Shadows of the Future
Chapter Eight
The Shadow Within
(Explanations, rating, and disclaimers can be found at the beginning of Chapter One.)
Knuckles opened his eyes blearily, waking up without knowing where he was for the third time in only two days. This is setting a rather disturbing trend, he thought sarcastically. He felt simply AWFUL, too. The slight energy boost he'd gotten from that lunch with Lorinda several hours ago had completely worn off, and now the full effects of the Island's sickness--as far away as his Island was--were hitting him full-force. The Master Emerald was almost drained down to nothing, and so was Knuckles. He felt so unbelieveably WEAK. Before, he had felt relatively fine, except for being unable to punch through heavy surfaces anymore. But right now, he felt as if he could scarcely even make a fist in the first place! Slowly, he sat up and looked around.
It was quite a spectacular sight. He was in the hugest, most opulent room he had ever seen in his life. Even the marble-tiled interior chambers of the Hidden Palace couldn't compete. Gigantic marble pillars soared up to a ceiling so high Knuckles had to crane his neck way, way back in order to see it. But it was very noticeable despite its height--it was painted jet-black and studded with lights to resemble stars--no, wait, they weren't lights, they were...diamonds? REAL diamonds? That MANY?! They picked up the light coming from a star-shaped skylight in the very very top of the dome and sparkled fit to rival the real heavens. The skylight looked tiny from down here but Knuckles was sure it must be easily as large as he was. And the patterns of the diamonds looked rather familiar...
He yanked his gaze away from the ceiling as he was sure it must make him look like some gaping idiot yokel, standing there with his head tilted all the way back and his eyes bugging out, and studied the rest of the room. It was no less impressive. The one room seemed to be EASILY the size of the entirety of Marble Gardens, though he was sure that must be a fevered exaggeration due to his currently dazed state. At any rate, the walls and floor were made of the finest, most gleaming jet-black marble he had ever seen, flecked with sparkling bits of gold--whether gold paint or REAL gold he couldn't tell, but he suspected the latter. Delicate crystal fountains carved into the shapes of echidnas and other creatures were scattered at random all over the floor; their seemingly unplanned placement making them seem even prettier than if they had been laid out in regimented rows. Each fountain had a light coming from some unseen source in its base, each one a different colour, so that the water droplets turned the colour of the light in its fountain as they came down, filling the room with rainbow sparkles. And each fountain also had a small round plot of grass--REAL grass! Indoors!--growing around it, with flowers planted in it in patterns that made pictures, each set of flowers the same colour as its fountain's light. Their delicate perfume filled the air, not overwhelmingly, just enough to be pleasantly exotic.
This MUST be the Royal Palace thought Knuckles. EVERYTHING in here is made to truly look like the center of a place called "The City of the Stars". Sonic once mentioned a place on Mobius called "The Starlight Zone". It sounded nice enough, but if you ask me, THIS is what the Starlight Zone SHOULD look like.
Sure enough, his suspicions were borne out when several large, but very genteel and cultured-looking, guards tromped into the room. They were all dressed in uniforms of black velvet embroidered with gold braid scrolls on the wrists, lapels, and skirts--their outfits were similar to those of a 17th-century fop on Earth, but of course Knuckles didn't know about that; he just they looked super-fancy. A crowd of even more elegantly-dressed people milled behind them, chatting amiably about nothing at all.
The two foremost guards pulled out long, slender, gleaming golden trumpets and blew a fanfare on them. "Permission to convene the Royal Court for the night, Your Majesty?"
"Permission granted," came a deep, throaty female voice from somewhere, but Knuckles couldn't see where at first. As the elegant people walked past the guards into the room, his gaze was drawn to a spot he hadn't noticed before: almost a hundred feet off the ground, balancing on an impossibly slender, curved pillar shaped like a claw, was a throne carved out of what appeared to be one, enourmous, diamond. "Have you brought the Outworlder?" came the voice again, from the direction of the throne.
"He is here, Your Majesty," called the same guard.
"Good," came the Queen's voice. How is she going to get down here to meet me, Knuckles wondered suddenly. There are no stairs, no elevator, no...
And the Queen was standing directly in front of him.
"Soooo...." she purred, slinking towards him and extending one long, graceful, very sharp-clawed hand. "YOU'RE the one the Palace Guards told me about. The one from the Floating Island. Let me tell you, I was VERY interested when I heard THAT. I had them follow you all day so that I could learn more. When I found out you were the Guardian of which our legends told I just HAD to meet you in person. Sorry about the roughness and the secrecy; but you see, I try to make it so that the average population can't just wander in to see me whenever they want; I DO so hate crowds, don't you? So I had to bring you here in such a way that no-one would see...you DO understand, don't you?"
"Uh...yeah..." said Knuckles dizzily, finally remembering to pull his hand back from the handshake--he'd been frozen that way all this time, staring with his mouth open. For several reasons. One--this Queen certainly wasn't ACTING like a Queen. For all the pomp and circumstance around her, she was chatting casually and smiling like a normal person. Secondly, despite Lorinda's warnings about "the evil Wizard-Queen, Riku-Dari", this woman, although she obviously DID have strange teleportation powers, didn't seem to be evil at all. In fact, she and Knuckles even had a few things in common!
And last but DEFINITELY not least, she was the most strikingly beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
She was tall, about the same height as Knuckles, and seemed to be about his age, too--very young, for a Queen. She had a very shapely figure, covered in glossy jet-black fur. Her face and what he could see of her underbelly were pale yellow, and the fur equally silky as on the rest of her. Her large, exotic, mysterious, slanty eyes were a vibrant orange in hue, almost like an orange Chaos Emerald, with the deepest, darkest black pupils he had ever seen--they seemed to pull him in, somehow, immobilize him for a moment. Her long, flowing, glossy head-spines reached to just past her shoulders, and each one was decorated with two bright golden rings fitted on them near their ends. She was clad in a gleaming golden sleeveless dress that left her muscular arms bare, swept the floor dramatically at the bottom, and was made out of thousands of tiny, delicate, overlapping scales of pure gold, that moved as she moved, rippling over her form like living water, and made a dainty, slight, tinkling noise.
"Oh, please, you needn't be so formal," she smiled charmingly, disengaging her hand from his far too slowly for his comfort. "Come, I wish to talk to you privately, honoured Guardian. We have much to discuss."
And with that--
--the two of them were alone, in a completely different room.
This one was much smaller and more personal--no marble or diamonds here, just silk curtains over the windows, a deep, soft plush carpet, low, velvet-upholstered furniture and polished warm red-brown wooden shelves and cabinets. The shelves were full of books, giving the room the appearance of an intellectual's study, and the only light came from reassuringly old-fashioned fancy brass lamps.
As Knuckles staggered and tried to get his bearings from the sudden extreme change, Riku-Dari strode across the chamber to lift an exquisite crystal decanter and pour a ruby-red liquid into two tall, slender glasses shaped like roses with long, winding stems. "Have some wine?" she offered, handing a glass to Knuckles. Knuckles didn't drink, but he thought it best not to be rude in front of someone as powerful as a Queen. He gingerly held the goblet between two fingers and took a half-hearted sip.
It was surprisingly good. It tasted sort of like sweetened, deep, purple grapes mixed with wild-growing mulberries and raspberries, and made him feel like it does when a cool breeze wafts in through the window on a hot summer day. Without thinking, he took a deeper drink. The Queen, watching him, just smiled. "Tell me about yourself, Guardian."
So he told her. He was still on his guard just enough to not tell her about his friends or any of his present situation, but he spilled his guts completely about his tragic childhood, the Master Emerald, the Island, how he became the "Guardian" and what the title meant to him--all of that. By the time he was finished, the wine in the decanter was half-gone--how HAD it gotten that low, anyway? He honestly couldn't remember--and a strange but not unpleasant fuzziness seemed to fill his head. He felt nicely warm from head to toe. Not hot, just warm.
The Queen smiled, a very, very wide smile that Knuckles found a bit disconcerting, though he couldn't say why. "You and I have SO much in common, Knuckles," she trilled. "Or should I call you Anansi? Anansi Korel. According to the ancient histories, that IS your true name, is it not?"
Knuckles nodded dumbly. He hadn't heard that name in ages. He'd deliberately stopped using it after the disappearance of his people because it brought back too many sad memories of his long-dead family, especially his dear mother. But somehow, now, he didn't mind hearing it again. Anansi. It sounded so strange, so out-of-place among the Mobian names like Maurice, Charles, Miles, Sally, Jolene, Bunnie. But here--here, back among his own people, among other echidnas, it sounded right. It belonged.
Just as he was thinking this, there came a timid rapping on the door.
"What is it, Jeeves?" snapped the Queen.
"It's Lord Django, Your Majesty," came a high-pitched, quavering voice from behind the door. "He says he has some very important news. Shall I send him in?"
"Oh, very well," said the Queen, grudgingly.
The door opened to admit a tall, middle-aged grey echidna in an ornate uniform. "Bad news, Your Majesty," he began without preamble. "Our top-secret files in the main computer database were accessed with an unauthorised code earlier this evening. We think it was the rebels again."
"WHAT?!" roared the Queen, her face contorted with rage, her eyes blazing. She leapt to her feet and started advancing on the distinguished Lord Django as if she was going to strangle him or something. "I have tolerated those traitors for long enough! Their troublemaking stops HERE, and it stops NOW! Find them, Django. I don't care HOW many troops it takes. Find them and kill them. ALL OF THEM!!"
Lord Django bowed and left. As the door closed, the Queen turned back to Knuckles with a sweet, calm smile.
"Chocolate?" she offered. Knuckles took it and munched silently. That glimpse of her REAL personality had temporarily broken the spell. But only for a moment...
"My dear Anansi, I too, suffered a tragedy at an early age," continued Riku-Dari, leaning closer to him on the soft, fuzzy velvet couch. "My own mother, the former Queen, died in an unfortunate...accident...when I as only 5, the same age when you lost YOUR parents! I, too, was raised alone, all by myself except for the books I was to study, until I Came of Age at 15. We believe that if a Princess can't govern herself properly, how can she be expected to govern an entire society when she grows up? And I am only 17 now, like you, Anansi! We are EXACTLY alike you and I! Like you, I have strange powers that make me different from other people. And, like you, I am the guardian of a rare and powerful treasure. Come, would you like to see it?"
Blearily, he nodded yes. By now, he was so far under the spell of her beauty and the potent alchohol--did she HAVE to press up against him like that?--that he would likely have done almost anything she said.
"Follow me, then," And she stood up and walked towards one of the bookshelves--and straight THROUGH it. It was evidently only an illusion, a hologram of some kind. "Well, come along," came her voice from seemingly inside the wall. Cautiously, Knuckles pushed on the shelf and found he was pushing on nothing at all. He shut his eyes, and threw himself forward.
"Good, you made it," smiled the Queen, taking his hand. She pulled something off the wall with her other hand and blew on it. A dim blueish light came up to light the way and he realised this must be some kind of torch, similar to the ones in Sandopolis--it wouldn't light up until it was needed, then went right back out again when it was put away.
Riku-Dari led him down a narrow, rough-walled stone corridor. Built obviously far more for utility than beauty, it had none of the opulence of the rest of the Palace. "Only Queens and Crown Princesses have seen this tunnel for hundreds of years," she told him as they followed the corridor in an almost unending spiral, down, down, down. "And what's at the END of the tunnel--people have DIED trying to see that..." With that, they finally broke free into a large room.
The Queen hung back a pace to let Knuckles enter the room first. He gaped. He couldn't believe his eyes. The room was, in every detaill, an EXACT replica of the Master Emerald Chamber in the Hidden Palace! The tile, the carpeting, the size and shape, the location--he supposed they must be directly centered beneath the palace proper by now--even to a replica of that eerily prophetic tapestry on the wall!
And sitting on a raised pedestal in the very center of the room, hooked up to a lot of strange, unfamiliar machinery, was something that--except for the fact that it was jet black instead of green--was an absolute dead ringer for the Master Emerald.
It somehow filled the entire room with its presence, though the room was huge, and gave off...waves of power. He could feel it throbbing even from the doorway. A strangely dark light was emanating from it, defining its every dully-sparkling facet in perfect detail while also somehow cloaking it in impenetrable shadows. He felt strangely compelled to touch it and run away at the same time.
"Go ahead," whispered the Queen in his ear, coming up VERY close behind him and stroking just the tips of her claws oh-so-gently down his back. His every nerve ending caught fire when she did that. "Go to it. It won't hurt you. It knows another Guardian when it sees one."
Feeling as if he was in a dream--or was it a nightmare?--Knuckles slowly, carefully crossed the floor towards the huge black Emerald. He was stopped by a sort of invisible force-field about 10 feet away from it--not hurt, shocked, or thrown back against the wall, just...held...for a moment. For a second he got the disturbing impression that the Emerald was somehow...TASTING him.
Then the feeling was gone as quickly as it had come and he was free to move again. Closer and closer he came to the jewel, his hand outstretched to touch it. Without thinking, he took off one of his gloves and slowly lowered his arm.
NO!!! shrieked a tiny voice deep inside him. You moron! She's the EVIL Queen and THAT'S the Dark Master Lorinda told you about! It's not a god, it's a dark Master EMERALD! You fool! You've been lied to, hypnotised, drugged, and seduced by this wicked enchantress and her fell gem! Pull back now, while you still can! FIGHT!
But that voice was drowned out as Knuckles laid his hand upon the Emerald.
Power. Strength. Energy. It all came flooding back to him in waves--all the power he had back on the Island, before his own Emerald had started getting drained. Power, flowing from the gem into his hand and from there to every part of his body, coursing through his veins, exhilerating, intoxicating. He knew without having to test it that he could now punch through the thickest of stone or metal walls or glide for miles without falling. He was himself again. He was whole.
And a little bit more.
He didn't quite know what the "more" was, but he knew that he LIKED it. He embraced it wholeheartedly.
And at that moment, the last tiny, pathetic spark of the real Knuckles was snuffed out.
Anansi Korel took his hand off the Dark Master, tugged his white glove back on, and turned around to look the sinisterly smiling Queen straight in the eye. His own eyes had gone from their customary purple colour to a deep, dark, ensaring black--gleaming miniature versions of the Emerald behind him.
"I am yours, my Queen," he said. "Together, we shall crush all who oppose us."