Author's Notes:
Hello, everybody! Sorry this chapter took so long. I just have trouble getting motivated when it comes to writing about the battle with FWR. See, the ending gets pretty convoluted, and the thought of trying to make it less so is actually pretty daunting. The fact that there's not a lot of room to add in details about the KuroSyao relationship that's been the main focus of the fic thus far also makes it difficult to get motivated, because it feels like I'm retreading ground that Clamp has already covered (though admittedly, they could have done it with considerably less confusion and the ending would've been just as good, if not better). Hopefully the next chapter will come a little easier, but . . . no promises.
On a lighter note, I've started a new fic (you can put the pitchforks and torches down: Shatterheart is still my main priority). The new story is titled Clockwork Tsubasa, and it's based on a prompt by the lovely Cinnamon-Romanji. I plan for it to be my next priority project, though it will be considerably shorter than Shatterheart (I'm not sure I could handle another massive fic like this so soon). Anyway, I couldn't manage to fit in any romance, but it does focus on Kurogane and Syaoran, so hopefully you guys will enjoy it. I'll be updating that piece periodically until this story is done, and then it will be my main priority, along with Reversal of Fate (which many of you have been waiting for). And thanks, as always, to all my loyal readers and reviewers.
Chapter One-Hundred Forty-Nine
In Nihon, Tomoyo woke, gasping for breath. Wrong. Something is wrong. Her heart hammered against her ribs, pulsed in every part of her body, and for a moment, she merely lay in bed, trembling. Then she got to her feet, knees shaking, and staggered to the door. "Souma?"
The door slid open, Souma appearing at her side like a shadow. Tomoyo staggered toward her, almost collapsing in the older woman's arms before righting herself. "Tsukiyomi! Are you hurt?"
"Something's wrong. I need—" A devastating quake rocked the foundation of the castle, nearly knocking them off their feet before Souma, quick-thinking as always, eased them closer to the ground so they wouldn't topple. Tomoyo shivered. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Something is wrong. "We need . . . Outside. Something . . ." Her hands shook with a fear she didn't yet understand. It was a familiar sensation—when she'd been younger and less in control of her dreamwalking, she'd often woken in distress, her dreams scattering from her mind like bugs from the light. But it had been years since that had happened, and she'd given up her dreamwalking ability to help Kurogane and his companions, so it had to be something else.
Souma didn't question her less than comprehensible orders. She simply guided Tomoyo to the nearest door, moving quickly even as the earth beneath their feet continued to shake. During their walk, Tomoyo began to draw comparisons—things that echoed the feeling that had yanked her from her slumber. An assault by demons, a dream gone awry, the knowledge that something awful would happen that she could not stop. So many things, but this . . . This felt worse than any of those.
They made it outside, and she sucked in a breath of fresh air, though it did nothing to ease the tightness in her chest. As Tsukiyomi, she'd grown accustomed to the gentle night sky, the soft light of the moon, the twinkling stars. They had been a comfort to her ever since her dreamwalking ability had begun to manifest itself, and she looked to them now, praying to find some echo of peace.
The stars were going out.
All life had perished in Ceres, and so there was no one there to witness the disaster. But a dimension could not be truly destroyed, not completely, so there was still a barren wasteland left, a hollow, empty place filled with the ruins of a civilization that had simply ended, like a bubble popping and leaving behind only the residue of its existence. But if anyone had still lived in Ceres, they would have seen the stars in the sky disappearing one by one, swallowed up by a great, impenetrable darkness.
Eagle sat in his throne, overlooking yet another chess match. This one had been flagged for review after one of the contestants had complained that the other team had cheated, and even though Eagle didn't mind the occasional rule-breaking, he still had to look into matters. He might have gotten through his examination had Lantis not staggered into the room, eyes wide, mumbling to himself.
"What is it?" Eagle asked, rising from his throne—really just a fancy desk chair, but he thought of himself as a sort of king, as arrogant as the idea seemed to others. "Lantis, what do you see?"
"The stars are going out," the man mumbled.
"What?"
Lantis blinked, steadying himself with visible effort. "Eagle . . . The stars are going out. They're disappearing. The dreams . . . I don't . . ."
Eagle stared at his companion for a long moment. Lantis so rarely lost his composure, even after a particularly nightmarish round of dreamwalking. So instead of ignoring the warnings, Eagle walked over to the nearest window, yanked the curtains out of the way, and turned his face to the sky. A handful of stars twinkled amidst the blackness, and the moon occupied the edge of the sky, barely visible from the window. Eagle focused on one of the brighter stars, drawn to it for no other reason except its luminescence. That star then dimmed until the only thing left of it was a faint afterimage in Eagle's vision.
In a world whose name didn't matter, a dreamseer of no particular significance walked through the shifting abyss between dreams. Bubbles of light speckled the landscape, each one displaying the dreams of another person, or, more rarely, of things yet to come. The dreamseer knew this and patrolled this world, alert to any changes in what had been and what might be.
I really ought to check up on Kell, she thought. He always gets into so much trouble. The thought of her old friend made the dreamscape shift, and several house-sized bubbles of light appeared around her. One she recognized as a normal dream. Two others were scenes from an earlier time. Or perhaps they were things yet to come. Time flowed in unexpected ways here, and things like age and circumstance could have more symbolic meaning than literal meaning, if one's talent wasn't particularly powerful or precise.
The last bubble showed a scene that the dreamseer recognized instinctively as a time yet to come, and she peered through the transparent shell, watching it play out. Kell would break his arm falling out of a tree in the summer while trying to pick a flower from one of the lower branches. She sighed. She'd have to tell him not to be such an idiot all the time.
She was about to turn away, but at that moment a cloud of black smoke curled around the edges of the bubble, creeping along its surface. Almost instantly, nausea rippled through her stomach. Something is wrong. She spun, gasping when she saw that the other bubbles around her had already been swallowed up by the malevolent smoke. "No!" she cried. "No, this isn't right!"
A deep laugh reverberated through the dream world, at once so soft that she swore it was her imagination and so loud that she clapped her hands over her ears. A voice followed, just as deep and booming (not real, can't be real) as the laugh. "The dead cannot come back to life. That rule will disintegrate!"
She fled—she could not say how, only that she imagined herself gone from this place and opened her eyes to find herself elsewhere, shivering. More dream-bubbles hovered around her, exuding a faint light that eased the pressure in her chest. "Oh, thank goodness," she said, then froze when something cold brushed against her ankle. Her foot jerked as she instinctively tried to free herself, but when she looked down, she saw dark tendrils of magic slithering up her leg, dragging her toward a black mass far below. "No! No!"
The darkness spread until it wrapped around her entire body like an ivy growing to cover the side of a building. She struggled against it, her voice becoming hoarse as she screamed and writhed. Wake up, wake up, she told herself, gasping for air. You have to wake up!
The shadows closed around her mouth and dragged her into the darkness.
Magic tingled across the back of Kurogane's neck, a thread of blue light wrapping around his body. He craned his neck, realizing with some surprise that he could move his head, and looked at the mage. Fai said nothing, his fingers twitching as he wove strings of magic around both of their bodies, but his eye flickered to Fei-Wang, then back to Kurogane. "Go," he mouthed, pointing one finger in their enemy's direction.
Kurogane needed no more prompting. He lurched forward, Fai's magic dispelling Fei-Wang's sorcery so the air no longer seemed as solid as stone. As he moved, he lifted Ginryuu. The enchanted steel vibrated with energy, as eager to fight as he was.
Fei-Wang glanced at him, muttering to himself, and lifted a hand. In an instant, a translucent circle formed in front of him. The edges of the circle glowed with a sickly violet light, then exploded outward. Before it could hit, a ribbon of Fai's magic circled around him, cushioning the blow. Fei-Wang's spell still slammed into his body hard enough to throw him into the nearest wall, but the blow didn't kill him, as it surely would've otherwise. "Why won't you die?" Kurogane snarled, pain reverberating through his bones.
Fei-Wang smirked, but otherwise ignored him. Kurogane started to get to his feet, only to collapse as a wave of dizziness forced him to lie back. Distantly, he wondered how many of his bones had been broken today.
"So you took her hand," Fei-Wang said, his eyes on the kid. The surge of protective anger Kurogane felt then forced him back to his feet, though the effort left him breathless. "And with that decision, the final link is broken."
Gods, I wish he'd quit it with the cryptic bullshit, Kurogane thought.
"You tried to go back to the very point of death," Fei-Wang went on, lifting both arms like some dark priest offering a sacrifice to his god. "And that thought—your final decision—calls to one who was also stopped one step from the edge of death. It calls to one who was stopped within in instant's time. It calls that person back!"
Something moved in the corner of his eye. He glanced over to see the younger Princess Sakura rising from the boy's arms, body floating higher into the air even as he clung to her hand. Magic swirled around her body—not the pulsing, malevolent magic Kurogane had come to recognize as Fei-Wang's, but a soft, glowing presence that matched the feeling that had radiated from her feathers, her soul. At the same moment, the princess's other body—the one Fei-Wang had brought out to absorb the feather that had reappeared a few minutes ago—floated toward the younger body, giving off the same ethereal light. Like two raindrops whose edges had come into contact, the princesses merged together, and the halo of light surrounding them grew blindingly bright. The end result was a single body, about fifteen years in age, with an aura so intense that Kurogane might have prepared for an attack if it had been anyone else.
"It's like big Sakura and little Sakura have formed into a single person!" Mokona cried.
"Yeah, what the hell is going on?" Kurogane asked, glancing over his shoulder at the mage.
Fai rose, his teeth clenched. "I don't know. But the Sakura-chan that we traveled with, and the Sakura-chan that was caught here, in this place outside of time . . . Either one of them would have tremendous magical power. If they truly have merged . . ." A shudder rocked his slight frame.
"I gathered souls and placed them in nearly identical bodies," Fei-Wang said, his voice carrying through the air as if magnified through a dozen speakers. Kurogane thought he must have been on one hell of an ego-trip, to leave them alive long enough to gloat about his master plan. "An empty vessel seared by dimensions, combined with the magic power banked for eons within the water, along with a true existence that has the nature to take both these things within herself . . . I have gathered them all together! Clow once attempted to save someone on the brink of death, but his wish went unfulfilled, and just like that princess, that person's existence was cut off from time. Because of his wish, she was separated from the dimensions." He turned his face up to the ceiling, where the fragments of the broken worlds continued to warp and break apart. "Isn't that right, Space-Time Witch? Isn't that right, Yuuko?"
The witch? Kurogane blinked. He'd been lost for most of the explanation—it involved a lot of magic that he didn't really understand, plus a lot of random elements that he hadn't known about, which had made it hard to follow . . . But that last detail snatched his attention by virtue of making no fucking sense. Why would this bastard want to bring the witch back to life—or back from the edge of death? She'd been opposing him this entire time, foiling his plans, manipulating their journey in her favor in ways Kurogane had only recently begun to grasp. She and Fei-Wang were enemies. If anything, the bastard should have been focused on getting her out of the way.
Why would he want to save her?
From the corner of his eye, he saw the meat bun bouncing across the reservoir, hopping across pillars of fragmented stone and other debris. "Sakura's light is vanishing!"
Kurogane's eyes flitted back to where the princess hovered, and he no longer had to squint to avoid being blinded. In fact, the illumination she'd been giving off before now looked weak, fragile. Kurogane didn't know what it meant, but that light had been the first truly innocent thing he'd seen since they'd landed in this world, and he wasn't about to watch it go out. He started forward, forcing his legs to move even as pain and dizziness had him swaying. Have to do something, he thought, staggering into the water. "Kid, hold on to the princess!"
The boy's head whipped around. He hadn't lost his grip on her hand yet, though Kurogane could see the strain in his arm from keeping the girl from floating away. That strain—that desperation—kept Kurogane moving forward. Yeah, maybe he'd felt a moment of jealousy when the kid had first taken her hand, but he wasn't an idiot, and he sure as hell wasn't going to pin any blame on either of the kids for anything that happened today.
"You will not interfere!" Fei-Wang snarled, his voice booming from every corner of the room. An invisible force slammed into Kurogane's chest and—for the hundredth time in the past hour—he shot backward, not stopping until his body slammed into a wall. Fucking magic, he thought.
Fei-Wang let out a laugh that seemed strangely at odds after his furious outburst. "The dream you were unable to fulfill," he began in a more moderate tone that Kurogane barely heard over the ringing in his ears. "It will now come true by my hand, Clow!"
Every inch of his body alive with pain, Kurogane tried to get to his feet. He couldn't even lift his head without sending a spire of agony through the rest of his body, and after a few attempts, he laid back, breathing hard. I won't be able to take another hit like that, he thought distantly. And I can't do anything. Every time I make a move, I get thrown into another wall.
How could all his training be worthless now that it really mattered? How could he have believed he could go against the most powerful magician he'd ever encountered and not only survive, but win?
"Sakura!" The boy's shout pierced through his hopelessness; he opened his eyes. At the other end of the reservoir, tendrils of darkness began to emerge from the air, wrapping around the princess's body and pulling her away from the kid. Syaoran's grip tightened, the strain in his arm building until his whole body looked rigid. He's not going to be able to hold on, Kurogane thought. Whatever that monocle-wearing bastard is doing, we're not going to be able to stop him.