Several days passed. Rudderless, the ThunderCats bid their friends farewell and returned home.
The morning dawned a soft, damp gray over the low rooftops of New Thundera on the plains below what was left of Thundera's great white wall. The village looked peaceful from here, new-marked fields awaiting spring planting, barns dotted here and there to house the few Thunderian mounts who had found their way back home, now trained to pull plows and wagons as well as carry riders, sturdy but modest homes built to withstand the weather, and even a small market street designed to welcome the travelers brave enough to risk the ghosts of the fallen empire. There were still craftsmen among Lion-O's people, still teachers and soldiers and merchants. Their pride wouldn't allow them to accept outside help, a sentiment Lion-O shared deep in his core. The combined efforts of the lizards and the rats had not managed to erase the heart and soul of Thundera. With time and hard work, Third Earth's cats would reclaim some of what had been theirs.
Likewise, the Sword of Omens would be repaired. Somehow.
Alone, Lion-O climbed through the ruins of his father's city, silent and dead and gray with ash turned to mud. His footfalls made no sound, save for the occasional kicked pebble – otherwise, he might have thought himself one of the ghosts. Up until a year ago, this had been the only home he'd known. Therefore, it didn't take him long to find the place where he, Tygra, Cheetara, and Snarf had burned Claudus's body to free the king's soul and send him into the Great Sky Cat's Lair.
He approached a tilted, crumbling wall. His feet disturbed something dry and scratchy at its base; bunches of flowers lay scattered by wind and rain. The cats he had helped rescue from Ratar-O's mines had obviously gathered them from the banks of the Rufus River and left them here. Heartsore, he reached up and pressed his palm against the cool wall.
Here, he'd used the Sword of Omens, heated over an open flame, to etch the insignia of the ThunderCats into the marble in the hopes that if any of their people had lived, they would see it, and know he was out there, fighting for them, avenging them.
His hand curled into a fist, claws scraping through the grooves of his carving. He rested his forehead against the wall, below his hand.
Had Pumyra seen this? Or had everything he had done this past year been for nothing?
"There you are." WilyKit appeared, perched atop a set of blasted steps that led nowhere. She turned and called over her shoulder, "Found him!"
She hopped nimbly down to Lion-O's level as Felline crested the rise and walked gingerly over to them. Both made sure not to step on the flowers.
"The mayor wants to give us some sort of sending-off ceremony," Kit announced. "Tygra's gone all growly because you're holding us up."
Lion-O released a breath too slowly for it to be a sigh. He couldn't bring himself to descend to the village and face his people, not when the Gauntlet attached to his belt was little more than a container for scrap metal. On his hands and knees, he had managed to gather every last piece of the Sword out of the dirt that day and wrapped them securely in canvas. With the pommel pointing up, it was impossible to tell that the Sword was broken, if no one looked too closely at the Eye, but he knew he had let every single one of his people down.
"Back in the old days, a grandfather like Russ wouldn't have been put in any role of importance. Times have changed," Felline said.
Russ. Lion-O remembered Russ. The old cat in the rats' gulag, the one who had nearly cried when Lion-O brought water to him. Bony, gap-toothed, quaver-voiced. He could not think of a better cat to protect New Thundera for the time being.
Sometimes, Lion-O wondered if the people of New Thundera needed him. On their own, they had elected a mayor to oversee their village while the king was away. He had not only not objected, he had sanctioned this temporary governance. They needed to look out for each other, and they needed someone to make the decisions he, in his indefinite absence, could not.
"The times have changed for the better," WilyKit said emphatically. She laced her fingers across the back of her head. "I've never understood why growing old was something shameful. It's an accomplishment. Russ knows all sorts of things that the younger ones don't. I'm glad they made him mayor. It's a good thing."
"Yes." Felline smiled down at Kit – but not very far down. "So much has been lost. We're lucky any of our elders survived."
Her tone made it clear that she was thinking, as Lion-O so often did, of Jaga. What would Jaga say to his former student now? It was next to impossible that the aristocratic old jaguar would approve of every choice Thundera's new king had made this past year. He probably didn't approve of a single one, in all honesty. Lion-O didn't like to admit it, even to himself, but he was afraid of reading the Book of Omens to find out. Lion-O had gotten them into this mess. He would get them out again.
He hoped.
Distracted from his brooding, he frowned at Kit and Felline. Something seemed different about them. After a moment, it dawned on him.
WilyKit's pink and purple-striped ponytail was gone. Her long hair, held in place with a pair of simple goggles, the kind meant to keep wind out of the eyes, stuck up in the back in a little curlicue. Her bangs swept sideways across her forehead, which revealed that she had ears. Large, feline ears like Felline's. The right one drooped at an angle, though the left swiveled and twitched normally.
Her outfit had changed, too. Gone were the stolen clothes, the dagged skirt and halter top, and gone were the gold bracelets and armbands looted from abandoned wagons. She was dressed in muted shades of forest green, cream, and walnut brown. Her fur-collared blouse had loose, detachable sleeves that stopped short above her wrists. A leather girdle, Lion-O noted with sudden, boyish embarrassment, illustrated the fact that the little wildcat, though coltish, was growing up. She wore a paneled leather skirt and a thigh holster for her flupe. Her footwear resembled the boots the wolos wore, with turned-down tops, though they left her toes and heels bare.
Felline, too, had transformed overnight. She was as short as ever, but the foreign dog's clothes had been replaced with an outfit that a cleric might have worn beneath her concealing cloak. She had loosened her star-white curls from their pins and gathered them in a high, messy ponytail that reached past her waist. A pale tan dress hugged the curves she used to keep hidden, from her collarbones to stopping just below the tops of her otherwise bare thighs. She wore a small, tight, sleeveless white jacket, belted under her breasts, which showed off the line of black rosettes on her shoulder. An ice-blue utility belt rode low on her hips, connected to belts which held up the partial leggings that swelled into armored pads over her knees. Padded blue vambraces protected her from knuckles to mid-biceps. Her footwear matched Kit's, in blue and white, and she had not neglected her thigh holster and gunblade. Except for her wide blue eyes, deceptively helpless when they weren't iced over in anger, she was almost unrecognizable as the useless, meece-like cub he'd once believed her.
"Where did you unearth those getups?" he asked, interrupting their conversation, which had moved, as it usually did with them, to food.
"Gifts from the villagers," Felline answered shyly, ducking her head. "They've been doing well here. They're relatively safe to build new lives for themselves. There is still wealth to be had in the city if they're careful. Mayor Russ says the least they can do for their king is to send him on his mission with the best left to them."
"They've got something for you, too, except you ran off before anybody else was awake and left us looking dumb when we couldn't find you," WilyKit added.
"We can't take from them when they have so little," he protested. Her words stung, considering everything he had gone through recently.
"Well, they kinda sorta had help from the Forever Bag. You didn't think we'd come here with our hands empty, did you? Someone has to make up for your slack." Kit put her fists on her hips and eyed him critically. "Oh, don't look so sullen. You're going to make everyone feel bad."
"Kit's right," Felline said. To soften their harsh words, she slipped her hand into his and waited until he gave her his attention. "With their help, we can make everything right. They want to do this, Lion-O, because they can't do anything else except wait for your return. It would disillusion them if you refused."
He did not take his hand back from Felline. Hers felt so small in his bigger paw, and he rather liked it. For the support, of course. Nevertheless, his mutinous thoughts must have shown on his face, for WilyKit grabbed his other hand and tugged.
"Come on, Your Majesty," she said, grinning. "Your public awaits."
Lion-O considered refusing to budge. It might have been funny to see the two of them struggle to move him when he was so much heavier, but he reconsidered in the same instant. Kit and Felline had always had the most faith in him and had supported him beyond the boundaries of reason on more than one occasion. So, endeavoring to shrug off his gloom, he allowed them to lead him down the hill.
..::~*~::..
Tygra piloted the Feliner from a field just beyond New Thundera's outskirts. It lifted like a large, white albatross amid the flurried remains of the wildflowers, which had bloomed last summer in spite of the lizards' efforts to salt the earth.
Lion-O stood in the open doorway. Rain struck his fur and left droplets that spread across the Feliner's windscreen like cracks. His new clothes, though more subdued than his old outfit in shades of royal blue and indigo, were edged in alloys which glittered golden in the muted sunlight. A two-toned shirt hugged his upper body, leaving his right arm bare. The left was protected by a short sleeve and a supple glove fashioned to fit inside the Gauntlet of Omens. He wore a spaulder on his left shoulder, its lames pointed, belted crosswise over his chest. Trousers, tucked into poleyns, were loose the way he liked them. Toeless sabatons covered the arches of his feet. His belt wrapped over stiff leather faulds, lined with steel plates, the lower layer of which buckled across his thighs. The Gauntlet hung, a familiar presence, from his left hip.
Good armor, easy to move in. Simple armor, with no need to proclaim that it adorned a king. His mane whipped in the wind, getting in his mouth, for the spikes were long enough now to brush his shoulders when he moved his head – and, finally, to his intense but deep-down private relief, it was showing signs of growing farther along his cheekbones and jaw. Someday, those signs would manifest as a full lion's beard. No longer would he be ridiculed as the child king of the ThunderCats.
When he raised his hand in farewell, the crowd of cats that had gathered at the edge of the field sent up a great cheer, waving their arms in the air. It took him an emotional moment to realize that what he was feeling was pride.
He thumbed the pad to seal the door.
"So where are we headed?" Panthro asked from the copilot's seat. He crossed his thick arms and tilted his head back. His eyelids were sealed as tightly as the door.
Lion-O took his seat at the navigation console. Snarf jumped into his lap. The little petcat turned three circles on his tiny paws and then curled up with a contented huff, ready for a long nap. He was a thinner critter than he had been back in the day, his red fur thicker and coarser from living on the rough. Lion-O scratched the tuft of yellow fur between his tasseled ears. "I can think of only one animal who might help us now," he said. "Problem is, I don't know where to find him. Last I saw, he left on a journey to return some stolen swords to their owners."
He looked over at Felline. She looked back at him. Then she grinned, a fierce, triumphant grin that he couldn't help returning.
"What are you talking about?" Tygra asked with thinly veiled irritation, looking back and forth between them. "Who do you two know that I don't?"
"Hattanz-O!" Lion-O and Felline said at the same time.
"Who?" Tygra, Panthro, Cheetara, WilyKat, and WilyKit chorused.
A/N: Hello, Dear Readers! In spite of my doubts, I have decided to move on with what I have. Tell me honestly, were the big blocks of description too much? Or is it okay because this book is based on visual media story-telling? Also, I took all new outfits from Dan Norton's early character concepts (Felline's is one of Cheetara's and Lion-O's is one of Tygra's), displayed on DeviantArt. Also Also, I changed the spelling of Hattanz-O's name (from Hattanzō) because . . . it just makes more sense to me this way?
Reviewer Thanks! KelseyAlicia, Heart of the Demons, Atea1793, FallingStar5027, Lionessa (I wasn't sure if the Sword had broken in the original series, but I understand now that it has - twice! I'm actually really happy to know that I wasn't taking this in a totally alien direction, haha), St4r Hunter, The Night Whisperer, Darwin, and Hestia28 (hee, I loved your review! I'm glad I'm getting people all riled up - I'll try really hard from now on for some Felli-O, promise).
Until next time,
Anne
