Chapter 11: A Deal with the Devil

Adora woke standing atop a hill. A breeze caressed her cheek, ran through her hair, and made the leaves and branches in the far away trees rustle and dance. Large, four-legged animals with spotted hides lumbered in the distance, occasionally dipping wide heads levered by thick necks to graze at the grass underfoot.

"Hello?" she asked, speaking aloud what she assumed would come out as only a thought in her mind. "Anyone there?"

Someone chuckled behind her and she turned. A tall woman garbed in white and gold stood before her, shoulders shaking with laughter.

"Hello Adora," She Ra said. "Do you recognize me?"

Adora blinked. "She Ra? Of course I recognize you. How could I not?" She frowned. "Am I dead?"

She Ra's eyes shaded with sadness. "No. No, you aren't dead. I'm protecting you from a memory right now, actually."

Adora frowned. "You're protecting me…from a memory?"

"Yes. It's quite an unpleasant one, really. Even with death, there are much better ways to have gone than what this person experienced. Unfortunately, while I can protect you from the memory itself, I can't protect you from what killed her. Not fully, and not for much longer anyways."

"I…I don't understand."

She Ra narrowed her eyes at Adora, and her entire demeanor shifted. "Well, I guess that puts us on an even playing field then, doesn't it?" she asked. "Because I don't understand either. Why did you choose to forsake myself and the sword, Adora? Why did you destroy it?"

Adora felt like she had been slapped. "Fors—…I didn't forsake anything. The Heart was going to destroy the entire planet. Light Hope was going to force me, I had no choice but to—"

"No choice but to what?" She Ra asked. "Someone else was going to force you to use your sword? Your power? And you decided the best course of action was to break the sword turn your back on that power altogether?"

"Yes…no, wait. That's not fair. That's…" Adora frowned, suddenly unsure. She huffed, feeling attacked. "I didn't just turn my back on it. What would you have had me do instead? Let the planet explode?"

"I would have had you control the power," She Ra said, emphasizing her words. "I would have had you think to your friends and those you love. I would have had you dig deep and refuse to let it be used without your consent, not turn your back on it altogether because it overwhelmed you. You have forsaken me, Adora. You are not the person I thought you were."

"I wasn't about to be some pawn in the First One's schemes! You think I turned my back on you, fine. We can agree to disagree on that." Adora crossed her arms. "I refuse to power the Heart of Etheria. I refuse to be their weapon, and if that means I've 'forsaken' you and my powers, then so be it."

"Do you even know what that weapon is destined for?"

"It doesn't matter what it's destined for," Adora said, jutting her chin out. "If it's powerful enough to destroy Etheria then it's powerful enough to destroy other planets, kill trillions. I don't want anything to do with it. I will not be responsible for genocide."

"Foolish girl, it does not matter what the weapon can do, it only matters what you choose to do with it! I am far older than the First Ones, and so is the enemy that I—that we—are destined to face." She took a step toward Adora. "Mara, in her ignorance, nearly cost us everything stranding the planet. And now you, when confronted with the notion that there is more to the Heart than you are aware of, wish to push your head further into the sand and stand behind a flimsy moral argument you made up with less than half the facts to begin with?"

She Ra seemed to have grown taller in her rage, and Adora flinched at how sudden it had come. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the landscape grew dark as black clouds rolled across the sky. Adora cleared her throat and tried to keep calm. This wasn't how she thought this conversation would play out, not that she thought it would have come at all in the first place.

"Enemy?" she asked. "You're not talking about the Horde, are you?" Those words made even less sense when she spoke them than they did in her head, and she couldn't escape the feeling she was just grasping at straws to say anything back.

"The Horde is part of the reason there is still a galaxy left to save at all," She Ra said. Some of the tension left her face, until she looked more sad than angry. "I only hope there is enough time."

"I don't understand," Adora said, shaking her head. "Enough time for what? What enemy? Please, tell me what's going on."

A heavy presence blanketed the area, like something sinister was trying to smother them. She Ra's face turned frantic. She took another step forward. "It's found us. My magic can last only so long without your cooperation. It was only a matter of time."

She took another step forward, reaching, and instinct forced Adora a step back.

"Tell me what's going on." Adora said. None of this felt right.

"Be brave. Remember, your friends believe in you and so do I, even after everything." A mental image of Bow, Glimmer, Angella, Micah, the princesses—everyone, flashed in front of her eyes as She Ra took another faltering step forward. "I will still be with you."

She disappeared, and Adora finally realized how dark it had become. The clouds had been letting up when she last paid attention, but now it was practically pitch black.

"She Ra?" Adora said, looking around. "Where did you go? Where am I?" Fear nearly paralyzed her when she reached out with both hands to feel about and couldn't see them. How could it have gotten so dark she couldn't see her own hands, groping about in front of her face?

"Hey Adora," said a voice behind her.

Adora whirled and saw two eyes, one blue and one yellow, staring back at her. "Catra?"

"Who else would it be?" Catra asked.

Adora frowned. Her voice didn't sound quite right. "What are you doing here? And where is 'here', exactly?" She looked around once more and still couldn't make anything out except Catra's eyes.

"You don't know?" Catra asked. "You should have listened."

"Should have listened to what?" She blinked, hoping that would help her eyes adjust. "Of course I don't know where we are. I can't see anything."

Lightning struck high in the sky and illuminated their surroundings. Adora gasped, finally realizing what about Catra's voice just seemed off: a dark void had swallowed the right half of her face and body. She looked as she had when she first chased Adora through the portal world.

"You should have listened when Light Hope told you to forget about me," Catra said. "You should have listened when she told you to let go."

Adora took a step back. "Catra, what are you—"

"You should have listened, Adora. I'm a distraction. I throw you off, make you second guess yourself." Another crack of lightning spouted overhead and illuminated her in time for Adora to see her snap forward and grab her wrist.

"Why are you saying these things?" Adora tried to pull away, but Catra held firm. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt she was forgetting something important. It hit her the next moment, and she successfully yanked her arm away with a snarl. "You threatened Glimmer. We were going to take the Emperor down, but were waiting for the both of you."

"There we go," Catra said. Another flash of lightning illuminated the grin spread across her face.

"You forced our hand….we had to surrender. What the hell happened, Catra? You still went ahead and chose to help the Emperor after he kept you hostage up on the citadel? I saw what you looked like in that cell, you looked miserable." Tears stung Adora's eyes and she blinked them away. "What did he tell you to get you on his side? I thought we finally found common ground. I thought…I thought…"

"You thought what? That we'd be on the same side and fight together again? After you berated me and called me stupid?"

Adora opened her mouth just to close it without saying a word, her response already dead before it left her lips. She recalled Catra's words from their argument in the throne room, and they gave new meaning to She Ra's warning from earlier.

Taline isn't here to conquer the planet, she's here to help. There's some sort of…enemy the Empire is fighting against and Prime needs her help fighting it. Etheria, the Heart…they need it.

The enemy Taline had mentioned to Catra…the one Adora so brazenly mocked her for believing…could that be…?

"It doesn't matter," Catra said, pulling Adora out of her thoughts. "Like I said, I'm a distraction. I make you second guess yourself. I hurt you."

Adora shook her head. "Catra, no. I shouldn't have dismissed you like that back in the throne room, I just—"

"How much more control over your powers would you have had if you didn't spend half your time in the Rebellion trying to hedge against me?"

Adora gaped at her. "I…I don't—"

"Do you think you would have had enough control to stop the Heart from firing prematurely instead of having to shatter the sword?"

"I don't know," Adora said, finally confident in at least one answer.

Another flash of lighting. This time it hung in the air as if frozen in time, illuminating their surroundings in harsh white light. Adora glanced about and couldn't help the second gasp that tore free when she finally saw what was around them.

The surrounding greenery and trees and grazing animals had gone. In their place, lay a wasteland: dead, dry grass dotted the landscape, scattered among piles of bones as tall as people. A ruined playground lay at the bottom of the hill, rust and mold eating away at the fixtures. A city skyline loomed in the distance, the holes and chunks missing from dilapidated skyscraper husks telling her that everyone in that once gleaming, sprawling metropolis was long dead.

"What is this?" Adora clapped her hand to her mouth and felt tears trickle down her face.

"This is you, Adora," Catra said. "This is what happens when you say 'I don't know' to the things you should know, just like you should have known to listen to Light Hope when she told you to let me go. You would have seen this coming you know? If you weren't so fixated on me."

Adora turned to Catra. "This can't be right. This isn't real. There are no cities like this on Etheria, this hasn't happened yet."

Catra gave a small, sad smile and glanced away. "Always the optimist, aren't you? Did you already forget we aren't in Despondos anymore? We're in the wider galaxy now, Adora. Well…a galaxy. One of many. This has already happened, on a world very far away. You were too late to stop it."

Adora felt like she battled for every breath with the way her chest constricted. "How do you know all of this? This isn't you."

Catra looked back at her and quirked her eyebrow, as if confused by the question. "Look to the stars and you'll see it too. You'll see exactly what I see."

Adora looked up. The lightning bolt still hung frozen in the sky. "I can't see anything. It's too bright, and the clouds are in the way."

"Not those stars, idiot. Look at me."

Adora looked back at Catra, not at all sure what she was trying to get at, when she saw small pinpricks of light emanating from the void-kissed parts of her body. "Is that…are those stars?" she asked, leaning in closer to get a better look.

And then she fell.

Fell through the void into the vastness of space, spinning and twirling, feeling like a log thrashed about and carried downstream in a whitewater torrent. She screwed her eyes shut, casting silent prayers in her mind for everything to just, for once, start making sense again. The vertigo pulling her in seemingly ten directions at once finally subsided, and she opened her eyes, this time looking at a beautiful, rotating universe that stretched out infinitely in front of her.

Adora saw everything. It was as if the atoms of creation itself were her eyes and ears. She saw the lumbering beasts from earlier, grazing atop the surface of the planet before its demise. She saw that planet hugging its central star in a tight orbit as part of a larger solar system, and saw that solar system following trillions of other systems as they rocketed a roughly elliptical orbit around the greater turn of one of the galaxy's arms. And from there, she saw trillions upon trillions of other galaxies, just like that one, expanding ever outward. Some collided with one another in a majestic cosmic dance, while others at the outer fringes of reality were growing dim, then finally snuffing out like a candle at the end of its wax.

She saw countless people, dead. Bodies piled higher than castle parapets, children without their parents and parents missing their children. The balance of life in this reality had tipped. It overwhelmed her for a moment, witnessing all these things, before a strange peace blanketed her. She realized then that she had already felt and seen this all before, every time she transformed into She Ra. Only, she had always experienced it as a filtered, concentrated force back then. This felt raw and unfiltered. Amazing.

A small cluster of stars in the center of one of the galaxies flickered and went dark. That darkness spread, rapidly, until the galaxy itself ceased to exist, and Adora frowned.

That isn't supposed to happen yet, a thought told her. Not for a world so young.

Scattered pockets of light in another nearby galaxy flickered and dimmed. Those pockets grew and collided with one another until, like a cancer, nothingness engulfed more than a third of that galaxy's stars.

Adora felt a chill at seeing that, and she peered closer.

All the stars surrounding her blinked out of existence at once like she had suddenly fallen head first into a black hole. Her unease from earlier grew into unrestrained terror. She couldn't tell up from down or left from right. There were no stars, no nebulae, nothing to orient her. She couldn't tell if she was spinning and hurtling through space or if she had stagnated and stilled in the void.

And then she felt it: a presence, a distinct entity, separate from the vast nothingness, full of malice and anger and hostility. A great face appeared in the darkness and fixed its eyes on her. And when it spoke, it was as if the cosmic background radiation of reality itself had been given voice, projecting a stream of blown out white-noise directly into her head.

" a", it said.

She gasped, and ragged sobs tore from her throat when she fell, again. Her palms were chained together, and they hit something cold and hard—a floor. She wasn't in the void anymore. She was back in ruins of Horde Prime's throne room, although when she had come back and for how long she had been away, she couldn't tell.

Her friends were still there with her too, including Catra, who no longer seemed to be consumed by the blackness as she had been earlier. All of them sat nearby with hands still bound together. It seemed no time at all had passed, but the image of that…thing still burned in her mind and its voice continued to echo in her ears, a reminder that what she had seen hadn't at all been just a dream.

Taline stood off to the side, trembling. Blood poured out of the gashes in her cheek, staining her uniform and dripping to the floor. Horde Prime approached her with a somber expression, and Taline immediately dropped to both knees in front of him.

"What have you done?" Prime asked. "Did you just…" his voice trailed off. Adora couldn't shake how strange it felt seeing someone like the Emperor at such a loss for words.

"No, my Lord," Taline said, shaking her head and keeping her eyes trained to a spot next to Prime's feet. "It was only a memory."

"Who's memory?"

Taline didn't immediately answer, and he repeated himself with more force. She still did not speak, but her shoulders began to shake and Prime must have inferred the answer, because he grew enraged.

"I ordered her forgotten," he said. "The mere mention of her name is forbidden. You dare defy me by subjecting my court and I to the memories of a damned woman?"

"She gave her life with the rest of them at Corynth's command." Taline's voice was hoarse with emotion. "She helped stem the tide for as long as possible, but the Barrier is failing and the Beast is coming through once more. We need the weapon, and if it is indeed true that we need all the princesses alive for it to work, then we cannot risk killing them."

Taline finally looked up, and she raised a shaky fist toward the Emperor as if presenting an offering. Slowly, she uncurled her fingers, revealing a dull red crystal, cracks and fissures running across its facets.

"She is gone, Lord Prime. Those memories were the last thing of hers that existed in this world, siphoned from her body before it was burned. Even still, the mere memory of the Beast is strong enough to transcend time and space and speak to us as if it were really there. Can we really afford to carelessly throw away lives if this is what we are to fight?"

Horde Prime reached out and plucked the crystal from Taline's hand. He looked down at it as if it were an egg about to hatch a creature that would attack him.

"Please, my Lord," Taline said. "I know It won't be enough to pay for their transgressions, but punish me in their place. I will relinquish my claim on this planet when a suitable replacement is agreed upon, and I will openly accept whatever punishment you deem necessary in their stead. Just please…spare them so we may research the weapon. I beg you."

Adora saw movement off to the side and looked. Catra sat there next to a pale and unconscious Glimmer, mouth open and eyes wide in unblinking surprise. She looked on the verge of saying something.

Anger welled in Adora's chest, then. She wanted to yell at her and taunt her for having such a brazen reaction about someone who, moments ago, threatened to kill them all if she didn't surrender. Instead, she kept quiet and simmered in her fury. Catra closed her mouth and averted her eyes in…was that shame?

You are so overwhelmed with emotion you can't even speak? Adora thought. That's never stopped you before. Where're the smart quips now? The incessant, smug comments about everything and anything? Where'd they go, Catra?

Adora stopped herself and looked away, suddenly feeling shameful herself. She had never felt this angry before—not about anything and especially not toward Catra, even after the portal incident. The rage and pent-up hurt scared her almost as much as that creature in the void had.

Prime laughed, still standing over Taline. "Even after all these years you are still mocking me," he said, speaking to the crystal as he studied it. He squeezed it in his hand until it shattered into a fine dust, then turned his palm to the side and let the pieces tumble to the floor. "Take them to their cells," he said to his clones before turning to look Taline in the eye. "I believe you and I have some negotiating to do."

The clones started grabbing people and dragging them off. No one struggled. They came for Adora last, and when she turned to look at Taline, still on both knees as the clones dragged her past, she saw how utterly broken the other woman looked. Tears mixed with the blood on the floor, and Taline gathered as many broken pieces of crystal as she could in her trembling hands, all while Prime looked on.