***Disclaimer in 1.
**Thanks to VOLVIC and MYSTRYFNN for the reviews. I appreciate any advice, reviews, critiques out there so feel free to let me know what you thing!
CHAPTER 8: GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Adam set the Wind Raider down in the barren area north of Castle Grayskull. He stared at the old ruin and a knot formed in his stomach. He hadn't been back here since that day. Memories of the event filled his head and he tried to shake them away.
He had to do this to protect his son. He wasn't going to let Adacan get all caught up in the magic of Grayskull as he had been. He felt both he and his son had already paid too high a price to protect it's secrets.
He took a deep breath and jumped out of the Wind Raider. As he walked towards the castle, he noticed the jawbridge was up. He remembered how he used to summon it open, but then realized he had left the sword of power at the palace. He hadn't used it in five years.
He didn't feel like being polite and going back to retrieve the sword. He didn't feel like waiting for someone to realize he was there, he wanted to get this settled, and there would be no better time than the present.
"Teela, open this damn door now!" he yelled at the castle.
That seemed to work as the jawbridge started to glow and lowered itself to the ground. The ground shook as it hit with a heavy "thud." Adam sighed and stepped onto the lowered bridge and walked into the castle he swore he would never set foot in again.
Things hadn't really changed much. The halls were still dark, it still smelled musty, but it seemed alive again and he could feel the energy from the great power within the walls. But none of that mattered. He just wanted to finish this game and get the hell out of there.
He walked into the great throne room and looked up at Teela. He was surprised to see she was not alone. A figure stood next to her in a white cloak, their face and hands were covered and they did not move, even when Adam made his presence very well known.
"Would you please explain to me why you feel the need to torture my child and me?" he yelled to the new Sorceress sitting at the top of a tower of stairs.
Teela looked at her cloaked companion and shook her head. Then she looked at Adam.
"There was no other way," she said as she stood and started to walk down to him.
For a second, he noticed how different she looked. She wasn't dressed exactly the same as the Sorceress, but she didn't look like her old self. Her brilliant red hair was piled on top of her head and a gold headband crowned her forehead. Gold snake bands decorated all of her arms and she wore a shimmering blue tunic. She looked more like an ancient Queen than the warrior general he used to know.
Nonetheless, she had made him very, very angry and he meant to put and end to it, once and for all.
He folded his arms and looked her in the eyes, the same emerald green ones that would roll up whenever he pulled one of his disappearing stunts.
"I'm done, I can't do this anymore," he said strongly. "I have to think of my son, gods know I didn't put my wife first when I needed to and I won't make that same mistake with Adacan."
Teela shook her head. She stepped off the stairs and approached her former friend. He stepped back as if she had a disease he didn't want to get. This hurt her.
"Adam, I had no intention of Adacan actually coming here," she explained. "That's why I sent a message to my father to stop him. What I was trying to do was get YOU here."
She smirked.
"And it looks like it worked. Not bad, huh?"
Adam unfolded his arms and looked at her with anger.
"I'm in no mood to play games with you Teela, I don't care who you are now, I told you, I'm out!" Adam through his hands up in the air and turned to leave. Teela looked frantically at the cloaked figure at the top of the stairs and turned quickly back to Adam who was almost out of the throne room.
"Skeletor's back!" she yelled reaching her arm out to stop him.
Adam froze in his place. He felt a burning sensation in his gut that hadn't been there for years. He always hoped that the Sorceress had taken care of the evil menace and that he would never return to plague Eternia or his family again.
He hated it when he was wrong.
He didn't turn, only tilted his head back and sighed.
"Are you sure?" he asked in a surprisingly calm tone. "Are you absolutely sure?"
Teela wanted to help her friend and walked towards him as he turned around. He still kept an uneasy step back from her. She dropped her arm, knowing he wouldn't accept her comfort.
"I don't want it to be true either, Adam," she said, her voice full of remorse. "But it seems as if he has been resurrected from whatever hell my mother," she paused. "My mother sent him to."
Adam looked down. He remembered the last conversation he and the Sorceress had. He had promised her he would protect Teela no matter what the cost. She said the price would be the life of someone close to him but in his wildest dreams he never thought it would be his wife.
For the last five years, he had blamed himself for Erin's death, but part of him also blamed the Sorceress and although he regretted that feeling, he could not shake it. This made it impossible for him to help Teela, the person who was his best friend for most of his life, grieve and he refused to see her as long as she was at Grayskull.
He looked at Teela, who appeared to be very worried.
"Adam, I know this is difficult, but you must be prepared for Skeletor," she said anxiously. "I'm not sure what exactly it will take to defeat him this time, but it will be a great battle, maybe even the one that finally finishes the war between good and evil on Eternia. He's much more powerful now, I can feel it."
Adam heard what she said but didn't respond. He looked past her to the figure in the white cloak, who was still standing next to the throne. The figure was ghostly and it bothered Adam that he couldn't see it's face. He looked at Teela again.
"Who's that?" he asked nodding in the general direction of the unknown guest.
Teela didn't need to look, she knew who Adam was referring to and as much as she wanted to tell him the whole truth, she couldn't...yet.
"That is one of the Counsel's advisors," she said quickly, trying to distract him from the subject. "They appear when they are most needed to give sitting Sorceresses guidance, especially the novice ones. They are the only ones that can show a bias towards the forces of good, mostly because in the end, they have no say or input over anything that the Counsel must deal with."
Teela looked down. She had spent five long years mastering her magic under Zodac, and some of it, mostly because of his snide remarks, had been unbearable. But she did it, and meant to fulfill her responsibilities to the fullest extent. Despite her hard work, she still had some things to learn.
She returned to the matter at hand.
"Adam, please, there isn't much time," she pleaded. "You must be ready. Alert the Defenders and ready the guards," Adam thought she was beginning to sound a little like her old self. "Skeletor will attack with full force, you can count on that."
Adam took a deep breath, his emotions were tearing him up on the inside. He looked at Teela, then the cloaked figure and then the floor. He turned to walk away.
"I have to think about it," he said with his head down and his eyes shut. "I can't make this decision right now."
Teela's once famous anger surfaced as she magically made her self appear in front of Adam, blocking the hallway and his way out of the castle.
"I don't think you understand what I'm saying!" she yelled. "Time is not on our side here. Skeletor will attack and his army will be legion, all of Eternia can fight, but we can't win without He-Man on..."
Adam slammed his fist into the wall next to Teela. That seemed to quiet her wrath, but not his.
"It is not that easy Teela!" he yelled furiously. "We lost the last time we took on Skeletor. We lost big! And even if he was vanquished, that didn't seem to work for too long. It didn't matter that I was He-Man then. Being He-Man didn't help saved my wife, or your mother!"
What he said next cut Teela like a million sword blades.
"All that it managed to help was you! Are you happy about that? You're safe within the walls of this castle but the rest of us have to face life with the consequences of our actions and quite frankly, the consequences of me being He-Man and being sworn to protect YOU have been too much for me to bear!!!"
Adam finally finished his rant and stormed past on obviously stunned novice Sorceress. She had no idea he harbored such hard feelings against her. She turned, unable to say anything and watched him stomp out. Behind her the cloaked figure appeared and put a hand on Teela's shoulder.
Teela stood up straight and quickly wiped away a single tear that rolled down her cheek. She turned to face to glowing ghost.
"You're right," she said to the faceless figure. "He didn't take that well at all."
The figure nodded and then vanished. Teela didn't worry, though, because she knew her advisor wouldn't be too far away. She was more worried with whether or not Adam would ever return.
*****
Evil-Lyn was beginning to have second thoughts about what she had done. This wasn't the same Skeletor, this was a creature, a being much more dark, much more powerful and much more unholy than Skeletor had ever been.
She sat alone with this creature in the chamber of Snake Mountain. The cold, limp bodies of Beast-Man and Mer-Man lay on the floor around her. She knew a sacrifice would have to be offered for the return spell to work, that's why she made sure they were there.
Before, she had no problem offering those two morons up to the clutches of death. Betrayal, to her, was only part of her conquest of power, which she thought she would have upon Skeletor's return.
But this was different. She tried to divert her attention from the large gaping wound on Beast-Man's neck. As much as it made her cringe, she found it ironic that the supposed master of beasts would have his jugular ripped out. She watched him suffer, at one point she even smiled, but that changed when she saw how the taste of blood made Skeletor ravenous, and that frightened her.
Mer-Man's demise wasn't as painful. Skeletor merely sucked all the moisture out of his body, leaving the fish/man mutant a little more dehydrated than he should have been. His dry and wrinkled face still held the look of surprise. Evil-Lyn contended he definitely didn't see that coming. A slight wind blew through the chamber and his remains turned to dust and scattered with the breeze.
Skeletor, or what she believed to be Skeletor, now sat on his throne across from her and stroked Panthor's furry back, slowly. Evil-Lyn couldn't even see his bony face, just the two red eyes that glared from the darkness under his hood. His form had also taken on a more demonic shape. He was still blue, but his skin was scaly, almost serpent-like and he was a good ten feet tall now.
She didn't like feeling so miniscule around him, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
There was no noise except for Panthor's snoring and the awful, heavy breathing sound Skeletor was making.
For the first time in her life, Evil-Lyn was frightened of her master. She cleared her throat and looked around, hoping that the red eyes that were focused so intently on her would find something else to stare at. They didn't.
"Master Skeletor," she said shakily. "What will be our first maneuver?"
Skeletor just chuckled under his breath and said nothing. He raised his havoc staff and projected an image against the wall.
Evil-Lyn turned and looked upon it intently. Despite her anxiety, she smiled and held her head down in an act of obedience.
"This time, he will not get away," she said as she left the throne room. "I swear it."
Skeletor wiped a drop of blood mixed with fur away from his mouth and chuckled again, softly.
******
Adam had possibly the worst headache anyone on Eternia had ever suffered. He parked the Wind Raider back on the palace landing field and walked right past the field attendant without saying a word.
His argument with Teela weighed heavily in his thoughts and he regretted saying such horrible things to her. The fact was, the second he walked into Grayskull, he felt the power pulling him back in and it scared him, a lot. He just didn't feel ready to go back to that life, and he wasn't sure if he ever would.
He was so entranced in his thoughts that he walked right by his parents without acknowledging them, then Man-At-Arms, then Orko, who seemed to be the only one offended by this.
He walked up the stairs to his room and walked in sat down on the bed, rubbing his eyes and face. He wondered what he was going to do. If he didn't fight Skeletor as He-Man, Eternia would certainly fall and many would suffer or even die. If he did, he felt he would be betraying himself; He-Man was responsible for Erin's death. He couldn't just let that go.
And what if he were defeated? He couldn't allow his son to lose both of his parents.
Searching for the right answer was tearing him apart and he felt himself start to lose control and he wanted to just start throwing things.
"You acting like a schmuck, you know that, don't you," the familiar woman's voice caught Adam by surprise but he didn't react as such. He hadn't heard her voice in so long, he almost forgot what it sounded like.
He slowly turned his head and made eye contact with the same eyes that both he and his son had seen every time they looked into the mirror. He smiled lightly and put his hand under his chin.
"Hi'ya sis," he mumbled as Adora leaned back in his chair.
**Thanks to VOLVIC and MYSTRYFNN for the reviews. I appreciate any advice, reviews, critiques out there so feel free to let me know what you thing!
CHAPTER 8: GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Adam set the Wind Raider down in the barren area north of Castle Grayskull. He stared at the old ruin and a knot formed in his stomach. He hadn't been back here since that day. Memories of the event filled his head and he tried to shake them away.
He had to do this to protect his son. He wasn't going to let Adacan get all caught up in the magic of Grayskull as he had been. He felt both he and his son had already paid too high a price to protect it's secrets.
He took a deep breath and jumped out of the Wind Raider. As he walked towards the castle, he noticed the jawbridge was up. He remembered how he used to summon it open, but then realized he had left the sword of power at the palace. He hadn't used it in five years.
He didn't feel like being polite and going back to retrieve the sword. He didn't feel like waiting for someone to realize he was there, he wanted to get this settled, and there would be no better time than the present.
"Teela, open this damn door now!" he yelled at the castle.
That seemed to work as the jawbridge started to glow and lowered itself to the ground. The ground shook as it hit with a heavy "thud." Adam sighed and stepped onto the lowered bridge and walked into the castle he swore he would never set foot in again.
Things hadn't really changed much. The halls were still dark, it still smelled musty, but it seemed alive again and he could feel the energy from the great power within the walls. But none of that mattered. He just wanted to finish this game and get the hell out of there.
He walked into the great throne room and looked up at Teela. He was surprised to see she was not alone. A figure stood next to her in a white cloak, their face and hands were covered and they did not move, even when Adam made his presence very well known.
"Would you please explain to me why you feel the need to torture my child and me?" he yelled to the new Sorceress sitting at the top of a tower of stairs.
Teela looked at her cloaked companion and shook her head. Then she looked at Adam.
"There was no other way," she said as she stood and started to walk down to him.
For a second, he noticed how different she looked. She wasn't dressed exactly the same as the Sorceress, but she didn't look like her old self. Her brilliant red hair was piled on top of her head and a gold headband crowned her forehead. Gold snake bands decorated all of her arms and she wore a shimmering blue tunic. She looked more like an ancient Queen than the warrior general he used to know.
Nonetheless, she had made him very, very angry and he meant to put and end to it, once and for all.
He folded his arms and looked her in the eyes, the same emerald green ones that would roll up whenever he pulled one of his disappearing stunts.
"I'm done, I can't do this anymore," he said strongly. "I have to think of my son, gods know I didn't put my wife first when I needed to and I won't make that same mistake with Adacan."
Teela shook her head. She stepped off the stairs and approached her former friend. He stepped back as if she had a disease he didn't want to get. This hurt her.
"Adam, I had no intention of Adacan actually coming here," she explained. "That's why I sent a message to my father to stop him. What I was trying to do was get YOU here."
She smirked.
"And it looks like it worked. Not bad, huh?"
Adam unfolded his arms and looked at her with anger.
"I'm in no mood to play games with you Teela, I don't care who you are now, I told you, I'm out!" Adam through his hands up in the air and turned to leave. Teela looked frantically at the cloaked figure at the top of the stairs and turned quickly back to Adam who was almost out of the throne room.
"Skeletor's back!" she yelled reaching her arm out to stop him.
Adam froze in his place. He felt a burning sensation in his gut that hadn't been there for years. He always hoped that the Sorceress had taken care of the evil menace and that he would never return to plague Eternia or his family again.
He hated it when he was wrong.
He didn't turn, only tilted his head back and sighed.
"Are you sure?" he asked in a surprisingly calm tone. "Are you absolutely sure?"
Teela wanted to help her friend and walked towards him as he turned around. He still kept an uneasy step back from her. She dropped her arm, knowing he wouldn't accept her comfort.
"I don't want it to be true either, Adam," she said, her voice full of remorse. "But it seems as if he has been resurrected from whatever hell my mother," she paused. "My mother sent him to."
Adam looked down. He remembered the last conversation he and the Sorceress had. He had promised her he would protect Teela no matter what the cost. She said the price would be the life of someone close to him but in his wildest dreams he never thought it would be his wife.
For the last five years, he had blamed himself for Erin's death, but part of him also blamed the Sorceress and although he regretted that feeling, he could not shake it. This made it impossible for him to help Teela, the person who was his best friend for most of his life, grieve and he refused to see her as long as she was at Grayskull.
He looked at Teela, who appeared to be very worried.
"Adam, I know this is difficult, but you must be prepared for Skeletor," she said anxiously. "I'm not sure what exactly it will take to defeat him this time, but it will be a great battle, maybe even the one that finally finishes the war between good and evil on Eternia. He's much more powerful now, I can feel it."
Adam heard what she said but didn't respond. He looked past her to the figure in the white cloak, who was still standing next to the throne. The figure was ghostly and it bothered Adam that he couldn't see it's face. He looked at Teela again.
"Who's that?" he asked nodding in the general direction of the unknown guest.
Teela didn't need to look, she knew who Adam was referring to and as much as she wanted to tell him the whole truth, she couldn't...yet.
"That is one of the Counsel's advisors," she said quickly, trying to distract him from the subject. "They appear when they are most needed to give sitting Sorceresses guidance, especially the novice ones. They are the only ones that can show a bias towards the forces of good, mostly because in the end, they have no say or input over anything that the Counsel must deal with."
Teela looked down. She had spent five long years mastering her magic under Zodac, and some of it, mostly because of his snide remarks, had been unbearable. But she did it, and meant to fulfill her responsibilities to the fullest extent. Despite her hard work, she still had some things to learn.
She returned to the matter at hand.
"Adam, please, there isn't much time," she pleaded. "You must be ready. Alert the Defenders and ready the guards," Adam thought she was beginning to sound a little like her old self. "Skeletor will attack with full force, you can count on that."
Adam took a deep breath, his emotions were tearing him up on the inside. He looked at Teela, then the cloaked figure and then the floor. He turned to walk away.
"I have to think about it," he said with his head down and his eyes shut. "I can't make this decision right now."
Teela's once famous anger surfaced as she magically made her self appear in front of Adam, blocking the hallway and his way out of the castle.
"I don't think you understand what I'm saying!" she yelled. "Time is not on our side here. Skeletor will attack and his army will be legion, all of Eternia can fight, but we can't win without He-Man on..."
Adam slammed his fist into the wall next to Teela. That seemed to quiet her wrath, but not his.
"It is not that easy Teela!" he yelled furiously. "We lost the last time we took on Skeletor. We lost big! And even if he was vanquished, that didn't seem to work for too long. It didn't matter that I was He-Man then. Being He-Man didn't help saved my wife, or your mother!"
What he said next cut Teela like a million sword blades.
"All that it managed to help was you! Are you happy about that? You're safe within the walls of this castle but the rest of us have to face life with the consequences of our actions and quite frankly, the consequences of me being He-Man and being sworn to protect YOU have been too much for me to bear!!!"
Adam finally finished his rant and stormed past on obviously stunned novice Sorceress. She had no idea he harbored such hard feelings against her. She turned, unable to say anything and watched him stomp out. Behind her the cloaked figure appeared and put a hand on Teela's shoulder.
Teela stood up straight and quickly wiped away a single tear that rolled down her cheek. She turned to face to glowing ghost.
"You're right," she said to the faceless figure. "He didn't take that well at all."
The figure nodded and then vanished. Teela didn't worry, though, because she knew her advisor wouldn't be too far away. She was more worried with whether or not Adam would ever return.
*****
Evil-Lyn was beginning to have second thoughts about what she had done. This wasn't the same Skeletor, this was a creature, a being much more dark, much more powerful and much more unholy than Skeletor had ever been.
She sat alone with this creature in the chamber of Snake Mountain. The cold, limp bodies of Beast-Man and Mer-Man lay on the floor around her. She knew a sacrifice would have to be offered for the return spell to work, that's why she made sure they were there.
Before, she had no problem offering those two morons up to the clutches of death. Betrayal, to her, was only part of her conquest of power, which she thought she would have upon Skeletor's return.
But this was different. She tried to divert her attention from the large gaping wound on Beast-Man's neck. As much as it made her cringe, she found it ironic that the supposed master of beasts would have his jugular ripped out. She watched him suffer, at one point she even smiled, but that changed when she saw how the taste of blood made Skeletor ravenous, and that frightened her.
Mer-Man's demise wasn't as painful. Skeletor merely sucked all the moisture out of his body, leaving the fish/man mutant a little more dehydrated than he should have been. His dry and wrinkled face still held the look of surprise. Evil-Lyn contended he definitely didn't see that coming. A slight wind blew through the chamber and his remains turned to dust and scattered with the breeze.
Skeletor, or what she believed to be Skeletor, now sat on his throne across from her and stroked Panthor's furry back, slowly. Evil-Lyn couldn't even see his bony face, just the two red eyes that glared from the darkness under his hood. His form had also taken on a more demonic shape. He was still blue, but his skin was scaly, almost serpent-like and he was a good ten feet tall now.
She didn't like feeling so miniscule around him, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
There was no noise except for Panthor's snoring and the awful, heavy breathing sound Skeletor was making.
For the first time in her life, Evil-Lyn was frightened of her master. She cleared her throat and looked around, hoping that the red eyes that were focused so intently on her would find something else to stare at. They didn't.
"Master Skeletor," she said shakily. "What will be our first maneuver?"
Skeletor just chuckled under his breath and said nothing. He raised his havoc staff and projected an image against the wall.
Evil-Lyn turned and looked upon it intently. Despite her anxiety, she smiled and held her head down in an act of obedience.
"This time, he will not get away," she said as she left the throne room. "I swear it."
Skeletor wiped a drop of blood mixed with fur away from his mouth and chuckled again, softly.
******
Adam had possibly the worst headache anyone on Eternia had ever suffered. He parked the Wind Raider back on the palace landing field and walked right past the field attendant without saying a word.
His argument with Teela weighed heavily in his thoughts and he regretted saying such horrible things to her. The fact was, the second he walked into Grayskull, he felt the power pulling him back in and it scared him, a lot. He just didn't feel ready to go back to that life, and he wasn't sure if he ever would.
He was so entranced in his thoughts that he walked right by his parents without acknowledging them, then Man-At-Arms, then Orko, who seemed to be the only one offended by this.
He walked up the stairs to his room and walked in sat down on the bed, rubbing his eyes and face. He wondered what he was going to do. If he didn't fight Skeletor as He-Man, Eternia would certainly fall and many would suffer or even die. If he did, he felt he would be betraying himself; He-Man was responsible for Erin's death. He couldn't just let that go.
And what if he were defeated? He couldn't allow his son to lose both of his parents.
Searching for the right answer was tearing him apart and he felt himself start to lose control and he wanted to just start throwing things.
"You acting like a schmuck, you know that, don't you," the familiar woman's voice caught Adam by surprise but he didn't react as such. He hadn't heard her voice in so long, he almost forgot what it sounded like.
He slowly turned his head and made eye contact with the same eyes that both he and his son had seen every time they looked into the mirror. He smiled lightly and put his hand under his chin.
"Hi'ya sis," he mumbled as Adora leaned back in his chair.
