AN: Yes, I am back! Also, yes, this chapter is shorter than normal. :( sorry guys, but I couldn't extend it any more. This is an interim chapter; all the cool stuff goes down in the next one.
On an alarming point: Reviews are scarce these days. I won't try to coerce you into doing so, but remember that reviews are important to an author's writing. I can't write better for you if you don't write back to me.
On a literary point: Here begins my new style, though calling it that isn't exactly correct. It's just updated, more literary than anything. I'd like opinions on my implementation of literary devices, for those who are proficient in that sort of thing.
On with the show
~ ("I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so well."—Henry Rollins) ~
Syaoron the Fox presents
Following the Events of Sonic '06
Accompanied by Various Music and Themes
Remnants of the Past
Chapter 15
Full Circle Pt. 2
^/\^|v\/v
Station Square Outskirts
January-8-2505
19:17 Mobius Time
As bleak clouds and the darkness of evening fell, the lights of the metropolis grew brighter. Against a stretch of wispy purple hue and melancholy orange sky, insidious sanguine swept a looming hand over the city in the distance. That cruel dark which was so far away seemed yet so close. However, outside the bounds of the metropolis grew a patch of tall, strong oaks in a field of soft grass. Here do the six reside.
Clenching the flaps of his coat, Ghost focused on the horizon of the city, apprehensive of what lay within. "We all saw the same thing?" he asked. Nods went all around. "Dammit. Our paradox is a person."
Crouching in the shadow of the oak, the fox faced the darker night which awaited them. He wanted neither to speak nor to listen to the others. Cold had he grown from his encounter with the undead—the one he coveted; the one he killed. Silver kept watch over the fox, worried for him. They're meet with the paradox girl had not been particularly fruitful.
"What happened when you saw her, Silver?" Thunder queried. "Of the three groups, you two managed to get the closest to her. Did anything seem different about her?"
Silver frowned. "You seem to forget that I was never part of the crusade against the Metarex. That was Knuckles and Tails' journey, not mine."
"She is the same. Nothing has changed." Tails uttered his first words since three hours ago. "She is exactly as I remember her."
All was silent. Tails' tension could be felt by all. They waited, waited for something to happen—would a smile stretch out first, or would the tears fall instead?—they waited for a response or emotion. Silver finally spoke up, "Tails… are you okay?"
"Okay? I'm… I'm great." The tears bubbled and the smile stretched; the two emotions battled for sovereignty. "She's alive. She was dead before, but now she's alive. That's… That's good."
"No, that's bad. That's very bad," Cynthia responded, sitting down against the tree as well. She faced the setting sun. "Now we must go back to the time when she died and fix her death."
"How did she die, anyway?" wondered the lion aloud. "It must have been valiant sacrifice if it was to save the universe."
"I killed her."
Knuckles frowned, searching Tails' blank stare for what haunted him and finding nothing. "Tails, you know that's not what happened."
"But it is."
"Not exactly."
"Then you tell me what happened, Knuckles. If my explanation fails to meet your requirements, you tell it."
Knuckles couldn't look at Tails for a while. He instead turned to the rest of the group, ready to explain. "A few years ago, Sonic encountered an enemy that far surpassed anything Eggman had ever created; anything we had ever faced before. The Metarex were unlike anything ever before, bent on total genocide of animals and all their kin.
"It was such a long time ago, and I still can't believe that we survived. Tails had taken us into space on the battleship Blue Typhoon. We spent months out there; I hardly even remembered what Mobius looked like by that point. We ran up against the Metarex in one final battle, and everything looked bleak. The Metarex were using some kind of planet to weaken us all. They had us all on our knees… every one of us but Cosmo.
"Cosmo used this amazing power. It's indescribable with words. She turned into a Cherry Blossom tree and stopped the Metarex's power. It was enough time for Sonic and Shadow to take out the planet using one final blast from the cannon on the ship. Cosmo was the sacrifice; Tails was the executor."
So, that's what happened, Silver mused, having never heard the story himself. Based on the faces of his comrades—wincing, frowning, grimacing—Silver knew they were just as shocked and appalled as he. The white hedgehog looked wistfully back and forth between Tails and Knuckles. Those two must have been through a lot.
Tails was silent still. He refused to say a word. Tears welled in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. He had come too far on the road to recovery, too far to give in. Yet the death always lingered in his mind's eye, always taunted him. The taunting was always there, and it manifested into something very real in the crystal palace.
As the kit stayed silent, Cynthia returned to the others with their next objective. "Our course of action is clear from here on out. We have to go back and kill Cosmo."
^/\^|v\/v
Castle Usha
September-28-2506
17:19 Mobius Time
"But why, Master Imperious? I don't understand the whole of this plan."
"That is because you're not thinking of time correctly, Chameleon. You keep thinking of time in a disconnected way, as a rainstorm in suspense. Time isn't like that. Time flows and ebbs; time drips and stirs."
"If not a suspended rain, then what is it?"
"Something more like a stream or river, little Dovahkiin."
"Why that?"
"The drops of time are all connected, Chameleon. This is something you must understand if you're going to be a lord over time. The stream flows eternally; where it goes is uncertain at best. The most you can hope to do to alter the streams path is pluck ripples in the stream to guide the path. As the tributaries of time splay out, it becomes easier to see how everything works. Rather than a river of unknown beginning and unknown ending, time becomes mechanism that is as easily altered as the writing on paper."
"But how do you know all this, then?"
"Dovahkiin, I am a nearly eternal being. I have observed history for centuries, millennia I would dare say. People are predictable, Chameleon. They are doomed to forever repeat the mistakes of their past. It never ceases to amaze me, the stupidity of these beings."
The two stood inside the dark throne room. Six, thick pillars lined a central walkway which led to Imperious' throne. The columns were inscribed with runes in an ancient language understood by none but the dragon himself. Settled in sconces bolted to the pillars were torches of smoldering, blue flame. Sat before Imperious was the young disciple cross-legged on the floor.
"Nearly eternal, master? I thought dragons were completely eternal."
"Some are, young one. Some dragons possess countless numbers of those coveted immortality scales which grant infinite life. By definition, I should be immortal; however, my practice in magic over the years has poisoned my body."
Chameleon looked up to his master, confusion and concern present within him. What he saw within his teacher was neither of those, only tempered determination. "Will I succumb to this too?" Chameleon asked.
"No, you will not succumb as I will. The power I have borne unto you is the Thu'um, the power of a dragon's voice. It is not magic; you will be fine."
Chameleon stood then and receded back into the dark. "I will leave you be then, Master. I still have practice to get to." Into the dark, the assassin vanished, leaving the megalomaniacal dragon to his own thoughts.
"Soon," Imperious mumbled as he gazed at the reels of time that stretched before his eyes. He darted over the timeline until he came across that desired time, the time when everything would be set in motion. "Soon, little kitsune."
^/\^|v\/v
Soleanna
September-28-2506
19:33 Mobius Time
Sonic sat just outside of Soleanna's palace, grimacing at the recent events. He sat on the marble steps and looked at the cobblestone crossroads that lay just beyond the gate. People occasionally walked by, hurriedly and frantically trying to get to shelter.
Sonic shivered, his fur soaked. It was raining; it hadn't stopped raining, and it seemed the rain would persist for eternity. The never-ending deluge shadowed over Soleanna, drenching its inhabitants and flooding its streets. Not a mote of light shined through the sky.
"Maybe I can go back," Sonic mumbled. He had never felt more defeated in his life, but he continued to deny it. "I can find a way to hook up with Tails and Knuckles. If I do that, I might be able to help."
"And do what?"
Alongside the hedgehog, a tired man sat down from a day of weary frustration. Jack looked over to Sonic, staring at him without emotion. "What will you do once you find them? What can you do to help? Even now, you can hardly walk, and you'll never run again."
"Jeez, you really know how to dash a guy's hopes, don't you?" responded Sonic.
Jack remained stoic and opened an umbrella above their heads. "There really isn't much we can do, you and I," he said. "Remain strong; have trust in your friends. You're a headstrong fellow, Sonic—I know that much based on your determination to help—but have faith. Your friends work hard. They're determination and strength is something beyond the confines of time and space. I could see the look in John's eyes when I fought with him, the look that told me that nothing would stop them."
"But what if they need me? What then, Jack?"
"I seriously doubt they would require the assistance of a crippled hedgehog. However, if there's an opening for the damsel in distress role, you'll be the first to know."
Sonic gritted his teeth, but barred his angry words from passing. He clenched his fist in frustration, looking solemnly toward the cold, wet ground. "Are you saying I'm useless now?"
"There is no easy way to say it, Sonic," Jack answered. "I'm not going to circumvent the issue. Against an unfathomable foe and his unseen forces, there is nothing you can do. At this point, there is nothing even I can do. I was crafted to be the princess' dagger, but nothing ever seems to work out the way it was meant to be. Imperious is knowledgeable, that I can gather. His plan extends beyond our comprehension."
"So you expect me to sit here and do nothing while my friends are out there saving the world? I need to help; I have to."
Now irate with the hedgehog's stubbornness, Jack shot him a glare. "Alright, let's presume you manage to find them, even given how incredibly difficult that task is. What then? You want to use your super speed to run in and save the day, but you don't have that anymore, do you? Your legs can only walk. You're just as good as the rest of us. What help would you be?"
"That doesn't matter. They need me there; they always have!"
"Pull your thick skull out of your rear end and listen to me, hedgehog!" Jack shouted. "Let go of this narcissistic thought that everyone needs you. Maybe you were once the protector of the world, but now that task falls to the hands of others. Do not think them weak."
At this, Sonic remained silent. Had he really been so thick-headed all this time? Everyone had always needed him; that was what he thought. Was that untrue? The hedgehog turned his eyes toward the ground. "Maybe you're right…"
"I am right, and you know this."
The air was thick now with rain. It was a bombardment of water, an aquatic Armageddon. "Bad things are coming to Soleanna, aren't they?" asked Sonic.
"The uncertain future is certainly upon us, Sonic. Of that there can be no doubt."
The signs were laid out before them; they need only interpret them now. The rain was here, but the storm had yet to arrive. A deluge of forbearing cascaded about them, but it awaited translation. They waited in the courtyard as bombs of rain wreaked havoc on the city. The cold bit and the water gnawed. Still, the storm had yet to come.
^/\^|v\/v
Temporal Vestige
-:-
-:-
"What do we do when we find her?"
Ghost raised his brow and looked at Thunder. "Her? Which her?" He questioned the lion's vagueness.
"You know exactly which her I'm talking about," the lion said. "What happens when we arrive at the proper time and find Cosmo?"
The man looked around—how was he to answer that? He tried focusing on the images that passed by as they floated through the golden vestige, but his mind returned to the question before too much time had passed. "You know what we have to do," Ghost answered shortly. "We go in; we fix the anomaly; we come out."
"This is different, John," argued Thunder. "Before, we were just fixing and mending a few little errors here and there. We're tampering with a life, John. A life that is very important to one of us."
"The kit, you mean? There is no need to use such circumventing rhetoric. Get straight to the point; there is no time to deal with fillers," Ghost responded coolly. "We have all had to suffer, Thunder."
"No one should have to suffer like that, and certainly not twice. Would you truly put him through the same suffering again, John?" Thunder asked. "I'm normally the lax one, but even I put aside passivity for my friends. Yet you regard this coming event as though nothing is happening."
"And how would you have me look at it?" Ghost inquired, glaring at Thunder. "It's just the same thing happening again. What more can it do?"
"You know damn well just what it can do!" Thunder shouted. "Have a little empathy. Imagine losing Samantha again, or losing your sister again. Imagine reliving those circumstances."
"I can live through it, Thunder. So can he."
"Tails is only a teenager!"
Ghost breathed a sigh and continued looking. "It's not my job to know what's best for him, Thunder. Considering everything we've been through, it would probably be best for him to pack up, go back home, and live his life in Soleanna; however, I can't let him do that. We're too entrenched in Imperious' coils to let him back out.
"Maybe it would be for the best if he sat out this mission, but we need his brilliant mind. It would be for the best if he never tampered with these events, but we know he will anyway. It would be for the best if he never saw that girl again, but he will have to. This whole set of circumstances was, is, and will be inevitable.
"Tails will have to face down the monsters and demons of his own past. Whether he is ready or not at this moment is not mine to judge. The kit will have to determine with his own power what kind of person he will be after these events."
Thunder sighed and looked behind them. He saw the empty stare and the blank visage of the kit. He noticed how at every moment he was on the verge of tears. "What then if Tails isn't strong enough to face this?"
"Then we repair what we can and move on."
Thunder sighed and floated away from the stubborn man. It would be impossible to change his point of view; Ghost was charging in with tunnel vision now that Samantha's salvation was in sight.
Meanwhile, Silver fixed his gaze on Tails, watching his expressions and motions. He watched Tails' movements and actions. Silver took in every detail of the contortions on his face and the clenching of his fists. Still, the psychic hedgehog couldn't place what was going on in the kit's mind. Something fierce and dark, he knew; however, what the specifics entailed, he could not decrypt.
Naivety, Blaze would have called it. Silver thought back on the cat that had stolen his heart and missed her more now than he ever had before. Before the Solaris incident, she had been his pillar of support in times of darkness. With dark powers closing in on them faster, his mind turned to her for comfort. Hopefully, as soon as they acquired all the Sol Emeralds, he would be able to bring her back.
Ghost had stopped at an instance in the timeline suddenly, and the others stopped soon afterward. Silver floated forward to see where they would be dropping off this time. In the new time, there appeared to be a fleet of dagger shaped battleships in space facing off with one lone cruiser. Bolts of laser light exchanged betwixt while the cruiser's shields upheld the onslaught.
Tails looked on, his façade incomprehensible to the others. He floated toward the image and clenched his fist. "There they are," he said with a pointed glare. "The Metarex."