Chapter 27: An Awakening

Adora sprinted down hallways and around hairpin turns in the Crystal Castle. The flood of spider bots chasing just behind roared like a tsunami.

I can't believe my own castle is attacking me, she thought. Her feet slid along the floor when she took a corner too hard and she almost slammed sideways into a wall. Why is my own castle attacking me!?

She saw Kalanthe ahead, her staff under his arm and the crystal he stole in the other hand as he sprinted. The speed with which he moved earlier during their fight wasn't just a figment of her imagination—he truly was fast. Despite his head start, she wasn't able to gain on him despite the years she spent on her grueling training regimen. In fact, he might have been putting even more distance between them. She'd see him disappear around one corner or fly up a flight of stairs, and when she'd round the same corner or clear the same staircase, he'd be back in her vision but even smaller and farther away.

The halls of the castle were dark, the emergency alarm lights casting everything in a low, ominous red. But despite the low visibility, Adora could readily and easily see Kalanthe against the backdrop. If she didn't know any better, she would have said he was glowing. It was subtle, but she swore she could see it, outlining him clearly against the darkness.

The hallway opened up to the outside. Dozens of carriers and dreadnoughts orbited in formation high above. Stars and the moonlight from Etheria's twelve satellites bathed Adora in a soft light when she blasted full tilt out onto the terrace near the top of the castle.

That light filtered through a pergola overhead, supported on either side by stone pillars lined up like an honor guard. It cast eerie, dancing shadows on her skin as she ran. The deluge of spider bots nipping at her heels continued, although the sound changed tone. It somehow sounded more overbearing, despite that sound no longer bouncing around the enclosed space of the hallway.

A flash of red high and to the right caught her attention and Adora looked up. There, balancing on tripod legs atop the roof of the terrace's central turret tower, stood a particularly massive sentry bot. Its middle eye glowed with energy and tracked Kalanthe from high above as he ran ahead of her.

"Hey!" Adora said, waving her arms and hoping her voice carried far enough for him to hear. "Watch out! I think that thing is going to blast you!"

Kalanthe gave no indication he heard her and Adora grit her teeth. When she looked back up, the sentry was no longer tracking him. It was aiming for her.

Her vision saturated as a tight beam of energy shot out of the sentry's eye, flashing everything red for a split second. Adora couldn't see its trajectory, but she ducked her head low out of instinct and felt it just miss the top of her head. A pillar to her left exploded from the impact and wobbled. The pergola creaked and bent, before snapping altogether. Adora zig-zagged her course forward as giant planks of splintered wood careened down and struck the stone underfoot, like hail slamming to the earth. One caught her shoulder and Adora yelped in pain.

That broken pillar turned into a domino that crashed into its neighbor just ahead of her. A crack raced from the base of that second pillar to the top. It too started to fall just as Adora zagged in its direction. A jolt of adrenaline shot through her the moment she realized why its shadow grew suddenly and alarmingly larger and darker around her.

Her feet tangled. She fell forward, sliding to a stop just under the pillar as it toppled to the floor. She watched it get closer with wide eyes, then squeezed them shut and crossed her arms in front of her face. Any second and it'd slam into her, squashing her like a bug. Killing her.

Death never came.

Adora cracked an eye open and saw the pillar hovering above her as if held by invisible hands. She blinked in awe for all of two seconds before the storm of spider bots chasing from behind surged in to overwhelm her. The pillar shot forward, scraping along the ground, breaking into separate boulders and crushing several dozen bots caught in its wake.

It wasn't enough. Dozens more of them still spilled around and over the now ruined chunks of rock and granite, gunning for her like a river. With another yelp of surprise, Adora picked herself up off the floor and started forward at another dead sprint. Her ankle didn't support her when she put weight on it. She cried out in pain and nosedived to the floor once again just as the first bot reached her.

Its icepick legs dug into her skin as it crawled onto her back. Adora screamed, although the pain she felt dig into her like a scorching needle somehow killed her ability to hear. She reached around behind her to yank it off and throw it forward. She got one, two, three limping steps before a half-dozen bots converged on her anew.

"Get off, get off, get off!"

She twisted and rammed her fist into the side of one of them, not caring that the metal of its body bruised and cut her knuckles, only that it tumbled off her and died. She twisted again, punching and hurling away as many as she could get her hands on, scrambling backwards and away from them. It was no use. When she got rid of one, three more came to take its place. They nipped and bit and scratched and peeled away at her, and no matter how vigorously she struggled to get away, they kept coming. Adora thought she'd go mad from the pain.

One got up and sat right on her chest, pinning her flat to the ground. Adora got her scratched and bloody arms up and gripped the insides of its pincer-mouth as it lunged for her throat, snapping over and over again. She struggled, straining and pushing to keep it away from her neck as it death rattled at her.

Her staff came flying from out of sight and impaled the bot clean through its center. It seized a moment, its pincers baying and snapping uncontrolled, and then it slumped down on top of her. Adora whined from the effort as she half-pushed, half-slid it off her, and she breathed deep when the weight finally abated from her chest.

Something didn't feel right. In another moment, Adora realized what: the sound of the bots rushing her had abated entirely, and she was no longer set upon by an avalanche of them trying to kill her. She pulled her head up off the floor and looked downrange. Hundreds of bots floated above the terrace floor, kicking uselessly about with their legs in the air like they were trying to swim.

Kalanthe is a mage, Adora thought with a sudden burst of inspiration. This and the pillar from earlier suddenly made sense. And if he had been using his magic to subtly speed his movements, that explained the fighting skill too—how he could move in ways that weren't readable. She looked the floating mass of bugs over.

Runes, she thought. There were always runes, so where were they now?

When she squinted and still found nothing on the bots, she angled her head up-range instead and found the answer.

Kalanthe glowed with brilliant light. Ley lines stretched and pulsed across his skin much like the way the princesses glowed when the Heart first powered on. His eyes were like pits of starlight. Adora thought she might get sucked through into another reality if she looked at them for any longer than a moment.

He himself is the rune, she thought, amazed at how different magic could manifest from person to person.

The sentry bot from earlier powered its beam eye once more and recoiled when it fired again, this time at Kalanthe. The beam impacted a barrier he had somehow erected around him without even moving. It deflected at an angle, and sliced through a sizeable swathe of the spiderbots still swimming fruitlessly above Adora. They all exploded in turn, one after the other, and showered her with gears and springs and splatters of oil.

She heard another roar in the distance and worried their fighting had awakened something fearsome deep within the castle. Then, a ship rose over the far edge of the terrace, casting floodlights down on them and making Adora squint against the brightness. Kalanthe had been reduced to a silhouette against the light.

A missile sprouted from the ship. It pigtailed through the air before slamming into the sentry bot atop the tower. A dozen more missiles fired loose, screaming through the air before making short work of the remaining bots that hadn't already been destroyed. Two more missiles shot past and slammed into the exit they came through, barricading the only hallway leading into or out of the terrace. Kalanthe seemed intent on preventing any more bots from following them, just in case.

Adora laid her head back down on the ground and sighed. She was safe. No more impending death from her own castle trying to murder her because it forgot who she was. Out of the top corner of her vision, she saw the ship rotate mid-air and touch down. With the light no longer shining on them, she saw Kalanthe, no longer glowing, head for a ramp leading into the hold of the ship that had just opened up.

"Wait," Adora said, trying to call out to him. Her voice came out as a strained croak. "Wait, don't go."

She rolled onto her stomach and pushed into a kneeling position. Her adrenaline was already waning, and the weight of her injuries piled on top now that she could fully feel them.

"You can't leave!"

Kalanthe locked eyes with her, and then he turned and disappeared inside the ship. The ramp rose slowly, as if daring her to do something about it. She heard the engines begin to build once again.

"No…stop!"

Her body didn't want to cooperate, but she forced it. She forced herself to her feet. Forced herself to take one staggering step after another. Forced herself to begin to jog, then sprint. She pumped her legs faster and harder despite her ankle screaming at her that it couldn't take any more abuse.

The engines spooled quicker, kicking up a small dust storm around the ship. The flaps on the wings extended and retracted, like a bird prepping for flight.

Her ankle twisted again and she crashed to the floor.

Move, Adora, she thought to herself. Get up. You have to get up!

Something buzzed at her wrist and she glanced down. Her PDA, scratched and busted almost beyond recognition, had come to life. Whatever phenomenon blocking any signal from reaching her when she first tried to use it had gone, and all the messages she had missed in the interim pinged over and over again. Messages from Bow. Several missed calls.

I got your text, he wrote. Where are you?

Another message: Angella checked your room. Your PDA and gauntlet and staff are gone and you aren't there. Please tell me you aren't at the castle already?

Yet another: Adora? Pick up! Entrapta told me the castle just exploded. Are you alright?

The ship pulled away from the ground.

Get up now! Her mind screamed at her.

The PDA continued to buzz on her arm as more messages come in. New texts from Angella and Entrapta now, and even more messages from Bow. They were minutes away, but wouldn't get there in time to help her stop the intruder from leaving. They were too late.

She fought with her body that refused to move, and her mind turned to her friends as she watched the craft slowly rise—watched the doors of her failure continue to close.

Thoughts of Bow came, images of him training relentlessly day after day to perfect his archery, tinkering with new tech that would allow him to be a fearsome foe on the battlefield; he had sworn to never go down again as quickly as he had when he last fought Catra. He still had faith in her. Adora felt like she was failing him somehow, unable to have that same faith in herself.

There was Glimmer, off in the galaxy on some alien planet, fighting on the front lines against the Beast to evacuate and save as many people from populated cities as possible. All the stories she had shared with Adora over the years…how terrifying it could be out there. What was Adora still doing on Etheria except stagnating?

She thought of Entrapta, working tirelessly to so that they'd be one step closer to stopping the Beast's relentless advance. This Kalanthe person had managed to do what she struggled to achieve and activate Light Hope again in a matter of minutes. And he was escaping. Not just with the knowledge of how to do what they could not, but also with a mysterious crystal she never knew existed in her castle to begin with. Whatever it was, it was important and she was letting him get away with it. Letting him slip through their fingers like sand because she was too much of a failure for her own castle to acknowledge her as She Ra.

The ship pulled higher into the air. If she took a running jump at it now, she might have just be able to touch the underside. But her body still wouldn't move! If she lost him, if she let him get away, all of her friends' hard work would be lost. What if they couldn't get the HEart to work again no matter what they tried? What if stopping Kalanthe and getting that crystal was the only way to succeed?

Another image she hadn't expected flashed in front of her. It was of the day she looked Catra in the eyes and told her they were done—told her she didn't want to hear from her any longer until they defeated the Beast.

She had wanted—no, needed—she had needed to focus on She Ra, damn it. But even after three years she was no closer than before. She had given up Catra for this! If she didn't stop this person…if she didn't succeed here, now, then even that sacrifice would have been meaningless.

Catra wasn't meaningless. She wasn't!

Rage and loathing boiled inside her at the thought of it. And as soon as she admitted that to herself, that she didn't want giving up Catra to have been meaningless, she felt a power surge through her.

It wasn't the same power she knew from when she still had She Ra (or maybe it was and it had just been so long she forgot what that felt like), but something other than more adrenaline coursed through her veins and made her feel lighter. Her ankle didn't throb as hard when she stood, and the pain from the lacerations that seared across her knuckles and all around her body burned less. She looked down and confirmed the injuries hadn't actually healed. She didn't look any different.

Except, now she held a sword.

The gauntlet she had been so used to seeing for so long now was gone, and in her right hand she held the Sword of Protection. It was thinner and sleeker than the sword of old, and glowed with a healthy brilliance she hadn't seen the old sword have.

Adora looked up at the ship, a full four stories off the ground, angling its nose to the stars to take off. She crouched low, concentrated every bit of energy she could muster into her legs, and with a banshee's scream, she leapt. As high as she could. She soared through the sky, and racing to meet the ship. At the zenith of her arc, she slammed the sword into the top of its fuselage, and it took off.

The ship raced through the clouds and jetted to the stars. Adora held on for dear life. The wind blew through her loose hair and screamed into her ears so loud she couldn't hear anything else. She looked behind, surprised at how quickly the Crystal Castle and surrounding landscape grew smaller. The air got colder, and it got harder to breathe the more apparent Etheria's curve on the horizon came to be. As quick and sudden as it had come to her, She Ra's power began to fade.

No, she thought. No, no, no. Not right now. I have to get inside!

The last dregs of her power and energy disappeared, and her vision blurred. She tried to blink it back into focus, but somewhere around the third or fourth blink she realized the ship was suddenly getting smaller: she had let go without realizing, and was now free falling toward the planet's surface.

Her body flipped around mid-air and she faced down. Etheria's curve flattened gradually with the wind still whipping her hair and her face. The ground underneath came up to meet her much slower than she had initially left it. Somewhere in her head, alarm bells rang. Death loomed once more, but she was too exhausted to pay any attention to it. It was almost like an old friend by now.

Soon, individual trees among the forest below came into focus. In her daze, Adora felt as if she could just reach out and pluck them straight from the ground. Everything went black then, and she fainted.