10 years ago
"I hope you're proud of yourselves," Tikal said as the warriors returned. "He's just a child."
"Yeah, and we lost him anyway," one of them muttered. "So you may as well give up the outrage now."
"You 'lost' him?"
"The owl used a ring," Pachacamac said, silencing the warrior's answer with a quietly raised hand. "He's gone."
"You chased a chaos-using child with no idea what's he's doing, off world, with no idea where he went?"
Tikal felt a shudder of horror run through her and couldn't tell if it was her own apprehension or actual reaction from her charge.
"Can you find him?"
Tikal closed her eyes.
"I don't know. The Master Emerald… Chaos… does not like what you have done."
Pachacamac shook his own head. "Power has no feelings, power is just power. We've humoured this fanciful idea of yours that the energy has some sort of living spirit of is own because it's apparently helped you focus when we've needed it but that's all it is. A fantasy. We don't need fantasies, we need power."
He turned back to the warriors. "You're dismissed now until I need you. Until we decide what to do next."
He turned back.
"We need it," he repeated. "I sent scouting parties out again, before we found the hedgehog and they found nothing."
He paused and Tikal reluctantly stifled a protest to listen. This news had not yet reached her.
"No other echidnas," Pachacamac went on. "As far as we know we are now the last. And we are a tiny clan and growing smaller. And everyone else knows it too. That power is all that keeps us safe. We thought were were the only ones who could use it. It's that's not true we need to know why."
He paused again, but before Tikal could agree with at least that bit, his voice hardened.
"Or we need to eliminate that risk. I'm tired of having this same conversation with you!"
Tikal turned away again angrily – even time she thought he understood. Every time. It came back to power.
"Tikal! Listen. If you had seen the… life that hedgehog child had, the vitality. We have all of the chaos emeralds. We have the Master Emerald. Yet we don't have that. We fade. Eggs fail to hatch or are never laid at all. Winter sickness no longer takes only the most elderly and frail. In all the tribe we have just one living child of our own. The power that once made us strong now barely keeps us alive, and if you can't find the reason, priestess, then the warriors must try instead."
Tikal shook her head.
"And that's how you intend for us to survive? On kidnapping children and stealing the power that Chaos granted them instead of us?" Tikal straightened her back and quoted. "Chaos is power – you and your warriors always remember that part well enough and forget the rest. 'Enriched by the heart.' And if echidna hearts have grown so dark that we wish to survive on the basis of snatching other people's children then perhaps we don't deserve to."
Anger that was only partly her own surged through her.
"And perhaps Chaos already knows that. Perhaps that's why we're dying. Perhaps that's why the power goes to others."
Pachacamac scoffed. "And if that all nonsense about 'heart' is true then perhaps you should control your temper." He struck his spear on the ground firmly. "And if you cannot then you are no suitable guardian. The warriors will take the Emeralds to a new site immediately. Go back to your babysitting, daughter. It's time this superstition came to an end."
Tikal stared at him. He didn't even check to see if she complied before turning his back and walking away to issue his orders.
Tikal stood frozen for a moment, mind racing in panic both fanned by and feeding the disturbance and distress of Chaos, churning in the heart of the Master Emerald.
Then she shook it off and ran, half formed plans and desperation whirling together in her mind. Back, as her father had angrily ordered, to her 'babysitting'.
She burst into the shelter and the little echidna, sitting on the floor, looked round with a big smile at her early return.
"Tikal! Look what I can do!"
A faint iridescence shimmered in his spines and he waved his hands through the air, swirling green and gold sparks into a bubble of light which wavered in the air between his palms.
"Knuckles," she began as the bubble collapsed in on itself and the room seemed for a moment even darker than it had been before the additional light had appeared.
Knuckles looked at the empty space between his hands where it had been and then at Tikal, wide eyed and starting to be afraid by her own alarm.
"Something bad has happened," he said in a tone which wasn't entirely a question. The light had gone from his quills and he looked even smaller in its absence.
Tikal nodded, rapidly gathering up supplies and belonging, shoving things into backpacks for the both of them. Picking out rings from the box on the shelf. Only two left. That was okay. It would be enough. Once there. Once back.
"Yes," she said, turning back to Knuckles who was still watching her. "Something bad has happened. But we're going to be okay. We're going to go somewhere safe. Okay?"
"Okay." Knuckles stood up and held out his hand, trusting in spite of the atmosphere of anxiety which now surrounded them both.
Tikal took his hand and led him at a run towards the shrine.
"Are we going to see the big Emerald?" Knuckles asked, scurrying alongside and keeping up easily despite the breathless pace that Tikal could barely maintain. "That's good. I think it likes me."
Tikal glanced down. There was nothing in Knuckles' face to indicate he knew he'd said anything unusual, despite the fact he was the only other echidna she knew who didn't fear the Emeralds as much as they coveted them.
"Yes," she said. "We need to go with it, and the chaos emeralds to somewhere safe. Some people want to take them away. We have to keep them safe."
Knuckles scowled fiercely. "Right!"
He let go of her hand to bound up the steps to the shrine, two at a time, as lightly as a bird, only to spin back around, in time with her, at a yell from the ground behind them.
Knuckles had stopped halfway up, Tikal with one foot on the first step.
"This place isn't your concern any more, Tikal," Pachacamac said. "Step aside."
She shook her head and turned the rest of the way around to stand squarely facing them.
"No."
Pachacamac glanced up at Knuckles.
"I thought you didn't believe in dragging children away from where they belong?"
Tikal glanced over her shoulder. Knuckles was half crouched on the steps, his eyes wide and honestly frightened this time. The shimmer was back on his spines.
She turned back to Pachacamac and his warriors.
"This is exactly where he belongs."
Pachacamac passed the hand not holding his spear over his eyes and for a moment looked almost weary instead of angry. "More of your fantasies. Please, Tikal. Step aside. I will not be responsible for your safety if you do not."
"You haven't been responsible for me since you started down this path!"
She planted her own staff in the ground as Pachacamac raised his spear, pointed it, and looked away.
The warriors surged forward and as she felt the first blow land, knocking her aside, Tikal reached for strength not her own, for Chaos and the emeralds. She found it already rising to meet her, all outraged fury, pouring down over her like water or wind or neither.
And then it had passed and stood before her instead. A spirit made, if not flesh, then at least solid, and it was angry. Leaping towards the warriors, it roared and the ground shook and bucked beneath their feet as though trying to shake off their very touch.
Atop the shrine the pillars crashed down, the alter split, and the steps cracked.
Tikal looked back as Knuckles dived clear of the falling debris but found nothing to land on. His head struck the opposite edge of the chasm of stone that had torn open in the stairway but somehow he'd secured a grip and pulled himself up.
"Knuckles!" Tikal shouted and he turned woozily in her direction, before an aftershock sent the stone beneath his feet whip-lashing like something alive, and he fell, tail over tip down the steps to lie motionless at the bottom.
She ran for him, jumping over bodies flung in her path by furious Chaos and scooped Knuckles up. There wasn't time to check if he'd survived because at this rate, no one would.
"No!" she shouted, not sure if she was addressing the spirit or the Emerald or the energy itself. "This isn't the right way!"
It's their way. Somewhere from inside or outside her the answer came. It's what they would have used this power for against others.
She couldn't deny it.
"I can't let you kill them!"
No answer came. It didn't need to because the answer was obvious. She had no good way to stop it.
Overhead from atop the shrine a flash of light painted the scene in lurid colours for an instant and was gone. In her arms Knuckles whimpered and stirred, struggling to be put down. She set him back on his feet where he staggered but stayed upright.
"The bad things are happening. Where did they go?"
Tikal brushed his confused words away.
"It's okay. We're going to stop it."
He shook his head. "No it's not okay. It's not. They're gone and-"
Tikal, on instinct, glanced back up at the shrine.
Gone. Knuckles was right, the chaos emeralds were gone and even as she watched another furious tremor shook the ground and the Master Emerald itself tipped off its pedestal and came crashing down the steps, tumbling as Knuckles had fallen, end over end.
Its normally tranquil hue roiled within it as it came to rest a handspan from where they'd flung themselves clear. Violent shadows lashed across the ground in its light as the echidnas fought, and lost to Chaos' fury.
Tikal looked around, desperate for some way in to intervene but finding nothing. Her gaze settled back on Knuckles, barely on his feet, defenceless, for all his potential.
If she couldn't stop this, if she could save no one else, perhaps there was this one last thing worth doing.
She reached for the rings in her belt pouch and beckoned to Knuckles.
"Come on," she said. "It's like I said. We need to take the big Emerald somewhere safe."
Knuckles looked close to terrified tears but nodded and came to her side. She threw the ring and the portal opened, somewhere habitable but as safe and isolated and empty as she could possibly remember.
She reached for the Master Emerald and heaved. It was really too big for one echidna to move alone but Knuckles set his own smaller weight against it too and blue-green light washed over them. Knuckles made a startled, quiet sound and then they were through the ring.
It snapped out behind them and a musty, twilight silence replaced the screaming uproar of moments before. The Emerald-light dimmed though for the moment the gleam lingered on Knuckles' quills, reflected in his wide eyes before blinking out.
Knuckles sat down with a bump on the spongy ground, looking dazed by the sudden stillness and plucked absently at the one intact strap of his back pack. Tikal slipped hers off and put it down beside him.
"Knuckles?"
He turned an almost empty gaze up at her. Fear and hurt and confusion all tumbled together into numb, uncomprehending shock.
It was almost impossible in the face of it to do what she needed but she spoke anyway.
"I need to go back. I need to stop what's happening."
Knuckles shook his head, still silent but urgent and so desperate that she nearly gave in.
Instead she kept talking.
"I need you to help me. I need you to stay here and hide the big Emerald. It needs to be kept safe, remember?"
She almost weakened again at the struggle on his face but in the end he nodded.
"Good. Be brave. I'll send someone for you when it's safe again."
"Send?" Knuckles' voice shook. "But, you..."
"I'm sorry. There's something I have to do and… it means I won't be able to come back."
He didn't reach for her or try to stop her and that made it almost harder to leave than it would have been otherwise.
"Can you really stop the bad thing?"
She nodded. "Yes. I think I know how."
"Okay." The fierce look was back on Knuckles' face even with tears running down his muzzle. "Then I can keep the Master Emerald safe." His voice hitched. "For a while."
"Yes," Tikal said. "For a while. Someone will come back for you. I promise."
She took the last ring from her belt and turned to throw it. As the portal blossomed in front of her she looked over her shoulder before stepping through. Knuckles was back on his feet, arms crossed tightly in front of him and his eyes bright with both tears and the same shimmering light that danced on his spines.
She kept her eyes on that tiny, defiant shape as the ring-portal swallowed her up.