Chapter 3
Shadow of the Light
Shadow left the painting behind and went to stand in front of the metal door. He knew without comprehending how, that what lay behind that door would change him forever. Gravity felt intensified as he struggled to raise his arm and seize the heavy handle. Crrk! A heavy latch moved as Shadow turned and the door opened with a loud Crack! Cold air drifted out from within the maw, but Shadow could not see anything. Darkness waited in the breach.
His legs trembled as he ordered them forward. Shadow could not say why he felt so afraid. All he knew was that it had never taken more courage than for him to walk into that abyss of shadow. Within seconds he was enveloped by the blackness. Shadow could not see his own hand in front of his face. Beneath his feet he felt the metal turn into iron grates. He paused and heard the soft motion of running water.
Shadow followed the sound and soon there was a light at the end of the tunnel. He reached a small arched bridge that led into a cavern with a high ceiling. Mechanical consoles lined the walls each connected to a series of phosphorescent lines. The tubes intersected in the center but whatever they connected to was concealed by a large triangular blast shield.
Liquid ran through the lines and Shadow could hear the faint humming of the active machines, but there was something else. Shadow's nerves burned as he heard long slow breathing. He gazed up at the blast shield. Something lay beyond it, some kind of monster.
There was a faint green light issuing from a small window at the top of the blast shield. As he got closer Shadow saw that the light was from a green liquid and that the shield obscured what had to be an enormous beaker of some kind. Something was inside the water, something pale and encircled by thin strands of white phlegm.
Drawn by morbid curiosity, Shadow walked closer. The thing inside the water shifted and Shadow felt his heart nearly stop. Within the window was a face monstrous in size and emaciated to the bone. Small medical tubes were implanted into its cheeks which pulsed with energetic liquid. One of its eyes was closed but the other hung open. The socket was stretched and the eye itself seemed to hang in an empty vacuum. It had no color and appeared completely lifeless.
Shadow struggled to catch his breath. He felt like someone was driving a spike of cold fear right into his heart. His eyes drooped and he saw something written above the foremost console. Chaos 001. Drawn forward, he approached the console. But before he reached it, he felt a strange pulsing. Shadow drew out his Chaos Emerald and saw that it was starting to vibrate. What the?
The emerald started to shake violently and release waves of potent heat. Shadow recoiled in pain and dropped the gem. It hovered in midair, sparkling light a star before suddenly bursting into thin powder. No! But Shadow's attention was quickly pulled elsewhere. Lights illuminated from the sides of the great blast shield. Metal casings drew back and a great staircase descended to the ground right at Shadow's feet.
The brilliant light was coming from seven Chaos Emeralds. They had been set in a circle around whatever the blast shield was holding. Shadow was struck by an instant familiar dread. The entire structure was a supersized version of the shrine of the Master Emerald. Whatever was held by the blast shield was set in the center and the light of the water was the same green sparkle given off by the Master Emerald.
Yet this was not the imitation of flattery. Shadow had the sense of demonic reversal. The only word he could give for what he felt was evil. All the same, he found himself ascending the steps. At the top he would stand face to face with the creature within the shield. Every movement of his body felt forced and artificial. The natural part of him wanted nothing more than to run away. Shadow could not even articulate what drove him forward. He was not curious anymore, it was as if some other will was driving him onward.
At last he reached the end. The face inside the water had been so deformed it was as large as Shadow's entire body. It was barely recognizable as human. Yet there was something about it, something familiar that Shadow could not deny. He pressed his hand against the glass and felt the low deep rumble. Was it asleep? Was it always kept in this state of suspended animation?
He looked into its eye. From up close, he realized it had not lost all of its color, it still retained part of its….blue….Shadow nearly fell backwards down the stairs. His knees buckled and Shadow fell forward onto the glass. No…no….He could see into the container now. The creature's body had seen the same kind of atrophy and deformity as its face. It was huge, at least twenty feet in size. Hundreds of tubes were gorged into its flesh, zapping it of some colorful liquid.
Tears flooded Shadow's eyes. As he watched, the skin above its shoulder split open. A long blue tendril lashed out and smacked the glass. Thud! Seconds later, buzz saws descended into the water. The tendrils were cut away and sucked into a shoot. The creature stirred slightly. Its mouth opened and released a small gasp of pain.
Shadow clung to the glass pressing his body against it, desperate for something to feel other than the collapsing horror that was consuming him. He banged his fist into the glass and the creature stirred. The pale eye rotated in its open socket. It blinked and the gray fog faded slightly and it became more blue. Shadow rose unsteadily to his feet to gaze into the eye, the eye of Maria Robotnik.
Certainty hit him with the force of a bullet. Shadow felt numb as he raised his hand upward. The creature blinked again. The eye searched him and seemed to widen with familiarity. Then there was a loud ringing. Maria drew back and Shadow watched in horror as the liquid turned blue. Metallic arms topped with needles submerged into the water and injected Maria in a dozen areas all at once. She seized up and her mouth opened into a silent scream. The water started to vibrate and turned blue. Maria seized up in pain, exactly as she had done as a child when her grandfather had first injected her.
Her other eye burst open. But it was not a human eye, but the green bulbous eye of the primordial monster known as Chaos. Shadow leapt back in shock and fell backwards down the stairs. He smashed hard onto the bottom step and watched as the water turned green again and the sound of thrashing slowly subsided.
Shadow covered his face with his hands as the tears started to flow. An urge to strike, to tear at his own skin, to cause himself pain boiled inside him. He smacked the cavern ground, but he had no energy. Why? What is this? Rage, his once sure defense against sorrow had abandoned him. Shadow was left alone with his grief. All he could do was weep.
Please…please take me back. Please…please…The Time Stones ignored his command. Had he caused this? Had he meddled with time and inflicted this horror on Maria?
"She has suffered a terrible fate."
An all too familiar voice echoed through the cavern with that unnerving feeling as if it had originated from within Shadow. Lines appeared in thin air like the slow cracking of a window. The glass finally shattered and Shadow was given a glimpse of absolute nothingness. A second later, the nothingness swirled into purple smoke and the Realm Lord emerged.
He was even larger than Shadow remembered. His cloak of night swallowed the light issuing from his crown of burning suns. So that, despite the splendor of the seven gems sparkling from the crown, the Realm Lord's appearance made the cavern darker.
"You…" Shadow croaked. He hastily wiped away his tears and rose to one knee.
"Behold a world in which you never existed, Shadow the Hedgehog." The Realm Lord raised his ephod and pointed it at the shrine. "In this universe, Gerald Robotnik failed to create the Ultimate Life Form. Instead, he found a way to synthesize the blood of Chaos with humans, making his own granddaughter his first test subject. After years of transfusions and tests, Gerald was finally able to achieve his grand design. Would you like to see it?"
The Realm Lord headed to one of the smaller consoles. He waved his staff and the machine activated. A piston fired, opening a compartment that let out a low hiss. The Realm Lord reached inside and retrieved a vile of a glowing blue liquid. From what Shadow could see, there were dozens more inside, each in a variety of different colors.
"Is that…a Chaos drive?"
"A similar design but no. This is what your Gerald failed to make. This is the Elixir of Life. One can be chosen based on blood type and, with a few simple injections, the human body is preserved from mortal decay."
"That's…that's not possible. Gerald never…he wouldn't-"
The Realm Lord laughed. It was a horrible sound that made Shadow's insides go cold. "Gerald did. You are seeing the evidence with your own eyes. Oppressed by his repeated failures and the stains of his legacy, Gerald used his own infirm granddaughter as a lab rat. Maria's disease made her the perfect candidate for the transfusions. A healthy host would reject the serum and die before they could produce any hybrid tendrils. Maria's immune system however was too damaged to fight back making her an ideal host. But there was a drawback. The repeated injection of the serum started to change Maria's biology. Her body morphed, it became monstrous and wild. Gerald had her confided to this facility where she could serve as a perpetual battery for his fame and genius."
As he spoke, the Realm Lord could not keep out his tone of sadistic pleasure. Maria's torture and the pain it caused Shadow seemed to excite him. "To make things even worse, the injections work on Maria like the elixir does. She cannot die but her immortality is nothing more than a perpetual prison of pain and despair."
"Stop…" Shadow dropped back to his knees. "Stop this…"
The Realm Lord paused. "This was not my doing Shadow the Hedgehog. You are the one who came here seeking answers, I am only providing them."
"This…this isn't' what I wanted. I just wanted to go to the past, I-"
"Have done nothing that I did not expect nor direct. You trusted yourself to the waves of time, and I am the god of time. The time stones obey my directives."
Shadow shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Allow me to enlighten you." The Realm Lord waved his hand and a miniature earth appeared in the air. "Beyond the confines of what one would call reality there is an infinite number of universes. Countless include an earth just like the one you know." The small earth multiplied into a dozen copies. "Most are so marginal in difference you could spend a thousand lifetimes in either one and never notice a difference. Ordinarily, there are no bridges that connect these worlds. They exist in parallel with no intersections. At least they were until I discovered the means to travel through them."
The earths vanished and were replaced by hundreds of pocket size universes. "As I told you before, I am the Realm Lord, the gateway between dimensions. Only I have ever pulled back the curtain to see the nothingness that lay behind. Existence spawned outward out of nothing, directing towards nothing. At least it did, until I put my will upon it. It was my intention to guide the forces of being and the interplay of entropy and order into a theater of my own design."
"What does this have to do with me?" Shadow snapped.
"When you used the Time Stones you did not travel backward in time, but through the portals between dimensions. Time that is the bridge between worlds, the only means to pass from realm to realm. I used my power to bring you to this particular world so that you would understand the price of the knowledge that you seek."
"But I haven't learned anything! Gerald didn't create me in this timeline." Shadow burned with desperation and confusion. The pocket universes continued to spiral randomly around the cavern.
"This is a timeline where I never approached Gerald Robotnik." The Realm Lord's eyes flashed dangerously. "Fool. I am the answer that you have been seeking. Here at the end of the road as I promised you I would be."
Shadow shook his head but he could not stop the memory of his last encounter with the Realm Lord from springing to his mind. "When you come to me again you will do so willingly."
The Realm Lord flexed his hand into a fist. All the pocket universes suddenly aligned themselves in a perfect circle. "I stood outside reality and tried to exert my will over it. But you have heard the warning about the price for meddling too deeply with time. For my perspective I was banished into limbo. I could see, but not exert myself. All of reality was laid before me like a book whose ink was already dry. This revelation nearly drove me to madness. Confined in a void separate from time I could neither die nor live. I neither existed nor was absent. I had always been and yet never was. Division and contradiction tore me in half and I experienced agony like that of no other creature."
"Yet in my agony I became aware of something. In the great expanse of the multiverse there were small echoes of my former being. The imprint of what I had been before my apotheosis. I searched and found that the echo persisted throughout time and space. Stronger in some places and weaker in others. Though it was faint I could exert some power and some small fraction of influence."
"It took millennia for me to learn how to use this knowledge. But I had no shortage of time for instruction. Steadily, I was able to use my influence to change the course of history within a given world. The more that world changed as a result, the more my power grew. It was only a matter of time before I gained complete sovereignty."
The Realm Lord waved his staff and the universes started to spin violently. "That is when I learned of my enemy. When I pulled back the curtain I thought there had been nothing, but I was mistaken. There was another, one whose purpose was so anathema to mine I could not perceive it. The Will of Disorder. Its nature was to resist all structures and it became aware of my growing power. Disorder's agents rose to defeat me and I thought I would be returned to my hellish prison."
The spinning universes started to break away from the circle and spread in random directions. "That is when I decided to create my own agents, individuals within worlds who would ensure that my imprint on a world remains strong. As they exerted my will upon their worlds my influence would grow until I could leave my cage and enter the physical world." The Realm Lord snapped and the pocket universes faded. "Do you understand now, Shadow the Hedgehog?"
Shadow's mind resisted the dawning compression that was slowly stealing over him. It couldn't be true, he could not allow it to be. He was surprised to hear himself answer, "It was you. You were the one who told Gerald to switch the prototype to a hedgehog. You told him how to create me."
The Realm Lord laughed, mocking the misery this confession caused Shadow. "You have always been my servant Shadow. As I have done countless times before, I have created my agent in another world. Every Shadow has been different, and I confess I had my doubts about you. It was not my intention that Gerald would combine your blood with his witless granddaughter, nor that he would befriend you to her. My influence over him was after all, not absolute. Yet all the same you are just as powerful and fit for my designs as is needed. The Ultimate Life Form, the perfect weapon to use against the hero of Disorder and rebellion. Are you ready for the final truth? Or have you already guessed it? Do you know what light you were created to emulate, why you are called Shadow?"
Something deep inside Shadow seemed to break. A fear he had long concealed flushed into his heart with the compounding cruelty of absolute certainty. He had known. He had known the moment they had first seen each other. The resemblance was uncanny. Their abilities were so similar, so unique. Yet it couldn't be true, it wasn't possible. Shadow was older, far older. That simple fact had been his only defense against the seed of doubt that had long laid dormant in his mind. Now it flowered and Shadow realized how obvious it had been. Metal knew. Of course he had, he and Shadow both shared the same fate. Both were copies, one metal, one organic, copies of Sonic the Hedgehog.
"Across a million universes I have made his Shadow. Sonic is the thorn in my flesh, the great power and eternal champion of Disorder. You must destroy him, as all your brethren have done across a thousand different worlds. It is your density, your one purpose. His death will shatter your world and alter its course to the point where I can enter it in the flesh. Then I can-"
The Realm Lord paused as Shadow started to laugh. Once he had started, Shadow found it difficult to stop. He laughed until his ribs hurt and he was forced to sit down on one of the steps. It was all so absurd. Shadow wiped the tears from his eyes and struggled to catch his breath. "What did you expect would happen next? Did you think you would just tell me all this and then just expect I would go along with your plan? I don't give a damn about you or Sonic. I'm not killing anybody."
"Your programming has been contaminated." Admitted the Realm Lord in a voice of forced calm. "Maria's influence has made you soft. Yet that does not mean there is anything wrong with your design. The hatred is still within you, the desire and capacity for violence lies just beneath the surface."
"I don't care." Shadow insisted.
It was the Realm Lord's turn to laugh. "Of course you do. Why else would you have gone through all this trouble to discover the truth? Your defiance means nothing. You will kill Sonic, and your world will fall into my hands like all the others. I see now that your true nature is too buried for you to unlock it. It must be forced out of you. Very well." The Realm Lord raised his staff and alarms started to wail. Shadow felt the ground beneath him tremble. "Remember Shadow, you are in my realm now. All things bend to my will, it is only a matter…of time." The Realm Lord spun his cloak and vanished in a flash of black smoke.
Crack! Shadow spun around. The blast shield containing Maria split in half. The metal housing collapsed onto the cavern floor and all the terminals sparked as they were crushed. Shadow leapt into the air to avoid the debris. He watched as the glass beaker started to crack. Maria thrashed and the glass broke in earnest, spilling the vile liquid onto the floor.
Shadow landed near the exit. There was an eerie silence while he tried to comprehend what he was seeing. Maria had finally been revealed in her entirety. Her monstrously stretched limbs were welded cruelly into a metal frame. The torso was stretched like the body of a serpent, and her ribs snapped outward from the force of expanding gelatinous blue liquid. Maria's head slumped downward as it appeared her neck could not support its weight.
For a minute, she simply breathed. The same long slow rumble that Shadow had heard before. Then she let out a roar. It was half a woman's scream and half the terrifying cry of a wild beast. CRUNCH! Maria moved forward and tore herself free of her restraints. The cavern groaned as tons of metal were sent flying in every direction.
Slowly, but surely, Maria destroyed the makeshift shrine that had served as her prison. As she thrashed, Shadow realized that Maria was turning into. Her human body was deforming into the beast that Chaos turned into when he consumed the seven Chaos Emeralds. However, her transformation was a mockery, a twisted hybrid that left her in perpetual agony.
She continued to thrash and the ceiling of the cavern started to cave in. Large chunks of rocks rained down upon her. "Stop! Stop!" Shadow climbed up onto one of the larger terminals and tried to signal her. "Maria! Stop!"
She paused at the sound of her name. Slowly, she turned to face him. Her human eye glared down at him. The blue was flooded with red lines. What human remained in her face vanished as her expression twisted into that of rage.