.
The ancient God known as Dark Gaia, the reflection of this world's Darkness, spoke to the plant boy with his low and ominous voice…
"So… Do we have a deal?"
A little while ago, this beast has made a proposition to the young Seedrian… He promised to help him finding his princess again… He had the powers to allow such task… And all the lovesick plant boy had to do in return… Was to retrieve a certain item for him… An item that has been encased in another dimension… A dimension that Dark Gaia's influence couldn't reach…
Because that particular dimension was born from pure nothingness.
The being also promised to grant the unfortunate boy with his lost memories… In change of his eternal obedience.
Void pondered about it for a while… And then, he made a decision.
"We do have a deal… Master."
A rather predictable one…
And so, once again, his life became someone else's property…
All in the name of Love.
The indescribable, gruesome serpent like demon seemed amused by his new servant's choice.
"Very well… Rest well for now. When thou shalt awake, your journey shalt begin."
Void nodded and then… Everything disappeared.
And thus, this story begins and I shall narrate it…
Who am I?
I'm this world's Love… And, hopefully, I shall save this tormented soul from the abyss he fell in…
From his own Hell.
From his own emptiness…
Let us commence.
For the casual observer, the smell would have seemed unbearable… But for this particular individual, it was a heavenly scent.
Humans tend to be strange creatures… They used to contradict themselves fairly often and change their believes or ideas even more times.
But one of the few things they all seem to agree about… Was that nobody liked pickle sandwiches.
Well… Nobody, except this old looking docent.
To say that professor Pickle had an insane passion for those namesake hoagies... Would have still been an utter understatement.
He stood still, in his own office, in the prestigious Spagonia University, holding the aforementioned loath of bread with that rather smelly pseudo-vegetable inside of it…
One would have said he was contemplating the religiously importance of the moment, like if the sandwich was his Lord and Master, and the human, his loyal subject and worshipper.
After a few minutes of this rather pointless pagan ritual, Pickle finally bit his prized meal and slowly, but gingerly, started chewing it… Tasting the awesome consistence of the namesake vegetables.
To the eyes of his current guest (as well as everyone else's for that matter) such spectacle looked terribly awful and, definitely, hunger killing.
After savoring his so-called delicious meal, the old rector turned his head over his guest.
"My, my… Where did my manners go? How can I help you, young lady?" He asked.
The "young lady", as the man referred to her, was a human girl around her thirties… A G.U.N. agent, for being more precisely.
She was there for a precise reason and, judging by the badge she was eagerly showing to her host, that reason was not personal amusement.
"I'm agent Topaz of the Guardian Unit of Nations… I need to ask you something about your son… Miles "Tails" Prower." She demanded rather than asked, authority was showed on her voice.
Naturally, Pickle was expecting that, he wasn't a fool, for human standards, I mean.
He smiled at the woman and gently motioned her to sit.
Over the next few hours he would have gladly explained to her how he did NOT know of what his adopted son was accused, how he did NOT have a clue of his current location and how he did NOT have anything to do with the dangerous black eyed alien…
Hidden in a convenient subterranean dungeon under Pickle's office, Tails was so glad that the human did pretend NOT to know a lot of things.
Thanks to his enhanced foxy ears he could clearly hear the conversation both his foster parent and his noisy guest were having. The vulpine smiled within himself, if there's a thing he learned in all of his young yet, intense life was that certain humans were awfully good in telling lies… Especially when they have to protect something (or someone) they considered crucially important… In this case, a loving father and mentor was protecting his non-blood related son and another guy who's been almost rolled by the man's very car more than a month ago.
In the utter silence of their refuge, both Tails and his forced guest, Void, were trying to relax their respective nerves by playing a random chess game they happened to find around.
And, of course, the two-tailed fox kit was winning 30 matches in a row…
To tell the truth, the Seedrian didn't look very involved in the game… His gaze was distant and so was his mind, he hadn't muttered a single word since his awakening from that latest, nasty dream.
This fact was worrying the Kitsune a lot. He could only imagine what his would be friend (or inter-dimensional son, if want to put it paradoxical) was going through in his damaged mind…
The pain and the guilt for hurting and / or killing people inadvertently…
The sorrow caused by his emotional emptiness and lost love…
And the fact that he was all alone in a world so different from the one he came from… The one he had almost no memories of.
Tails used to be an empathic person who cared about others' feelings… That was one of the reasons of why most of the female students of the university had a weakness towards his regards… Another reason was his natural pet like fluffy cuteness.
A thing that he personally hated… And so the male students did.
"Tails? Can I ask you a question." The sudden voice of his fellow chess player asked.
The young vulpine abruptly snapped out from his latest Hong Kong express of thoughts.
"What is it, Void?" He replied almost in a cheerful tone, visibly happy about his companion's burst of sociality… He would regret it a second later.
Void's expressionless eyes seemed full of doubts and fears yet, determined and focused at the same time… A behavior he had in common with his "father".
He spoke.
"Tell me… If you had ONE chance to regain what you've lost… One chance to escape from your mental and emotional miseries… To be happy again… Wouldn't you do anything in your power to have it back? Wouldn't you even KILL if necessary?"
And now… The kit found himself seriously scared… And unable to answer his question.
Void weakly smiled and answered for him.
"Of course you wouldn't… You're a wonderful and caring person and your soul is strong. You've managed to went through a lot of pain in your life and yet, there you are… Helping a complete stranger who caused the death of two people and seriously hurt the ones you loved…" A single tear rolled down from the boy's eyes. "… For what I can recall, the Tails from my original dimension… My father… Used to be as strong as you are…" He lowered his head, feeling somehow ashamed of himself. "… I wish I could be half as strong as you two are."
Tails couldn't take it anymore, without any advice or foreword, he rose from his seat and darted towards the plant boy… Hugging him tightly just the way he used to do with Sonic, his big brother, some time ago… Just the way a young kid would do to express his feelings to someone he cares about.
Strangely enough, Void was not taken aback by this… To be honest, he almost hoped this would happen so he could pretend that he was actually his father… His one and only father…
Despite being younger…
Despite being another Tails…
Despite the cruelty of this chaotic life.
He returned the embrace and hugged him back with his ugly hands… His so unlike him, ugly hands.
It was night. Tails was asleep on his spare bed… The other, however, wasn't.
Void was standing right in front the vulpine's bed, watching him sleep, trying with all his might not to cry… Not to wake him.
The time has come, for he to leave… To go looking for his past… For his lost love… And to fulfill his promise to his new master.
He closed his eyes, already feeling the disfiguring guilt of what he was about to do… He knew it will cause sufferance and pain… Death and demise… Most of all, he knew his course of action would utterly disappointed his two-tailed friend…
What other choices had he, though? It wasn't like he could decide not to proceed… The creature who claimed the ownership of his soul wouldn't let him escape… Like it or not, he was his agent… He's been gifted with just a fragment of the God's immense power and he would have been forced to hold such burden for Chaos knows how long.
He gave one last, sorrowful glance at the sleeping, serene form of the kit… Then he slowly turned and left the security of the dungeon and the university for good.
His last thoughts before his departing:
Please… Don't miss me, father... Hate me!
And then, he was gone.
Due to Dark Gaia's doing, Void's mind was slowly starting to regain some of his lost memories and now he knew his rather unique species had a name…
He was a Seedrian, the only anthropomorphic plant based life form in existence… He had a mother, her name was Cosmo but he didn't know anything else about her, he still couldn't remember her face clearly…
He had some unique powers, mostly related with nature and other plants… And, amazingly enough, he could read other people's soul through their eyes… Just like he did with this world's Tails earlier today.
This has been what his new master let him to remember for now… Other precious memories would have come as a reward for his accomplished chores, the demon promised.
In order to reach the ultimate goal of his mission, Void needed to travel through other dimensions… A thing that a mortal being like him, although being Chosen by Nature and Chaos, couldn't do without sacrificing his own life force due to the tremendous physical and temporal differences between universes… Or so he thought.
A creature like Dark Gaia, being the incarnation of this planet's will, existed contemporary in each and every dimension (even in Void's own), except of course, the one he had an interest towards… Therefore, the powers he gave to his unwilling agent would have, somehow, inexplicably and whatever-ly, protected him from sustaining damages…
All he needed now, in order to perform a successful time / space travel… Was chaos energy… And plenty of it.
And, thanks to his master's omniscient cognition, he now knew where to find it.
There were several things the various dimensions had in common with one another… They all had Chaos Emeralds… For whatever reason that no one cares about.
This dimension was no different and one of them was currently held inside a rather dangerous place… The G.U.N. base right outside Spagonia.
For any normal being, to get inside an hyper-protected military base such as this one, would have been considered an act of foolish self-murder or something like that… Void, however, was NOT a normal being… Especially, not now.
Being the source of all Darkness, Dark Gaia craved his strengths from the night… When Sonic and a rather unwilling Shadow, got just a glimpse of his power, they became werehogs… As ridiculous and inexplicable as it could seem, it just happened that way… Void, on the other hand, being granted with some more control over his current unwanted powers… Could do some more interesting things.
He braced himself and entered the base.
He was hearing nothing…
The screams of terror…
The noise of broken bones shattering through out soft and bloody flesh…
The pleads for mercy…
Nothing.
He saw nothing…
The blood…
The corpses…
The terror deformed faces…
Nothing.
His mind separated itself from his body during the whole… Unbearable… Twisted… Time.
He let his possessed physic to do everything. He didn't want to have anything to do with this massacre… There was a price to pay for having the necessary power to achieve certain seemingly impossible goals…
Human lives were part of it.
His master had a weakness for living souls… It was his caprice, one would say… Plus, he happened to despise mortals, mainly because they, instead of him, were absolutely free and yet, they wouldn't enjoy their own freedom because of their stubborn attachment to their precious rules and will to find a sense on everything… How he envied them for it, but of course, he would have never admitted it.
Through the link he had with Void's mind, he could see all of that beautiful spectacle… All the dead and all the destruction…
To bring destruction and sufferance over the world was his ultimate goal, after all… Simply because he had to… It was his role, to be the source of all Evil. To be Satan. To be Darkness.
It was something he never asked for in the first place, it just happened… And he would have carried on with his plans, no matter the prices…
This universe needed a dark side… In order to be a whole… Just like any living being.
Including his agent… Who, right now, was showing the full extent of his new dark side.
His claws were immensely huge, bigger and uglier than ever… His whole form was a few inches taller, his once green leaf hair were now bright white, unlike his eyes, and slightly longer… He didn't look feral like a werehog used to be, instead, he looked like a cursed angel of Death… A messenger of the apocalypse, one would say.
If he only would have had a single black wing and a ludicrously long sword, some videogame nerd would have probably asked his autograph…
He was covered in blood. Red, warm blood all over his mutated body.
His external expression looked glacial and emotionless… But internally, he was burning alive… The only thing that was pulling his sanity together was, yet again, her image…
Finally, he reached the room he (or rather it) was "looking" for… Slashing and killing around for… Mass murdering for… Suppressing his burning feelings for… You've got the angst of it all.
Once inside, there were two things that caught his attention almost immediately: the first was his former black cloaked vest, which he hastily retrieved and, once resumed his normal stature and appearance, put on, finally disposing of his awful street thug like tracksuit… The second thing happened to be a certain red gem he was looking for…
The Chaos Emerald was now his.
Without wasting anymore valuable time in mourning and feeling guilty for the death of a bunch of worthless supporting characters… Which will haunt him later, eventually… He summoned the required energy from the aforementioned jewel, now in his tight grasp…
And so, a spell he didn't even remember to know, came out from his mouth… From his lungs… From all of his being.
"CHAOS CONTROL!!!!" He yelled.
Some kind of a cheap looking cliché portal was opened in the space / time continuum and, without any further hesitation, the dark Seedrian entered it…
While doing so, another few memories found their way back in his mind… A proof of his master's appreciation, apparently.
With these brand new remembrances, he could now call his one and only love with her true name…
And so he did…
He called her name…
He screamed her name…
He was falling in the pit deeper and deeper, just for her…
His burning soul mate…
"I will find you… Blaze the Cat!"
And then, he just let the absolute randomness of these chaotic forces he drowned himself with… To drive him into the next world… And the next perils.
His destination? The Unknown.
… His mind still screaming.
Every night I burn
every night I call your name
every night I burn
every night I fall again