S Peter Davis
All characters (C) SEGA, Archie and SP Davis 2004 (unless otherwise noted).
Used without permission
Seven:
The Runes of Awakening
The light in my darkest hour is fear,
Denies me of anything good,
So don't lose your heart,
You'll need it.
- Silverchair
It's a shame we have to die, my dear,
No-one's getting out of here alive this time.
- Foo Fighters
It's the end of the world as we know it,
And I feel fine.
- R.E.M.
FAITH
I/Cinos
In the end, it all came down to light and dark. Opposite sides of the same coin, equal forces vying for the same prize. Reflections of each other. But isn't that the way it always has been?
Picture the darkest, most morbid pit of the underworld. A gigantic wall of rock glows red from the brimstone and searing flames beneath. The heat distorts the air, makes everything waver before your eyes. Embedded in the walls are lines of skulls, forbidding you from proceeding onward if you value your life. Or your sanity.
Two figures dare to brave this veritable Hades; their shadows, flickering and elongated, dance upon the stone wall behind them.
"I've palavered with the Hidden Ones, the Old Gods," one says to the other, "They've told me many things, Mister K."
"It's almost time," the other replies, "A few weeks. I have to play this right, we have to be patient. I can see it, I can almost taste it."
"He has the Fifth, you know. And he's coming. Right now, he's packing his bags and he's headed here."
"I've been counting on it. He'll arrive just in time, not a minute too early, I'm sure of it. Fate is playing into my hands, you see. Even fate wants this to happen, can't you feel it? The stones will all move into place at the same time, he'll help it to happen, and then not he, not his friends, not any force on either of these worlds can stop it."
II
"You can only be shown choices. It is up to you to make them."
The world shifted and shimmered as though it were being seen through a lens of water, and Sonic watched it not through the eyes in his head, but the ones in his mind.
Roxanna stood across from him, the two facing each other, standing alone. They stood in a field of roses. It stretched from horizon to horizon, as far as the eye could see in any direction. An ocean of brilliant red and green, beneath a cobalt blue sky. The sun was directly overhead.
(Bathe in perfect calm, Sonic)
Sonic took a deep breath and held it a moment. He found that with his eyes closed he could still see the roses. And why not? Where he was, nobody ever needed eyes to see.
(Let it flood over you. Let it become you.)
Far, far away on the horizon, he thought he could see a tall tower, just like the one he had seen on the antiverse-side of Desolation, from this distance only a needle in the sky. But trying to focus on this was only a distraction, and he turned to look at Roxanna, to focus all his concentration and calm on her body and spirit.
(Let it wash out your concerns. Let me see you. Let me join with you.)
Sonic had been in this state twice before, but had shared the experience with unconcenting and unwilling partners, amidst hostile surroundings, which had made it an unpleasant and difficult state of affairs. This time, the joining of minds was mutual and calm, as both participants had done this before and entered into it willingly. It was sublime, lucid and simple.
Roxanna's thoughts and his flowed as two-way traffic from both of their minds. Sonic thought he could almost see it, like streams of mist running toward and away from him in the clear air.
(Now. What is it you wish to know?)
You know what I need.
(Concentrate on what you seek, Sonic. What is your quest?)
My quest is to-
(-seek and protect the-)
-Runes of Awakening-
(-and keep them from the clutches-)
-of he who would use them to remake the world in the image of evil.
(Good. Then let us begin.)
The field of roses vanished, and they stood in the temple in the jungle, the temple of the Emerald and the Rune. Except that this time, it was not an ancient and disused artifact of a forgotten past. Ancient still, perhaps, but very much in use. Before Sonic eyes, in a huge alcove below him, hundreds of porcupines were gathered together in deep meditation. They sat motionless in dozens of rows, all of their eyes closed, all of them facing the giant clear emerald and a large stone tablet which had been propped up before it.
As Sonic watched, he paid attention to the flood of knowledge that Roxanna transmitted to his mind. It didn't feel like learning, for their connection made it seem as though he was remembering things he had known all his life, as it was undoubtedly the result of Roxanna's porcupinian tutoring.
(The Ancients focused their energy through ten years of deep meditation to call upon the magicks of the Mobian spiritual plane, and gather the combined power to split the stream of time itself. Another world was created just below our own, in a unique orbit of synchrony. The Lower Realm.)
A burst of white light, brilliant but not blinding (for the eyes of the mind were not to be blinded by light of any intensity), obscured Sonic's vision, and when it faded the porcupines were gone, as was the stone tablet. Time raced at an unnatural speed, and the temple began to dilapidate as he watched, plants growing tall and dying and reproducing and overgrowing the building. The Emerald glowed on, unchanging.
(The accumulated power of the ritual was locked inside the Stone of Awakening, and the Stone was broken into five, its pieces scattered, out of reach of any one mobian. Each bore a powerful symbol, a Rune, one fifth of the magickal formula to unlock their secrets. One, the Rune of Shalpad, remained here, at the gateway of the two realms, protected by each generation of porcupine as a testiment to peace. The others were taken to the four corners of the globe, each locked inside a mighty Tower.)
Again the scene changed before Sonic's eyes, and he found himself once again in the wastelands of the Torion Cape, staring up at that massive tower that stood alone in the antiverse. Stormclouds overhead crackled and thundered, sparked and rumbled like angry gods.
(The Runes lock the Upper and Lower Realm together as nails driven through wood. The Towers were constructed in the Lower Realm as spiritual conductors to lock away the devastating power of the Runes, which were held in the Upper Realm; and so they stand in duality - Tower and Rune, each existing not in one realm but in both, a physical aspect and a spiritual.)
Sonic watched as a bolt of lightning struck the top of the Tower, and the entire structure lit up for a moment with a surge of blue energy. For a moment he thought he could see two worlds at once, merged together at the base of the Tower, distorted and intertwined, subjected to some unfathomable force.
(Each Rune carries with it a fragment of the combined spirit of the Ancients, their mirth, their fears, their woe, their love, their wrath, the most intimate essence of their souls created in the likeness of Mazsha. Each was buried in a powerful position on the face of Mazsha's Mobius, upon the image of a star that for thousands of years has knitted these powers together across deserts and oceans, jungles and mountains. And here they remain, until the time of the Prophecy.)
Tell me of this prophecy.
The image changed again. Now they stood in a terrible place, a cavernous pit of flames and sulfur. Rivers of magma flowed through the caverns, and Sonic saw that he and Roxanna were standing knee-deep in it, although there was no pain, not in the immortal world of the imagination. Even so, Sonic felt a growing fear of this place.
(The Prophecy tells of the end of the age of the Dual Realms, where one mortal is to collect the five pieces of the Stone and reunite them in the flaming core of Mazsha's mighty heart. The mortal, draped in a brilliant blue, enters the portal of the spirital Awakening, and here he transcends his mortality, he enters the realm of souls and absorbs the spiritual energies of the universe into himself. Even the Gods bow to him as he undoes creation and remakes the world in His image.)
Sonic turned and saw there was a rock cliff as high as fifty meters above the lake of fire, and somebody was standing at the edge, defiantly, as though there was nothing to fear from teetering over the edge. Had Sonic not known better, he might have thought that it was himself he could see up there on the cliff, but it was clear to him that it was Cinos. The dark hedgehog stared down at him, and he was surrounded by some kind of bright white light- No, five points of light, so bright that they looked like only one.
Sonic was suddenly very afraid, and Roxanna sensed his fear as easily as if it was her own.
(Do not fear him! You must not allow him the upper hand!)
Sonic turned around, but Cinos was already behind him. He was cackling and reaching for Sonic's neck, and Sonic cried out and fell backward.
(He cannot harm you! Be strong!)
"Oh, give it up, Sonic," Cinos snorted. The Runes lay in a circle around him, and the symbol on each stone was glowing like the sun. Around Cinos' body were the tight pale coils of the thing Sonic knew as the Whitewyrm, although it was now a great slimy beast as big as an anaconda with squid-like suckers along the length of its body. It pulsated and quivered, and made a soft high-pitched cry. Cinos didn't seem to mind, in fact he stroked its vile flesh with one hand, while he held an apple in the other. He took a bite out of the fruit, laughing deep in his throat. The apple bled like an animal.
"Why don't you just go home?" the dark hedgehog asked, "Seriously, back out of this with a bit of honour intact. It's just starting to look pathetic, now, dear brother. How many times am I going to have to beat you?"
(Your fears are taking you over,) Roxanna hissed, (You must stand up to them if you are to have any hope of victory!)
"Oh shut up, kiddo, the grown-ups are talking," Cinos snapped. "So how about it, Sonic? Last chance to concede before I have to humiliate you completely. Remember what I told you about the nature of evil. It always wins. You know I'm right. As long as you have a conscience, you'll always have something weighing you down. Think about it. It makes sense. You know it does."
No! Sonic screamed, No! No! No! I won't let you do this!
"Sonic? Boo."
The Whitewyrm lashed out at Sonic with a terrifying roar, its mouth full of teeth like shards of glass, but before it could touch him, the intensity of his fear severed the connection he had with Roxanna, and the Awakening came to an end.
III
(This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark and cold to an orchard so young in the bark)
The final leg of the journey was also the most comfortable, thanks largely to the porcupines of Septennia, who stocked Sonic and his companions with as many supplies as they could ably carry. Each had a sleeping bag, and a knapsack of food and herbal medicines. Everything was made of some crude kind of woven organic material that had been treated to resist decomposition, but it was all rather feeble anyway. Sonic hoped that they were never caught in the rain, for he believed that their supplies might simply fall apart. He supposed he couldn't blame them, for the porcupines never travelled, and what craft they knew suited their purposes just fine.
The most finely tailored piece of equipment in their inventory was a small bag that Sonic carried around his shoulder - inside it, the Rune of Nine. Alastrine had evidently cast some kind of enchantment upon it and provided it for this purpose, claiming it would dull the Rune's effects on the unguarded mind. And it worked, Sonic thought, for it put an end to the halluscinations and nightmares he had been experiencing. It all came down to rotten luck that the one stone his party had managed to procure was the one that was perhaps the most difficult to live with. It was not an evil object, he sensed, it was probably as neutral and indifferent as any other rock. But it was also harsh, unforgiving and intolerant, like some pagan god.
Espio scoffed at the idea that they were carrying some kind of enchanted bag, and more than once he mentioned something he called the placebo effect.
Either way, the party of four travelled the rest of the distance without concern for any phantom rock playing havoc with their emotions, and at night they slept in relative comfort. What was more, Sonic found he enjoyed the journey more than ever, and chalked it up to the fact that he was in the company of fine friends. It seemed at times more like a vacation, a road-trip, than a mission. Taking care to resist the urge to sightsee, they made the final lap of the journey in record time.
Unfortunately, one member of their party was not present, and this alone concerned Sonic, for he worried about the implications of reaching the end of this journey as a broken team.
(Reminds me of all that can happen to harm an orchard away at the end of the farm)
It hadn't started out this way. But there had been resistance in the group when Sonic had announced exactly where it was that they were going. For Niles feared a conspiracy when he heard, and although he was cranky a good ninety percent of the time, Sonic had never seen him so furious. It was not conspiracy, however, merely inconvenient coincidence. Or perhaps there was more to it than that, for Sonic did at times suspect that there was an intelligence guiding their fate, although whether it was working for or against them he could never quite say.
During his mind-meeting with Roxanna, Sonic had envisioned the image of a five-pointed star, a powerful shape in porcupine lore. Later he referred to the map of Westerica and marked their progress with a stub of chalk. Four rune locations he already knew, and could instantly see that, connected, they formed the same shape over the landscape.
The peak of the star sat over Sun Port, the dock of Stratosphereon, on the coast of the gulf that led out to the northern ocean. The town of Desolation was at the tip of the star's left arm, and the right was somewhere in the Crux Desert where the Chameleon Cabal had held their awful ceremonies. The right leg of the star stretched over the southern ocean and came to a point on the 'Annual Isle', the Land of Septennia. From here it was a simple task to measure out the left leg and follow it to its tip, for there was where the fifth rune resided, unless it had been taken already, by Cinos or someone else. Somehow he felt sure that it would be there, and so would Cinos. He was to clash one final time with his evil twin, and it was to happen here.
He knew that the place would be populated. Every other site had been, even the two runes they had found out in the desert had been in the middle of some isolated pocket of civilisation. These were very powerful places, perhaps the most powerful places on all of Mobius, and they called people the world over to them, one way or another, the way shards of iron will find their way to points of great magnetic force. And, just as he expected, the final point of the star landed on a city of some decent size, on the southwestern tip of Westerica, sandwiched between the fertile lands and a coastal mountain range. It was called Bayer, and it was so close to home that Sonic didn't know whether to laugh or cry. If only he had known this to begin with, all the time he needn't have wasted, all the distance he needn't have travelled. While Cinos had set out northward into the desert, Sonic could have gone to Bayer and Septennia without expending too much effort at all, and scooped up two runes rather than the meager one he had collected after all his blood, sweat and tears. It may have made this journey somwhat simpler.
Of course, in that case he would never have met Espio and Niles, and that would have been a dire shame. There are some misfortunes, he found, that he wouldn't have any other way.
(All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse)
Niles had thrown a veritable fit when the name of the town had been spoken, and for a while Sonic hadn't the vaguest idea why. The fox demanded to know why they had to go to that awful town, and began to insist that this had been somehow planned from the beginning, an elaborate hoax designed to lure him away from his new life. He began to accuse Sonic and Espio of being kidnappers, mercenaries hired by the Arack Empire.
Sonic soon learned that Bayer was the city where Niles had grown up, and from which he had fled as a fugitive when the Arack Empire had taken over. Niles was terrified at the prospect of having to go back there, fearing that he would never be able to escape the city twice. The only thing that the Aracks hated more than a freeloader was a traitor, and leaving an Arack settlement without the express permission of the Webb was seen to be an act of such.
Sonic was not indifferent to his companion's plight by any means. He knew of tyranny and he knew of fear, and he understood that it was unreasonable for him to ask that Niles put himself in jeopardy to such an extent. Once again, Sonic was caught in a moral conundrum, the solution to which he couldn't seem to figure out. He had already taken two people from their homes, one against his will, and put them through countless dangers on what was largely a personal crusade. Niles and Espio trusted him and believed in him, they had faith in him. It seemed a fine line between harnessing that faith and exploiting it. To what degree was he willing to endanger them to succeed in his own quest? Was he willing, even, to sacrifice them? Was it right that he should do so, considering the greater implications of failure?
Espio, always the level-headed one, had made a statement that had relieved his mind a good deal. "This is more than just your quest," he had said, "It's our quest."
It was an insightful point. Espio and Niles were their own people, they had free will and intelligence enough to make their own decisions. Sonic figured that the best thing to do was to lay out all the facts, establish the risks, leave everything out in the open, and allow his companions to make up their own minds. If they decided to follow him into the inferno, then it was their perogative. He would not try to force them. They could end the journey here if they so desired, and he would make do.
Niles decided to take Sonic on his word, and although Espio was fuming about the fox's cowardly behaviour, Sonic restrained him from giving Niles a piece of his mind. They would make the trip back to the mainland together, and then Niles and the rest of the group would go their own seperate ways. Sonic reasoned that an unwilling Niles would be useless to them anyway. And so, when the time came to leave, the porcupines of Septennia donated a sturdy wooden boat to the foreign crusaders and their new porcupinian companion, and after one night travelling northwest, they once again reached the Westerican shore somewhere just west of the Great Forest (So close to home that Sonic was sure he could see the smoke of Terantulopolis on the horizon). And the next morning, Niles Wilkinson-Price bade them good fortune for the remainder of their journey, and left them.
(I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse by deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse)
After travelling for so long with the same two companions, it felt strange to Sonic not to have Niles around, and instead to travel with Roxanna, a relative stranger. As time passed, Sonic began to realise that she got along much better with Espio than she did with himself, and at first he couldn't understand why. The chameleon and the porcupine were about as different from each other as it was possible to be. Roxanna, after all, had grown up in a culture adept in the spiritual arts of what Cinos had referred to as the Old Ways. She claimed to be able to see and read auras, bands of colour around people's bodies, almost like the spiritual miasma of the soul. She claimed prophetic visions and dreams frequented her, and she never stopped talking about Mazsha and the other characters of her ancient religion. Espio, however, was a strong skeptic and an atheist who found little time for spiritual matters, things he regarded to be little more than fairy stories for grownups. But these differences seemed to enhance, rather than obstruct, the development of their friendship. They seemed to fascinate each other. Sonic was quite sure also that Espio was attracted to Roxanna, which obviously helped. And they did say, after all, that opposites attract. Sonic thought about the way his evil twin Cinos held a disturbing allure over him when his guard was down, and he shuddered.
Sonic was also prouder than Espio by nature, as was Roxanna, and one of the most recognised universal truths about interpersonal relationships was that two inflated egos weren't likely to get along. And so, as Espio and Roxanna grew closer, Sonic couldn't help feeling somewhat like a third wheel. With two companions who were both very strongly opinionated on spiritual matters, Sonic couldn't help missing Niles as a go-between. But it was just the three of them, now; their Kindred was broken, they would just have to make do.
(I wish I could promise to lie in the night and think of an orchard's arboreal plight, when slowly and nobody comes with a light)
There was a city very close to Bayer named Meath, and although like Port Knix it was heavily pouplated with spiders, it was still a seperate locality from the Arack Empire and did not answer to them. Things would change, Sonic figured. It was scary how much of a foothold the Empire had on Westerica, now; living confined to the Great Forest, Sonic hadn't realised the extent of it. How long had it been since the fall of Mobitropolis? Five years? Less? In the frighteningly short amount of time since the Acorn monarchy had fallen, the Arack Empire had siezed the entire south coast of the former kingdom. Far be it for Sonic to ever consider the deposition of Robotnik to be a bad thing, at least the good Doctor had been a moderate counterweight to the political pressure of Arack. The power vacuum that had been created at the end of his reign had only allowed the Empire to solidify their grip on the continent. Sonic figured that Sally would want to know of what he had seen on this journey. The threat they faced now was one more powerful than a single sociopathic dictator running a genocide factory on the outskirts of Westerica. Even the Kingdom of Acorn in all its might had struggled to hold back the flood of the Arack Empire into this part of the world - the Freedom Fighters had been a thorn in Robotnik's side, but it was going to take more than a few thousand forest-dwelling rebels to hold back this threat. It would be like an elephant being attacked by a mosquito.
This was a concern for another day, though. For now, the focus was Cinos.
The road they had been following started in the farmlands to the southeast as a dirt track for a few dozen kilometres, and then merged in the more populated area as a bitumen road. Horses trotted past every so often, pulling carts full of vegetables and other trade from the farms. The first time Sonic saw an automotive tractor plowing the fields, he had laughed almost until he choked. They were back in civilisation, back in a world that Sonic had known before liberty had grown sick and died. The fact of this town's inevitable assimilation into the Arack Empire was what got to him. He didn't want to admit it, but he felt like crying.
Looking toward the north horizon, the travellers could clearly see the city of Bayer, black and foreboding, their final destination on this long and arduous journey. A year of almost non-stop travel had taken them unbelievably far, they had circumnavigated the entire continent, coast to coast, and now they made plans to stop for the last time, so close to Sonic's home that he could smell the pollens of the Great Forest on the breeze.
Sonic, Espio and Roxanna made their final plans, prepared to conclude their travels and face their demons once and for all. It was time to end this thing.
(Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God)
IV
There was a cafe not far from the entrance to town, and the party sat down for a well-deserved rest. Espio plonked the rune down onto the table, and the symbol stared blankly upwards. Sonic was staring into the street.
"You have magnificent settlements," Roxanna said, "Your world is bigger than I could ever have imagined. My people will be fascinated by my tales when I return home."
"This is nothing," Sonic replied, "Mobitropolis was ten times this big. And Station Square had skyscrapers."
"Was and had," Roxanna replied, "Not is and has. Do these cities not exist any longer?"
"Not really. Mobitropolis has been taken over twice. It's an Arack city, now, like the one we're headed toward. And Station Square was levelled by a kind of monster, so it's not very impressive anymore, although they're rebuilding it slowly."
"A monster? Such as the Wood Devil?"
Sonic chuckled morbidly. "Uhh, a little bigger actually."
Roxanna shook her head. "There is still so much conflict in this part of the world. I should not wish to remain here longer than necessary."
Espio scoffed at this. "What, you don't have any conflict back on Monster Island?"
"Our faith gives us peace. The rest of the world has lost this faith and that is the reason that there is so much violence. Those who live in harmony with Mazsha see no reason to kill and harm one another."
"What, like the Bloodmongers?"
Roxanna paused for a moment. "That is different," she said, "The Bloodmongers corrupted Mazsha's message to serve their own desires."
"Yeah, exactly. No matter how good a religion's intentions are, it always winds up killing people one way or another."
"You guys talk about religion like it's a living, breathing thing," Sonic said, "I don't know if people invented religion or not, but it's people who practice it, and the way I figure, people are going to hurt each other no matter what they believe. If there's some ideology going around that at least tries to convince people to respect one another, I don't see how that can be a bad thing."
"I don't agree," Espio said, "For me, it's gotta be the truth. A bunch of people who believe a lie in order to stop them fighting is really no better than the people of Stratosphereon. Sure, there's peace, but at what cost? Those people are never going to be free. They're on puppet strings. Whether the drug is God or Libria, it's still just a complex system of mind control."
"You have a very rigid interpretation of the concept of truth," Roxanna said.
"Of course I do, that's how the world works. Everything has to be either truth or fiction. It happened or it didn't happen. The truth is out there whether we know it or not."
Sonic suddenly recalled his short tour of the antiverse city Chagrin Las Mortis, and his conversation with Father Thaldymort on a similar topic to this. "We never know anything for certain," the priest had said, "Faith is inherent in every decision we make every day." And there was wisdom in this, it seemed. Truth was an elusive, abstract concept that may or may not actually have existed. What was it, after all, but the sum of facts which were contructed from varying degrees of belief?"
A stranger said, "You guys want anything?"
They all looked up. A waitress had approached them. She was a hedgehog with brown spines, and the long bangs of hair on her head had been dyed black. She cocked an eyebrow and looked down at them.
"Uhh, actually," Sonic said, "We were just sitting here. We don't have any money. I hope it's okay." It was true. The last time any of them had seen money was when they were using the last of it to hire a boat out of Port Knix, a boat they proceeded to sink. They wouldn't be getting their bond back on that particular investment.
The waitress shrugged. "Don't worry about it. I haven't seen you folks around... that's a nice rock."
The Rune's protective bag lay open on the table, and the stone itself lay inside like a big dumb stone from anywhere, except for the intricately carved design in the middle. Three parallel lines, two straight and one waved.
"Thanks," Sonic replied, a little embarrassed.
"You haven't seen another one like it, by any chance, have you?" Espio asked, although his expectations for the affirmative bordered on nonexistant.
"Sorry," she replied, "You guys look like you've been on the road for a while."
"Oh yeah," Sonic replied, "Forever. I barely remember what home looks like."
"Wow," the waitress replied, "How about I bring you lads a round of drinks on account? On the house."
"Are you allowed to do that?" Sonic asked.
"I own the place," she replied, "So I guess I can."
So the four of them became acquainted; the waitress introduced herself as Kim, as she handed out a round of tall, ice cold lemonades.
"Tell me about the rock," she said.
"The bane of our collective existence," Espio replied.
"We're on a quest to save the universe," Sonic added. "We have to protect this rock from my evil twin, or else we're all going to die."
"The stone is the key to a parallel realm manifested by my ancestors," Roxanna said.
"Uh huh," Kim nodded with faux interest, "Seriously. What's with the rock?"
"I like rocks," Sonic replied, and sucked on his lemonade straw.
V
Sonic and his companions rested for a few hours at the cafe, discussing their strategy. Kim, the waitress and proprietor of the establishment, turned out to be highly talkative and provided them a great deal of useful information on Meath, Bayer and the surrounding area. Bayer had evidently been renamed Sol-Hayyim after the Arack Empire had assimilated it, and it was now operating under Arack law under the lordship of a spider named Slobodan Vladimir. There was pressure in the parliamentary council of Meath to make the same change, and sadly it was probably inevitable. The Arack Empire didn't always expand through invasion and war; often they simply used political leverage to overwhelm their opponents. Once a pro-Arack party was established in a government, the Empire put an enormous amount of effort into procuring power for it, through fair means or foul. If it didn't end with a full political coup, it was usually because the Empire simply flooded the city with so much of its own influence that a coup wasn't necessary. Either way, the Arack Empire was accustomed to getting its way.
Arack cities had an unusual policy regarding tourism, and it was easy to see why tourism was so rare. Visitors from outside the Empire were required to work in exchange for avoiding extradition. The Aracks didn't think highly of the idea of a bunch of foreigners freeloading off their facilities, it seemed.
In fact, the two most important virtues of being an Arack were work ethic and insane paranoia, which brought to light a considerable problem Sonic's group was going to have to solve before they could proceed - none of them were going to be allowed into Sol-Hayyim without some kind of proper identification, something of which none of them had possession. Sonic pondered on this conundrum and wondered how Cinos had gotten around it, for he was sure that he had, somehow.
"So are you guys gonna be staying here for a while before you go and get yourselves killed?" Kim asked.
Sonic looked out over the comfortable-looking town and thought about how different it was going to be from the Arack colony down the road. He wished the ancients had had the foresight to bury their rune somewhere that wouldn't become infested by a hostile empire of workaholics with too many limbs.
"I suppose we will," he said, "We're going to have to figure some things out, first. I don't know where we're going to stay, though, with no money."
"Well," Kim replied, "A good friend of mine runs a shelter downtown, if you don't mind slumming it for a night or two. It's not very glamourous, but there's a mattress and a roof, and you get a free meal. Might be better than sleeping on a pile of leaves."
She pointed to the three porcupine-crafted sleeping bags that lay under the table, and they did indeed look almost like bags of leaves and bark. Sonic didn't want to admit it aloud with Roxanna present, but he did yearn for the comforts of modern technology after roughing it for so long.
"Who's this friend of yours?" Espio asked.
"Father Matheson," Kim replied, "He does a lot of charity work in the area. Nicest guy you'll ever meet, if only a little eccentric."
She gave them the directions to Matheson's shelter, and Sonic made a note to check it out. In the meantime, they had much to learn about the nature of life in Sol-Hayyim if they were going to infiltrate its dark heart and play with the fires within.
VI
Work Sector M012, known to its inhabitants as The Pit, provided eighty percent of Sol-Hayyim's raw construction materials, and for this reason it was very important to the Arack colony's ongoing prosperity. It also employed a large number of what the Aracks called Quads, or non-spider mobians, who worked hard in the dark of the mines with very little reward for their labour. To say that the Quads were slaves was an opinion open to dispute. After all, they worked no harder than the spiders who shared their burden. However, it was an ironic twist on the concept of liberty that it was the policy of equality that actually worked against them in the Empire. For equality was set at an Arack standard, one that the non-spider citizens found it much more difficult to achieve.
By way of a quirk of biology, the mobian spider's strength and agility exceeded that of any other race on Mobius. They could exert more effort, for longer, with less food and rest. The industrial laws of the Arack Empire were based upon taking this fact for granted. Arack settlements worked like giant machines, of which every citizen was a part. There was no excess baggage allowed, nobody was permitted to absorb more of the Empire's prosperity than they put in, as such people were seen as freeloaders, decadent parasites. Welfare was a concept barely even existent in the Empire, as even those who were crippled or old were able to do something to earn their survival.
Unfortunately, Quads were required to match their spider colleagues in terms of work and output, and this was where life became difficult for non-spiders living under the wing of the Arack Empire. In the dark shafts of The Pit, it was considered average for an individual to work a fifteen-hour day with a single quarter-hour break. A spider could do this standing on his head, and in fact many skipped their break on account of it taking almost the whole quarter-hour to leave and return to the mines anyway. For a Quad, it was a little more difficult, and for this reason the non-mobian races were frequently typecast by the Aracks as lazy, apathetic and whiny. It was difficult for a non-spider to attract sympathy, and the more they complained, the harder it was to be a Quad living in the Arack Empire.
Such was the case of Harvey O'Sale, a weasel who lived and worked in the city of Sol-Hayyim as a miner deep in The Pit. Although Harvey was not content to bear the brunt of the Aracks' overzealous labour oppression. He had seen the horrible effects of overworked mobians being driven past the threshold of exhaustion, seen what it could do to people, and he wasn't content to simply watch it happen. That was why, when most workers were using their well-earned fifteen minutes of break time to have some rest and eat some of the Empire's standard barely-digestable pseudo-food, Harvey O'Sale was spending time with Broderick Gibb, eating a hearty meal of high-protein food illegally smuggled into the mines, and discussing the details of the conspiracy that was soon going to shake the foundations of this mighty Arack slave machine.
Broderick Gibb was a fearsome individual, a ten-foot grizzly bear, a patch over one eye and three fingers missing from his left hand. The weight of his muscle alone almost equalled that of two whole mobians, and he was one of the only Quads in the city who was able to meet the uncanny labour standards of the Arack overlords. But Harvey was not intimidated by this mobian, who could snap him over one knee with all the ease of breaking a cracker between his fingers, because Broderick Gibb was one of the most prominent players in an underground movement for Quad liberation. Broderick saw the plight of his fellow mobians and was sympathetic and kind-hearted despite his fearsome appearance. He was one of the ringleaders of a very secret operation known only as the Spanner Project, of which very few knew the name and even fewer knew the details. Discretion was important, as the discovery of a Quad conspiracy within the ranks of the Arack Empire would have dire consequences (The paranoia of the Arack elite was legendary and their knee-jerk overkill reactions to threats were globally notorious) but the Spanner Project's success would bring an end to Quad oppression in Sol-Hayyim and, hopefully, bring the issue to the attention of the world, inspire similarly downtrodden people to take a stand against the Empire. A lot depended on this, and those at the reigns of the project were determined to get it right.
"Delicious," Harvey O'Sale muttered, shovelling food into his mouth faster than he could chew it. "Sometimes I forget what real food tastes like."
Broderick just grunted in reply, watching out for anybody who might stumble in on their private meeting. It was unlikely, but a possibility. Broderick did not eat, for he had already eaten and had unlimited access to this kind of contraband, which Harvey did not.
"So what's the word?" Harvey asked, speaking with his mouth full, "Has Shapesk set a date?"
"Three days," Broderick replied, "Provided the shipment comes in soon, and provided everything is running smoothly. He wants to know that everything is in order, that there will be no problems at ground zero. We can't afford any mistakes down there, a miscalculation has the potential to be catastrophic."
"My guys are ready. I've seen to it myself. There won't be a problem, at least not at this end."
"Excellent. Tell them to prepare themselves. In three days we move."
"That's good news. I have to go. Break's over."
"Time flies."
They shook hands, and Broderick put a big hand on Harvey's shoulder and nodded.
"See you tomorrow, Harvey," the bear said, "If you can live another three days in this pit of horror, I'll see to it personally you never have to lift a pick or a shovel again."
"That sounds mighty fine, Brod, mighty fine."
VII
Sonic, Espio and Roxanna went in search of the town of Meath's homeless shelter as the sun fell in the west and the cold began to descend, the insufferably dark and icy cloak of night. Sonic wondered how many nights he still had to spend away from home. Lately it seemed he couldn't shake the images of his friends from his mind, for although his new friends were great ones, he still pined for his old comrades, the young fox Tails who had become his closest ally, Sally and the Freedom Fighters, even the introverted Knuckles. He didn't want them to fret about him, but nevertheless he hoped they thought of him as often as he thought of them.
The shelter stood exactly where Kim had told them it would be. A few vagrants milled about outside and in, warming themselves and listening to an old radio that had been set up. Some were playing board games and others sleeping in bunk beds that had been set up, a couple of dozen. The three travellers stepped inside and attracted a few glances, but nobody seemed particularly surprised to see them. Sonic looked at himself and his tired, travel-worn companions, and was surprised to see just how closely the three of them resembled the homeless. Sonic recalled the days when he himself had lived on the streets of Mobitropolis, and couldn't help thinking that his life had come full circle.
Somebody wearing a long set of robes was busy about the task of making one of the beds, and Sonic began to approach him. When the stranger turned to him, Sonic almost jumped out of his skin.
"Thaldymort!"
The wolf priest, tall, dignified and gaunt, stood before him with his rosary around his neck and a pile of laundry in his arms. But after only a moment, Sonic saw clearly that this was not Father Thaldymort at all. This priest was younger, had for the time escaped the ravages of age, without any gray hairs or crow's feet in the corners of his eyes. As a matter of fact, he didn't look much like the antiverse priest at all. Sonic felt mildly embarrassed.
"Whatymort?" the stranger asked, "Why, you must be some kind of crazyperson."
"Sorry, I thought you were someone else," Sonic replied.
"Hm? Funny. Nobody's ever anybody except who they are. I mean, if we weren't who we were, then who would be?"
Sonic and Espio looked at each other, bewildered.
"Can you repeat the question?" Espio asked.
"I don't even remember what the question was," the priest admitted, slumping his shoulders. "Anyway. Nice meeting you all."
He wandered away and began to go about whatever needed to be done.
"It seems to me that no information was actually exchanged during that conversation," Roxanna said.
"Yeah," Sonic replied, "Let me try again. Hey!"
The priest turned around again. "Oh! Hello there."
"Yeah, hi. Listen, are you in charge here?"
"Yes." The wolf held out a hand. "Father Yuke Matheson. I run this shelter. Unless you have come to rob me, in which case I'm afraid I don't speak any English."
Sonic shook the hand, and found that Father Matheson had an uncomfortably firm grip. He wasn't sure how to take this strange behaviour, so decided to take it in good humour. After all, Kim the waitress seemed to get a kick out of it.
"My friends and I were wondering if we could stay here for a night or so. Is there room?"
"Oh yes, there's room. Always room. Do any of you have any contageous diseases, may I ask?"
"Oh, no," Sonic replied.
"Well, you will tomorrow. I hope you like ebola."
The priest wandered away again, and Sonic, slightly disconcerted, returned to his companions. "We can stay," he said, "Uh, I think. Well, anyway, it's not too flashy, but at least there's a bed, and it's warmer in here than out there."
"Great, I can't wait to hit the sack," Espio replied.
Father Matheson appeared again with an expression of mild concern written on his face.
"I was only kidding about the ebola," he said, "I mean, you guys got that, right?"
"Yeah," Sonic replied with a chuckle, "I gotcha."
"Great." Matheson sighed with relief. "I wouldn't want to worry you, we haven't had an outbreak in days." The odd priest wandered away, muttering to himself.
VIII
Despite his exhaustion, Sonic had trouble sleeping. He lay awake in the bunk (which was every bit as comfortable as he had hoped) and cursed the fact that one of his very few opportunities to experience this degree of comfort was wasted by his inability to stop worrying about tomorrow.
He glanced around the shelter. Espio was sound asleep, and had been from the moment his head had hit the pillow. Sonic envied the chameleon's ability to stay as cool as a winter breeze in even the most stressful situations. He would awaken tomorrow, rested and content, prepared to face whatever the day might throw at him without complaint or dejection, simply eager to get the job done and move on. He had never even needed to be convinced, his loyalty cost no price. Even though he didn't believe in the power of the Old Ways, put no credence in the idea that Cinos could do any harm at all with these runes he sought. Espio just seemed to enjoy the fantasy, was so happy simply to escape his sheltered life and go on an adventure alongside somebody he could talk to.
In the coming days, this quest was going to reach its pinnacle, and Sonic was sure that each of them was going to have to prove themselves, each of them had some important role to play in their final stand. Whether they would survive this stand was what Sonic didn't know. What if Espio was to die in the course of the coming events? What if that was his purpose here, his reason for being made Kindred with Sonic? If this journey had indeed been choreographed and planned by God, then Sonic figured a God who would play such a cosmic joke as to bring Espio all this way, all these hundreds of miles, simply to mark him for death at the very end, was not a deity worthy of worship, and Sonic would work hard to stop Cinos, not to honour Him, but to spite Him. He hoped with all his heart that this wasn't so.
Roxanna, however, would probably be content to die for the sake of fulfilling her role in these events. She, moreso than any of them, had faith in the cosmic importance of this quest. She saw this as her fundamental responsibility, and Sonic was sure that she would do whatever it took to fulfil this responsibility. He saw, with some amusement, that the young porcupine girl had taken to sleeping on the floor beside her empty bed. The Rune of Nine lay in its protective bag at her side, her arm around it protectively. She had not wanted to venture away from her homeland, possessing none of the adventurous spirit that flourished within both Sonic and Espio, but she had taken up this challenge maintaining that it simply must be done, and she did not question that she was the one who must do it.
Both of Sonic's companions, for widely differing reasons, were solidly dedicated to this quest. Sonic noted with fascination that they were both quite possibly more dedicated to it than he was himself. For he had allowed Cinos to get inside his head and pollute him with doubt. If Cinos had simply been a liar, then it might have been easier to ignore him, but Sonic knew that Cinos was not a liar, because Sonic was not a liar, and they shared the same mind if not the same soul. What the evil hedgehog said made sense, and it drove Sonic mad to think that Cinos might be somehow superior to him. Cinos was the copy. But he had less to lose and more to gain, and he would fight to the bitter end. For these reasons, Sonic questioned his ability to defeat his evil twin.
That, and the fact of Niles' absence.
This was an enigma, too, that shook Sonic's belief in the idea that he was somehow destined to defeat Cinos. If each of his companions, each of his Kindred, had been placed in his company by destiny in order that he might succeed, then why had Niles been allowed to leave? It wasn't as though he hadn't tried to convince him to stay. Short of physically restraining the fox, Sonic had done everything to keep his group intact to the end. Had destiny failed, or was destiny an illusion?
Perhaps Espio was right. Perhaps there was no God, there was no destiny, no magic, and the universe was nothing but a series of events held together by dumb logic and, as he had once said, just a lot of light reflecting off stuff and hitting his eyes a certain way. And, in that case, Cinos would surely win in the end. Because, in a universe no deeper than perception, that was the only result that made sense.
Sonic got up out of bed and, as quietly as he was able, he moved toward the entrance to the shelter. Sleeping would probably be out of the question, at least for a few hours. There was simply too much on his mind.
The bitter chill of the outside nipped at him the moment he stepped into the open air. He hugged his shoulders and watched the town, dark and placid, sleep through the night.
"Hey. Kinnos."
Sonic wasn't sure whether or not the whispered voice from the shadows was his imagination. Since he had become acquainted with the Rune of Nine, he'd learned that he wasn't even able to trust his own perception, which up until now had been one of the only things he knew he always could trust.
"Kinnos. Kinnos Sharpe!"
But no, there was most definitely somebody there. A figure stepped out of the shadows, an unkempt raccoon in a tattered overcoat, with wild eyes and missing teeth. A vagrant, but one who knew Sonic's cloned twin in some way. Sonic knew it was always a bad sign when somebody approached him mistaking him for Cinos, for the simple fact that most people who knew Cinos were inclined to walk the other way.
"Not me," Sonic replied, wary.
The raccoon appeared confused. "Kinnos. What choo doing here?"
"I said I'm not Kinnos, I'm somebody else. But how do you know him?"
"What, you idennical twins or suffin?" The vagrant chortled.
"Or something," Sonic replied.
"Nah, cut it out," the raccoon said, "How's tings in yonder Sol-Hayyim?"
"I'm telling you the truth," Sonic snapped, but realised that the truth was going to be impossible for this sheltered streetwalker to accept. So he sugar-coated it. "I'm his brother," he said, "I've come here to meet him, but I'm not exactly sure where he is, suffice to say that he's in the area. Would you know?"
"His brother, hey? What choo name, boy?"
"The name's Sonic, what's yours?"
The raccoon appeared mildly distrustful, and looked left and right as though somebody might be spying on them. As if anybody would want to.
"Jasper. Jasper Raster."
That was possibly the worst name Sonic had ever heard, but he kept his opinions to himself.
"How do you know my brother?"
"Let's just say," Jasper replied, "Dat he and I conducted a little business, yessir. I say dis to you 'cause if you ain't him then you so alike you almost should be him. But usually dis information, it be confideshal, secret-like."
"Business," Sonic repeated. Now he was definitely interested. "And what business are you in, exactly?"
"De business of mobian traffic," Jasper replied, "I be a people mover. I get folk to places where dey ain't s'posed to be. For a price, a'course."
"Okay, and where do you send these people?"
Jasper chortled, a laugh punctuated by a throaty cough. He lit up a cigarette and began to puff on it.
"Dere's only two ways to get in to de Arack Empire," he said, "You either got to be a citizen, or you got to be in da company of some guffer who is. No essepshuns. What I do is I make it possible for folk to bypass such bothersome restricshuns."
"You forge Arack documents."
"Well now, dat's one awful crude way of putting it."
"And you got my brother into Sol-Hayyim."
"Man, I been getting him in and outta dere for tree months," Jasper replied, "He's me best cushtomer." He laughed and puffed on his cigarette.
"Tell me," Sonic said, "Would you be able to do the same for me?"
"Well now, dat depends, dunnit. How much you gonna be able to pay for such a service?"
"I don't have any money."
"Dat, my friend, is gonna be a problem. A big problem."
"I'm sorry to hear that." Sonic sighed. "I guess I'm going to have to find another way to get in."
"Dere's only one way to get in alive," Jasper said, "And dat's my way."
"Well, we've already ruled that one out, now haven't we?"
Jasper chortled deep in his throat. "Now now, hold yer horses, hold yer horses. Dere may be another option here, being dat dis is the city of brotherly love and all, and yer obviously rather attached. It jus' so happens dat I've been looking for some guffer who may be able to run a few errands for old Jasper Raster down in rotten old Sol-Hayyim, a few tings dat need doin'."
"What kinds of things."
"Oh, dis and dat. Certain tings need to find dere way to certain people."
"If it's drug running, you can forget it."
"Not drugs, ya nincompoop! Look, if yer not int'rested-"
"Okay, okay. Do whatever you need to do to get me in there, and I'll set off in the morning with whatever it is that you want me to take. Just as long as it's not drugs."
"No drugs."
"Or guns."
"No guns."
"Okay then." Sonic nodded. "Thanks."
"Don't menshun it. Just be here tomorrow, early. I'll find you."
IX
Sonic was dreaming again, when sleep came to claim him. In his dreams, he was lost in the antiverse city of Chagrin Las Mortis, lost among potholed streets and unkempt buildings. Except there was something distinctly strange - even for this city. There was absolutely nobody around.
The wind whistled through empty corridors and soundless streets. Sonic ran for escape, the sound of his clicking heels deafening in this ocean of concrete, but there was no end in sight. He was here forever.
Sonic stopped before an abandoned shop window and gazed into the foggy glass. The display cases were empty, and the shop was covered in spider webs. In the insanity of his dreams, he thought I better not enter, it's full of spiders and I don't have the right paperwork.
"Hey there, Sonic."
Sonic looked around to see who was talking to him in his own voice, but he saw nobody. When he turned back to the window, he saw that it had been his reflection who had spoken. The image in the glass was grinning and tapping its foot.
"You can't beat me," he told it, "You're just a reflection."
"Am I?" the reflection asked, "Maybe you're the reflection."
"That's not true."
"Truth? What is truth? We never know anything for certain. Faith is inherent in every decision we make every day. Truth is a fiction. Only fiction is truth."
Sonic ran from the window, away from the mocking image in the glass. But he wasn't looking where he was going, and he tripped on a gutter and fell in a puddle with a splash. The reflection in the water laughed at him.
"Have a nice trip?"
"Shut up!" Sonic snapped.
"You'll fall again, Sonic. You'll fall all the way next time. You will have four Awakenings before your quest is complete, and then you'll fall for me. It's inevitable, dear brother. You'll come to see that I've been right all along."
Sonic picked himself up and ran again, but the streets were lined with mirrors, and in each one he saw his own face jeering and sneering. Hundreds of mirrors, hundreds of reflections, like a carnival funhouse, and no escape.
At last he came to a dead end, and faced one of the mirrors. The reflection smiled and shrugged.
"I'll find a way," Sonic said, out of breath, "I'll find a way to beat you. You are just a reflection."
"No, we're the same," the reflection replied, and with that it struck out with its fist, emerged from the mirror and struck Sonic in the gut. And on impact, Sonic shattered. He fell to the street in a shower of blue shards.
X
When Sonic awoke in the morning, he was afraid that he might have missed out on Jasper's help, for the raccoon had told him to meet him early, and Sonic had slept in until nine. But after walking outside the shelter and looking about for a few moments, he heard somebody hissing his name from the same shadowy corner where Jasper had emerged the previous night.
The vagrant raccoon was wearing a backpack and holding a folder full of papers, which he handed to Sonic.
"Congratulashuns," he said, "Yer now a full citizen of de Arack Empire. In here is everyting you need to slip into yonder Sol-Hayyim, so long as you keep yer cool and don't act suspicious. You gotcha authennic-looking Empire passport, yer certificate of permission to travel - dat's so you can get out again when you wanna leave, people often forget that particular detail - yer birth records and yer occupashun certificates. You gotta show up to work, I'm afraid, dat's important in de Empire, ain't nothin' will get you arrested faster than not doing yer job."
"Right," Sonic replied, "So what's my job?"
"Yer workin' in Sector M012, yer a miner, whaddaya tink about dat?"
"I hate it."
"Dat's de spirit. Now listen close, dis is the stuff I want you to take in."
He handed Sonic the backpack. It was very full, and quite heavy.
"Won't they check this?" Sonic asked.
"Don't you worry 'bout dat. De stuff is hidden, and dere's a device dat jams dere scanners. As long as you keep yer cool, dey won't tink twice about'cha. Once you get into the city, you'll wanna go down into de mines where ya gonna be workin', and get dis stuff to a weasel by de name of Harvey O'Sale."
"Harvey O'Sale."
"Dat's right. Apart from dat, you can do whatever it is dat you wanna be doing in that rotten old city, hope you find yer brother and all dat, but ya need to be unloadin' this stuff as quick as possible, right?"
"Sure."
"Den we're finished. Good luck and all dat, and you just remember, if you ever need my services again, you just holler."
"I'll remember."
The raccoon vanished into the shadows again, and Sonic hauled his stuff back towards the shelter entrance. Espio was standing there, watching him, eating something that looked like oatmeal out of a bowl. He gave Sonic a wave.
"Morning, sunshine. Are you hungry? The food is free."
"Nah, not really."
"What's in the bag?"
Sonic put the bag down in the doorway. "I'll tell you in a minute. We've got stuff to talk about." He began flipping through the folder of documents that Jasper had forged for him.
"Hey, where's Roxanna?" Espio asked.
Roxanna had been cornered inside the shelter by a group of tough-looking teenage homeless boys. She was answering their questions earnestly, but a few of them were sneering at each other behind her back, and Espio appeared concerned.
"She's fine," Sonic said, glancing up and then down again.
Espio shot him a dark look. "Don't say that. She doesn't know anything about our world, you know, she's a naive outsider and it's liable to get her in trouble if we don't look out for her a bit."
"Well, can you bring her over here? I need to talk to both of you."
Espio left him to his documents. Sonic glanced down at the backpack he was supposed to carry into Sol-Hayyim with him. Great, he thought, So I'm a smuggler, now. A career criminal again. What a circle my life has taken.
Espio returned with Roxanna, with the sound of teenage boys laughing in the background.
"We should take time to discuss our plans for today," the porcupine said.
"Yeah," Sonic replied, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I've figured a way to get into the Arack city. I've spoken to a guy who's able to help us."
"Great!" Espio replied, "Is that what that's all about?" He pointed to the folder Sonic was holding.
"That's right."
"Well, let me just grab our stuff and let's go! The morning's getting on already."
"Wait," Sonic said, "There's more. Guys, I'm going to go in alone today."
"Huh? Alone?"
"Yeah."
"Sonic, we didn't come along all this way so you can drop us on the front doorstep before you mosey in."
"I think it's better this way," Sonic said.
"Sonic! If Cinos is in there somewhere, then we've all gotta go in together! As a team! Remember, the team? Kindred and all that? This isn't about you feeling like you're leading us to our deaths again, is it?"
"Hey, I'll come back," Sonic explained, "All I mean is that I'm going to check the place out for a day or two, do some espionage, find out what the situation is with Cinos before we bring in the cavalry, guns blazing. We're going into a very hostile environment, we need to be a little delicate."
Espio laughed. "Dude, every stop on this whole journey has been in a very hostile environment. We can handle this."
Sonic turned to Roxanna and saw that she was squinting slightly, her head cocked.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I am reading your aura."
Sonic smiled. "Oh yeah? And what does my aura look like?"
"It shows that you are still poisoned with doubt. You are not ready to face him yet. You are wracked with uncertainty. You feel that you will fail."
"I'm not going to fail," he insisted, "I'm fine. And I'm not going to face him yet. I'm just gonna scope out the place, see if I can figure out the situation. I'll come back for you guys, I swear, when the time is right we'll go in together and we'll finish this. As a team."
Espio crossed his arms. "Two days," he said, "You've got two days. If you're not back by then, we're going in after you."
XI
The road leading in to Sol-Hayyim was flanked by several heavily-armed soldiers, or drones, who looked like they weren't willing to take anybody's attitude, as was the usual nature of the military of the Arack Empire.
Arack soldiers wore a standard suit known as a combatant enhansive carapace, an armoured bulletproof 'exoskeleton' that fitted over the entire soldier's body and made him three feet taller, as well as replacing his third and fourth hands with deadly plasma rifles. It was always daunting to see an advancing army fronted by two thousand carapace-suited Arack drones, spewing plasma and waves of bullets. It was just as daunting for Sonic to pass by these rows of golem soldiers and try to keep a cool façade.
Sol-Hayyim looked, at least at first, very much like the city of Terantulopolis that had been built on the site of the fallen Robotropolis. The architecture was much the same - tall, black spires and pointed skyscrapers, everything angular and sharp, built in spirals around the center point - and the city was surrounded by the same solid wall of titanium and sticky webbing. Of course, Sonic had never tried to defraud his way into Terantulopolis, and in fact much of his energy was spent trying to stay out. This was the first time he'd wanted to get into an Arack city badly enough to consult a people-smuggler, and although he had no intention of committing any act of espionage against the Empire itself (this time), he knew that it would probably seem that way, and with the paranoid nature of the Aracks, such a thing would have dire consequences. If he was caught, it might even trigger an international incident. If the Aracks recognised him as a Freedom Fighter, the Empire might even make a move against New Knothole, and that would be a short battle indeed.
This was a very risky operation. Sally would never allow it. Then again, how many times had Sonic's stupid risks saved the Freedom Fighters from certain death? Sally always refused to answer that one on principle.
The doors of Arack buildings were something that Sonic could never get used to, and he hoped that the soldiers hadn't seen him shudder when he approached the portal at the entrance to the city. The Aracks had access to some kind of doughy quasi-living material that wasn't quite biological and wasn't quite plastic, and in fact Sonic didn't know exactly what it was, save for the fact that it could mould itself into any shape it was commanded to. The Aracks called it mandiblax, and made many things out of it, including most of their doors. When Sonic approached it, the mandiblax door made a dull sucking sound and opened like the mouth of some gelatinous sea creature. Thus it was that entering the Arack Empire felt almost like being swallowed by it.
There were booths inside the building, almost like bank tellers, each one manned by a secretary spider. Secretaries were a race of spider mobian who stood tall on thin, spindly legs with arms like pipe-cleaners that they could wrap around their bodies three times, had they enough elbows. They were, more often than not, given the menial, boring jobs that involved paperwork and calculation, as they were too physically feeble to be much good in the military or doing hard labour. But secretaries were quick, very quick, and Sonic thought that some of them could almost give even him a run for his money. Almost.
"Please supply adequate documentation pertaining to your identity and your reason for requesting entry into the city of Sol-Hayyim," one of the secretaries said.
Sonic calmly and routinely handed over the folder that Jasper Raster had provided him. "I'm a citizen," he said.
Well, this was it, the moment of truth. Time to see whether Jasper was the genuine article, or just some loon. Sonic discreetly checked the positions of the Arack soldiers. He could still run, given any trouble. The mandiblax door probably wouldn't open, but he was confident that he could spindash through it.
The secretary flipped through the pages of the documents with lethe efficiency, his buggy eyes zipping from left to right as he read.
"Interesting, interesting," he said.
Just let me through, you dumb bug, Sonic thought.
The spider handed Sonic back his papers. "Everything seems to be in order, here. Now, there is just the matter of the contents of your luggage."
Two of the guards took a step forward, and Sonic realised with no small amount of shock that he had psyched himself up for this so much that he had neglected to do the obvious and check the contents of his own bag. What if he had been set up? What if Jasper had been bitter about Sonic's demand for free passage, and had stocked the bag with something that would get him arrested on the spot? Too late, now. And one of the guards was now conveniently blocking the door.
Sonic gulped and handed the pack over to the secretary, who took it in all four arms and began to search it, without a great deal of delicacy. Upon opening the main compartment, the spider froze, and his eyes narrowed.
Well, that's it, Sonic thought, Busted. And I barely even got three feet into the city.
The secretary reached into the bag, and slowly withdrew something... bright pastel pink, and frilly. It was a child's doll. A ballerina in a tutu. With another hand, he pulled out another of the dolls. A pink unicorn, encrusted with glitter and plastic jewels. The spider held them both up with an expression of confusion that bordered on distress. From this angle, Sonic could see into the pack, and saw that it was full of pink, frilly, glittery dolls.
"Yes," Sonic said, "I'm a collector."
"Some people collect stamps," the spider said.
"What a novel idea."
The secretary stuffed the dolls back into the bag and zipped it up again. Then he ran it through a machine that looked vaguely like an x-ray. It went through smoothly and without incident.
"Welcome back to the grounds of the Royal Arack Empire," the spider said, "You will report for work at seven a.m. tomorrow morning. Here is the location of your living quarters."
One of his machines printed off a slip of paper, and the secretary tore it off and handed it to Sonic. The hedgehog took it and reclaimed his pack.
"Thanks."
He thought he heard the spiders chuckling as he left the building and entered the nightmarish city of the Aracks.
XII
Sonic had been inside Terantulopolis, and now, wandering the streets of this strange metropolis, he figured that the two cities might as well have been the same. More industrious than creative, the Aracks tended to formulate the most efficient singular design and simply replicate it again and again.
But the cities of the Arack Empire, although identical to each other, were like an alien world compared to the settlements of other races. Sonic was spellbound by the concept that this had once been a typical Westerican city like Mobitropolis or Station Square. Indeed, so fast and so amalgomated were the Aracks that they could build a house in two days, and when the Empire gained control of a new city, they wasted no time in setting about converting it into a more familiar Arack format.
The buildings were arranged in spirals, with streets between, and Sonic had no doubt that if one viewed Sol-Hayyim from above, it would look like a web. The buildings themselves were long and flat on the outskirts of the city, and gradually became narrower and taller as they spiralled inward, culminating in the centerpoint tower, an oblisk-shaped skyscraper that housed the autocrat of the city (known as the Sector Lord) and his government. The tower could be seen from anywhere in the city, and Sonic glanced up at it as he walked. A foreboding pillar of black that cast its shadow eastward over the city.
If there was one key feature of Arack technology that Sonic thought set it apart from any other that he was used to, it would probably be the conspicuous absence of wheels. Such a fundamental necessity for the advancement of any culture, and yet nothing round seemed to exist here among the Aracks. Their vehicles of transportation all hovered or walked, shambling along the streets like giant four- six- or eight-legged insects. Some machines even slithered, if that was an accurate enough description, but nothing at all rolled. Angular tram-like vehicles used magnets to speed along rails that ran beside the roads, and every so often stopped to let people off.
Sonic did notice one distinct feature that separated this city from Terantulopolis; there were a significant number of people living here who weren't spiders. And he supposed the difference came with the fact that Sol-Hayyim was a city assimilated into the Empire, whereas Terantulopolis had been constructed over the ruins of something that was only a mockery of a city, a metropolis whose living population remained static at one. The people living here had been trapped by the Empire that had grown around them like a mold. Those who were unable or refused on principle to leave this city (as Niles had once done) stayed within its walls. They were automatically granted Arack citizenship despite their lack of legs, but who would want it unless they were a spider? Who would be comfortable in a place like this, painted all in shades of black and gray, among monsterous, scampering machines and bizarre metamorphisising pseudomechanical dough? These people had been living here with their families and their careers when the laws of the land had changed around them, and they had suddenly been commanded to work longer and harder, eat and sleep less, and abandon public individuality in favour of a system of colourless, automated protocol. Sonic finally developed a deep understanding of Niles' unwillingness to return here. It wasn't so much the depressing, hateful nature of this place that hurt so much, as it was the memory of what had died to give birth to it.
Sonic found the building that had been assigned to him as his living quarters. The Arack Empire used a system of apartment blocks not unlike those used in Stratosphereon, except that the City of Clouds had provided luxurious five-star rooms for its citizens, whereas the Empire's rooms were dark, dingy little shoeboxes. The only furniture that was provided were two blocks of mandiblax that could be programmed by the user to take the shape of several preprogrammed items a couch, a table, a desk. Sonic didn't go near them, but noticed to his relief that at least they had given him a room with a regular door. After eating from an unlabelled can of ambiguous soup of unidentifiable flavour and composition, Sonic went to sleep on the floor, wishing he was anywhere else, and hoping for the wishes to become dreams.
XIII
"I'm jealous of Sonic," said Espio, while he worked on a bowl of mashed potato.
"Jealousy is a vice," Roxanna replied, and smiled.
"Yeah, yeah. But I am anyway. You know, I've had more fun this year than I've had in my entire life. I had no idea that the world was this... colourful! To think I spent years in a hole in the desert when I could have been out adventuring! Fighting bad guys, travelling around the world, like he does. Apparently he does stuff like this all the time. The stories he's told me..."
"What a bothersome life," Roxanna said, "I shouldn't want to do this again."
"That's what I can't understand. Don't you ever feel the urge to leave your sheltered little island and see what's out there?"
"I've seen what's out here. I've heard you speak of it, too. It would seem that this world is nothing but wars, tyrants and unhappiness."
Espio laughed, and then the two of them ate in silence for a short while. They listened to Father Matheson asking somebody if they liked anthrax, because if not they probably shouldn't eat the stew.
"The food here is delicious, however," Roxanna said at last.
"And how," Espio replied.
Night began to fall, and Espios thoughts wandered to Sonic, alone in the infamous spider city nearby. What was it like there? Espio had never met a spider, and the first he had ever seen had been in Port Knix, on the western coast, mere weeks ago. On one hand, he was concerned for his friend's wellbeing. On the other, and no less significantly, he wanted to see this city for himself, and remained bitter at being told to stay behind.
"Hey, Roxanna?"
"Yes."
"I wanna ask you something."
The porcupine looked up at him, brushing the forelocks from her eyes. Such incredible beauty, Espio thought, Invested in one single person. How could a world be considered bad to have created such a thing?
"Do you think we're going to live through this?"
Roxanna looked down again. Such a powerful spirit, and yet she had trouble meeting people's eyes.
"I cannot assure it," she said, "The prophecy says little of it. And yet, the prophecy is not set in stone. If it were, then there would be no reason for this quest."
"I don't want to die," Espio said, "Now that I've really seen the world for the first time... I feel like my life has just begun, and for it to end now would be a tragedy. And yet... I feel like I would die, if it came to that, if I had to. You know what I mean? I'm not even sure why. I mean, I don't even believe that Sonic's brother can destroy the world. I think that he'll bring all those rocks together and they'll just do what rocks do, and he'll feel like the biggest chump in the universe. And yet, I'm willing to fight to the death to stop him from doing it. Why do you suppose that is?"
"I cannot say. Perhaps, now that you have seen beauty in the world, you seek to protect that beauty."
Espio looked into her amber eyes, though she didn't return the gaze. "Yeah," he said, "Something like that. I never thought I'd say this, but... it seems like for a while, without even realising it, I've just been running on some kind of faith. Not logic, not reason, just faith. That this is the right thing to do. That this is what I have to do."
"Then that is a faith that we share," Roxanna said, "And I hope that neither of us, nor Sonic, shall need to lay down our lives for this cause. But should you need to make that sacrifice, be content that I shall see you soon upon the island where the departed wait in death."
Espio smiled and nodded. "If only I could believe that island is really there."
XIV
"You must go."
Roxanna's meditations took her to the place where the spirits spoke. It was an ancient rite that dated back to before the seeds of civilisation had set. Alastrine, her grandmother, had instructed her well in these rites, but Roxanna had always shown a natural affinity for them. She possessed an uncanny connection to the spirit realm; her ability to see the auras that encapsulated every mobian's soul, her tendency to experience prophetic dreams. These were abilities that Alastrine said her own mother had possessed, and the spirit of Roxanna's great-grandmother was surely alive inside of her. She was a Sunshine Child, a spiritual prodigy, and despite her youth and inexperience, her visions were always taken as powerful omens.
"He will need you soon. It is not too late, but you must leave now. All Things depend on it."
While Roxanna dreamed, she received a visitation. One of the spirits called out to her, insisted on her council. A matter of some urgency required her attention. Her role in this Kindred Alliance was about to come to light, she had a part to play and she was late on stage.
"Who are you, spirit?" she asked.
In her mind's eye, the astral mists coalesced to produce an image of a being. Roxanna did not recognise this person, this brown-spined hedgehog who appeared before her wearing a cheeky, friendly grin, but she recognised the energy and wisdom of this spirit, and a powerful aura of goodness. His connection was not to her, but to Sonic. He was Sonic's guardian angel, probably had been for a very long time.
"I will come to him soon. But first he needs you. He will face the darkness very soon, but he is not yet ready. He may think he is, but there is too much doubt in him. If he faces it alone in this state, he will die. He needs more time. Your time, however, has come. And you must go."
The spirit smiled warmly at her. She basked in that warmth. But not for too long, because time was running out. Her time was now, and she had to go.
XV
When Espio awoke the next morning, he had seen Roxanna's bed already empty. That was enough to inject the first twinges of concern into his heart and gut, for he worried about this girl who knew so little about the world wandering about in it alone. Especially with so many tough-looking thugs hanging about the area all the time.
The feeling grew when Espio saw that she wasn't in the shelter. Though the bed was in disarray, the porcupine was nowhere in sight. But their bunks had been close together, surely he would have awoken, had she been taken against her will.
But where would she have gone by herself?
Espio wandered outside, hoping that she had merely left the shelter for some air. She wasn't out there, not in sight.
Heading back inside, he began asking people whether they had seen her. Three or four homeless had no idea, being much more interested in where their next meal was coming from.
Finally, he questioned Father Matheson himself. The wolf priest smiled.
"Oh yes, the young lady you were travelling with. As a matter of fact, she left during the night. Had a matter of some urgency to attend to, it seemed."
"What do you mean, she left?" Espio snapped.
"Departed," Matheson replied, "I don't mean left as in the direction of left, like, as opposed to right. Nor was I making any insinuations about the young lady's political affiliations."
"Where did she go?"
"She never said. In too much of a hurry. Oh, but she did leave a message for you."
After a moment of silence, Espio twirled his fingers in the air.
"And the message is?"
"Oh! Right. The message. Well, it doesn't make much sense to me, but she said that you would understand. She said that she had to go, and that you must trust her. She said to take care of the stone, and that you will know when it is your time to act. She also said something about... meeting you on an island, but she was already racing out the door."
"Shoot! Espio exclaimed, "Whatever happened to teamwork? Why is everybody off fighting Cinos except me?"
"Are you directing your questions at me, or at a figurative third party representing your own psyche?"
"Uh, the second thing."
"Okay. I'll go, then. Good luck, Eugene."
"Espio."
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
With a sigh, Espio gathered his belongings and began to pack them. The bag with the Rune of Nine inside fell open, and his eyes fell upon the benign-looking stone with its malevolent energy throbbing just behind the realm of visibility. This was madness, how was he supposed to protect this thing alone? They were supposed to be a team, but now their Kindred was completely fragmented. Four lost souls, wandering the world apart, easy pickings for whomsoever should desire their elimination. What if Cinos should come knocking? How was he alone to stand in the way of that monster? He'd be dead before he saw it coming.
One thing was for sure. He wasn't safe here.
"Thanks, Roxanna," he grumbled, "Thanks, Sonic. Thanks Niles. Great work. While everyone remains content thinking there's some kind of mystical freakin' aura of protection keeping this group together, Cinos is just laughing at us. He'll pick us off one by one while we're sitting around waiting for fate to intervene. God isn't going to pull this group back together, so I'm going to have to do it myself."
He wrapped the Rune in its protective bag, picked up his belongings, and left the shelter. But when he stepped through the open door, he dropped everything and shrieked at the figure approaching from the other direction.
"You!"
XVI
It had taken Roxanna most of the night to make her way to the gates of Sol-Hayyim alone. The city rose up before her in the dark, swallowing the moonlight, its guarded entrance only another kind of wall for one such as she. For although she knew nothing of the Arack Empire from experience, she had learned enough from Sonic and from the people of this world to know that she would never be permitted to walk through these gates, nor would she be able to scale these walls, nor burrow underneath them. Sol-Hayyim was an inaccessable part of this world.
But only this world.
Roxanna's father had been an alchemist, her mother an expert weaver. Both were gone, now, her mother in childbirth and her father from cancer fifteen years later. It was her grandmother, Alastrine, who had recognised the child's talent and trained her to focus and enhance it. When she was five she had dreamed of an entire world covered in ice, an arctic world of frozen oceans and mighty snowstorms. Alastrine convinced the village to make preparations following this omen, and behold, a month later, the island of Septennia struggled through the coldest and most forbidding winter in memory. It was a freak natural disaster, hitting suddenly and without the usual warning that precedes such weather, and many lives would have been lost through poor preparation, were it not for Roxanna's dream and Alastrine's wisdom. Since that year, Roxanna had been renowned throughout the land as a Sunshine Child, a girl of vision, a seer, blessed by the spirits.
Alastrine had taught Roxanna much about the world, and the worlds beyond it. She taught her of the mysteries of the universe, and how a mortal might connect with them. When it came down to it, all anyone really needed was faith. Obstacles, the old porcupine had said, are nothing but the ghosts who haunt you when you take your eyes from your goal. They are false, insubstantial, immaterial. For a Sunshine Child, they aren't real. And if Roxanna ever needed to call upon the spirits to guide her, to summon her precious gift, she only needed to remember her dream, the infant's dream that saved the lives of dozens one horrid winter. She only needed to remember what she had accomplished, what she was capable of. The dream. The ice.
"Blizzard," she whispered at the dark city that lay spread out before her, at the base of the hill, flanked against the rocky, craggy mountains that rose up like a wart on the world. A few lights glittered in the city, and they sparkled off a great artificial salt lake that the Aracks had built to channel water in from the ocean. The metropolis stood silent, those guards in their terrifying battle suits vigilant and still.
Roxanna sat down on the dirt road, crossed her legs and closed her eyes. She formed a picture in her mind of a snowstorm, wreaking its cold destruction upon the globe. She pictured the oceans frozen, and mighty glaciers drifting slowly in their all-devouring glide to the sea.
As she pictured this forbidding winter world, she calmed. Ice was stable, it was strong, and soothing. The winter world was quiet, silent. She focused on this, and only on this, and entered a state of deep meditation.
What she was about to do was something that could only be done in theory, for no porcupine had attempted it in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Although the ability remained, and accessable with less effort than it took to move across a room, it was a forgotten ability. Forgotten deliberately. For until now there had been no reason, and nobody would ever want to. But the time had come to look beyond all of that, for the fate of all things was in peril, and this was the only way.
While Roxanna's mind travelled to this frozen world, her body travelled too. When the meditation ended, Roxanna woke up in the Lower Realm. The antiverse.
Sol-Hayyim, the city of the Aracks, was gone. In its place stood a tower in a dead city, a Rune Tower, although this ancient mystic construction appeared almost to be ready to crumble, itself. The city around it had been obliterated by some mighty force. It was little more than a field of fallen pillars, smashed walls, and rubble. There were no lights but for the moon and the stars, but the city was just as silent.
Roxanna picked herself up and walked toward the ruined city. The entire area sat upon a bed of scorched ground, as though this place had been the site of a catastrophic explosion. It was now a desert of rock and black soil. There was some plant life, but all of it was sick. Whatever had happened here had left its touch upon the land, for this was a dead place, and nothing would grow here. What kind of blast could not only level a city, but poison it as well? Roxanna decided that she would never want to meet the sorcerer responsible for this.
She entered the silent, destroyed metropolis. Only a short distance would do. She pictured how far she would need to go, perceived a point, and moved toward it without looking around. This silent city frightened her, for she dare not imagine the malevolent spirits that must haunt these pillars and stones.
"Blizzard," she whispered. "Blizzard. Blizzard."
A sound behind her broke her halfway out of her meditations, but she shook her head and continued walking. Only her fear, not a real sound. Only her imagination. One of the false ghosts that tempted her to look around, to turn away from her goal. She continued walking, continued to imagine the winter world.
Only the sound returned, louder. A footstep crunching through rubble, and not her own. Something in this dead, poisoned city was creeping up on her from behind. She heard it breathing, a wet, thick sound. It was enough to finally break her, and she turned around.
What stared at her was something that might once have been a mobian. It stood on two legs and stared at her with wide, haunting eyes. The sweat on its dark, hairless body glittered in the moonlight, and slowly it reached out to touch her with a mutated hand. Two fingers and a withered, useless thumb stretched out to touch her face, as though this creature hardly believed that she was real. Roxanna's heart thudded in her chest, she panted and trembled, frozen ar the sight of the thing that stood before her. It touched her, and its hand was slimy and gave off a putrid stench that stayed on her skin. The creature was breathing like an elderly person with bronchitis, taking deep, wet gasps.
Another one stepped out of the shadows further away.
Roxanna stumbled backward and struggled to reassert herself. Just a few more steps, and she would be where she wanted to be, and she would leave the residents of this dead city in peace. She turned away from the creatures and focused on her destination.
"Blizzard," she gasped. "Blizzard. Blizzard. Blizzard."
The creatures behind her pursued intently, and she knew that several had emerged, now. She heard them chattering at each other in whatever alien language it was that they spoke. She tried to block out the wet sound of their words, put her hands over her ears and whispered blizzard so that the word swirled in her head. She pictured snow, delicate and soft and harmless.
Something grabbed her below the shoulder, and she glanced down at the arm of one of the creatures. She saw to her horror that the creature's arm had sprouted another arm at the wrist, a tiny and withered thing that twitched and shuddered. These creatures had been tainted by the poison that engulfed this land. She saw dozens of them, all around her, emerging from the shadows; some with three eyes, some with none at all, some with horns and some with tentacles. Something cold and wet brushed by her ankle, something else breathed on the back of her neck.
"Blizzard, blizzard, blizzard," she stammered, and focused only on her destination. Just a few more steps, just a few more.
A crowd of creatures now surrounded her, and they were becoming rowdy. Dozens of mutated hands with varying numbers of fingers reached out to her, as the miserable creatures of the blasted city vied for one touch of her untainted skin. Wet hands grasped her, groped her, slowed her, threatened to drag her back into the crowd, but she pushed on, just a few more steps.
"Blizzard. Blizzard. Blizzard."
And then something monsterous appeared, something that stood twice as high as the other hobbling creatures, something of enormous girth that stepped out from behind the crumbled walls. A terrifying two-headed thing that shambled on legs like tree trunks. It howled with both of its mouths, and the other creatures scurried out of its way. The king of the creatures leaned toward Roxanna, slobbering and snarling, and grabbed her neck with one powerful paw. Its talons closed around her and began to choke her while it wailed. This was no place for beauty, no place for untainted flesh, and the monster was prepared to choke the life out of her to keep it that way. She closed her eyes and gathered all of her strength to focus, to concentrate, before she blacked out.
The blizzard swallowed everything. The snow spread across every inch of the globe. Islands were only mountains of ice upon the wasteland of the frozen oceans. Silence dominated. Silence. Like death. And then the sun itself froze over, and plunged all into darkness.
Roxanna awoke with the talon of the hideous mutant beast still closed over her neck. She thought that she had failed, and prepared to relinquish her life to the monster king, when she realised that the talon was not squeezing. It was a dead weight.
She lay on the cobbled streets of Sol-Hayyim, beneath its very much intact architecture, staring up into the starry sky. The constellations gazed back at her, twinkling. She reached up and struggled to pry the dead hand from her neck. It fell to the ground and twitched slightly, as though it still believed it was attached to something living. When she had slid back to the Upper Realm, she had mysteriously taken half of the monster's arm with her. It was severed cleanly, with a cut so straight that it would be impossible to replicate with any weapon, and it leaked black, putrid blood onto the paved ground. Its existance would be a fantastic mystery to the residents of this city when it was found in the morning, but Roxanna did not intend to be around to observe. She left the monster's arm where it lay and vanished into the shadows as the sun rose in the east.
XVII
Sonic had never had a need for regular employment. From science experiment to criminal to Freedom Fighter, his life had never fallen neatly enough within the descriptor of normal to make getting a job one of his priorities. But Sonic was a citizen of the Arack Empire, now, albeit a fraudulent one, and it was the only state on Mobius, so far as he was aware, where showing up late to work was an arrestable offense.
And so Sonic descended into the dark maw of the abyss known as The Pit, the mines from which the city of Sol-Hayyim derived the majority of its resources. He had no idea what he was in for.
The Pit was just that - a huge, gaping, pit cut into the side of one of the mountains that flanked the city. Extending outward from the main chamber were massive tunnels dug out by huge, powerful machines, and it was inside these tunnels where thousands of mobians worked to extract the minerals that the Empire desired. Sonic had seen the inside of mines before, but this was the largest of such he had ever come across. Looking down into The Pit, he saw an ocean of workers scurrying about, operating machines and digging by hand, and he imagined it was the largest ant colony in the history of Mobius.
And Sonic, being Sonic, entered into this challenge even somewhat willingly, hopeful that this might even be a fun experience. This hope did not become reality. Sonic was assigned to the task of attacking a wall with a pick that was almost too heavy for him to lift. After three hours of this, he was ready to go home. The shift, however, wouldn't end for another twelve hours. He feared that he wouldn't live to face Cinos after all.
Looking around at his fellow workers, it was even easier to see down here how the assimilation of this city into the Arack Empire had destroyed the lives of these people. A good number of them - perhaps as many as forty percent - were non-spiders, and Sonic wondered about the sanity of the decision to put all of these people down here. The spiders worked without complaint, with clockwork precision and effortless consistancy. The others, however, were drained and haggard. Sonic could see the pain in the eyes of these people who were wasting away in the most terrible job imaginable. Sonic was already determined to find a way to escape having to do this again tomorrow, and he was well aware that most of these people had been doing this every day for years. That was no life, it was a living nightmare.
Angry, he struck the wall with the pick, and it dug into the wall so hard that he couldn't pull it out. He swore aloud and tugged. His raw hands screamed in symphony with his aching shoulders.
"Whoa, whoa there," somebody said, and the tool was grabbed by a second set of hands. Sonic turned to see a weasel, his fur soaked and dripping with sweat, helping him to wrench the pick free. With the added strength, it came loose.
"Thanks," Sonic panted.
"Here's a trick," the weasel said, "You hold it like this, and you swing like this." He showed Sonic how to use the tool, and Sonic tried to emulate the motion. "This way, it takes the pressure off your arms and puts it on your gut. Toward the end of the shift, you'll want to kill yourself if you've been working on those arms all day, because they'll ache like heck."
"Hey, thanks. It's my first day."
"You want it to be your last, right?"
Sonic laughed. "Oh yeah."
"What's your name, kid?"
"Sonic."
"Hey, Sonic. I'm Harv. Listen, if you need anything, don't go to the Aracks, you come straight to me, 'kay? We Quads gotta stick together, am I right?"
"Hey!" came the booming voice of one of the Arack foremen, "No socialising! Back to work, the both of you!"
Harv gave Sonic a wink and a pat on the back and began to walk away, but Sonic was hit by a realisation and shouted after him.
"Harv? Harvey O'Sale?"
The weasel turned around, surprised. "Yeah, that's me."
"Listen, I've been looking for you. I've got a package for you. From a guy named Jasper Raster."
Harvey's eyes widened, then he looked around in horror and walked back to Sonic.
"You keep your voice down about that, you hear me?" he snapped, then looked around again, suddenly paranoid. He came right up to Sonic to whisper to him harshly. "As a matter of fact, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know anything about it."
"Sure you do," Sonic replied, "I can see that you do."
"We will not discuss this in public, you fool. How can I even be sure you know Raster?"
"Because he's a jerk. He filled my bag with girly stuff and sent me through customs."
Harvey nodded, and looked around again. "Yeah, that's Raster all right. Okay."
"Hey! I said get back to work, you slackers! I will not tell you again!"
People were looking at the two of them, now, and Harvey looked even more uncomfortable.
"Don't you ever bring attention to me here, understand? Whatever you have, hold on to it. I will find you later. Don't come looking for me. Don't let people see us talking again."
With that, he vanished into the crowd of workers. Sonic was left feeling embarrassed and wondering how much trouble he almost caused. In order to avoid further complications, he went back to work, as well as he was able.
XVIII
Espio sat on the curb, drawing pictures in the dirt with his toes. Beside him sat Niles Wilkinson-Price, who ran a finger idly across the design on the face of the Rune.
"It strikes me that I've simply been a right fool," he said, "A coward of the lowliest sort."
"Yeah, that's about right," Espio replied, "Sonic was pretty wrecked when you left. He's already terrified that he's going to fail, we're all going to die and that's all somehow going to be his fault. It only made things worse when the group broke apart."
"I have shamed myself," Niles said, "And now the poor fellow has gone away on his own. Oh how will I ever redeem myself?"
"Put that away, we probably shouldn't have it out in the open."
Niles stuffed the rock back into its bag and rested his head in his hands.
"So what made you came back?"
The fox shrugged. "I tried to settle down, dear fellow, but I found I couldn't sleep. I consider myself an honest and upstanding gentleman, you see, and yet, over the past months I have made my share of promises, and failed to keep them. This is terribly unlike me, you see. I consider it..."
"Unfinished business."
"Precisely. And although I never did promise that I would venture back into that... horrid Empire, I did guarantee that I would carry through until the absolute end, and I wouldn't feel right if I went back on that now. We still have a few miles to go before we sleep, what?"
"Glad you changed your mind," Espio replied. "Sonic always had faith in you, I think."
"Oh, we all have faith in each other, my dear, what we need is faith in ourselves."
Espio looked up at the main street of Meath, the road that led out of town and toward the city of Sol-Hayyim.
"I told Sonic I'd give him two days," he said, "He's had one. If he's not back tomorrow, we'll have to find a way into that city and find him. Since Roxanna went off on her own, I've been tempted to go in anyway. But, like you, I guess I made a promise I intend to keep. If we leave now, we might be taking this rock straight to Cinos."
"So we wait?"
"Until tomorrow. I just hope that Sonic and Roxanna are all right. I think they are... I guess that's just yet another question of faith."
XIX
Sonic worked all day. Although he thought it might kill him, he worked, and he lived. He almost collapsed when it was announced that the work day was over, and estimated it must have been something like eight o'clock at night. What an unspeakable horror to have to sleep eight hours and then return to this in the morning. One wouldn't even have time for anything else. The Aracks, it seemed, had no personal lives outside of their work. Sonic imagined that he might contemplate suicide if faced with such a fate.
It didn't matter, however, for he wouldn't be returning to work tomorrow. Not having expected the rigidity and time-consuming nature of his undercover occupation, he had wasted an entire day in here without seeing hide nor hair of Cinos, nor learning anything of the Rune that existed here, somewhere. Why couldn't that ratbag Jasper Raster have given him a different job? Because he was supposed to meet Harvey O'Sale and give him his stupid dolls, that was why. Tomorrow he intended to explore the city and find out something useful. He didn't want to report back to his friends and tell them he knew nothing. They were counting on him.
Sonic's hands were blistered almost to the point of mutilation. His shoulders and wrists hurt like he had been lifting cars all day. His compensation for being so lethe, so agile and so swift was that he wasn't very strong, even by hedgehog standards. Manual labour wasn't what his creators had had in mind for him. It didn't matter to the Aracks, but giving Sonic a pick-axe and putting him in a mine was like giving a fish a pair of wings and throwing it into the air.
The hedgehog was sifting around his living quarters, investigating the possibility of some bandages or disinfectant (or some hard liquor) when there was a knock on his door.
He froze. This, he knew, was unusual and worrying. Who would be visiting him here? Quickly, he checked his exits. It might be possible, he figured, with some difficulty, to make it to the ground if he climbed out a window, but he was up high. He hoped it wouldn't come to that.
The knock again. "Who is it?" he called out.
If they're coming to bust me, the jig is up. They probably have the place surrounded.
For a moment there was silence, but then a voice from outside answered him:
"It's Harvey O'Sale."
Sonic realised he hadn't been breathing, and exhaled harshly. What the heck did that guy want? Then it dawned on him that he still had the bag full of dolls.
He went to the door, still a little cautious, and opened it. Harvey O'Sale walked in without invitation.
"Please, come in," Sonic said, after the weasel was already well inside.
"You have something for me," Harvey said.
"Yeah, yeah. Let me find where I put it." He began rifling through drawers.
"I'm sorry if I was harsh to you this morning," Harvey said, "This package is very important, and very secret. Nobody talks about the Spanner Project in public, even the small stuff. Too much is at stake."
Sonic dragged out the backpack he had smuggled into the city, and was about to toss it to Harvey, but the weasel shouted "No!" and walked the distance to claim it. Sonic sighed.
"So why all the secrecy?" he asked, handing the pack over. "You're pretty sensitive about your secret doll obsession. It's okay."
"No, no," Harvey replied, "It's not the dolls." He unzipped the pack and lifted out one of the dolls, a pink fairy. With the kind of brutal violence that Cinos was usually only renowned for, Harvey grabbed the doll's glittery smiling face and ripped its head right off of its body. Shaking the head carefully, something dropped from the open neck into his palm.
The purple and orange blunt-spiked object that Harvey now held in his hand was something that Mecha Sonic would have recognised as a resin-grenade. Sonic had never seen anything like it, only that it looked like a larger version of one of the jacks that children played with.
"Great," he said, unimpressed.
"We only recently discovered a method of jamming the Aracks' scanners," Harvey explained. He pulled out another doll. "The device is inside the mermaid."
"So what do you intend to do with all this stuff?" Sonic asked, "What's the Spanner Project?"
"You don't know?"
"Raster didn't tell me anything."
Harvey obtained that mildly paranoid expression again, looking left and right, and keeping his voice down. "The Spanner Project," he said, "As in, 'spanner in the works'. You were there today, in those wretched mines. You know as well as anyone what a nightmare the Empire makes of our lives. We Quads make up almost half of the workforce, and we're exploited way beyond the limits of reason. Life in The Pit is insane."
"I see what you mean, but what are Quads?"
"You're a Quad. I'm a Quad. If you have four less limbs than the number required to live a comfortable life in the Arack Empire, you're a Quad. And we intend to turn the tides on this madness. We're going to send a message direct to the Sector Lord, direct to the Webb, that we won't take it anymore. We'll do it by grinding this entire city to a halt."
"Who are 'we'?"
Harvey shook his head. "I don't even know everyone who's running the project. Everybody just knows as much as they need to, and I'm not very high on the ladder. The whole thing is masterminded by a guy named Ronin Shapesk, I don't even know what he looks like."
Ronin Shapesk, Sonic thought, That name doesn't really sound right.
Aloud, he said, "And you're going to grind this whole city to a halt, using these little purple things?"
"They pack quite a punch," Harvey replied, "Some of the most powerful explosives that you can find anywhere."
"Oh great," Sonic sighed, "I told that jerk I wasn't doing this if it was weapons I was smuggling. I have no intention of being associated with some kind of terrorist attack, even if it's spiders you're bombing."
"Do I look like a terrorist to you?" Harvey snapped, "We're not killing anybody, except this evil machine of exploitation. It's been planned to the smallest detail. Sol-Hayyim imports a huge amount of water from the ocean for the city's drinking supply. It's stored in a massive artificial lake, desalinated and purified. The lake is right near the mines, and one shaft in particular shares a wall with it. That's the key. These tunnels are normally guarded around the clock, even at night, with one exception. During the day, the miners are given a fifteen-minute break that happens to coincide with the guards' scheduled break. For fifteen minutes a day, the mines are empty. And in two days, the Spanner Project is going to strike."
"You're going to flood The Pit," Sonic said.
"The Pit provides this city with the vast majority of its resources," Harvey said, "Drowning it is like poisoning a weed's roots. What could be a more powerful message than that? Hundreds will be liberated. The Empire will be forced to re-evaluate its policy on Quad citizenship rights."
"Glad I could play a part," Sonic said glumly.
"You take care," Harvey said, and gathered the dolls back into the bag. "Tomorrow will be the final day for this nightmare of a city. After that..." He winked and smiled, and with that, he took his bag and left.
Sonic closed the door behind him, and resumed his search for first aid, fretting over what he had just heard. Something told him that Ronin Shapesk's project of liberation wasn't going to go quite as well as Harvey's idealistic dreams. Not quite.
He hadn't walked far before he heard another knock on the door, and sighed. What did that guy want now? He returned to the door and opened it.
What he saw on the other side almost shocked him to death.
XX
"What are you doing here?" Sonic demanded.
Roxanna looked up and down the halls timidly, and then into Sonic's living quarters.
"I had to come. It was necessary."
Sonic's initial feeling of anger was quickly swallowed by relief, and he pulled the porcupine inside, closing the door behind her and locking it.
"Well, come in! Are you all right? How did you get here?"
"I saw you and I followed you to where you were living," she replied. "I saw that somebody was in here with you, so I waited until he was gone."
Sonic shook his head in disbelief at Roxanna's resourcefulness. Espio had been concerned about her fragility, her naivete in this world and her youthful inexperience, but obviously he had nothing to worry about. How had she infiltrated the city of the paranoid Aracks? A realisation came to him.
"You came here through the antiverse, didn't you."
"I never want to return there," she replied, a dark cloud of bitterness passing over her face. "Ever."
Roxanna had brought with her a small pack with several satchels of medicines and herbs from her island home of Septennia. They found some bandages, and Roxanna helped him dress his wounded hands with bloodleaf ointment. While she worked, Sonic talked about what he had learned.
"There's an uprising brewing here," he said, "In two days they're going to try to flood the mines and break the Aracks' means of production, all under the direction of some guy named Ronin Shapesk. That's all fine and dandy, but there's one little problem. Ronin isn't really Ronin. He's Cinos."
"How can you be certain?" Roxanna asked.
"I only just figured it out. Ronin Shapesk is what you call an anagram. Rearrange the letters and you get Kinnos Sharpe, another one of Cinos' aliases. It's something that only I would be able to work out, and I think that's exactly what he wanted me to do."
"Why is that?"
"How should I know? He just likes to play stupid games. I know, because it's the kind of dumb thing that I'd do, and we share the same sense of humour. Maybe he wants me to know he's out there, he's pulling the strings and there's nothing I can do about it. But at least that solves a mystery. We know where he is and we kinda know what he's up to. What we don't know is why, and what all this has to do with the Runes. To tell you the truth, it really has me spooked."
"Spooked?"
"Yeah. I mean, think about it... why the heck would Cinos go out of his way to plan and implement a project to liberate hundreds of people from oppression? I can't work it out. This is the last thing I'd expect him to be associated with. Unless, of course, there's something deeper that I'm not seeing. He's gonna do something bad. Real bad. I don't know what it is, and I can't even warn anybody, because everyone thinks he's their saviour."
"What do you propose we do?"
"Well, you're staying here, and hiding. It's dangerous for you here, that's why I didn't want you guys here in the first- ouch!"
Roxanna had squeezed his hand in the wrong place, and a dart of pain shot up his arm. She looked up at him, frowning.
"It is about time that you begin seeing this for what it is," she snapped, "We are Kindred. You are not our leader and you should not profess to be. Nor are you the architect of this quest. We have found each other, and we now walk as one, united. Believe it or not, Sonic Hedgehog, there are forces higher than you making the rules. The first time you swept us to the side, you threatened everything."
"Oh, how did I threaten everything, Roxanna? Tell me that."
"I have business here," she said, "With you. Very soon. Had I not been here, you would very likely die when my presence became necessary. There is a certain spirit who has taken an interest in our quest, and it is he who came to me and informed me that it was folly for me to stay behind."
"How am I supposed to know these things?" Sonic demanded, "You're the one who talks to the spirits and all that guff, I don't. You're the Sunshine Child, not me. I'm just following my intuition, here, because I don't know what else to do. What more am I supposed to do? What do you expect of me?"
"Only faith," Roxanna replied.
"What, in Mazsha? In some dead religion that a dozen people in the entire world follow?"
"It does not matter what name you give to the Spirit From Whence All Comes. It does not even matter what rituals you choose to follow, all you need is to have a little faith that there is a force out there, a force more powerful than you or I or the Dark Twin or anybody, a force that wants us to succeed."
"Well why doesn't it just get off its holy butt and tell me what to do?" Sonic knew as soon as he had said it that it was a silly thing to say. In his head, the voice of Father Thaldymort immediately answered his question.
You can only be shown choices. It is up to you to make them.
Roxanna shook her head. "It speaks to you every day, it is you who does not listen."
"Okay, fine," Sonic sighed, "I get it. So we know that Cinos is planning so move in two days. What we have to do, both of us, is get at him sooner. Tomorrow. We'll find him and we'll stop him."
"We will find him," Roxanna replied, "And when the time is right, we will stop him."
XXI
Morning arrived in the Arack city of Sol-Hayyim as it always did - the city awoke like it was alive, as though it were a creature of flesh and blood, springing up from its sleep, ready to face the day. Insectile machines trundled out from their cavernous hiding places and crawled along the streets like monsterous parisites.
Much of Sonic's energy this morning was focused on the task of simply making sure that Roxanna did not appear conspicuous. It was, he feared, a battle that he was losing. The porcupine girl simply did not look like somebody who had been forced for any length of time to live under the governance of the Arack Empire. Whenever one of the transports trundled past, she gaped in awe, pointed and marvelled. She looked like a tourist, and tourists were an anomoly in the Arack cities. So much so that it was likely to prompt the paranoid authorities into suspicion. Sonic was relatively safe on his own (although his documents wouldn't hold up to that much scrutiny, he figured), but Roxanna had sneaked into Sol-Hayyim without any kind of documentation. She was an illegal alien, and would be revealed as such if she was so much as questioned. Sonic would be busted simply for his association with her.
"Don't look at them," he warned.
Roxanna turned to him, puzzled. "How am I not to look at them? I cannot control what my eyes perceive."
"Sure, but don't gawk. You've gotta look like you've been living here a long time. You've gotta pretend that you've seen all this every day for years."
And so Roxanna made an effort, but even so, it was clear that there were many things that she did not understand. It frustrated Sonic no end, but he bit his tongue - after all, she wasn't simply a lost child entrusted to his care, no matter how circumstances might paint her. She was one quarter of a whole, and despite her weaknesses, it was her unique abilities that made her an inseperable and equal part of this group. As she had told him the night before, Sonic was not a leader this time, only a colleague.
The mission today was to locate Cinos, and it was not a simple proposition. Logical reasoning suggested two things - one was that his assigned occupation probably had something to do with the mines. The second conclusion came about through Sonic's certainty that his evil clone's interest did not lie with either the liberation of Sol-Hayyim's oppressed 'Quads', nor with the weakening of the Arack Empire through some kind of rebel upsurge. The only explanation for his having engineered this elaborate plot was that he had some kind of innate interest in the mines themselves. There was some reason why he desired access to both The Pit and a whole lot of explosives, something was down there that could only be obtained by blowing something up.
Sonic didn't need three guesses to figure out what that something was.
And so, in order to locate Cinos - who Sonic was coming to affectionately know as the Devil Twin thanks to Roxanna - the two headed back toward the mines at the edge of the city. Sonic, however, was unwilling to venture too close. He had no intention of being spotted and sent back to work again. He thought he would rather risk spending time in an Arack prison.
The Pit stood against an outcrop of rocky mountains, and from the vantage point that Sonic had settled upon, he could see them as well as the Aracks' great artificial lake. It was a simple and yet ingenius work of engineering; water was channeled from the ocean through a system of pumps and aqueducts, and filtered into this reservoir. From there, it was purified and desalinated, using technology that even the advanced nations of Mobius had yet to perfect and implement, to turn sea water into clean drinking water.
All of this sandwiched against the mining operations from where Sol-Hayyim obtained most of its raw materials, and which probably benefited the neighbouring Arack cities in much the same way. This mine was probably an important asset for the Empire's colonisation and expansion into Westerica. In fact, if the so-called Spanner Project went ahead, Sonic figured that not only would it grind Sol-Hayyim to a cataclysmic halt, it would probably significantly stunt the Empire's growth, at least for a time. It might even directly affect Sally Acorn herself, assist her directly in gaining the political and military leverage required to re-establish the monarchy and fill the Westerican political vacuum, before the Empire could. Cinos' selfish crusade could inadvertantly begin the chain reaction that wins the war that began when Robotnik collapsed Mobitropolis.
Sonic was suddenly struck by a strange philosophical enigma that dug at his perception of this entire quest, a paradox regarding the nature and definition of both good and evil:
If a murderous and completely immoral individual commits a selfish act, an intrinsically villainous act, that happens to directly result in the liberation of thousands of people from tyranny or death, is that person not in fact a hero?
Sonic wondered if Cinos would appreciate the irony (and he probably wouldn't) that despite his inverted morality and his backward soul, his love of all things twisted and perverse, in the end he had become a Freedom Fighter.
What was worse was that Sonic was going to stop at nothing to make sure Cinos did not succeed in his inadvertantly heroic plans. The one event that might sincerely turn the tide of this war in the Freedom Fighters' favour, and it was Sonic who was going to intervene to prevent it. So what did that make him?
Was this just another example of Sonic's small acts of heroism benefiting the growth of a greater evil? He didn't want to think about it. This was not the time.
"So, what now?" he asked aloud, "Are the spirits telling you anything?"
Roxanna did not recognise Sonic's sarcasm. She shook her head. "I would think, though, that if the Devil Twin is in those caves, we should need to obtain access."
"I was afraid of that. Man, if I had my way I wouldn't go near that place again for as long as I live. But, if I gotta... I guess we should see if there's some back way in, somewhere we can get in without being seen and put to work."
Sonic and Roxanna approached the mines from another angle, following the pipelines that took water from the treatment plants around the lake and led into the city's water supply. As they moved, Sonic kept his eyes on those mines, watched as dozens of wretched unfortunates entered The Pit for another gruelling day of hard work. His heart went out to them, but their plight was not currently his concern. His business today was to prevent their liberation, not to grant it.
(Don't think of it that way, Sonic! Don't even think about them at all.)
But he couldn't help it. He had spent a single day in those mines, and that was enough for him to know that there was very little he wouldn't be willing to do to avoid another day. These people were doomed to this every day of their lives. Their only chance was that the Spanner Project might go ahead and wash away their oppression. But if that happened, Cinos would yet again be one step ahead, would achieve yet another victory in his near flawless record.
Sonic knew that there was one very surefire way that he could stop tomorrow's events from happening - and that was that he could tip off the Empire authorities as to the unfolding plot. The paranoid Aracks would stop it faster than he could blink. However, the inescapable consequence of this would be that the Empire would clamp down harder on its resident Quads, and the orchestrators of the Spanner Project would face some harsh and likely mortal punishment. Sonic equated this with turning the Freedom Fighters in to Robotnik. He would consider this in itself to be an evil act, and make him no better than Cinos. It was something he could never bring himself to do.
What was more, he knew that Cinos would laugh at this predicament. For it was he who many a time had pointed out that the only way Sonic could achieve level ground with his nemesis would be when he resorted to evil acts, as it was his moral hang-ups that held him back. It was Cinos who predicted that Sonic would "fall for him", see things from his perspective, and ultimately embrace evil in order to succeed.
And, when that time came, he may not even defeat Cinos after all. What reason would there be to fight, when both parties would essentially agree?
"Hey Ronin! Ronin!"
At first, Sonic didn't even notice that somebody was shouting at him. It was, after all, not his name. But after a moment the shouts penetrated his deep thoughts, and he recognised that the name being shouted was familiar. Ronin was the pseudonym that Cinos was using.
He spun around and saw a rabbit in an oily work uniform waving for his attention. It wasn't the first time he had been mistaken for Cinos, and it was the one benefit he could see in resembling the dark hedgehog. If he could infiltrate his enemy's social circles, he might be able to track down the real Cinos, as well as find out his plans.
The rabbit was standing just inside the entrance to one of the water treatment plants that surrounded the lake. He had a distressed expression, and was waving for Sonic to approach.
"Wait here for a second," he said to Roxanna, "Keep out of sight."
Warily, he put on his best Cinos impression and walked toward the rabbit.
"What are you doing?" the stranger demanded, "Buddy, you come late to work again, and you're gonna be in some serious trouble, you dig? These spiders, they don't mess around."
"I do what I like," Sonic snapped, "You think they scare me?"
"Man, you're crazy," the rabbit lamented, "Come on, you still got time. Just hurry, okay? They got you working down section T, today, on the secondary filters. And they're not gonna give you many more warnings, take it from me."
With that, the stranger walked away, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
XXII
Roxanna was concerned about Sonic's aura.
The ability to perceive the aura of the people around her was not one over which Roxanna had terribly much control. It simply came on unexpectedly for a few moments at a time, and then went away. Somebody less trained in the nature of such things might pass it off simply as some anomolous vision problem, but to Roxanna it was a powerful tool of insight.
She saw Sonic speaking to a rabbit that she did not recognise. Both were surrounded by what appeared a little like coloured mist. It swirled about their bodies, danced almost like it had a life of its own. This was the haze of their souls, the radiance of their very essence. And from the colours and patterns in these auras, Roxanna could divine the emotional state of the person themselves.
The rabbit, the stranger, was simple. He was suffering stress and anxiety, he was worn out and concerned for his future, but his concerns were largely superficial. About him, Roxanna cared not at all. Sonic, however, was going through much deeper turmoils. He was fundamentally unsure about his very identity. His faith in himself was dwindling, drained by defeat after defeat at the hands of his Devil Twin. He had allowed his twin to get inside his head and start rattling around. Cinos, after all, was more than simply Sonic's enemy. He was Sonic's negative thoughts themselves, skimmed off and poured into a hedghehog-shaped mold. Cinos knew exactly what to say to slice through Sonic's ego and hit a nerve, he knew all the buttons to push, all the triggers. He had a knowledge of Sonic's mind that nobody else could ever hope to match, and his psychological attacks were eroding Sonic like water on sandstone. If Sonic continued down this path, then it would be merely an empty shell of a hedgehog that faced Cinos at the end. The Devil Twin would simply breathe on Sonic, and he would fall over.
The auras faded before Roxanna's eyes. The spirits had relayed their warning to her, and she had understood.
Sonic returned with a smile on his face, a smile that she knew was only superficial, hiding a deeper anguish.
"I should have seen it!" he exclaimed.
"What have you learned?" Roxanna asked.
Sonic looked back towards the water treatment plant. "Cinos doesn't work in the mines. How could he? If he had been there, somebody would have recognised me, just like that guy did. I'm the only blue hedgehog who works in The Pit. Cinos works here. Whatever he's really planning, I have a feeling the evidence is in there. Come on, I'll sneak you in with me."
Roxanna nodded, and followed, wary of Sonic's brewing inner turmoil. Soon her time would be up as a member of Sonic the Hedgehog's Kindred. She would soon be leaving the path. She hoped with all her might that she would leave him on the road to inner recovery. For this, she prayed.
XXIII
Work Sector W125 was the code for this, one of many water treatment plants that served the metropolis of Sol-Hayyim. The mandiblax doors opened with an almost alive sucking-sound that made Sonic shudder, and he feared that Roxanna might react worse. She tried not to, remembering Sonic's advice.
Keeping away from people as much as they were able (Sonic didn't want to be mistaken as Cinos too often, lest he risk being called on his bluff, and he especially didn't want to have to explain Roxanna's presence too often), Sonic and Roxanna descended into the belly of the facility, where pipes full of rushing water ran alongside the walls. People, many of them spiders, worked at consoles, redirecting the flow of liquid around the plant and doing various things that Sonic wouldn't have the first clue about.
He thought of Cinos working shifts here, doing a healthy day's work for the first time in his existence. It seemed he wasn't beyond the ability to make sacrifices for this crusade. His covert operation in Sol-Hayyim had been surprisingly delicate, showing that he had learned something of patience in the past year. Sonic considered himself to have grown up significantly along the course of this journey, and interestingly, it seemed Cinos had done the same.
As they moved through the plant, Sonic happened to pass several rooms where dozens of people in white coats milled about at once, each performing their assigned duties, around some kind of giant machine into which scores of pipes converged. Some of these machines had windows on their sides, and Sonic could see the water sloshing around inside, undergoing various degrees of purification. To his horror and disgust, he saw that the water at each stage of this process was being pumped through mandiblax devices that looked like giant worms or leeches, sucking water in one end and spitting it out the other. He wondered whether the people who worked here thought differently about the water they drank through the taps, and whether they opted for fruit juice instead.
Deeper inside the facility, several floors below ground level, they came to a chamber that looked as though it had been constructed as an engineers' access area, in the bowels of the plant. It was dimly lit, and lined with iron scaffolding. The ground was ordinary dirt. This would seem to have been the base of the facility.
Dominating an entire wall of the chamber was a huge window, on the other side of which was water. It looked like one massive tank. Sonic realised that it was the lake - only a pane of thick glass stood between them and thousands of tons of seawater. He could see sand and seaweed on the other side, and small fish that had escaped the ocean to live in what was essentially the biggest fish tank in the world.
"I still can't figure out exactly what it is that Cinos wants to do," Sonic said. "We can only assume that this whole Spanner Project thing has been designed to make the last Rune accessable, I mean, that's all that he cares about. And the stone is buried, so we can assume that he's found it in the mines somewhere. It's been dug up, or it's about to be. But what I don't understand is... Cinos is going to flood the mines. That'll put the rune underwater, won't it?"
Roxanna looked up at the glass window, watching the fish circle mindlessly in the cloudy water. "Perhaps," she said, "The Rune is not in the mines at all."
"How do you figure?"
"Perhaps it is in there." She pointed at the glass.
Sonic looked back into the cloudy depths. "Hey, yeah. That makes sense. The Aracks just scooped out a big crater in the ground when they put this lake here. Maybe they uncovered something... if the rune is underwater already, then draining the lake into the mines will actually bring it to surface."
"Sonic. There is something I wish to speak with you about."
"Hm?" Sonic was clearly deep in thought, staring into the glass.
"Sonic."
The hedgehog turned to her. "Yeah, I'm listening. What is it?"
Roxanna took a deep breath and looked into his eyes. "I still sense much doubt in you. You try to hide it, and you have probably fooled the others, but your aura gives you away."
"What are you talking about?"
"You fear that if you face him, you will fail. You fear that his success is inevitable, that he is more powerful."
Sonic sighed and averted his eyes from her gaze. "Cinos has gotten the better of me more often than vice versa. He and I both know it. He loves it, he thinks it's hilarious."
"His words are trickery," Roxanna said, "Designed to force you to question yourself, to question your faith. You cannot listen to him. He is your Devil Twin, he possesses no ability that you do not share."
"I know he's deliberately trying to get to me," Sonic replied, "What I fear most is that he has a point. Shortly after I set out, when Cinos and I were trapped together in the Chameleon Cabal, I knew that either of us could escape the cage any time we wanted. We both had that ability. The only problem was that, to escape, we would probably have to kill people. Cinos has no hang-ups about murder, but I do. At the end of the day, while we both had the same ability, only one of us was willing to do what it took. That's what I fear. All my life I have lived with the belief that good always triumphs over evil, because morality is more powerful than immorality. What I fear now is that this is a romantic fallacy, because, more and more, I'm seeing that it doesn't stand up very well against cold logic. If you don't have any morality, you can do literally anything you like. People like you and I, who consider ourselves moral people, we might be strong, but we always have these barriers in our minds, saying Oh, I can't do that, it might hurt somebody, and Oh, I can't go out and fight evil, I have to protect my friends. It weighs on your potential. One of my enemies, Zero Tolerance, always goes after my friends first, because he knows that they are my weakness, and he doesn't have the moral barrier that prevents him from fighting dirty. And you know what? Zero's probably come closer to killing me than anyone. I form attachments with people, and then my mind gets all clouded up with worry. I make mistakes, I lose focus."
"You fear for our safety," Roxanna said, "The safety of your friends."
"Well, yeah. Heck, I love you guys, all of you. Love is great, but I'm afraid that it really does make a person weak. I know that you're all willing to risk yourselves for this quest, and I realise that you'd still go ahead even if something happened to me, but I'm still afraid- I'm afraid that when it comes to the crunch, I'll protect you guys first, even to the detriment of the mission. I'm afraid that if beating Cinos requires any of you to sacrifice yourselves, it's just not a length I'm willing to go to. It doesn't seem right. I'm trapped by my love and my morality, I won't be able to do what it takes."
"If the Devil Twin succeeds, then we will all die. We will probably suffer worse fates at the end than any of us could meet with along the way."
"I realise that, but... I dunno. This haunts me. I don't think I've ever told you, but years ago I used to have nightmares about snakes. Every night. They were the bane of my existence. I got over it, but... since I set out on this quest, I've been having nightmares again. Not about snakes, though. Cinos has replaced the snakes. Often it's a street lined with mirrors, but he is the reflection in all of them, and he laughs at me. He tells me that my morality is my weakness, and that I am going to have to fall for him before I can beat him, that I'm going to have to embrace evil in order to defeat him. I'm afraid that the sacrifice of my friends is the evil that I am going to have to embrace."
While Sonic was speaking, he was leaning with his back against the window that held back the lake. His hand slid along the glass, and came into contact with something soft and gooey.
"Oh, gross," he spat, "Somebody stuck their chewing gum on the glass."
"You put your faith in logic," Roxanna said, "And logic has its place. Rationality and practicality has allowed my people to live from the bounty of our island for millennia. But it is a wise person who sees that logic is not everything. Truth and fact are deceptive concepts, and a skilled person knows how to twist them to his advantage, to use them to manipulate. That is why we also embrace faith, because faith is static. Indestructible, so long as your mind is strong."
"Sure, but I-"
Sonic looked down again at the gum on the glass. A huge purple wad of it. More than he would be able to fit in his mouth. "That sure is a heck of a lot of gum," he said, warily. Where had he seen something like that before? He touched it again, and it was so sticky that he had trouble wrenching his fingers back.
"I would not know," the porcupine replied.
"Hey Roxanna, why do you suppose Cinos isn't down here today, anyway? This is where the Aracks have assigned him to work, and he would know that not showing up to work has dire implications here. Why would he risk becoming suspicious to the authorities, now that he's so close to pulling off this huge operation?"
Realisation had filled Roxanna's eyes, now. "He knows something that we do not," she said.
"Maybe it doesn't matter whether he acts suspicious or not," Sonic replied, "Maybe it's too late... Oh my gosh, I can't believe I didn't see this before."
"What have you realised?"
"Roxanna, Cinos isn't bound by morality. The reason that the Spanner Project has been scheduled for tomorrow is because that is when everybody associated with it will be expecting it, and they'll be able to make sure it happens safely, that nobody gets hurt. But Cinos won't care about that. As far as he's concerned, he can set this whole thing in motion whenever he feels like it. He can blow the lake as soon as he has the ability to do so. And I delivered his bombs last night."
"He is going to move early," Roxanna said.
"Yeah. He's gonna move today, that's why he's not here. And there's something about this gummy stuff that has me worried, because I've seen it somewhere before, only-" His eyes widened. "Mecha Sonic."
"I beg your pardon?"
"This thing was stuck to Mecha, I kicked it and it blew him to smithereens. It's some kind of explosive. I think this is the stuff I smuggled in."
He stood back from the window, and saw more of the purple wads. At least three of them, stuck to the glass at regular intervals. "Holy crap," he choked, "This whole place is rigged."
Each of the purple wads had something buried in its center, and Sonic had little doubt that they were detonators. At least one of them went off while he was speaking. A small click and a loud spark. The entire wad began to glow bright red.
"Run," Sonic warned.
"What do-"
"Run!"
Sonic bolted, grabbing Roxanna as he passed by, forgetting momentarily that she could not run as fast as he could. They ran toward the stairs that led up to the next level of the facility, but a mind-shattering explosion obliterated the glass wall that held back the lake. A tsunami of dirty, salty water burst into the chamber, sweeping both of them from their feet. Sonic's head collided with something metal, and he saw stars. Disoriented, he siezed up, making no effort to escape the rushing water.
A scream from Roxanna snapped him out of his daze. He could not see what had become of her. The water rushed into the facility with breakneck force, pitching him under the waves again and again. He realised to his dazzled horror that the both of them could be killed very easily, should the water dash them against something with enough power. That was if they didn't drown first. Sonic was having a difficult time staying above water.
"Roxanna!" he screamed, but the sound of the rushing water smothered his voice. He tried to swim against the flow, but it was pointless. After all these years in situations like this, Sonic wondered, Why the heck have I still not learned how to swim?
The tide weakened, and the facility began to fill up. Then, there was another explosion, and the water began moving again. Cinos was systematically blowing out walls, directing the water toward the mines. Whatever was in the water moved with it. Sonic's nose and eyes were full of salt, and his struggle to breathe was made all the more difficult by his uncontrollable coughing.
Roxanna was nowhere in sight.
Sonic ceased his efforts to defeat the water, and focused his dwindling energy on merely avoiding death. A sharp outcrop of metal zipped past his face at such speed that it could have taken his head off without slowing him down. There was a hole blown into the ground, and Sonic was ripped through it like an invisible chain was locked around his ankle. He scrambled for air, but there was no longer any surface to find. He hadn't even had a chance to take a deep breath. He was being pulled down, down, down...
And then he was in the air again. The water, now dark red with mud, roared out of a tunnel that exited into the mountain caves preceding The Pit, and Sonic took in a desperate, hoarse gasp of air before being pulled under again. It was probably pointless, because he knew that these tight, rocky caves would kill him even more quickly than the facility. Being dragged through these caves would break his bones in so many places that he would come out the other end looking like a sack full of rocks. Though he had pleasant fantasies of being washed up onto dry land, dusting himself off and walking away unharmed, he knew that it was a ridiculously unlikely scenario. Realistically, it would be a miracle if he came out of this alive.
As he prepared for the messy death he was about to endure, he found that he wasn't terrified. He wasn't even afraid. In fact, all he could think about was how futile everything turned out to be. For a whole year he had been caught up in the fantasy of being some kind of Chosen One, of being fated by some higher power to save the world, exploring ideas of God and spiritual reawakening and Higher Purpose, only to find out that the entire fiasco could end with something as trivial as entering a chamber at the wrong moment. The idea of the universe as some structured system of significance and importance collapsed upon itself, as Sonic realised that it was all meaningless after all. The universe was a feeble, random conglomerate of cause and effect, his life and death simply a spin of the dice, no more complex than a line of dominoes pushing each other over. He was going to die, and no amount of faith or fate was going to save him.
Sonic closed his eyes.
XXIV
It took Sonic a few moments to realise that he wasn't moving. The water was yanking him with incredible force, sucking him toward the twisting caves that called him to his death, but he wasn't answering that call. He was snagged on something.
Sonic squinted through the rushing, abrasive salt water to see what had gone awry. He expected to find himself skewered on a piece of shrapnel or a jagged rock. Instead, he found that something was clamped on his wrist, and he was dangling on the end of his own arm like a fish on a hook. The water pulled him with such force that he thought it might even dislocate his shoulder. Slowly, though, he found himself being winched with no small effort out of the tide. The water desperately fought for purchase, but its hold on him weakened progressively as less of him remained under the waves.
Soon, he found his strength again, and managed to supplement his rescuer's efforts by climbing the rock. He pulled himself up to a level surface, and rolled onto his back, panting and trembling. The water roared beneath him. He looked up, and saw that it was Roxanna who stood above him. She, too, dropped to her knees and then onto her back, lying beside him.
"You saved me," Sonic panted.
"Yes."
"How?"
"I am the best swimmer in my whole village. It appears that you would not be able to say the same for yourself, judging by the way you floundered."
"Oh, I floundered?"
"Yes. You swim like driftwood."
Sonic smiled. "Thank you," he said.
"Do not concern yourself. It is why I am here, why we were brought together. I possess the skills that you lack."
Sonic picked himself up, weakly. He felt as though his skin had been stripped off with sandpaper, and he knew that he had suffered several bruises that would be getting worse before they got better. He had, however, been saved before he could break any bones.
Roxanna had pulled him onto a rocky ledge that opened into the mountain caves. Just below, the water from the lake roared past, like a river, but one more fierce than Sonic had ever seen before. He knew that it was filling up the mines as he watched, and could only imagine the chaos that was unfolding in the city of Sol-Hayyim.
As he watched, he heard a terrible sound right behind his head.
The cocking of a gun-hammer.
Click-click.
Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head. The enemy stood behind him with the barrel of a pistol in his face, and stepped back toward the dark and winding caves, out of his reach.
"Hello, Rasputan," Sonic said.
"Hello-hello," the porcupine replied, his eyes darting back and forth from Sonic to Roxanna, "Did you come to watch the show, or just to play on the water-slide?" He nibbled the fingernails of his free hand, his mood-ring glittering a radiant yellow.
"The sidekick's here," Sonic said, "The king of the clowns can't be too far."
As if summoned, Cinos stepped out of the shadows, smiling as one does when meeting up with an old friend. He took the gun from Rasputan (who was actually reluctant to give it up, obviously very attached to the weapon), and resumed pointing it at Sonic.
"I knew I could count on you, my brother," he said, "I never lost hope that you would get here on time. And oh, look, you've even got yourself a little girlfriend. Cute. A little young for you, though, isn't she? How are you, by the way? You look like crap."
"You've gone too far, this time," Sonic growled, "You may have killed hundreds. But you don't care, do you?"
"Sure I care! I think it's great! Sonic, where is the Rune?"
"Safe. From you."
"Nothing's safe from me. I'm about to bring this home. This is my time, now. I'm a little tired, you see, and I'm not in the mood for any of this nonsense. Where is the freaking rock, Sonic?"
Sonic glanced back at the river, and saw that it had stopped flowing so hard. The water was still moving, but he thought he could ride it into the caves without being hurt, now. The only problem was that he had Roxanna to think about, as well. Cinos was as fast as he was, and he would shoot them both in a heartbeat if Sonic tried to grab her, or tell her to run. He looked back up at Cinos.
"I haven't come to deliver anything to you. I've come to stop you."
"Oh phooey, Sonic, how many times do we have to go over this? You can fold, or you can join me. But you can't stop me. It's about time you stopped living in a fantasy world and made your choice."
"I've made my choice."
Cinos grimaced and waved the gun in the air, as though Sonic had forgotten about it. "You're about to make a bad choice, Sonic. Make no mistake, I will put a bullet in your head and then I will do the same for your girlfriend, and then I will find your other friends and kill them too. I will find what I want either way, the only difference is that you'll all be dead!"
Before Sonic could respond, something happened that confused him into silence. Something was hurled at Cinos' head, something that burst over his face and created a huge dusty cloud that obscured him completely. Cinos cried out and squeezed off a shot, the bullet hitting the rock wall just above Sonic's head.
"Go, Sonic!" Roxanna cried.
Sonic figured out what had happened. Roxanna had brought several herbal concoctions with her when she left the island of Septennia, tied up in little bags. Sonic had assumed that they were all healing remedies, but evidently she had had more foresight. One of her bags had turned out to be some kind of weapon, even if Cinos was only stunned.
"Go, Sonic, go! Do not concern yourself with me!"
The gun fired again. Pebbles rained down on Sonic's head. The thoughts raced through his mind so quickly that it was almost an instant. Did he have time to save her? If he risked it and failed, Cinos' wrath would end them both. In the brief moment he had, Sonic made a decision. A decision he despised so badly that it tasted bitter in the back of his throat.
"I'm sorry, Roxanna!" he shrieked, almost gagging on the words, "I'm sorry!"
He dropped backward off of the cliff, plopping into the water. The tide, rather gentle now as the mines filled up, took him away from Cinos and Roxanna, took him into the darkness.
XXV
Roxanna watched Sonic fall into the water and his pleas for forgiveness. She knew how hard it was for him to do it, to sacrifice her for the greater purpose when he knew she may not survive, but it was inevitable. Sonic was fast enough to use a momentary distraction to his advantage, but she was not. Already, Cinos had his bearings again, and his gun was levelled at her.
She hoped that Sonic had heard her calling after him, telling him that it was all right. Her purpose had been served, and the quest would go on. The universe would hold together for at least a little longer because of what she had done.
The cloud of white dust hung in the air, slowly dissipating, and Roxanna looked at Rasputan, lurking in the shadows. The spirit-connection had returned to her, and she could see his aura. It was a dancing yellow mist that shimmered around the porcupine's body, and Roxanna was amused to see that it was the exact same colour as his mood ring.
But then something else stepped out of the fading white cloud, and her amusement faded into horror. For what she saw approaching her now was not like anything she had ever seen, even in her dreams.
Cinos' aura was also visible, but it was horrid. Not a faint miasma of coloured mist at all, but a swirling, squirming coat of black slugs. Like an oil that moved of its own volition, or some kind of horrid dark slime. It looked almost like the black bags that were used to contain dead people. Bile welled up in Roxanna's throat, and she felt sure that she was going to throw up.
This creature does not have a proper soul, she thought, And what he has in place of one is a horrific thing indeed.
The aura faded, and Cinos came out from under it. She could see his face, now, and the dark hedgehog was not amused. His face was blank, his lips pursed, his eyes unblinking, cold, empty. He held the pistol in one hand, and in the other he now held his dagger. The hand with which he held the knife was trembling softly.
"Oh man," he whispered, "Are you ever going to regret doing that."
XXVI
"Sonic told me about your brother," Espio said to Niles, and the fox looked up at Espio from the shadows without surprise. The two of them had sought refuge underneath an abandoned building away from the main thoroughfare of the town of Meath. The sun was beginning to go down, and the cloudy sky was painted with an amber glow.
The Rune of Nine lay inside its protective bag, hidden from sight. Both could feel its nefarious thrall, but it was muffled, as though bound and gagged. Still, it seemed to throb, very faintly. Silence only made it more noticeable, so Espio spoke for the sake of speaking.
"I get it, you know," he said, "I do understand why you didn't want to come back here. And while I hate that you left, I do appreciate that you came back. More than you know. It's very... big of you."
Niles looked down again. "He was twenty-seven," he said, "Matthew, I mean. My brother. Two years my senior. When I lost him, there was nobody. Nobody at all. My parents, both deceased. Neither Matthew nor myself were ever entirely popular with the fairer sex, so we had no families. It was simply he and I against an increasingly insane world. I never have been a particularly brave individual, you see, and when he was taken from me, I felt as though I had been thrust into a situation that I could not handle by myself, I was simply not ready to face life alone. I lived in fear every day. So I escaped that horrid place and moved north, and when I settled in Stratosphereon, I thought that I had found somewhere I could settle down." He shook his head. "What I wasn't ready to admit, I'm afraid, was that I still lived in fear. Every day, terrified that I would say or do the wrong thing and wind up a victim of that wretched libria treatment. I had only traded one set of unfortunate circumstances for another, and really it was no better. Joining this little crusade of yours, I figured, was at last a way that I could escape, but alas I was wrong yet again. Every step of the way, we have been attacked by every villain and monster living on Mobius, and again I found myself living in fear."
"The prospect of returning to Sol-Hayyim was too much for you," Espio said, "I can see your point."
"I fled," Niles replied, "It was all that I knew how to do, it was the only way I knew I could escape my fears. What I realised, however, lying awake every night, still in fear, was that running away has never solved my problems. Every time I run, you see, I find that one fear has been replaced by another. I have decided thus that the only way I can defeat fear is to face it head-on, vanquish it directly through action. I know that I can do this by returning to my old home, facing the source of that original fear, because, my dear fellow, what has occurred to me is that I no longer need to face it alone."
"None of us do," Espio said, "The four of us are in this together, to the last. And I'm glad you're willing to do this, because Sonic's been gone more than two days, now. I made a promise before he set off. The time has come for us to go."
Niles appeared vaguely concerned, and Espio could see that not even these revelations had made him exactly eager to return to the Arack Empire.
"I must say," he said softly, "I was rather hoping that we could sleep on it."
"We've delayed enough already," Espio replied, "We can't stay here any longer, waiting for the world to end. The time for action is now."
Niles sighed. "Very well. Better sooner than later, I suppose. Let us be off, then."
XXVII
Father Matheson kneeled before his modest bed, dressed in only a pair of old tracksuit pants and a robe, his eyes closed and his hands clasped, his forehead resting lightly upon his knuckles. He barely spoke aloud as he prayed, but his low whispers were still audible in the silence to anyone who might chance to listen, although Matheson only intended the audience of one being.
"Oh God," he prayed, "Oh graceful Lord of Heaven and Mobius, I give thanks for the days behind me, now one more, and for the days ahead of me, now one less, and pray that your love will continue to see me through each of them with safety and good humour, as with all of those blessed with your eternal benevolence. I ask that you bless and protect each and every sacred life upon this planet, and that you continue to deliver the innocent from the grasp-"
"Of evil?"
Matheson opened his eyes, not being used to receiving auditory responses from these nightly rituals, and turned his head. A shadow fell across his bedroom; the door was open and a black silhouette filled the portal, somebody looking in at him while he prayed.
"Excuse me," the priest said, "But I was kind of in the middle of a private conversation."
"I'm sure it was intellectually stimulating," the figure replied, "But I have a feeling the Big Cheese won't mind too much if I take a few minutes of your time. You were probably boring him to death, anyway, he just wants to get back to his regular job of killing people and sending them to the big fiery pit under the ground."
The figure stepped into the room and a bar of light fell upon his face. Father Matheson saw two wide, glaring eyes, the irises a brilliant green, but something unfathomably dark behind them.
"I can relate to that," the figure added.
"What do you want?" Matheson demanded.
"Just to pick your brain a little. You should hope for your own sake that that's all I decide to do to it. A small group have passed through here recently. A purple lizard, an uppity annoying fox, a smartmouthed porcupine chick, and a fourth who looks... just like me. You gave them sanctuary, or so I hear, and now they're gone. I was very much looking forward to stabbing them in their sleep, but alas, I find to my extreme irritation that their beds are empty and they've flown the coop. Now you're going to tell me where they've gone, and every time you lie, you're going to bleed a little more."
Something glinted in the darkness.
"I guess you think you're intimidating me," Matheson replied, "Look at where you are, look at what I do for a living. You think this is the first time I've been held at knifepoint?"
"Do you know who I am?" the figure spat, "Do you have any idea?"
"I know who you are. You wear many diguises, you come in many different forms, but I know who you are. And I know that, unlike Him, your ways aren't quite so mysterious. I'm not afraid of you."
Something glinted, once again, and the figure began to advance toward Matheson, breathing heavily. He heard a sound and some voices from the homeless shelter's kitchen, and froze, turning his head. He snarled, a gutteral and almost animalistic sound.
"You have a lot of friends here, Father," he said, "Fortunately for you, I don't have time to deal with them right now, and one scream from you and the whole pack of stinking, slobbering animals would be in here quick smart. So you better hope I find who I'm looking for, because if I don't, I'll be back for you tonight. It will hurt plenty." He smiled, and backed out the door. "Sleep tight, Father."
XXVIII
Picture the darkest, most morbid pit of the underworld. Picture it again.
A gigantic wall of rock glows red from the brimstone and searing flames beneath. The heat distorts the air, makes everything waver before your eyes. Embedded in the walls are lines of skulls, forbidding you from proceeding onward if you value your life. Or your sanity.
Two figures again brave this forbidding chamber; one of them dances while the other merely watches. The shadow of the former is huge upon the mighty stone wall behind them, leaping and frolicking into the air as the flames crackle and sear below.
Roxanna-Le Destra sat on the hot stone, too bruised to move, looking up with venomous contempt at the other, who danced and laughed, almost in rhythm with the flames. Rasputan Nethergate, druid of the antiverse, flashed her an insane, mocking grin.
"The end is here!" Rasputan shrieked, "Everything has happened in exact accordance with the ancient prophecy! Do you still believe your friends are going to stop it?"
"They will, Bloodmonger," Roxanna spat, "You can do what you like to me, but you will never see the Rune of Nine. Your liege will never stand over the lake of fire and peer into eternity. Mazsha will see to it."
"Wrong, you heretic! You infidel! You stinking fool! You can't see what's right in front of you! The Old Kind have grown weak in this world, weak and soft and tender. You have no concept of the power of the Old Ways! You've lost your abilities through thousands of years of weakness. I have stayed true to the Ways! I have seen the way this plays out! I receive my visions direct from the Old Gods themselves! From Mazsha Herself!"
"Are they the Old Gods, or are they merely the voices in your head?"
Rasputan was taken aback. He gasped and stepped backward so hard that for a moment Roxanna thought he would trip up and fall into the bubbling magma. He regained his compusure, however, and let out a veritable roar of outrage.
Picking up the gun that he and Cinos had obtained in Stratosphereon, the porcupine druid spun around and pistol-whipped Roxanna across the face. She screamed and fell to the ground, her cheek bleeding, tears streaming from her puffy and bruised left eye.
"Never- Never speak to me like that!" Rasputan shrieked, "I am not crazy! I am Rasputan Nethergate, the greatest sorcerer on two worlds! You will see. Heretic witch, you will see. When Daddy-K gets back here, we're gonna shake up all of reality, and misguided infidels like you, who corrupt the Old Ways through inaction and weakness, will occupy the most torturous level of the purgatory that he will create! It's very close, now, so very, very close. Only hours away, now. It's almost over, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Zilch. Because it's already been written.
XXIX
Niles and Espio walked alongside the main street of Meath, the road that left town and headed toward Sol-Hayyim, with care and caution. The sun had vanished for the night, and darkness ruled. Ghosts and demons seemed to dance in every shadow, but Espio knew that they really only danced in his imagination. He wondered if Niles knew the same. Facing the basic fears was the first step toward facing the big ones. Somehow, Espio was sure that the fox was ready. They were Kindred, after all. And the time had come for both of them to shine.
Despite all of this, Espio almost leaped out of his scales when somebody jumped out at them from the darkness.
Niles screamed and fell over. The figure was panting hard and moving sluggishly, as though injured. In the dark, it might have been anybody.
"Who are you?" Espio demanded, "What do you want?"
"It's me," the figure groaned, and stepped into the light. "Get a hold of yourselves. It's me!"
"Sonic!"
The hedgehog looked tired and haggard. He was covered in bruises and scrapes, like someone who had just played a rough game of football. He also looked exhausted. Espio immediately rushed to his friend's side, deeply troubled both at the state of him and about what might have been responsible for it.
"It's great to see you guys," Sonic panted, "I was worried. Cinos hasn't got the Rune, has he? Is it safe?"
"Sonic, it's right here. What happened to you?"
"Cinos. He-" Sonic winced and brought a hand to his face. "I stuffed up. Cinos blew the lake, he flooded the mines and caught us up in it. He must have killed... I don't even know how many people. I just ran. He's a monster, he's just a monster."
"What about Roxanna?" Espio asked, "Sonic? What happened to Roxanna?"
Sonic didn't reply, he just looked up at Espio with a helpless, fallen expression, and Espio knew. The chameleon nodded and turned away.
"Sonic, dear hedgehog," Niles said, "It's me!"
Sonic looked up at the fox blankly. "Yeah. It's you. Guys, listen. Cinos is here, he's come looking for the stone. I followed him, but I don't think he knows I'm here. He's trying to track you down, and he'll stop at nothing to get at that rune. We have to get going, get away from here."
"But where?" Espio asked, "Where do we go?"
"Back to Sol-Hayyim. We have to protect the rune we have, and the one he still hasn't dug up. And if Roxanna is still alive, we have to get back to her. I don't want to leave her in the hands of that lunatic Rasputan."
Espio nodded. "Can you get the three of us past the gates?"
A brief shadow passed over Sonic's face, and he almost turned green. Espio was almost amused by it (or would have been, were the situation not quite so serious), being that he had considered himself the only member of their party who possessed the ability to change colour.
"I left my papers behind," the hedgehog groaned, "My citizenship papers. They're gone, I can't get back into the city."
"Never fear!" Niles declared, "You shall be thankful that Niles Wilkinson-Price has returned to you, for I hold the solution to our dilemma. There are two ways to gain access to an Arack city, my dear fellows, and being a citizen is but one. For if you arrive in the company of a citizen, if you enter by invitation, you are rewarded some limited degree of access. And do remember, friends, that I am a genuine citizen."
Niles reached into one of his coat pockets and withdrew a collection of folded and somewhat scrunched and worn sheets of paper. Citizenship documents; bona fide ones, not forgeries.
"But Niles," Espio said, "Aren't you a fugitive? Won't they just arrest us all on sight?"
"It is a risk," the fox replied, "But I do believe it is the best plan that we have for the time being, is it not?"
"If we get into trouble, we'll run for it," Sonic said, "He's right, this is the best plan we have right now. Let's get back before Cinos finds us, he's pretty steamed. We can get two runes to his three, put him in a stalemate."
Espio nodded. "Right. Then let's do this thing." His voice faltered a little. "And lets get Roxanna back. If he's done anything to her, I'll kill him myself."
XXX
Oh woe, observe forlorn, for terrible times indeed had afflicted the innocent, oppressed and tortured citizens of Sol-Hayyim.
Broderick Gibb looked over the city from the dark corner in which he hid, his teeth set, and what remained of his hands clenched into fists. Behind him, Harvey O'Sale sat with his head in his hands.
"I don't understand," Broderick growled, "I just don't understand. With all our well laid plans, with all our planning, in mere moments we have done worse for these people than the Empire ever has. What have we done, Harvey? What in God's name have we done?"
The Pit had been almost completely flooded out. It was now a great underground lake in its own right, more than half of the mines now lay beneath the water. And while the Spanner Project had achieved its primary objective - the flooded mines would be of no use to the Aracks, and the entire southwestern branch of the Empire would all but grind to a halt due to the loss of much of its resources for expansion - the completely unprecedented day-early execution of the project had meant that the mines had been full of people when it happened. Full of the very people that were supposed to be liberated by this action.
They had been liberated, all right. Just not in the way that was expected.
"It wasn't us," Harvey replied, shaking his head softly, "We did everything right. It should have worked... flawlessly." The weasel appeared on the verge of tears.
The tragedy of the Sol-Hayyim mines had happened almost twenty-four hours ago. The sun was coming up again on the city that, once prosperous, already knew it was in dire trouble. Things had begun to fall apart almost instantly, and while terrorism was suspected, the Aracks were more focused at the moment on damage control and analyzing the extent of the tragedy than they were on locating the perpetrators.
Luckily, the mines had flooded early in the morning, before everybody had even arrived at work, and the alarm had been raised quickly so most had escaped before the primary shafts were compromised. Still, dozens had remained trapped in The Pit when the water reached them. Possibly as many as a hundred. The state of the mines meant that it would take quite a while before the toll could be estimated, and until then it would be a long and difficult time for the families of those who had been lost, or assumed so.
"No," Broderick Gibb replied, and turned to his friend. "It wasn't us. It was him. Ronin Shapesk." He spat the name out as though it tasted revolting. "We invested our trust in him and he gave us nothing but the vilest betrayal."
"What are we going to do?" Harvey asked, "How are we ever going to live with ourselves?"
"We will proceed as planned. You and the others will salvage whatever you can from this mess, and prepare for the evacuation of the refugees while the Empire sorts out its own problems."
"And what will you do?"
The ten-foot bear crumpled his face into a fearsome scowl, and beat his fists together.
"I'll stay behind. I'm going to track down Ronin Shapesk. And I'm going to kill him."
XXXI
"This place is familiar," Espio said.
He stood with Sonic and Niles in the dark back-streets of Sol-Hayyim, and looked over the city in awe. It was quiet in this area of the city, almost silent, for most of its residents had accumulated nearby the mines while the devastation unfolded. Espio was greeted with a relatively unobstructed first view of the bizarre Arack architecture.
The first thing he noticed, to his horror, was that there was no colour. The streets, the buildings, even the people, all in shades of black and gray.
"I've been here before," he said, "I grew up here. Only it was underground, and full of chameleons. But it's the same place."
"Indeed, what a drab and depressing world they make for themselves," Niles replied, "I had always feared the day when I would have to see this... awful décor again. Above all else, I had feared dying here. Anywhere but here, beneath this horrid cityscape."
Espio shook his head in disbelief. "What is it about mobiankind? We're given this beautiful world filled with colours and wonder, and we feel the need to build these ugly, colourless atrocities on top of it all, just because we decide to believe in invisible gods instead of the world that's right before our eyes and we don't even see it."
"Actually, chap," Niles interrupted, "The Arack society is Atheistic. If they worship anything at all, it's the Empire itself."
"You're kidding," Espio replied, "But... it's the same. It's totally the same. It's the Chameleon Cabal all over again, how can they be so different and so similar? How can two completely opposite conclusions give the exact same result?"
There had been problems entering Sol-Hayyim, problems that had only escalated since infiltrating the city. The authorities at the gate hadn't wanted to let Niles and his guests inside, due to the ongoing crisis at the mines, so Niles had had to get pushy. It would have been a tragedy of irony if Sonic had managed to smuggle contraband into the city using fabricated documents with relative ease, while a genuine citizen like Niles was left unable to enter via legal means.
The trio had managed at last to talk their way through the immigration center and enter Arack territory, although the fear had always been present that the authorities would recognise Niles as a treasonous fugitive. All the way through the process, Espio expected that the fearsome soldiers in their massive battle suits would grab them and arrest them all, sending them immediately to some horrid fate in an Arack prison, but the secretary spider who handled their case merely informed them that everything was in order and that they could proceed.
And Espio was consistantly horrified by everything he saw from the moment he stepped onto Empire land. From the battle suits that the soldiers wore, towering over them like golems, to the bizarre and description-defying substance known as mandiblax, like veiny dough, that moved of its own accord like something alive, but clearly was something entirely alien. Espio had been excited to travel all over Mobius and experience all the foreign cultures that he had never been able to perceive in his sheltered underground life, and even the less appealing destinations had roused his interest. This final one, however, only horrified him. From the moment he arrived, he couldn't wait to leave.
After the three had made it safely inside the city, their fears were indeed realised. They heard shouts from within the immigration center, demands that they return immediately, and the soldiers had begun to advance on them. They never knew whether the reason for this had been that Niles' criminal status had indeed been revealed, or something else. It was possible that they had misread the situation entirely and the complication was something innocent. It didn't matter either way - when they heard the shouts for them to halt, Sonic, Niles and Espio had elected to run instead. They ran until they lost sight of their pursuers, so now they were surely wanted fugitives no matter the situation.
There was nowhere to go but onward.
The trio made their way through the city toward the northern edge, the industrial area where the mines and the lake lay against the craggy mountains that shielded this side of Sol-Hayyim. From an area of high ground, they rested for a moment, watching the unravelling events.
The lake was little more than a muddy crater, now, drained of its water. The aqueducts had been sealed off, their flow more of a hindrance to the already dire situation, and the Aracks were fiercely attending to the flooded mines, already making an attempt to pump out the water. It would take an extremely long time, especially by Arack standards, to bring this problem under control. During that time, Sol-Hayyim would have no drinking water and no resources, both of which would be required in vast amounts to actually complete the monumental task of removing thousands of liters of water from the mines and re-filling the lake.
As Niles would say, the city of Sol-Hayyim was right buggered.
Sonic pointed toward the lake. "That's where we're going," he said.
Espio squinted. The dry lake? Why would they go there? Then he noticed a strange detail - in the wall of the crater, there was a crevasse, like a cave, a fissure that would have been deep underwater, were the lake actually full. It opened up a hole under the mountains.
"When Cinos flooded the mines," Sonic explained, "He emptied the lake. In doing so, he brought that cave to surface. It leads right to the resting place of the fifth Rune. He went to a huge amount of trouble to gain access to it, and now it's wide open, he can march in whenever he likes and just take it. We have to get there first."
And so they started forward again, heading toward the lake bed with absolutely no plan as to how they were going to make it through. After all, the entire sector was crawling with Aracks. Soldiers cordoned off the scene of the disaster, probably fearing more attacks. They would likely proceed with deadly force against anybody trying to break through, especially three tagged foreign suspects who were already on the run, one of them a known traitor. Logic played no part in the execution of this siege. The only thing left was the faith that they had to succeed - they hadn't made it this far just to get arrested or shot dead within sight of the final destination. It would be an unthinkable irony.
Sonic walked in the lead as they began to make their way through the waterworks, passing huge pipes that now lay silent and empty, and toward the guarded zone. Frequently he looked back to make sure that his companions were still following.
Niles kept close to Espio, and spoke to the chameleon in a low voice.
"Our dear friend Sonic appears to be quite furious at me," he said. "I rather hoped that he would be happy to see me, but he has yet to speak a word about my absence and subsequent return. One would think that I hadn't even come back at all."
Espio frowned and nodded. "He hasn't spoken much to either of us. I'm concerned about him, I think that it's all becoming too much for him. Cinos has obviously pulled off a pretty significant disaster this time, and lost Roxanna to boot. I'm worried about her, too, worried sick, but we can't let it ruin us. We have to keep going."
The entrance to The Pit was in sight, now, and Espio and Niles caught a glance as they passed it, keeping carefully out of view. The Aracks had already set up their huge machines, drilling and demolishing and building. The purpose of some of the technology was clear and obvious, others a complete mystery. Espio noted the tallest of the machines, like an enormous crane shooting far into the sky. At its base was a massive mandiblax bubble, like an inverted hot-air-balloon, that puffed out and deflated repeatedly in a constant pattern. What that thing did was a mystery that only the spiders themselves would be able to answer, and Espio wasn't going to ask them.
"Look," Niles said, pointing ahead, "Dear hedgehog, stop! If you proceed much further, I fear we shall all be seen and arrested immediately! We must stop and think carefully about how to proceed!"
"Just a little further," Sonic replied, "Then we'll stop."
So they followed the hedgehog further, although they were approaching distressingly close to where the Arack authorities were collected together. Espio could see the entrance to the lake - a gate in the fence that cordoned off its circumference. It was well-guarded, but there were clusters of pipes running through, which did provide a degree of cover. There was no way they could sneak through as it was, with six armoured Arack soldiers standing at the gate, but if the guards were adequately distracted...
"Hold it right there! This is as far as you go, and you go no further!"
At first, Espio thought that they had been spotted by a guard, and the game was up. There was no way they would outrun all of this heat. His heart skipped a beat, and he didn't know whether he would scream or cry. He did neither. For when he looked around in the direction from where the command had originated, he saw no soldiers or spiders. He only saw two porcupines, and one was holding a gun.
"Rasputan!"
The twisted druid of the antiverse held Roxanna in an awkward grip, one hand clutched at her mouth. It wasn't so much a grip designed to keep her from running as it was to keep her from screaming, as one look at her bruises and her hopeless expression made it painfully clear that she was too weak to put up any kind of resistance. Her captor pointed his pistol at his enemies, grinning in the way he always did.
"Roxanna!" Espio exclaimed, "Are you okay? Has he hurt you?" It was a stupid question, as it was so obvious that he had. She tried to muffle a reply, but it was incomprehensible.
"Oh, she's just fine, my little technicolour buddy," Rasputan said, "A little worse for wear, a little under the weather, but still breathing, sure. Not for long, though, not if you take another step."
Espio looked to Sonic for guidance, who merely stared at their ambusher, a strange and unreadable expression on his face, a bizarre glint in his eyes. Slowly, he began to approach Rasputan.
"Don't, Sonic," the chameleon warned, "I don't think he's bluffing."
But Sonic continued. He walked right up to Rasputan and stared him in the eye. Rasputan made a move that Espio mistook for him aiming the gun at Sonic, and he gasped and took a few helpless steps closer, unwilling to approach further. But Rasputan was not adjusting his aim. In a move that boggled Espio and Niles completely, the porcupine stepped forward and handed his gun to Sonic.
Espio was losing his grip on lucidity.
"Sonic?"
The hedgehog turned around slowly. His face was sullen, shrinking into a scowl. Then, with a move that terrified Espio to the core, he lifted the pistol himself and pointed it directly at the chameleon's head.
"No, my lad," Niles said morbidly, "Not Sonic."
XXXII
"I'd like to thank the academy," said the glowering hedgehog Cinos. Beside him, Rasputan laughed as though he had just heard the world's funniest joke. Although Espio recognised this as a joke, he did not consider it funny.
"I hope you liked my impression. I also do celebrities."
Espio wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I can't believe this happened, I can't believe you didn't catch on. You've spent every day with Sonic for the best part of a year and you couldn't even tell that it wasn't him? You idiot. You fool. He squeezed his eyes shut and slinked back. Niles put a comforting arm around his shoulders.
"And so," Cinos said, "we're finally here. The moment of truth, the final stand. All of Sonic's idiot friends together in the same great big trap. Now, I don't know any of you from a bar of soap, so I can't say why you've all opted to join his naive crusade against me. The image of a hoard of lemmings dropping off a cliff comes to mind. Doesn't matter, we're all here now, one big party, and I do believe you've brought me a present."
Espio curled his fingers around the strap of the bag that held the Rune of Nine. The invaluable stone that they had carried right into the enemy's trap.
"You think you're getting your hands on this?" he asked, "Never."
Cinos sighed. "I really was hoping that we could do this without anybody dying."
"I find that hard to believe."
"Yeah. You're right. See, the real problem is that there are a huge bunch of butt-ugly spiders just ahead who are just one scream or gunshot away from coming over here and indiscriminately plugging us all. That would be a hassle for all of us, so let's try doing this quietly, shall we?"
"Not going to be that easy, Cinos."
"Oh, okay, well I guess that means I'll just violently murder your little girly-friend while you all watch. This is the fun option."
He aimed the pistol at Roxanna.
"Wait!" Espio cried.
"Wait, you say? Sure, if that means we have a deal."
"You think we're going to deal with you?"
"Absolutely. The girl for the rock. Unless you think she's not worth as much as a rock."
"Let her go, you sick freak!"
"That wasn't the answer I was looking for."
Espio's entire body seemed to shift toward a redder hue as he exchanged glances between Cinos, Rasputan and the captured Roxanna. The latter appeared strangely calm despite the situation, which wasn't entirely out of character for her. Even so, she had clearly been tortured and roughed up, which filled Espio with a greater hatred than he had ever felt for anybody, even taking into account his days living within the Pit of the Chameleon Cabal, watching his kin murder in the name of their religion. She's just an innocent girl. A quiet, warm, innocent girl. How could anybody be so twisted? And how could anybody mistake such a twisted monster for a close friend?
For once, he was completely clueless. Espio had no idea what to do. He looked to Niles for the answer, pleading with his eyes for the fox to get them out of this situation and make it so that it never happened. But Niles just looked back with the same helpless, hopeless expression written on his face. They could try to escape, and they might get away, but Cinos would murder Roxanna out of spite, just as certain as night followed day. Then again, they might not get away at all, and all three of them would die by Cinos' hand, and the dark hedgehog would still get the rune. He was, after all, faster than they were.
Despairingly, Espio knew that there was only one choice that would see them through this alive. It was a bad choice, but the best one they had.
"Take it, then," he spat, "Take the stupid thing, just let her go."
"No," Roxanna murmured. Rasputan jabbed her hard.
"You've made a wise decision," Cinos said, "Just drop it, and we can all be on our way."
Niles took the rune bag from Espio. "I think it is quite clear that you, sir, cannot be trusted," he said, "Therefore, I propose that we make a sporting trade. I shall walk across to you with the stone, and your lunatic associate shall walk across to here, escorting our friend."
"Whatever, whatever, hurry it up."
Niles began to walk toward Cinos with the Rune of Nine wrapped safely in its protective bag. Rasputan began to walk in the opposite direction with Roxanna, both parties wary of the other's deception. They met in the middle, staring into each other's eyes.
Just then, Cinos made an exaggerated yawning sound. "No," he said "I've changed my mind."
He raised his gun and shot Niles down.
"No!" Espio screamed, and ran to his fallen friend. Rasputan whooped and cackled, snatching up the rune bag, and dragged both the bag and Roxanna back to where Cinos stood.
Niles wailed in pain and sat up. "Bloody cripes! He shot me in the bloody leg!" Blood had begun to flow from the bullet wound in his shin, running down his leg and onto the concrete.
"I still need some insurance!" Cinos exclaimed, "I need to know that you won't follow me! I'm making the rules here, you little twirps, and the rule is that if I so much as suspect you're coming after me, I shoot your friend in the face. How's that for a deal?"
He opened the bag and lifted the rune out of it. The small and wretched chunk of stone that Sonic and his companions had fought so hard to procure in the town of Desolation, had worked so hard to protect from the very person who now held it in his hands. What have I done? Espio's mind screamed, I've doomed us all.
Cinos gaped when he set his eyes on the symbol on the stone. Those two straight lines and one crooked, such an impossibly simple design and yet so mindblowingly significant. The hedgehog's eyes opened so wide that they looked as though they might fall from their sockets. His lips trembled, and he seemed to lose himself inside the stone.
"Yes! he shrieked, "Oh, yes!"
Espio immediately knew that the Rune of Dark Thoughts had found the one soul in existence capable of loving it.
"Kinnos," Rasputan urged, "We must go!"
"So we must," Cinos replied, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the stone. It filled him with such beautiful misery, such marvellous anger!
The two enemies and their captive made haste and left Espio beside his fallen friend, who tendered his bleeding leg with tears in his eyes. Espio's eyes were teary, too.
"What have we done, Niles?" he asked, "Good Lord. What have we done?"
XXXIII
Sonic, in his pain, asked the same question of himself.
The hedgehog had awoken inside the mines, his head killing him almost as much as his arm, and tried to remember what had happened.
Cinos. Roxanna. The lake. The explosion. The sacrifice.
The water had brought him to The Pit, which was now just a giant underground lake, but it had roughed him up quite a bit first. Rushing through the caves, he had been thrown against rocks and battered by debris. He remembered something colliding with his arm so hard that he was sure it had been broken. Then there was a pain in his head and everything had fallen dark until now, when he had awoken face-down in a mine shaft with the lower half of his body floating in water. There was blood under his face; he could smell it and taste it. He had been knocked unconscious.
Nothing new.
His arm screamed in agony when he tried to move, the epicenter of the pain in his shoulder, and he realised it had been dislocated. Whether it was broken as well, he had yet to discern. He popped the limb back in its socket, and screamed. His voice echoed throughout the mines, answered only by the lapping waves of the water, like an underground shoreline.
Sonic knew that he hadn't made a small mistake, this time, hadn't allowed a minor setback to hinder their progress. He had screwed all the way up. When Cinos had blown that lake, he might conceivably have murdered hundreds of innocent people, and Sonic hadn't done a thing to stop it. Things didn't look good regarding Roxanna's survival, either, after he had left her alone in the hands of his murderous dark twin and fled.
And fled.
"Since when do you run away, Sonic?" he asked himself. "Since when do you leave a defenseless, innocent girl in the company of a homicidal maniac while you flee the scene? What is that all about?"
But the cave did not reply, did not offer any insight into his predicament. He never thought that he would ever do such a cowardly thing. When it came to protecting the innocent, he strived for selflessness. In any other situation, he would at the very least have pushed Roxanna into the water away from harm, and faced Cinos himself.
So what was different about this situation?
"Because you're not ready to face him yet."
This time, the cave did seem to answer his question. Aloud. It startled him. Had he really just heard a voice? Was somebody in here with him? He turned around and saw nobody. Of course not. He had been shaken up, knocked on the head pretty hard. He wasn't thinking straight.
He knew he wasn't ready to face Cinos yet. Deep in his heart and soul, he knew it. But when would he be? The question was frightening, because Cinos had already offered an answer.
Fall for me, Sonic.
He would be ready when he finally resorted to evil. When he admitted that his dark twin's philosophy was right and that only underhanded acts could defeat underhanded acts. Only when he abandoned his moral baggage and was prepared to fight dirty would he be a match for the mighty Kinnos Sharpe.
Had he already begun to turn? Was abandoning Roxanna the first step? Subconsciously, had he suspected Cinos would flood the mines when he did, and allowed it to happen in order to gain an upper hand? Had Cinos finally eroded him to the extent that he would commit heinous crimes in the name of desperation, so that he might finally achieve the advantage? And was that really the only way to do so?
"It isn't true, Sonic."
This time, he knew he had heard a voice. He turned to face whoever it was who had spoken, suspecting Cinos was trying to play another one of his tricks. This time, the intruder had made himself visible, but it wasn't who Sonic expected.
It wasn't somebody Sonic would have expected in a million years.
"Kethriel..."
"Hello, old friend."
Sonic choked up, speechless, at the sight of Kethriel Rosethorne, his old mentor, standing before him. The older hedgehog, Amy's elder brother and the person Sally would have married, smiled with the warm and friendly visage he had always carried. He was like everyone's favourite uncle, the most popular member of the Freedom Fighters, and one of its founding members.
There was only one problem with his being here like this, but it was a pretty significant one.
"Oh man, I really did hit my head hard," Sonic muttered, "I wish you really were here, though. I've never needed your advice more urgently."
"What makes you think I'm not?" Kethriel asked.
"Uh, you're a little bit dead, Keth."
The older hedgehog's smile seemed to drop away, replaced by a look of shock.
"Holy crap! Am I?"
"Yeah. Remember? The Death Egg?"
"Oh, yeah. Right. Well, I guess that does explain a few things. Like, how I don't seem to need to breathe or eat anymore. And I have been walking through an awful lot of walls, lately. There's this guy with a black coat and a big scythe who's been chasing me around the place."
Sonic laughed and sat down. "You sure sound like Keth."
"Well, I should. 'Cause it's me. It's good to see you, kiddo. I never thought I'd be able to actually speak to you again, but... at times like these, we're allowed a little bit of leeway with the rules."
"So, am I dreaming or what?"
Kethriel seemed to consider the question. "Well, there's no easy answer. You are, but you're not. The difference between maginary and imaginary visions isn't something I have time to explain, as my visit is limited, and Cinos is already on his way to his final destination as we speak. Let's just say that you're not dreaming."
"But I know you're not real outside my head. You're dead. And besides, your voice doesn't echo in the caves like mine does."
"You're right, but like I said, it's complicated. But in any event, I'm here. You should know that I've been watching you for some time. I've seen you grow into quite a hero, kiddo. I'm very, very proud of you. Your adventures will make great stories someday."
"Thanks, but I'm not really thinking that highly of myself right now. I'm really questioning the whole hero thing."
Kethriel smiled. "You know, I remember your first adventure. As I recall, I sent you all over the world in search of some very valuable stones. Sounds a little familiar."
"Oh, you mean the time that Robotnik destroyed our home and killed thousands of people while I watched, all chained up in the cockpit of his doomsday machine?"
"That's one way to look at it. Another way is that your actions saved thousands more from the same fate. Not to mention that you almost single-handedly stopped the Doctor from going on to robotize the whole world."
Sonic shook his head. "Small potatoes, considering the looming reality - if somebody had just killed Robotnik when they first realised what he was planning, his crimes would have been prevented. Millions would have better lives today."
"But that would have been an underhanded thing to do. Evil in itself."
"Exactly. Hence my... My crisis of conscience, as Orlando Winterburn called it."
Kethriel sighed. "Sonic, if it will put your mind at ease, you should know that the destruction of Mobitropolis was inevitable. No matter how many people died in the process, and no matter how many other cities had to fall as well, Mobitropolis' time had come. However, because of you, it was no more of a tragedy than it had to be."
Sonic snorted. "How do you know that?" He flicked the water at his feet with two fingers, playing with the ripples.
"That's something else I don't have time to explain," Kethriel replied, "I'll try to make it brief and simple. The future isn't something that's predetermined. Mobians have free will, and that free will, the choices that people make, shape the world that you live in. That's the way it works, on this level of the Tower. But there are certain things that are written. Things that will happen no matter what anyone chooses. Big things, little things. Imagine an incoming tide on a beach, and that tide is time. The beach is vast and flat, and there's nothing to shape the way the water flows. But every so often, it collides with a jetty-post. Something that's already been placed there for the water to run into."
"And the fall of Mobitropolis was one of these things."
"Correctimundo."
"And Cinos? His victory?"
"Unwritten. It could go either way, conceivably. But your quest, your crossing paths with the three companions you've been travelling with, that has been something fated, something that had to happen. And haven't you felt it, kiddo? Haven't you felt that guiding hand, all the way? That indescribable something that you just feel, deep in your gut?"
"And you can see this?" Sonic asked, "Can you ghosts all see the future?"
"We're granted a little extra... perspective, from our vantage point. Just like when you're standing on higher ground than somebody else, you can see a little further than they can."
"You can see the jetty-posts."
"Some of the closer ones, sure. I know certain things that are going to happen soon, it makes things a little more interesting from where I am. They don't let me see the big picture, though, any more than you can. And I can never see past free will, none of us can. The choices that you make are your own, there's nobody pulling your strings. You can be shown choices-"
"But it's up to me to make them."
"Bingo."
"So if I chose to commit evil in order to prevent evil?"
"Well, kiddo, you've really gotta wonder whether that even makes sense."
"Nothing makes sense, Keth. It doesn't make sense for evil - unrestrained, unencumbered evil - to be defeated by burdened morality. It doesn't make sense for love to overcome hatred, or for the power to create to be stronger than the power to destroy."
"No. No, I guess it doesn't make any sense."
Sonic flicked at the water again, feeling lost.
"And yet," Kethriel continued, "It happens. All the time."
The younger hedgehog looked up, gazing into his mentor's kind eyes, wordless. Something began to click over in his mind. At long last, some form of catharsis, a developing realisation. Kethriel smiled and nodded, as though he detected this. "And now," he said, "You must go. You have a clone to catch up to. He's almost at the end of his journey, and so are you. Your friends are right outside this pit, waiting for you to join them. You all have some important choices to make. As for me, alas, I'm due elsewhere as well."
"Why?"
"Oh, you know. Ghost stuff. I'm late already, I'm supposed to be haunting an abandoned church in an old graveyard at three."
Sonic smiled and wiped away a tear.
"Hey, Keth?"
"Yeah, kiddo?"
"Can you tell me about the future? Any jetty-posts I should know about?"
"Well, I'm not really supposed to discuss it. I'd tell you to watch out for the Abbalah-Dinn, but that's really more Knuckles' concern than yours. The thing is, knowing which results are inevitable kinda messes up the whole purpose of life, which is to find out for yourself. Go forth and discover, and live. Now go on and do what you're supposed to do, kid, stop procrastinating."
Sonic looked up at the caves, to where the light filtered in from the outside through various holes cut into the surface. He could hear the Aracks outside, already working.
"It's good to see you, Keth. Really good."
"Likewise, Sonic, likewise."
"Amy and Sally still miss you heaps. Do you want me to tell them anything for you? Do you want me to tell them you love them and watch over them?"
"They already know I do."
Sonic turned around again, but Kethriel was gone. Not only had he vanished from the caves, but the whole concept that there was somebody else in here had withdrawn so thoroughly that it seemed ridiculous. The caves were silent but for the splashing and trickling of the water and the tinkering of the Aracks outside echoing throughout the mines. There was nobody here, nobody at all, and no evidence whatsoever to suggest there ever had been.
No evidence that Sonic hadn't been talking to himself.
And yet, he felt enlightened. His mind was aflame with new light, and for the first time he knew what it was that he had to do.
It was time to do it.
XXXIV
After Cinos had fled with the Rune of Nine, Espio and Niles retreated from the scene, fearful that the Aracks might investigate the sound of gunshots. They rested in a jungle of water pipes, Niles tendering his injured leg.
"In all my years, I never imagined!" Niles exclaimed, "Shot! Like some bloody gangster! How did that happen? I'm a librarian!"
"Try not to move too much," Espio replied, "What we need is some way to stop the bleeding. I wish there was something I could use to get that bullet out."
"Oh dear. I would rather prefer that task to be performed by a person with a medical degree. No offense intended, you understand."
"I don't think that's a liberty we can afford right now. Look, tear a strip of material off your jacket."
"Tear strips off my jacket?"
"Yeah man, we'll make a torniquet. Geez, I'm no good at this medical stuff, I wish Roxanna-"
He couldn't finish the sentence, as his voice broke and he had to put his face in his hands to compose himself.
"It isn't your fault, you know, lad," Niles said, gripping his jacket but hesitating to damage it. Finally, he sighed and began tearing off a strip.
"But I should have noticed instantly! Do you realise that he didn't call either of us by our names? Not once! He doesn't even know our names. He managed to trick me into thinking he was my best friend, even though he knew nothing about me. How does that happen?"
"You've always been the one who goes on about group responsibility. I must say, I'm every bit as guilty as you are. He said not a word about my having returned, presumably because he was never aware that I had left in the first place."
"I know," the chameleon replied, "And I know that we did say we would fight this to the end, even if it meant sacrificing each other and ourselves. It just cuts right to the bone when someone you care about is being used against you. I know now how Sonic must feel."
"Did I hear somebody say my name?"
Niles and Espio looked up to see a blue hedgehog standing over them. There were all together too many blue hedgehogs hanging around lately. Espio was on guard immediately.
"What do you want, Cinos?" he spat, "Haven't you done enough damage? Leave us alone!"
"Whoa, whoa!" The hedgehog stumbled back, as though fearing that Espio might take a swing at him. By the look on the chameleon's face, it might not have been far from the mark. "It's me, it's Sonic!"
"Oh yeah? You're gonna have to prove it this time."
"We're sticking together to the end, right? We're Kindred, isn't that what Alastrine said? Look into my eyes, search your feelings. C'mon buddy, it's me."
Espio's anger melted away from his face. His eyes welled up with tears instead.
"Sonic-" he stammered, "Sonic, I lost her. I screwed up, I lost the rune and I lost her."
"It's okay," Sonic said calmly, "He's still missing a stone. He'll find it soon, but until then we still have time to stop him. And we will." Sonic shifted his gaze to Niles, who was tying a strip from his jacket over a wound on his leg.
"Niles... it's great to see you back, man."
"Likewise, dear hedgehog. Though I fear I'll be little use to anybody in the state I'm in. I've taken an injury, I'm afraid."
"It's not that bad," Espio added, "Cinos shot him in one of his more generous moments."
"A mere fleshwound," Niles said.
The hedgehog and the chameleon stood either side of Niles, each taking an arm around their shoulders and helping the wounded fox to his feet. Niles winced with the pain, but took it bravely.
"Sonic," Espio said, "I'm worried sick for Roxanna. I know there probably wasn't anything more I could do, but I still feel like I lost her. I'm not used to... well, I'm just not used to caring about anyone this much. I know what you mean, now, about it making you weak. Cinos doesn't love anybody, he can do whatever he wants and he has nothing to lose. He can use Roxanna against us."
"Espio," Sonic replied, "I know how it feels, I know better than anyone. But I've been wrong. It's only just dawned on me. The four of us - you, me, Niles and Roxanna - we haven't been put together as friends as a means of hindering us from our quest. Our bond was made to strengthen us, make us more likely to defeat Cinos, especially if he decides to use us against each other."
"What do you mean?"
"Zero Tolerance always told me that it was my commitment to my friends that made me weak, and Cinos always told me that the person with nothing to lose is always the person who will come out on top in a fight. They both think that way because they love nobody and nothing. What they don't realise is that he who loves nothing has nothing to fight for. Cinos is right in one way - we're the same, he and I, except for that one thing. But he thinks that one thing is going to be my undoing. I think the same thing is going to be his."
"You have a way of circling around the point, dear hedgehog," Niles said.
"The point," Sonic said, "Is that his mindset means that he can fight harder, but mine means that I can fight for longer. He might not realise it, but in the end, I want to win more than he does."
"So how do we use this?" Espio asked.
"The old fashioned way," Sonic replied, "We fight. We fight for Roxanna, and for the Runes, and for the survival of the world. We fight until there isn't a single breath left in our bodies. Are you with me?"
"Oh bother, I left my boxing gloves in my other jacket," Niles said, "The one that hasn't been torn to pieces."
"I'll take that as a yes. Espio?"
"I'm with you, Sonic. All the way. To the very end."
"Good. Then lets get that hedgehog."
XXXV
Sonic, Espio and Niles hid from sight in the shadows of the concrete pipes, peering through the tall chain-link fence that separated them from the dry lake that Cinos had emptied. There was still a knee-deep puddle of water in its bed, with clumps of seaweed visible poking out of the slimy surface. The crevasse that had once been under the water was visible and unguarded, although the entire lake was blocked at its entrance by six Arack sentries, each fully armoured in CEC battle suits. This was the first time that Sonic had seen this; the second for his companions.
"That's what he was after," Sonic said, keeping his voice low. He knew from experience that the CEC suits were equipped with sensory enhancement equipment. "He drained the lake so that he could get at these underground caverns. That's where the Rune must be."
"Tough luck getting in there," Niles said, "Our eight-limbed friends have cordoned the area off quite effectively, it seems."
The fence was high - too high to climb, and laced with something like razor-wire anyway. From what they could see, there was only the one entrance, guarded by the six Aracks. Several large pipes were laid down, conduits between the lake and the many treatment facilities, and Sonic thought that it might be possible to use them for cover, to sneak through the gate. However, it could not be done unless the guards' attention was already focused on something else, distracted for just a few moments.
But what at their disposal could create that much of a distraction?
"How did Cinos get in?" Espio asked, "He didn't go this way when he took the Rune."
"I'm guessing he would have gone in through the mines," Sonic replied, "He blew a few holes between The Pit and the lake. Even if those are guarded or inaccessable, he still has quite a few explosives left. He used four or five when he blew the lake, but I smuggled in at least a dozen."
"You... smuggled in? What do you mean?"
Sonic realised his friends were still ignorant of the sad, ironic story of how he came to be the courier of his enemy's own weapons, and shook his head. "It's a long story, and you'll hear it later. Not now. The point is that there's obviously more than one way into that cave, and they're all probably safer than this one. We just need to find another way."
"Dear hedgehog, we're running out of time," Niles said, "Our adversaries are already en route, and they know precisely where they're going. It's going to take the three of us positively forever to locate an alternative entrance... especially if you two plan on escorting me, hobbled as I am, all the way."
"I don't know what else to suggest. This way is far too well-guarded, we don't have any way of getting past the Aracks."
"There is a way, dear hedgehog."
"Well, what is it?"
Niles smiled, and waggled his eyebrows in a knowing little gesture. Then he raised his nose high into the air and straightened his posture, and Sonic was reminded of the stuffed-shirt egotist he had first encountered in the library of Stratosphereon, before he had been cut down a few notches by his travels and his company.
"My friends," he said, "The time comes in every fellow's life when he must stand up and make something of himself, make a stand for what is right. That time has come for me."
"What do you mean?"
"What we need, dear hedgehog, is a diversion." He smiled. "I would like to offer my services as that diversion."
"Hey, Niles, no. It isn't necessary-"
"I'm afraid it is necessary, my dear fellow, for you see, it is clearly evident to me that my role in this quest of ours has come to an end. There is nothing that I can do to assist anybody in those caves down there, and my injury assures that I would only slow things down considerably. As it turns out, the only real skill that I possess to further our cause is the fact that I am a wanted criminal in this city, a so-called traitor, and out of the three of us, I am the only one who might be able to distract those guards sufficiently enough that the two of you might gain passage."
"I think he's right, Sonic," Espio said, "We've only got one shot. One of us is going to have to be left behind, here."
Sonic shook his head. "We've all come so far. I wanted the three of us to be together, to get Cinos together. There's no telling what those spiders are going to do to you when they catch you."
Niles put a hand on Sonic's shoulder. "Sonic, several years ago, I was faced with a problem and made a decision to flee from it. Since that day, I have lived in many places and seen many things, but nothing has granted me relief for the baggage I have carried with me all this way. I have always been a coward and I have always run from my strife. I now choose to stop running. The time has come for me to reap the consequences of my actions all those years ago. I am going to face this in the way that my brother would have. I am going to make him proud of me, even though he will not be here to witness it. And you fellows are wasting a lot of time talking about it."
Sonic nodded. "Then I thank you. And I promise that we'll make the most of this. We'll get Cinos and pummel him into next century. We'll get in a few extra for your leg."
Niles and Sonic hugged, but Niles made it a very cultured and dignified action, punctuating it with a brisk handshake. He then repeated it with Espio. As Sonic struggled to keep the tears out of his eyes (somehow, he felt it would be embarrassing to cry in front of Niles, who for the first time had become somebody he genuinely looked up to), and saw that Espio's scales had turned orange, the same colour as Niles' fur, during their embrace.
"Adieu," Niles said, "My dear friends, it has been an honour to know you both, and I truly do hope that you find success in all of your ventures."
"Hey, whoa," Espio protested, "No goodbyes, okay? We're seeing each other again."
"Perhaps, perhaps. I do hope so."
Niles gave a salute, and came out of hiding. He winced in pain at having to walk on his wounded leg unassisted, and moved with a heavy limp. Sonic watched with a heavy heart as he approached the battle-ready Arack soldiers, but steeled himself as much as he was able, knowing that they had a small window of opportunity in which to act. Niles had most assuredly been right - Sonic had his speed, and Espio had the ability to hide himself among his surroundings, but there was no way that they would have been able to smuggle Niles past those guards, even with a distraction. One way or another, Niles Wilkinson-Price would have ended his journey here, and it was fitting that his final action for the cause should be to finally confront his demons and stand up to his fears. It was right.
"Hey!" the fox shouted at the guards, limping toward them, "You ugly sods! I'll have you know that I've been working out, and have developed some rather smashing pecs! I shall take on the lot of you, if you are brave enough to confront me! I say, I really am quite out of control at the moment, and I do believe it is indeed time to rumble. Can either of you fellows smell what the fox is cooking?"
Sonic and Espio made their move when it was clear that all six of the guards were focused away from them and moving toward Niles, who was now declaring that he felt the need, the need for expeditious velocity and was leading them astray. Although not all of the guards were willing to leave their post, all six were giving Niles their attention, and it was just the lapse in focus that the hedgehog and chameleon needed to slip past them and into the enclosed area of the lake, where they kept to the slimy bank, just shy of the Aracks' line of sight, and headed promptly toward the exposed crevasse.
When Sonic heard the first gunshots, each sound seemed to pierce his chest and stab into his heart, icicles of anguish, and he sincerely wondered whether they would really ever see Niles again. He promised himself that, should the fox's uncanny act of bravery be his last, the ultimate sacrifice, he would make sure that it counted.
They stepped into the humid cave together and began to descend. They did not see the huge, broad-shouldered figure who followed them inside, breathing gruffly, hands squeezed into fists like boulders.
XXXVI/Cinos
The dark hedgehog was indeed already deep in the molten heart of Mobius, and he knew that he would soon find what he had come here for. He walked the final stretch of what had been a long, trying and arduous journey through a world that offended him to his very core. It would be worth it, for the power he was about to obtain.
Although it had never been about the power, not really. Power bored Cinos. What he anticipated, what thrilled him the most, was to see the expression on the face of everyone who had ever crossed him, the moment they realised that he had the power. The moment they realised that he was about to be the architect of their messy, torturous demise. If he was about to be a god, Cinos decided he would make the most of it. There would be no salvation in the Age of Kinnos. Nobody would ever have anything to look forward to at the end of their lives besides a fiery pit, although he would make sure that his Hades was only slightly worse than the nightmare he was going to make out of Mobius.
Slung over his back was a bag containing four of the five Runes of Awakening. Already they roared with power, filling him with visions of what he was to look forward to when he located the fifth stone and unlocked their dormant energies.
He could feel each of them as independently they screamed their piercing energies at his offensive, backward soul, and the combined force of them threatened to drive him insane. He could hear the chattering, anguished voices of a thousand porcupine spirits like darts in his brain. Nothagodos, Fleg and Shalpad, each carrying with them a unique kind of torture. But it was his latest acquisition, the Rune of Nine, that made it all bearable. The delightfully miserable and wretched energies of this stone shared almost a kind of common wavelength with his own rotten spirit. It was like a drug, infecting him with sublime placidity. He fought the urge to stop moving, sit down and simply hold it to his chest, stroking it and rocking it like an infant. The only thing stopping him from doing so was the knowledge that he was about to unleash an unfathomable amount of misery upon the world, the extent of which even he failed to imagine, and he would suck it all in until his deistic form simply exploded for the weight of it.
He dragged Roxanna with him. She went semi-willingly, held at the neck by an iron crowbar that Cinos used in a choke-hold. The porcupine was an insufferable burden to him, and he was conscious that she was deliberately slowing him down with her futile resistance. Sonic was coming. They both knew it. Cinos kept her alive because of the emotional ammunition she represented, but his patience was quickly wearing thin, and he knew his anger would soon overcome his resignation. If not for the Rune of Nine, she would probably already have been dead.
I'll kill her when I find the final stone, he promised himself, I'll beat her until there's nothing left, the little witch.
The porcupine was chanting something to herself insufferably, and though Cinos couldn't quite make it out, he thought it sounded like she was repeating the word blizzard, although that made absolutely no sense.
"Shut up!" he roared, "Or else I'll throw you down there!" He shoved her so that she hung precariously off the side of the brief ledge along which they were walking. The bubbling, hissing lake of magma below sent its heat and fumes up to taunt them, and Roxanna sobbed and writhed as Cinos held her over the open flames. Then he pulled her back onto the ledge and forced her to continue moving ahead.
It wasn't long before they reached their goal. Cinos trembled and gaped in wonder as he set his sights upon a stone wall into which was set the ancient symbol of the Awakening. The huge glyph loomed down on him as the final confirmation of his assured victory. He raised his arms and bathed in the glory of it.
For a few moments he seemed lost in a world of his own, and didn't realise that Roxanna had broken free of his grasp and was crawling away from him on her hands and knees. When his eyes opened, however, he shifted his attention to her, shambling desperately on all fours as though she thought she had any hope in this state of escaping the fastest thing alive.
The Black Blur.
Even so, Cinos moved toward her slowly. He dragged the crowbar behind him along the stone passageway, delighting in the loud and foreboding sound that it made. Roxanna crawled until she had nowhere to go, and turned with her back against the rock, huddled, to look up at the dark hedgehog who stood over her. She looked into his green eyes and saw nothing beyond them apart from a black, sucking abyss.
Cinos did not smile when he lifted the crowbar above his head. He simply stared back at her without a trace of emotion, and then brought the iron bar down hard.
It struck the rock wall with a splintering crunch. Cinos frantically ripped at the stones until they gave way, grunting and snarling with the effort. His hands blistered and began to bleed, but he didn't seem to notice.
Roxanna, seeing that the dark hedgehog had temporarily found something more pressing in urgency than cold blooded murder, took the opportunity to crawl away from him and keep moving until she reached safety. The next time he saw her, she knew that she would not be so lucky as to earn another reprieve. The porcupine slinked away into the shadows and disappeared.
Cinos was reduced to such manual labour to proceed further in these caves, as he had used up the remainder of his resin-grenades, but it didn't faze him. He had to keep going, he must, it was so close. He continued ripping at the wall until he had created a hole big enough to squeeze through, and entered the chamber that lay beyond it. The four stones he already carried with him screamed louder the moment he saw what he had come for, and their cacophony threatened to rip his mind apart. The one coherent thought he managed to produce was that he had surely won, for there was no way that Sonic would get here in time.
With a grunt, he thrust the crowbar into the wall in an effort to dislodge the embedded Rune of Awakening from its ancient slumber.
XXXVII
Sonic and Espio heard and felt several explosions from some distance up ahead since entering the formerly subaquatic lake cavern, and it was clear that Cinos was blowing his way further into the mountains with whatever explosives he still had with him. He knew exactly where to find what he was looking for, which meant they didn't have much time to stop him.
The cavern was slippery, coated almost entirely with moss and seaweed and other things that grew in stagnant bodies of water over time. They had to exert some amount of energy and care just to keep from slipping and falling. And the fishy, mildewy stench was almost unbearable.
"Somehow, this seems appropriate," Espio said, "This place, I mean. This rotting pit of stink and mould, it's like the perfect place to find that monster of a twin of yours."
"Have a walk around the antiverse sometime," Sonic replied, "It makes this place seem like a candy store."
They fell silent for a while, and then Sonic spoke again.
"I'm glad you're with me, Espio."
"Hey," the chameleon said, "To the end, bro."
"There's one thing I still don't quite understand, though."
"What's that?"
"It's why you're still with me. I mean, you're still a skeptic. I know you don't believe Cinos can do what he thinks he can do. Do you even believe in the antiverse? Why would you be so dedicated to a quest that you don't think has any real purpose?"
"What I believe or don't believe about Cinos and his supposed Old Ways doesn't have much bearing on my resolve."
"So why have you come all this way?"
Espio shrugged. "Because it's the right thing to do. I don't know about gods and monsters, parallel universes and magic spells, but there are some things I do know. I know that Cinos is a psychotic and a murderer. I know that he has the desire and the initiative to hurt and kill innocent people, people I care about. And I know that you are a hero, and the most noble person I know, and if there is something that you think needs to be done to make the world a better place, then I think of it as an honour to be by your side, helping you get it done."
"That's about the most flattering thing anybody's ever said to me."
"I know. Sonic, if you die, can I have your CD collection?"
"I'll think about it."
The cave suddenly became dryer and less slippery, and piles of rubble and a chaotic scene of recent destruction indicated that Cinos had detonated an explosive, here. The cave had ended, but Cinos had apparently known very well that there were more beyond, and had blown out this wall to get to them. What they came to was a series of natural subterranian tunnels that had probably been completely inclosed since time immemorial. It was an enormous relief to walk on dry land again. The stench of the mildewed caves faded, too, replaced by a faint odour that Sonic couldn't quite identify.
As they walked through these new tunnels, Sonic ran a hand along the walls and found that orange-brown stains came away on his gloves, and the rock crumbled away a little.
"Hey, check this out," he said. "These caves are, like, sandstone or something. Soft rock."
"So what?"
"Well, it's kind of a bad sign. Cinos is going around just blowing holes in it everywhere with powerful explosives. If we're not lucky, he's going to bring the whole place down on our heads. I can already see places where the rock has fractured in great big cracks, there and there. A big enough boom in the wrong place, and we're all pancakes."
"Well, at least Cinos will be too."
"Yeah, and we won't have to pay for our burial."
They came to a wide cavern, a massive underground bubble of sorts, and were stunned to find that the walls, floor and ceiling were covered in small crystals, almost as though they had stumbled into an enormous geode. They twinkled in the dim light. The strange, unidentified smell was stronger in here, and seemed to emanate from the tunnels ahead.
Espio ran a hand along the walls, amazed. "It's beautiful," he said.
"Don't stop to sight-see," Sonic warned. "Hey, you know what? I think I know what that weird smell is. It smells just like somewhere I was once before, under the mountains on the Floating Island. I think it's sulfur. There were crystals on the walls there, too. I think these caverns are volcanic."
"More bad news, if Cinos is blowing up the joint."
As though to confirm this, there was a dull roar, almost inaudible, rising up from deep in the ground. The caverns shook a little, and tiny pieces of rock broke off from above and fell to the ground. It lasted a few moments and then stopped, but Sonic and Espio fell dead silent.
"I didn't like the sound of that," Sonic said after a while, in a low voice. "Come on, let's get going."
They didn't get going, however. Somebody blocked their way. Somebody who was bigger than both Sonic and Espio combined.
"Ronin!" the figure roared.
He had come out of the darkness silently like a stalking predator, a ten foot tall mobian grizzly bear with a chest like a billboard and limbs like fur-covered telegraph poles. Espio cried out in alarm, knowing something about stealth himself and still having not noticed this beast until he lumbered out of the shadows. Sonic looked up at the stranger in terror, imagining being punched in the head by one of those tightly balled fists, how it might create an effect not dissimilar to a watermelon being hit with a hammer.
"Who are you?" he demanded. Whoever it was, he clearly wasn't having a good day. The bear's face was a map of fury. Sonic noticed that he wore a patch over one eye, and was missing fingers from one of his hands.
"You played us for fools, Shapesk," the bear snorted. "You played us all for fools. You killed people, the very people we were trying to save, you killed them. And now I'm going to kill you."
Sonic realised that he had become the victim of mistaken identity, and unfortunately he wasn't optimistic about his chances of convincing his attacker that the hedgehog he sought was in fact his evil twin from a parallel reality.
"Hey, cool down a little," he said, holding both of his hands up to show he was unarmed. The stranger didn't seem to care. It was clear that he wasn't interested in a fair fight anyway.
Sonic was about to speak again, but the bear leapt forward and swung his mighty fist in a left hook. Sonic was quick enough to duck, and the punch connected with the cave wall, causing a small avalanche.
The hedgehog saw no alternative but to flee. He wasn't going to fight this anguish-wracked stranger. He didn't want to hurt him (after all, the bear was actually their ally, he just didn't know it) and he wanted even less to be hurt by him.
"Espio, let's go!" Sonic ran from the bear's wrath, back to where Espio had taken cover. Unfortunately, their attacker had managed to get around in front of them, blocking their progress through the tunnels, and the only way to go was back in the direction they had come. More fortunate was the fact that the cavern was quite dark, and it was fairly easy to hide. Sonic and Espio found a niche behind a rock that hid them quite effectively, and huddled inside.
"Come back, you coward!" the bear roared, pounding on the stone walls, "You mess with the people of this city, you mess with me! Whatever you want outta that cave, you'll have to go through me first!"
"Who is that?" Espio demanded in a whisper, his eyes wide and terrified, "He's as big as a house!"
"I dunno, but he's none too fond of speedy blue hedgehogs. He's barricading the only way forward, we have to think of a way to get past him, and quick."
Sonic imagined Cinos peering out of a mirror and cackling. Go ahead, my brother. You've already helped me drown all those people, not to mention having sacrificed two of your friends. Why not kill this guy too? It's all part of your becoming, Sonic. Fight fire with fire. Fight evil with evil. Fall for me, Sonic, become me.
"Could we beat him if we fought him?" Espio asked.
"I don't want to fight him," Sonic replied, "I think I could take him down, God knows I've reduced bigger robots to scrap, but he's no robot. Technically he's on our side, an innocent. And that's not to mention the fact that he would probably only need to connect one punch to kill me stone dead. Look at the mitts on that guy. Maybe I can lure him out of the way and run past him."
Espio shook his head. "Sure, but he'd pursue us. He has to be taken out of the picture, we can't be fighting him and Cinos at the same time. We haven't got much time left. Do you think he can be reasoned with?"
The bear pounded on the wall, and by the sound it made, it seemed he might be able to bring this cave down with his fury alone. "Face me!" he roared.
"I don't think he's in the mood," Sonic said, "One of those obliterate first, reason later kinda guys." He sighed. "Maybe I will have to fight him. You're right, we're almost out of time. I can almost reach out and feel Cinos, and I'm sure he's either found the fifth rune, or he's close."
"I have an idea," Espio said, "An alternative."
Sonic smiled. "I really am glad you came along. You and your juicy brain. What do you have in mind?"
"Take off your shoes. And your gloves."
"Huh? What, are we getting in the spa?"
"Trust me. Hurry up."
Quietly, Sonic did as he was told. It was rare that he removed his gloves, and his shoes much moreso. His best friend Tails had given him the pair of red and white sneakers years ago (well, had stolen them), and Sonic wore them everywhere, often even slept in them. They were worn, but incredibly resilient, and still didn't have any holes. Looking down at his thickly-callused blue feet, he thought it funny that they were probably the body part that he actually saw the very least, considering they played such a central role in his life. He really only took off his shoes to bathe and to change his socks. (The latter he hadn't done in a year. Considering the amount of walking he had done in that year, the smell that filled the caverns upon their removal almost completely masked the sulfur and mildew of the caves.)
Sonic watched in confusion and amusement as Espio put on his shoes and his gloves. Both sets were a very poor fit, the shoes too small and the gloves too big.
"Espio, buddy, what are you doing?"
The chameleon didn't reply, but wearing Sonic's clothes, he reached out and laid his hands on the hedgehog's shoulders. Sonic still couldn't get used to the sight of Espio physically changing colour, as he did now. The hedgehog's royal blue spread like spilled ink from his spines onto Espio's scales, eventually covering his entire body and masking his natural violet. He took his hands away and smiled.
"What, are you supposed to be me?" Sonic asked. "You don't look anything like me."
It was true. Espio was shorter than Sonic, and a different shape. He had no spines, and his head was encased in something like a bony reptillian frill. Not to mention the single yellow horn that poked out of his forehead, the colour of which Espio could not change.
"Maybe not," he said, "But it's the best chance we've got, isn't it? Besides, it's dark, and I don't exactly intend on letting him get a good look at my face. I'm going to let him see me, and then I'm going to run. Fast. Lure him away from the tunnel so that you can go ahead."
It was a strange plan, but it was inventive, and good enough. And Sonic had the strange idea that it was what was supposed to happen. Why else had he been allowed to take a colour-changing chameleon with him to his final stand?
"Okay," he said, "It's crazy enough to work. But where do you want to meet up with me later?"
Espio's smile faded a little, and he sighed.
"I don't think I will be, Sonic. You have to go on."
"But, Espio! I thought we were doing this together, remember? Together to the very end!"
"This guy has to be far away when the time comes for you to do what you have to do," Espio said, "For your safety and for his."
Sonic was very saddened, but he understood. He had a job to do. The purpose of his friends was to make it possible for him to do this job. Roxanna had known it, and Niles had known it. As did Espio.
The hedgehog put a hand on Espio's shoulder. "I'm going to see you again, buddy. If you're skeptical about everything else, then at least believe that. This is not goodbye."
"I believe it, Sonic."
"I could never have done this without you, you know that. I'd be long dead, a corpse in the desert with vultures picking at my face."
Espio laughed. "I believe that too."
"You take care. If this guy catches you, he won't hesitate-"
"Sonic?"
"Yeah?"
The chameleon nodded. "Get Cinos," he said. "You get him, Sonic. Get him for me."
"For all of you," Sonic replied, "For everybody. For Mobius."
"You have to shout. It has to be your voice."
For a moment, Sonic didn't understand what Espio meant. But the chameleon crawled out of the niche, stood and began waving his arms, and Sonic understood. It had to be his voice.
"Hey, Big Ugly!" Sonic shouted, "Over here! You wanna fight me, you gotta catch me!"
The bear roared in fury and launched himself at Espio, fists thrusting like two sledgehammers. Espio turned and ran out of the cavern, back through the tunnels that led to the lake bed, and the bear pursued. They ran right past Sonic, who hid quietly and cautiously in the shadows. The footsteps of his friend and the snarling of his pursuer faded away, and at last Sonic was left with his own breathing.
When he crawled out into the open and went on his way, Sonic was naked and alone.
XXXVIII
Such a long distance had Sonic travelled over the past twelve months. The year came full circle as he wandered these caves, and so had his quest. For all his adventures, all the friends he had made, the battles lost and won, he walked this last stretch alone. His Kindred had served its purpose, brought Sonic all the way to this final destination, the site of his last stand. It was all about him, now. The two of them. Sonic and Cinos. One hedgehog and his reflection.
Sonic was shocked when he passed through another of his evil twin's makeshift grenade-crater doorways and stepped into the cavernous depths of a volcano. Shocked, because he had seen this place before. In his mind. He had stood here during his Awakening with Roxanna, the journey of knowledge they had embarked upon together.
(The Prophecy tells of the end of the age of the Dual Realms, where one mortal is to collect the five pieces of the Stone and reunite them in the flaming core of Mazsha's mighty heart. The mortal, draped in a brilliant blue, enters the portal of the spirital Awakening, and here he transcends his mortality, he enters the realm of souls and absorbs the spiritual energies of the universe into himself. Even the Gods bow to him as he undoes creation and remakes the world in His image.)
This is where the Old People prophecised that a blue mortal would take in the power of the Runes and undo creation. Thousands of years ago, they had seen Cinos, had actually seen these events unfolding to their catastrophic climax. Taking in the enormity of this, Sonic flashed back to his coversation with the spectre of Kethriel Rosethorne, about the nature of the written/unwritten future.
If the porcupines had seen this so many years ago, actually come forward and watched this happening, then was the future in fact an inevitable fate? Had Kethriel lied, or been ignorant? Was Sonic doomed to defeat after all, a victim of the impassable barrier of fate that dictated the be-all and end-all of how things were to play out? After coming so far, physically and mentally, it would be nothing if not a cruel joke, a horrendous irony.
Sonic shook his head, gritted his teeth, knotted his brow, clenched his fists, walked onward. The answer was no. After everything that had been sacrificed, everyone, Sonic wasn't going to let fate or God or the Old People or anybody else knock him on his back at the very end. Cinos was going down. This was the only outcome that Sonic was going to allow.
The volcanic caverns roared and rumbled beneath his feet. He looked down from the side of the ledge he was standing on, looked down into the flowing river of magma, and was suddenly very concerned about the strength and integrity of the stone he was walking on.
Molten rock had shaped these tunnels into strange designs over the centuries. Sonic looked up and saw the ceiling above was composed almost entirely of loosely-suspended boulders, probably igneous rock thrown up by some ancient eruption, piled together, cooled, and hollowed out again by the molten flow. The entrance that Cinos had created with an explosion had run dozens of thick cracks all the way along the soft-rock walls and right up to the ceiling. Sonic wondered whether the low, steady rumbling he now felt might be the precursor to a cave-in triggered by Cinos' grenades. Certainly the place looked as though somebody yelling too loud might do it in.
Despite the complexity of the caverns, there was only one path that Cinos could have taken, unless he had learned to swim through magma, so Sonic followed it. He saw a few spots of blood and wondered who in his evil twin's party they belonged to. He had the grave idea that it was Roxanna's.
The caverns narrowed and declined into a myriad of dark tunnels, and this was where the trail became uncertain. Cinos could have taken one of several paths. Sonic searched the ground for some sign of which way he should go. His heart was picking up rhythm, and he began to feel the first signs of panic creeping in, well aware that his time was running out. Cinos had the five Runes of Awakening, Sonic was certain of it, and he was probably in the process of unlocking their powers while Sonic was looking at the floor here in the tunnels.
Then, a sign. A short distance inside one of the tunnels was another droplet of blood. Just one, but it was enough.
Sonic was still staring at it when he ran into Rasputan Nethergate.
He almost collided with the porcupine, and looked up, startled, staring into his eyes. They stood there for a moment, eyes locked on eyes, and Sonic was so shocked in that moment that he didn't even properly register the noise
(bang)
that had reverberated throughout the caverns. It seemed so distant, an echoing crack, so loud and so sudden. Sonic regained his senses and realised that his entire body had spun around a quarter of a full turn, as though he had been yanked or hit.
He felt cold. Molten rock all around him, and he had run cold, the only exception was the stream of deep warmth running down his arm. Terrible warmth.
The hedgehog and the porcupine continued to stare into each other's eyes, both expressions blank, eyes wide. Sonic took a lurching, stumbling step backward.
There was another sound. This time Sonic heard it loud and clear.
BANG!
The crisp report of a gunshot, like a firecracker, and a stabbing pain in his chest. He could see Rasputan's pistol, now, smoking from the barrel, trained on him.
Another stream of warmth, running down his chest, down his stomach.
Sonic fell to his knees.
Rasputan was trembling, jittering, nibbling on his fingernails, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back again like some strange dance.
"I got the hedgehog," he rasped.
Sonic stammered something incomprehensible and gritted his teeth against the growing pain.
A smile crept its way across Rasputan's face, and he began to giggle, and then to laugh.
"I got the hedgehog!"
XXXIX
In all his years as an adventurer and Freedom Fighter, Sonic had taken many exotic injuries and avoided thousands of flying bullets, but never until now had he actually been shot. He had always imagined what a gunshot would feel like - a searing hot, sharp little fragment ripping through skin, bone, organ - but he had never expected the reality, which was that he hardly even noticed it had happened.
That was, until he looked down.
Two bloody holes now breeched his body, puncturing his right shoulder and lung. A dull, thudding pain wracked his torso, and blood dripped onto the rock beneath him in dark, gruesome spatters.
Sonic, weakened, paralysed, dropped to his side and lay there, propped up by his good left arm, the wounded one limp across his body. He panted softly and looked up at Rasputan.
The druid porcupine trained the pistol on him and chuckled.
"Don't you go anywhere, Billy-blue. Mister K needs some privacy if he's gonna perform the ritual just right. That's the problem, y'see, with the Old Magicks. They need so much patience, so much concentration. Not at all like this sweet New Magicks."
Sonic's gut wrenched and he felt as though he might throw up. Instead, he threw his head aside and coughed, loud, deep, hard coughs. Blood and spittle sprayed out of his mouth.
"This new magic," Rasputan continued, "This new kind of magic, Mister K calls it technology, it's a lot more user-friendly. Take this, for example, this... pistol-stick. It's a warrior's dream, it is. No more chants, no more herbs and incantations and candles, you just pull the trigger-"
Rasputan raised the gun and fired it into the air. When the loud report went off, Sonic knew that he heard the walls crack a little, the stones in the ceiling groaned and the foundations trembled with a deep, low rumbling sound.
"Boom!" the porcupine shrieked, "Whatever you point it at just dies. And you know the best thing? You don't even have to be a sorcerer to use it! Now, if these had been around, back in the time of the Bloodmongers... well, things woulda been just a little bit different in this world, dontcha think? There wouldn't be quite so many infidels running around. Like you for example. Just look at how easy it roasted your turkey."
"You serve him like it's in your best interests," Sonic rasped, "Do you think he's going to share his power with you? Do you think he's got some demigod position vacant for his annoying little tag-along?"
"I serve Big-K just as well as I'm able to," Rasputan replied, "I'm a smart one, I am. Kinnos might cast me away in the End Times or he might not, but I got a better chance'a survival if I help him out. And if not, then at least my end is gonna be a whole lot less painful than yours."
"You can-" Sonic coughed again, spitting more blood into his hand. "You can stop him. Just shoot him like you shot me, finish him before he's too powerful to be finished."
"Ain't gonna happen, Billy-blue. There ain't no stopping the big K. It's all fated. Gonna happen no matter what." He chewed on his fingernail.
Sonic glanced up at the unstable, rocky ceiling a few feet above their heads. He looked again at Rasputan, and wondered whether he would be able to make a run for it. Probably not - his injuries made him extremely weak, he didn't even know how much energy he had left. He might get a few steps and collapse, and the nervous porcupine would put a bullet in his head just for trying.
But what other options did he have?
He heard Sally (or was it Kethriel?) whisper in his ear.
Don't overlook the elephant in the living room.
He glanced around the caves, his head swimming. Looked at the rocks, the magma, the blood. Don't pass out, Sonic.
"It's not fated," he moaned, "You loon. It can be different. He doesn't have to win. If you don't want to save anybody else, at least save yourself."
"Don't you call me a loon," the porcupine spat, "It makes me want to hurt you. Worse than I already have, I mean. And by the way, it is fated. I've seen it."
"Oh yes, I'm sure you have," Sonic replied, "I'm sure you see lots of things in your head. I just don't put a lot of faith in the words of a guy who hears voices and thinks guns are magical."
He coughed up more blood, and groaned in pain. The reality of the bullet in his lung had begun to settle in with his shocked nerves, and coughing felt like being stabbed.
"Do you doubt?" Rasputan shrieked, and Sonic thought the sound of his voice actually made the caves rumble harder. A few small pebbles fell from above like stone rain. "Do you doubt, even now?"
"Technology isn't magic, you nut, it's just an explosion in a tube." Sonic saw the porcupine's face twitch at the word nut, and began to get an idea. He glanced up again at the groaning, weakened stone ceiling.
"Things such as these do not exist in the natural order of things," Rasputan growled through clenched teeth, "You can't just squeeze your finger and make things go boom-boom, not without divine faith in the power of Mazsha to make it happen. I've got the faith, Billy-blue, and that's why I'm holding the pistol-stick and you're full of holes. Kinnos has opened my eyes to the true power of faith, you see. He's shown me all the miracles that Mazsha creates for the faithful. See these?" He pointed at his sneakers. "Magic shoes that never wear out. They feel like walking on clouds. And this!" He held out his hand and displayed the rings that adorned it, most notably the thick bauble of his mood-ring. "It actually changes colour according to my mood!" he shrieked.
Sonic couldn't help but be amused, even now, by the fact that Rasputan truly thought this tacky plastic children's toy, this chemical-filled bauble that changed colour depending on how warm and clammy his hand was, was actually an invaluable magical artifact powered by his faith in God. He watched the porcupine chewing his nails, smiling and staring daggers into the bleeding hedgehog at his feet.
"Oh sure, it's magical," Sonic said, "So why is it black, Rasputan?"
"Huh?" The druid held the bauble up in front of his own eyes. The ring was indeed black.
"What does black represent, Rasputan?"
The porcupine frowned, wiggled his fingers, waggled his hand in the air. He tapped the ring sharply on the side of the gun, and held it up again, still black.
"Black is fear, isn't it Rasput-"
"Shut up!" Rasputan shrieked, "You're not worthy to speak of the gifts of Mazsha! You'll defile it with heresy! You're defiling me, right now! Defiler!"
"It is, isn't it? What are you afraid of, Rasputan? If Cinos has won and nothing can stop it, and I'm shot full of holes and you're holding the gun, what are you afraid of?"
"Nothing! Nothing!" The porcupine pulled off the mood ring and flung it at the ground. "I am Rasputan Nethergate, and I fear nothing!"
"Except the voices in your head? What are the voices telling you now, Rasputan?"
The porcupine covered both of his ears with his hands and tried to drown out Sonic's voice. "La la la la la!"
Sonic pulled himself to a sitting position despite the fierce pain, and exchanged glances between Rasputan and the rocky ceiling.
"You're pathetic!" he shouted, "You're psychotic! You're just a miserable, annoying little nobody-"
"Shut up! Shut up!"
"-who tags along with anyone who shows some guts, just because you don't have any courage of your own. You ridiculous little nothing. You intolerable loser. You raving, shrieking, wall-pounding-"
"Shut up or I'll shut you up!"
"-pillow-chewing, howl-at-the-moon, one-almond-short-of-a-full-sack-of-nuts freaking lunatic!"
Rasputan thrust forward his gun and began pulling the trigger, screaming at the top of his lungs.
"I told you-"
BANG! BANG!
"-to shut-"
BANG! BANG!
"-up!"
BANG! Click! Click! Click!
His rage screwed up his aim, but he hit Sonic twice. One bullet grazed his arm, slicing a wound into it just above the elbow, and another went into his gut. He cried out and fell forward, winded, clutching at his midsection as fresh blood began to flow, feeling winded.
(No, Sonic, get up. Get up now and move. Move or it will all be over right here.)
Rasputan's face twisted into an expression of horror and intense confusion. He shook the gun violently, and pointed it at Sonic again.
Click! Click! Click!
The clicking of the empty pistol chambers was barely audible over the roaring of the cave. Small chunks of rock rained down in a steady shower from above. Then bigger chunks.
Sonic forced himself, despite the unimaginable agony of his wounds, to his feet. He moved, limping, clutching at his gushing injuries, past Rasputan and into the deeper caves, the stable and rigid tunnels of solid rock carved out by centuries of rushing magma.
(Faster, Sonic, move faster)
Rasputan did not try to restrain him, he just kept trying to fire the empty gun, again and again and again.
Click! Click! Click!
"No! No! It can't be!"
Click! Click!
"It isn't fair! It's not fair, you hear me!"
As Sonic moved into the tunnels, Rasputan threw the gun at him. It hit him in the back, and almost knocked him over in his weakened state, but he kept his footing.
(Just a little further)
Rasputan was looking up, now. The roar of the caves was almost deafening, punctuated by a powerful cracking sound from all around. Rock rained down on him like mortar in a collapsing building, and every so often a boulder hit the ground and smashed.
"It isn't fair."
Sonic didn't turn around to watch, but he winced when he heard the climactic cacophony that could only be the entire cavern collapsing into itself. He was shielded by the stable stone passage around him, but there would be no retreat now, not that way. The avalanche blocked off all light instantly as the mouth of the cave was covered. It felt like an earthquake, and Sonic had to lean on the wall to keep from falling over.
When it ended, there was silence. Sonic could hear himself breathing, and realised his breathing was wet and gluggy, as though he was suffering from bronchitis. He buckled over as he was wracked by a painful coughing fit. His hand came away bloody, and he could taste more in his mouth.
A lot more.
Even so, he had to keep moving. As he stumbled forward, he saw something small and yellow in the darkness. Rasputan's mood ring. He picked it up and lurched onward.
XL
There was a light at the end of the tunnel. When Sonic saw this, the physical representation of a metaphor that was known the world over, he knew that he was going to die.
His bullet-riddled body burned with pain as he stumbled onward in his ever-weakening state. He could feel the blood running down both of his legs. Shot four times, in his arms, his lung, his gut. None of them were quick kills, but they would indeed end him soon enough. Inside his body, he knew he was bleeding very badly, and the more blood he lost, the weaker his heart pumped. The only mystery was whether blood loss or drowning would be the ultimate prognosis. Every time he coughed, he tasted more warm copper.
All the same, he knew only one concern - he must stop Cinos before his time ran out.
Sonic the dying hedgehog approached the light one step after another. The light at the end of the tunnel. The end of his quest, his destiny, his life. It all ended here, and it was never an end that he would have imagined. Sometimes he had let his thoughts wander to the subject of his mortality, and wondered how he would die. He saw himself heroically fending off a hoard of robots, a hundred or two, beating them down with every spark of energy left in his limbs until finally they overwhelmed him. He saw himself leaping from a world-shattering explosion, his body riddled with debris, carrying a rescued damsel to safety before succumbing to his fate. He never imagined it would end here, a thousand miles from the Freedom Fighters, in some volcano, shot to bits by a porcupine he barely knew and who barely knew how to even use a gun.
Oh well. It was as good a scenario as any, he supposed. Probably even a long time coming. He had lived his life far too dangerously. And he wouldn't have had it any other way.
The light was brighter. An orange-red ambience that flickered a little. Sonic thought it was an unsettling omen that the light at the end of his tunnel was fire and brimstone. Still, he lurched forward. Step. Step. Step. Keep moving, Sonic. Keep awake, keep moving.
His mind wandered, and to his delight and distress, his life began to flash before his eyes. His friends and enemies paraded themselves before him like a reunion marching band. Tails Prower, stubborn but spirited child, his best friend. Knuckles, the bull-headed echidna, who he respected deeply but rarely got along with. Sally Acorn, princess and warrior. Amy Rose, beautiful, optimistic. Kethriel... Finally, Espio, Niles and Roxanna, no less important, those with whom he had shared a kind of soul-bond.
And then there was Robotnik. Mecha Sonic. Spinster. Zero Tolerance.
And Cinos.
Sonic lurched ever onward, continued until the light bathed him. He had reached the light at the end of one tunnel. Soon it would happen again.
But not before he did what he had to do.
XLI
Cinos stood in the chamber at the end of the passage.
This cavern was huge, and dominated by a lake of magma that stretched as far as Sonic could see. It lit up this entire cave with a flickering red light. This was the chamber that Sonic had seen in his Awakening with Roxanna. He knew without having to look that there was an outcrop of cliff overhanging the fiery lake. That was where Cinos was supposed to stand when he remade the universe.
"Hi, Sonic," the dark hedgehog said without even looking up. He appeared to be concentrating hard, in the middle of some highly engaging task. Sonic saw that the five Runes of Awakening had been placed in a circle atop the cliff outcrop. The stone that Sonic had brought here himself, the Rune of Nine, as well as the two that Cinos had taken from Stratosphereon and the Pit of the Chameleon Cabal, and finally the two that Sonic hadn't even seen, the stone from Septennia and the one that Cinos had found here.
Sonic wasn't surprised that the symbol on the latter was the rune that Cinos used to represent his cult in Chagrin Las Mortis. That symbol, something like the letter 'M', had been carved into his followers' foreheads.
"It ends here, Cinos," Sonic said, stumbling into the cavern.
"I know it does, Sonic," the other replied, "That's not news to me. It might not go the way you'd hoped, though." He pointed to each Rune, counting them, making sure they were in the right place. He nudged one with his foot a little, and then stepped into the circle.
"Your friend is dead," Sonic said, coughed and stumbled against a wall. He held out Rasputan's ring, and flicked it onto the ground.
Cinos looked up at him for the first time, and smiled. "What, that nut? You didn't do anything but a favour to me, Sonic. He'd outlived his purpose. It looks like he got a few good shots in first, though. I'd hate to see the guy who lost, as they say."
"I've come to stop you."
The dark hedgehog laughed. "How? You can barely stand. Hey, look, I'm glad you could make it. I wanted you to see this. Sit down and enjoy the show, will you?"
Sonic tried to approach his evil twin, but pain ripped through him and he buckled, fell to his knees, clutched at his gut with a wail.
No! his mind screamed, Get up! You have to get up!
But he couldn't. He could only watch.
Cinos began to chant in a language that Sonic didn't understand. He was reading the symbols on the Runes, reading aloud the terrible sentence they formed together, over and over. As he did, the stones began to glow with their own light.
Sonic dropped to his hands and knees and crawled. He didn't know how he was going to do it, but he was going to reach Cinos and stop him. Somehow. There had to be a way. Despite the ridiculously improbable nature of this goal, the thought of failure never crossed his mind. Couldn't.
As Cinos shouted out the incantation, he closed his eyes and slowly began to leviate. He raised his arms out to his sides as he became weightless, his feet drifting away from the ground. The Runes, glowing with their own light, began to shimmer and fade as though they weren't entirely a part of reality.
To Sonic's horror, the effect spread out from them. Like the air was folding in on itself. Everything in the cavern took on an ethereal shimmer, and took on the intangible unreality of dreams. The rock under Sonic's hands and knees itself seemed to twist and fold and stretch. Sonic felt as though he was sliding into the antiverse - but only going halfway.
"Do you see that, Sonic?" Cinos called, "That's the two realms preparing to meld into one. Things are gonna look kind of weird in here right before I devour everything. Like a kaleidoscope."
Another pain floored Sonic again. He watched as the five stones glowed so brightly that they became white beacons. And then something else began to happen - a tendril rose up from each of the Runes, five thin white-glowing ropes of indiscernable making. They moved with their own power, curling into each other and melding into a single entity, one thick tendril that curled and twisted in the air as it grew.
Sonic knew what this was. It was the Whitewyrm. Only it wasn't a worm at all, but a whip of energy, like the umbilicus of all reality. It snapped back and forth, twisted and flailed, and then latched on to Cinos' leg. Almost intimately, like a snake on a limb, it curled around the dark hedgehog's waist and flowed into him.
Sonic found a new burst of strength and used it to hurl himself at Cinos. The two hedgehog's collided, and began to wrestle. The moment they touched, bizarre static filled the air, zapping both hedgehogs with pinprick shocks. Cinos angrily grappled with his twin, beating into him with furious strength.
"You're an idiot!" he shouted, "The process has started, it's not going to be stopped! Look at you, you're like the walking dead! What have I said to you, Sonic, time and time again? You're not strong enough to face me, you never have been! Why can't you concede to that?"
"Because it's not true," Sonic choked.
Cinos, the Whitewyrm still coiled around him, the energy of two universes flowing into him, grasped Sonic and wrestled him into a headlock. Sonic was trapped by his stronger twin's powerful grip, and found himself staring down into the open lake of magma, bubbling below.
"I can kill you without even trying," Cinos rasped, "In fact, I think I will."
He let go of Sonic and kicked him off the cliff.
Sonic screamed as he went into a freefall - and then jerked to a stop. Cinos had grabbed him by the hand, and he turned around to face his dark twin. He was leaning backwards off the cliff, one foot planted on the ground and the other dangling in midair.
The only thing preventing him from falling to his death was the fact that Cinos was holding his hand. At the point of contact, static charge popped and crackled, and stabbed Sonic's hand with painful jabs. He assumed that Cinos felt the same, this strange energy that ordinarily prevented them from standing too close comfortably, but he didn't relinquish his hold.
"You see?" Cinos said, "I can kill you just by letting go. That is the power I hold over you, Sonic, and it always has been. I won't unless I have to, though. I really want you to see this."
Power unfathomable flowed from the Runes into the Whitewyrm and into Cinos. The world seemed to waver and flatten out. Entire boulders vanished from sight, and others appeared. Some things seemed to exist in two worlds at once, others in neither. It hurt Sonic's head to watch. He shifted his gaze to his hand - and shouted in alarm.
At the point where Cinos held him, their hands seemed to be melting into one another.
Cinos had removed his gloves, and Sonic had relinquished his to Espio. The two hedgehogs' naked hands seemed to join together in one clump, intertwined, like conjoined twins. Cinos followed his gaze, and laughed.
"Of course!" he exclaimed, "The worlds are joining together, becoming one! And so are we, Sonic! After all, we're the same, aren't we?"
"We are not the same!" Sonic screamed, "I'm not like you!"
"Sure we are. We're one and the same. After all, you killed all your friends, didn't you? Sure you did. And why? Because you were so obsessed with getting this far and bringing me down that you didn't care about anything else. You shed your morality because it was weighing you down, and you made it all the way here. But you still can't beat me, my brother, because you're full of holes and I'm dangling you over a pool of lava. So you have two options - you can relinquish the pitiful remains of your heroism and join with me in glorious evil, or you can naively hold on to the idea that you're still a good guy, in which case you will die and I will still win. Now, Sonic - choose."
Their arms twining together like a woven basket, and the world around them curling back on itself, Sonic and Cinos stared into each others eyes. As they did, Sonic began to feel something else. His pain faded away, and everything seemed to darken until nothing existed but him and his evil twin. When he realised what was happening, he tried to resist. But Cinos forced it, and there was no going back. Sonic felt himself falling into the abyss behind the dark hedgehog's emerald green eyes.
Screaming and flailing, Sonic experienced his fourth Awakening.
XLII
The two hedgehogs' minds came together, merged, on an empty street in an empty city. The wind howled and softly caressed Sonic's spines. The street was lined with mirrors, and at the other end of it, he saw Cinos.
I'm not really here. I'm in a cave, dangling above a lake of fire.
(Sure you are, my brother. You're here and there. Two places at once, body and soul.)
Cinos was distant, like a blue speck on an unending stretch of road through a ghost city, but he spoke to Sonic direct to his brain and sounded like he was standing an inch away. Distance wasn't a factor here. They were together in Sonic's mind. Or in Cinos'. Or both at once.
Sonic looked down at his body and saw that it was completely intact. No bullet wounds.
(Just like new) Cinos thought/said.
Hatred for this cloned monster welled up in Sonic and overflowed. Cinos had destroyed him and threatened to destroy everything he loved and cared about. The quest to stop this happening had consumed Sonic's entire life. Now he was here, and Cinos was here, and the moment of truth had come at last.
Sonic began to walk along the street.
At the other end, Cinos did the same.
The walk became a jog.
The jog became a run.
The run became a sprint.
The mirrors either side of the road whizzed past, became one long line, a blur. Sonic focused on one thing as he ran - the growing image of Cinos in his sights. The hedgehogs ran toward each other at a speed that defied the limits of possibility, two trains on a collision course, two speeding jets, two rockets, two bullets. Sonic and Cinos jumped in unison, curled their bodies into spindashes. At the speed of thought, the two spinning blue balls collided in the air.
At the moment of impact, every mirror shattered. The street cracked and exploded. The buildings burst and collapsed on themselves. The city of their minds was obliterated and reduced to rubble.
Sonic and Cinos fought. They punched and kicked, leaped and rolled. At a phenomenal speed their limbs moved, the two fastest things alive, competing for the title.
I am the victor, Cinos. I am better than you, you sick freak of nature.
(Go ahead, Sonic, call me names, get it all out! Let out that anger. You know deep down that I am stronger. You've always known it.)
The hedgehogs wrestled and grappled, throwing each other down, scratching, hitting.
That's a lie, you're full of lies and I recognise that now.
(Believe what you want! You're always going to be sick with concern, and it makes you sluggish. Morality and love is like a thousand ton weight.)
You're wrong. The things I care about inspire me to fight, never to give up. Persistence always wins out.
(You can't persevere if you're dead, Sonic.)
I won't lose.
(Yes you will. Permit me to demonstrate.)
Cinos sent Sonic a mental image. A vision of his friend Tails, dead. Face down in a ditch, his twin tails limp and lifeless.
Sonic wailed in horror, and recoiled, putting his hands to his head. Cinos proceeded to thrash into him with double the ferocity, and Sonic was quickly floored, his twin beating the stuffing out of him. He wanted to strike back, to fight fire with fire, but he didn't know how.
(Yeah, Sonic, that's right. Just try to think of something that'll shock me, something that'll frighten me that much. You won't. I care about nothing.)
Sonic retreated. He rolled away and got back on his feet.
(Chicken.)
Come and get me.
Cinos did. He launched himself at Sonic, and the hedgehogs began to thrash and fight again, rolling around the crumbled street, kicking, punching.
(This is fun, isn't it!)
I'm going to kill you.
(Ooh, look out. When I'm done with you I'm going to make that image a reality, my brother, I'm going to make little fox-boy suffer in ways you can't even imagine. And then when I'm done I'm going to devour his soul.)
Sonic growled and thrashed in growing fury.
(And then I'm going to take my time with everybody else in Knothole, starting with that cute little honey Amy Rose. She'll bleed, Sonic, she'll bleed bad.)
In a moment of heightened rage, Sonic managed to trip Cinos over backward, and he fell upon the dark hedgehog, holding him down. Cinos sent him images of all of his dear friends, beaten and mutilated in creative ways, and Sonic shook his head violently and screamed. With gritted teeth, he held Cinos in a choke-hold against the ground, and drove his fist into the dark hedgehog's face, again and again and again and again and again.
But Cinos was laughing. Howling laughter in fact. And it only made Sonic angrier.
(That's right, Sonic! Embrace the hatred! Embrace the violence! Embrace the call of evil! Your inhibitions are the last thing to go. Fall for me. It won't be long, now.)
Sonic pulled his fist back for another strike, but realised for the first time that there was no blood. Not here. And it seeded a concern in his mind, a kernal of insight.
(What's wrong? Come on, you have the upper hand! You just got your second wind! You're not getting cold feet, are you? Or have you finally decided to concede?)
You're stalling.
(Excuse me?)
We can't hurt each other here. This isn't how I'm supposed to beat you. You're only stalling me because you know that time is ticking over in the real world. The power is still flowing into you.
(You came all this way so that you could stand and fight me, to prove you're better than me. This is your chance, Sonic.)
I agree. But this isn't the way.
He stood up, and allowed Cinos to do the same. The two identical hedgehogs stood in the demolished city, facing each other. Cinos hissed at his twin.
(You're still so certain. I've shown you. Why do you persist, Sonic? After I've proven to you, again and again, that I am stronger and I will always beat you. What makes you so certain? What doubt remains? What makes you think that, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, good can still overcome evil?)
Sonic shrugged.
Faith.
(What?)
Let's have a little discussion, Cinos.
Cinos appeared wary, and Sonic could sense it in him. He wasn't afraid, per se, but he was treading lightly. He knew that, for maybe the first time in this entire journey, Sonic had severed his puppet strings. For the first time, Cinos didn't know what he was up to. He probed Sonic's mind for answers, but Sonic allowed the intrusion. He did not resist.
(Sure. Talk away. We've got all the time in the world, my brother.)
This Awakening. This joining of souls. I don't really understand it, but I think I know its purpose.
(Yes?)
Listen carefully.
(I'm all ears.)
You're right, Cinos. We're the same.
(Of course.)
Somewhere out in the world, there is a cave, and we are inside this cave. You are standing on a cliff overlooking a lake of molten rock. You are holding my hand, and I am dangling over the edge. Right?
Cinos was more wary, and he squinted at Sonic, probing his mind harder, but he found no method in his twin's investigation.
(That's right.)
But we are the same. You and I, two parts of the one whole. Only our souls, our minds, are divergent. When we agree, we are indistinguishable. Right?
(...)
Isn't that what you have been trying to tell me all along?
(So you agree?)
That we are the same.
(We are.)
Sonic and Cinos looked deeply into each other's eyes. Sonic stepped toward his twin, and Cinos stepped back.
Somewhere out in the world, there is a cave, Sonic repeated, and we are inside this cave, and we are the same. I am standing on a cliff. I am holding your hand, and you are dangling over the edge. He smiled. Right?
(What?)
XLIII
The lake of fire spread out under the two hedgehogs, vast and wide, more like an ocean. Sonic braced both of his feet on the rocky cliff and stood within the circle of five Runes, holding one arm out over the edge.
Cinos had a look of sheer terror on his face, an expression that Sonic had never seen him make, and he clutched Sonic's hand with a crushing grip as he hung wide over the edge, over the ocean of magma.
"What have you done?" he screamed, "Change it back!"
Sonic saw that Cinos was now riddled with all of Sonic's bullet wounds. He himself was intact. They had not only switched places, they had switched bodies. But the Whitewyrm that coiled out from the glowing Runes was now wrapped around the hedgehog who hung out over the edge.
That's because it's not attached to his body, Sonic realised, It's attached to his soul.
"What have you done, Sonic?" Cinos demanded again, and though he grappled for safety, he was still at the mercy of his twin, his weight bared entirely by those merged hands.
"I put things in perspective," Sonic replied, "It's the one flaw in your theory, Cinos. Your lack of morals makes you stronger in one way, but weaker in another. Weaker in the only way that counts."
Cinos scowled. "What you can do, I can do, brother. I'll change us back."
"No, you won't."
"I will defeat you!"
"No. You won't."
The dark hedgehog screamed and thrashed, murderous rage filling his eyes, but after a moment he calmed. He closed his eyes, perhaps to count to ten, and then opened them and stared placidly back at Sonic.
"So, that's the way it's going to be. It's just more reason for you to join with me, Sonic. After all, we are brothers. We complement each other. We both have strengths to cover each other's weaknesses. We could be so strong together! You know that you want to, you've always known."
Sonic looked down at Cinos' body, the body that used to be his own. Riddled with bullets, bleeding to death, dangling over oblivion. Cinos coughed up a lungful of blood and stared at it, horrified. His folly of beliefs had come back to him tenfold, earning him a destroyed, dying body. But he was still absorbing the power of the Runes, even now, and if it was allowed to continue then his wounds would not kill him. They would not matter at all.
"Yours is an attractive lifestyle," Sonic told him, "But I reject it. I will always reject it. And the process you have begun, I can not allow you to finish. In the interest of the people I care about, the people you have exploited, and every resident of both of the worlds you intend to destroy, I must stop you."
"Fall for me, Sonic."
"Sorry, Cinos, but I'm afraid it's you who is going to fall."
Sonic pulled back, let go, rejected Cinos with all of his strength. Their hands uncoupled, pulled apart, pulled away. Cinos, suspended by nothing, fell into oblivion. The Whitewyrm stayed with him until the end, wrapped around him like a bunjee-cord, but it did him no good.
"Fine!" the dark hedgehog screamed as he fell, "Take it! Take it all! Have it and choke on it!"
Sonic didn't watch, but he heard the splash. Cinos fell into the lake of fire, and with a belch of yellow flame it devoured him utterly.
XLIV
And then, Sonic died.
At least, that was the way it felt. He knew the very instant of his evil twin's death, he felt it in every cell in his body, felt it in his very soul, and the sudden severance of the close mental connection they had shared almost struck him down. For a moment, he thought that it would kill him. For a moment, he thought that he was dead.
I am dead, his mind told him.
He felt Cinos' demise so intimately that he swore he shared it. But it was the strength of his soul, a strength more considerable than that of Cinos, that convinced him otherwise. His world reformed itself, his reality returned, and he saw that he was still alive. Still alive, still the fastest thing that was.
The Runes of Awakening blazed on in their white fire, and the Whitewyrm flailed and thrashed angrily in the air, bounced off the walls, whipped and snapped about like a wounded snake. The process was not supposed to be interrupted. The soul it was attached to had been extinguished, and the Wyrm needed somebody else into whom to inject the energies of all reality. It made its choice.
Before Sonic could escape, the Whitewyrm snapped around him like a whip, coiled itself around his every limb, every part of him inside and out. The force of it knocked him through the air, and the powerful spiritual entity threw him about like a rag doll before it slammed him into the ground and began to do its work.
"No!" Sonic screamed, and tried to abort it, tried to escape it, but the Whitewyrm was unsympathetic to his pleas and held him in place. This was going to go ahead, it demanded, and it didn't care who was recipient to its powers. It had been summoned, and it would not be summoned in vain. One does not open Pandora's box half way.
It was now that Sonic understood the paradox of the Old People's prophecy, how they had seen a future that had been nevertheless unwritten. There had not been a single possible outcome, but two, like a fork in the road, and both outcomes involved a blue hedgehog standing in the red heart of Mobius and inheriting the world. Sonic had made the choice, but it had been a joke choice, because now he himself was going to be the one who undid reality.
"I don't want this!" he screamed, "Take it back and keep it, I don't want it!" But it was no good. The Runes injected their terrible energy into him, and he felt himself rising higher, ever higher, surpassing his mortality, surpassing time and space and everything else.
Sonic, unwilling but exhausted, finally submitted.
XLV
"Sonic."
The blue hedgehog opened his eyes, and saw only white. Lying on his back, he surveyed his surroundings, but found there was nothing to survey. He lay alone in a formless, colourless ether. He didn't even cast a shadow.
Somebody stood above him, looking down. Sonic sat up and looked the other up and down. It was Kethriel Rosethorne. The elder hedgehog smiled and saluted.
"Howdy, kiddo."
"Hey," Sonic replied. "How's things?"
"Things are... a little slow."
Sonic nodded and stood up. He looked around again at the boundless universe of white.
"Well, I guess this means I'm dead, right? Are you here to usher me through the pearly gates?"
"Actually, Sonic, you're very much alive. More alive than you were before, in fact. Uh, if that makes sense."
"It doesn't really."
"Well, I'll put it this way. How would you like a great big chilli-dog with all the extras?"
"Is that an offer? Because it's cruel to taunt." But Sonic noticed, even as he was speaking, that he was holding one. An enormous bun, dripping with meat and sauce, was nested comfortably in his hand. He felt the warmth of it, and it seemed almost like it had always been there.
"You took the power of the Runes into you," Kethriel explained.
"Oh, yeah. That."
"And now, you're here."
"Where, exactly, is here?"
Kethriel looked around. "Well, technically it's not anywhere. Or, it's everywhere. Or, both mean the same thing, under the circumstances."
"And what are those circumstances?" Sonic looked at the food in his hand warily, as though it might be poisoned, and realised that he wasn't the least bit hungry. He imagined it away, and it was gone.
"This," Kethriel said, "Is your clean slate. You've been granted the power to remake the world, Sonic."
"The whole world?"
"The whole world. Atom to galaxy. All of reality is your canvas, it's an artist's dream."
Sonic laughed. "I'm no artist, Keth."
"Well, you are now. So, what's it gonna be, kiddo? You've got a lot of work ahead of you. Six whole days of it, but you can take Sunday off if you like."
"I-" Sonic stammered, and stared blankly into the white nothingness, "I don't have a clue."
"A little daunting?"
"I wouldn't even know where to begin."
Kethriel smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.
"Whatever you want, and it's yours," he said, "I mean, just think of what that means. You get to decide what happens. You get to see justice prevail, for everyone who has ever been wronged in the world. Just imagine - you can give Sally the throne, her rightful inheritance, bring Mobitropolis back to its glory. Tails can know a real life, grow up in a real family, he never needs to see a gangster or a gun for as long as he lives. You can give Knuckles his people back, rebuild his island. The Arack Empire never needs to opress a single mobian, and Robotnik never even needs to exist at all. Whatever you want, Sonic. You can make everything the way it should be."
Sonic's eyes sparkled. "I really could, couldn't I?"
"You really could."
Sonic closed his eyes and imagined it. Everything could be set right, everything that he had fought for over the past years, he now had the power to see it happen. The Freedom Fighters could finally see the victory that had eluded them for so long. Everybody in this world plagued with misery could get what they deserved, and evil could be made never to prevail.
Nobody need ever be hurt again.
"It's all up to you, Sonic."
Sonic looked up at his old friend and smiled from ear to ear. His eyes were filled with hope and optimism. Everything was going to be all right.
"I'm going to do it," he said. "I'm going to make everything the way it should be."
XLVI
Footsteps broke the silence of the ethereal red caves, foreign sounds in a place where nobody ever walked. Three sets of feet, tourists in the dark heart of Mobius.
The stone walls flickered with warm colours cast by the flames and the magma that flowed here and warmed the planet with its inextinguishable heat. Tall shadows danced against the wall.
"I say. He certainly did mess this place up, didn't he."
"Look, there he is! Over there!"
"But which one is he? We should be cautious, my dear lizard, after all, we have made this mistake before."
"No, it's him. I'm sure it's him!"
"Yes. There is no question. It is him."
"But is he... alive?"
Sonic opened his eyes; blinked once, twice, and stared at the ceiling. Red light flickered on the stones above, and on the faces that stared down at him like angels from heaven. His friends, all alive, all well.
He sat up and looked around the cavern. He had been lying right where he had stood when the Runes had taken him, but the circle of stones were gone. In their place were five small pools of molten rock. The Runes of Awakening, conduits for an unfathomable amount of energy, had completely melted away.
Sonic looked up at the three others standing over him, eyes wide and fearful.
"Has anything changed?" he asked, "Is anything different? Has anything changed?"
"No, Sonic... nothing's changed, everything's the same as it was."
Sonic smiled and lay down again.
"Then everything is the way it should be."
He passed out.
XLVII
The smell of coffee and cake was a welcome sensation after the harrowing ordeal of Sol-Hayyim. It was Kim's philosophy that anybody who was forced to endure that wretched place for any length of time had already paid a more than adequate price for a cup of joe and a slice of cheesecake. Sonic was inclined to agree.
He looked out over the streets of Meath, busy people milling about, doing what they did every day - living, loving, hurting and feeling. Sonic intended to do a lot more of all four before his life was over, and he hoped it wouldn't be over for quite a while. His purpose on Mobius was far from finished - he had a feeling it was only beginning.
The purposes of his new friends, also. Fate had not chosen this to be their final adventure, for all had escaped the clutches of death by inches. Even Niles, who seemed surely to have met with an inescapable demise, had averted it by using the last of his strength to dive into one of the giant water pipes that had been recently emptied after Cinos' meddlings. The Arack soldiers, encapsulated in their bulky CEC battle suits, hadn't a hope of pursuing. It seemed that everything that happened had indeed happened for some kind of reason. Sonic was overjoyed that it had.
Lifting the cup to his mouth hurt, and he removed one of his gloves to look again at the bandaged hands underneath, hands almost shredded. They would heal, but they would scar.
"You certainly did a number on those hands of yours," Niles said from across the table. The fox's leg, also bandaged, was propped up on another chair as he sipped at his cup of earl gray, finger pointing in the air like a bad stereotype.
"I didn't," Sonic replied, replacing his glove with tender care.
"Oh, that's right," Espio said with a chuckle. He talked with his mouth full of cake, one eyebrow poking up. "They're Cinos' hands, right? 'Cause you switched bodies."
"That's right."
"Uh-huh. So tell me, Sonic, I forgot, was this before or after you ascended and were given the chance to remake the universe?"
"Before."
"Of course."
Sonic laughed and took another bite of the best cake he had ever tasted. He thought he could eat the whole cake if they gave it to him. He and his three companions sat in silence for a while, but it was Espio who spoke again.
"But hey. Supposing it's true. Supposing you really were given all of this power. There's something I don't get."
Sonic looked up at him. "What's that?"
"Why did you turn it down?"
This was a question that even Sonic had spent a considerable amount of time pondering, but ultimately the answer was simple. He looked over his friends, and the people who lived their lives in this town, and knew that there was no other choice he would have made. For all the people who lived in this world, hurting and loving, living and dying, there was not a thing that he could think of, not a single tiny thing in all the world, that he wanted to change.
"My place is here," he said, "I am what I am and I do what I do. It's not my job to be God - that position is already taken. It's a hard world, I know it's hard. But it's just fine."
Roxanna Destra sat beside Espio, stirring her coffee but never drinking from it. She had never liked the taste of the hot, bitter stuff, and found its popularity remarkable.
"How are you feeling?" Sonic asked her.
She nodded. Out of the four of them, it was she who had taken the severest beating. Cinos hadn't killed her, being that she served a greater purpose to him alive, but that didn't stop him from thrashing into her. She wore bandaids and bandages, all superficial wounds and bruises, no breaks or internal injury. It hurt, but she would heal. She had treated enough injuries to know it.
"So what about the antiverse?" Espio asked, "This supposed parallel universe you're always talking about? What's to stop more crackpots from flooding here with world domination fantasies?"
"The Runes are no more," Roxanna replied, "The gateway is closed. There will be no more travel to and from the Lower Realm. That rotting place can rot alone." She turned to Sonic. "I thank you, Sonic," she said, "My people thank you. Your story will become legend when it is heard, it will pass down from generation to generation until the end of time. Rest assured that you have secured your immortality regardless."
"I did what I had to do," Sonic replied, "And I'll more than likely do it again next week. Cinos wasn't the only bad seed out there."
"Even so," Roxanna said, "You will always be welcome in our land. Septennia is always open to you."
"Thanks. For now, I'm more anxious to see New Knothole again. More than anything. What about you two?"
"Living in the wilderness," Niles said, "Among the animals. Sitting in the dirt drinking horrible tea and being bitten by mosquitoes, like a camping trip that never ends. Oh, I can't wait."
"I'm stoked, Sonic," Espio added, free of the fox's sarcasm, "It sounds like heaven."
Sonic smiled. "I know. It's going to feel good to have my feet planted on the ground again." He shifted his gaze to the horizon, toward the west, where the Great Forest spread out somewhere beneath the red setting sun.
"But first," he said, "We've got some ground to cover. Rest up, guys, we set off first thing in the morning."
"More walking," Niles muttered.
"Sure. After all, the journey's just as much fun as the arrival."
CINOS:
The Last Interlude
I've travelled the world from sea to sea and seen remarkable things,
The falls of empires, the rise of mountains, the legacies of kings,
But never again in all my life have I been able to find,
A shadow-thing so fallen that his soul had never shined.
He had no heart, this cursed wretch, nor empathy had he,
He didn't have a single trace of kindness I could see,
This creature didn't care for the moral way to behave,
And in his face the stony absence of the silent grave.
I met him on my travels once, I wish I never had,
For staring into that abyss can drive a person mad,
He danced with thoughts of murder, power, lust and hope defiled,
And all at once it came to me, this is the Devil's child.
I asked, "Can you help me to understand you, Blackened Soul?
Why is it that your heart has been replaced by a dark hole?"
But he would not reply to me, this creature full of sin,
He only looked at me, his face contorted with a grin.
I said, "I must inquire as to how someone can fall,
So far as to desire the power to destroy all?"
He still did not reply with words, but in his eyes I saw,
The blackened pit residing in the depths of evil's maw.
I've travelled this globe all over, oh the lessons I have learned,
The cultures I have visited, great empires overturned,
But what a lesson I have learned from one whose name was Death,
Who just wanted to devour until there was nothing left.