THE END OF ETHERIA
The End began strangely. Adora remembered vaguely taking on the form of She-Ra to fight a Horde battalion outside the edge of the Whispering Woods, but she had no memory of what had transpired immediately afterward or how she had gotten home.
She awoke with mid-afternoon light streaming through the window in her room to cats hanging from the ceiling by thin ropes – five stray cats, or perhaps someone's pets, hanging from nooses, all with broken necks, some with broken legs and two flayed open at the belly, butchered as if being prepared for a stewpot.
She screamed, of course.
Her jacket had smears of blood on it and there was a message scrawled on the floor in blood, bordered in bits of cat-gut.
"You refused to come with me – my best friend – I loved you."
Adora couldn't make out the smears beneath that message, but she thought the other message said "Time to pay" or to "pay for." The only word she could make out in the mess was "Pay."
Or perhaps it was "Pray."
In any case, her scream echoed through Castle Bright Moon. Glimmer teleported in to see what was wrong. Queen Angella threw the door open. They both gasped and stared.
"I don't know what! I don't know why!" Adora repeated over and over again as she gripped her hair at the sides of her head with bloodied hands and rocked back and forth on her knelt position. "Who did this?" she asked. "I was in my room alone, right?"
"Calm down!" Angella commanded, kneeling beside her and draping her in a wing. "What do you remember between yesterday's battle and now?"
"Nothing," Adora mouthed, wide-eyed.
"We were all tired…" Glimmer yawned. I've been asleep up until now.
Angella turned to her guards. "Check for any signs of infiltration! I want Adora's room under strict guard! Move! Now!"
"I don't know! I don't know!" Adora choked out. "I have no idea what happened! I don't remember anything."
"Are you unharmed?" Angella asked.
Adora caught her breath. "I seem to be. I don't feel any pain anywhere."
"Come on. Let's get you to the infirmary. We need to get you checked out."
"I… think I blacked out!" Adora said. "I don't remember getting hit in the head or anything. Just that there was a small skirmish. I split a tank in half…the Horde ran… I think… then nothing…nothing at all until now."
"This is serious!" Glimmer said. "You've never blacked out as She-Ra before… except… that one time, in Castle Dryl with that weird First Ones virus – and then you were acting like you'd drunk a keg of wine."
"I don't feel drunk," Adora said, "or drugged. I think I would have reacted if someone had snuck into my room."
"I'll do a thorough investigation," Angella announced. "We'll take care of it."
It happened a few more times – in rooms or in the woods, animals butchered and displayed as if in some kind of ritual – cats, scorpions – strangely enough – Adora did not know that those were a part of the wildlife of the Whispering Woods – bats, lizards.
She had no idea who was following her and doing these awful things. She was beginning to worry that no one was.
Angella made a controversial proclamation. She demanded tribute from each Princess in the Princess Alliance – treasure from their kingdom for Bright Moon's coffers. Everyone objected, even though it was presented as "for the war-effort."
The Alliance objected more when they saw Glimmer dressed in all that glimmered – gold and gems. She, too, started demanding obedience and claiming power in a way that was uncharacteristic for her. Bow tried to get her to come to her senses.
She started exiling him from her life. He remained in the Rebellion, but ever distant. He tried to talk with Adora, but she didn't remember much from their conversations as her blackouts were increasing.
"Catra, check this out," Entrapta said from a console where she was monitoring the Black Garnet and her current master-project.
"Yeah, what?"
"I have successfully tapped into the other Runestones as Hordak ordered! I've been trying my info-tweaks and I'm getting some really interesting data, too! But it's all…very weird."
"How...weird?:
"Well, you know that 'divide and conquer' idea of his? I think it just may work, but some of the readings are reminiscent of a virus I've encountered before."
"A virus?" Scorpia asked from her corner of the room, "You mean like a cold or something?"
"No, a computer-virus," Entrapta tried to explain. "I'm seeing a kind of…techno-genetic code that looks like a broken code I picked up on a First Ones disc found in one of Dryl's mines a while back. It made my robots go all screwy. This reminds me of it, but…it's different. I wonder if it came from that crystal you found for me; or if I mis-entered something in the program."
"As long as it gets results," Catra said, combing her claws through one of Entrapta's long locks. Entrapta, for her part, paid no attention to this contact, her gaze glued to the readings flashing rapidly upon a monitor-screen.
"Maybe Entrapta should rest?" Scorpia offered. She's been at this for days.
"It's no problem," the technician replied. "I snooze at my screen."
"Keep working," Catra said. "You can take a bunk when you have a breakthrough worthy of presenting to Hordak."
"I don't have to use small words with him," Entrapta yawned.
She-Ra stood before the broken bits of a Horde battle-mech when she heard Glimmer and Bow behind her plead for her to stop. The Runestone on the Sword of Protection was glowing red. She was She-Ra, standing before a frightened Horde soldier, the tip of the sword pointed at his throat. His fallen comrades lay all around him, their armor pierced and stained crimson and dressed in other fluids.
Adora just stood there, something savage coursing through her spirit. She tried to stay still and heed the voices of her friends. Another part of her derived pleasure from the prone soldier's chalk-pale face as he begged for his life.
She brought the sword down on him.
Mermista was the first to refuse to pay tribute to Bright Moon, yet she began demanding it for herself from her subjects. An internal rebellion started up in Sailineas. The interior of the inmost islands suffered a punishing drought brought upon the land by the will of their monarch. To quash the rebellion on the coasts, Mermista brought in tidal waves and raised the seas to flood the cities.
People who were close to her said that they could see her eyes glowing red as she barked her most furious orders to loyalist soldiers.
Rumors out of the area said that Sea Hawk had led the uprising against her. His ship was dashed upon the rocks and he was lost at sea.
The jungle thickened in Plumeria and plants of a poisonous nature began choking the land and the beneficial trees. Kudzu engulfed the people's simple houses. A thorn-wall cut off the country from all others. A few managed to escape before the thorns grew thick and the carnivorous giant flytraps started taking victims.
The survivors claimed that Princess Perfuma had gone mad and no one knew the source of the madness. Some said that her grief over the lost friend to whom she'd made a statue in one of the sacred gardens had finally broken her. Others spoke of strange lights and colors seen within the Heart Blossom and strange red outgrowths upon its host-tree.
Deerfolk talked of watching members of their families eaten by enormous red flowers in the center of which were acid that digested victims almost instantly.
Dark clouds shaded the Fright Zone as they always had, although they looked stormier now.
"No, this isn't right!" Entrapta wailed at her console. She desperately fiddled with levers and typed code. She jumped out of her swivel-chair and ran to where the code-crystal was pulsating with outgrowths like arteries and capillaries. They had taken over the Black Garnet chamber like so much kudzu. The thickest outgrowths on the First Ones crystal made it resemble a mammal's heart in a slow beat.
Entrapta tried to pry the crystal out of its housing with a screwdriver and got a shot of electric pain that ran up through her veins for her efforts.
"What are you doing?" Catra demanded, rushing into the room.
"Abandoning the project!" Entrapta called back to her. "Experiment officially failed! I didn't think it would go this far! I didn't…"
"Well, what did you think?" Catra snorted, lashing her tail. "Hordak's orders were to tap into the Runestones and to see if you could veer them toward disharmony."
"Yes, but..."
"What part of this strategy don't you understand?" Catra hissed. "If the Princesses destroy their own kingdoms, the Horde just swoops in and takes over the remains. Easy-peasy – world conquered! These are those snooty princesses we're talking about here. You remember – the ones who left you?"
"An infection has taken root! One I can't control! This is the end of the world we're talking about here!"
Catra grabbed one of Entrapta's hair-tails roughly and yanked on it. "Pull. Yourself. Together. It's just a few natural disasters. You didn't care about that stuff before when we did the first tinker with the Black Garnet."
Entrapta looked Catra full in the face, ignoring the pain in her scalp. Her red eyes were pinpoints. "You don't understand," she said, slowly shaking her head. "This is worse…this is far worse."
"So, how about you explain it to me in nice, small words."
"If I can't counteract this virus, there won't be a world for Hordak to conquer. Not even the Fright Zone will be spared in the end."
"So…"
"We're all gonna die."
The Kingdom of Snows had always been a harsh land. After Bright Moon started a war to annex it, it became an even harsher land. A few fur-clad survivors managed to escape what they were calling the Deep Chill. A gale-force wind came off the glaciers and from the center of Castle Chill. The last people to see Frosta claimed that she resembled something undead, a frost-bitten corpse animated by her own magic gone-unnatural.
Many hardy animals lived in the Kingdom of Snows, beasts with fur and blubber, and carrying the right kind of metabolism to stave off what would kill humans without gear and without magical protection.
These, too, fell dead or froze in place. One of the refugees that had joined a band of travelers that Bow had gathered told him of how he'd forever be haunted by a final image of his homeland: The poor man had seen a walrus caught in a silent bellow, as still as a statue, as if it had never lived.
There was no protector of the people anymore.
Every Princess, Queen, Empress, Prince and King of every kingdom had taken to madness. Those that did not close off their kingdoms in isolation to purge them into the purity of their element seemed to delight now in cruelty for its own sake.
The common people – or what was left of them – banded together in small nomadic groups. Some headed toward the Crimson Wastes. Some headed to Dryl. The only places where people lacking in high-magic could live anymore were countries unconnected to Runestones and some of the paths in between the lands.
Even these were not safe. There was a hunter on the road, a being whose strength was once tied to a destiny to defend the weak. Now, the fighting spirit empowered by the Runed-sword wished only to spill blood. The Sword wanted to lap it up and drink it.
It was said that She-Ra had long slain her own horse and only pursued her prey on foot. Her rages had started with the Horde, but the madness drove her to kill anything living she'd come across.
Bright Moon was radiant – literally.
The Queen and the Princess combined their forces with the corrupted Moonstone and the entire kingdom exploded in an instant one day in a wave of light. People were disintegrated, their shadows burned into the walls of their homes, into any standing sides of city buildings and onto the streets.
Most of the people who survived the bright inferno were the unlucky ones. Their bodies became poisoned. Their hair and teeth fell out. They grew tumors and suffered mysterious burns.
People on the outside could not approach even the outskirts of the kingdom without risking this happening to them.
The trees in the Whispering Woods took on an unnatural sheen.
Bow sat upon a rock in the Drylian Mountains, looking at the uncanny distant glow of what used to be his home. Other nomads were bedding down for the night in their tents, dispensing their rations, coughing, grunting, and treating their injured and their sick.
He wondered why he'd survived out of everyone. His fathers hadn't made it. Adora had lost her mind, as had Glimmer. Queen Angella was someone he'd considered to be like an aunt – she was gone, too, given to madness in the glow. Aunt Casta was a lost cause -Mysticor couldn't even be found anymore. Some said that it had vanished completely, having torn itself apart on the winds of space-time.
The entire world was dying and the little band of survivors would not be long for this world, either. Even the Horde had ceased all military activities in the face of the Madness of the Princesses. In fact, there were some Hordesmen among the survivor-band, reduced to nothing just like the rest.
"Bow?" One of Bright Moon's former castle-guards caught his attention. "There's someone here to see you. I… I can't believe it's her."
Bow followed the woman to the edge of the camp. He stood stark-still as he beheld the figure limping toward him. Her shirt and overalls were torn, caked in blood both drying and fresh. She shambled along, her long right hair-tail acting as a crutch for a useless leg. She had a broken lip and tired eyes.
"Entrapta?"
"It took… a long time… to find you… Bow," she said with raking breaths.
Bow snapped his fingers. "Healers! Help her!"
Entrapta shook her head and eased herself down by her hair onto a flat-topped rock with a strangled yelp and a hard wince. "It's too late," she said, looking down. "I didn't know if I would find you. I thought I should at least… come home…to Dryl…before the end."
"We… we thought you were dead," Bow began. "Long ago… you ran back and got caught in the incinerator."
"So…that's…why…Augggh!"
"Entrapta!"
Bow gently held her up as he waited for the healers among the caravan to get their things so they could see to her.
"She-Ra destroyed Emily."
"I'm sorry."
"Got me, too."
"We're going to help you."
"I destroyed the world."
"Huh?"
"In… in my logs. I guess… I guess I finally get to show you my new recorder. I'm so sorry. I was…following orders…and gathering data… I didn't think through what I was doing. It was all a failure – an utter failure."
A pair of healers came to examine her as she passed her recorder into Bow's hand. One of them got out a needle and thread, the other brought a magic staff.
"You… you should know what happened," she said. Her eyelids fluttered and she looked like she was trying to keep a focus on him and failing.
"Don't strain yourself," Bow said. "Just stay still and stay calm and let the healers work."
"I didn't mean to end Etheria."
She stared off to the glow of the former kingdom of Bright Moon in the distance. It emanated out like a perverse sunset as the evening set in around them.
Entrapta took a calm breath in and out as one of the physicians administered some painkiller by injection so he could work on her worst wound. She ignored him.
"Bow?"
"Yes, Entrapta?"
"My energy's getting low…and it's getting dark."
In that moment, her trembling body fell. She tumbled backwards into a heap of her own hair upon the dirt and rocks. The healers took on a sudden look of panic. "Cardiac arrest!" one of them barked as he directed the other in both physical emergency-aid and magic-staff work.
"Entrapta? Entrapta!" Bow yelped, bile rising in his stomach. "No…no… I just got you back! Please don't do this!"
One of the physicians looked up at him helplessly. "She's bled out too much. There's nothing we can do."
Bow held the blood-flecked recorder over his chest. "C-clean her up," he said, shaking. "At … at least she's home. We can take her home." He turned and walked away, past his stunned fellow wanderers.
He turned on the recorder and listened to Entrapta's voice. "Day 41, Hour 12, Fright Zone Log: After going over the data gathered on the Black Garnet experiment after the failed Battle of Bright Moon-"
"Black Garnet experiment?" Bow wondered aloud before turning the log back on. He'd hit a random place on the recorder. He decided he'd go back to the first logs on it, but for the time being, he was intrigued by the one he'd hit upon.
"Hordak has commissioned me to hack into allll of the individual Runestones of Etheria! Ooh, this sounds like fun! He wants me to see if I can ever so slightly destabilize them in hopes turning the powers of the Princesses against one another! Oh, I hope this doesn't go too badly. They were jerks for leaving me behind, but they were kind of nice while I was with them? I don't know. I just want to see what happens."
Bow sighed, his shoulders feeling as heavy as his heart.
He stopped in his tracks as he saw the silhouette of something hanging in a tree by a thin rope. He smelled blood and saw it dripping in the dark off the figure: a cat-woman, hanging by her broken neck.
Shadsie, 2019