Work Text:
“Now listen closely,” his Aunt Metra said. “I am going to tell you a story.”
The voice of his aunt echoed out from the grey sky. Sickly trees reached up with brown leaves, and when he gently touched their trunks, bark peeled easily under his fingertips. The wind ruffled his hair, but the sea in the distance was still, like glass.
“I like your stories.” His voice was smaller than it had ever been, thin and young.
“I’m glad. Listen now, my little kit. Once, a long time ago, before there were sides to the ocean and green in the hills, before our world was two, there was chaos. It was complete and full of wondrous, impossible things.
“In this chaos came a little planet, around a little star. There had never been green before, and so in the chaos it brought forth this impossible colour, and they called it emerald. It grew in the hills and the islands, between the flat prairies and the oceans and beneath the big blue sky.”
He walked and he saw small eyes peering at him from the trees. Animals, their skin holding onto their bones tight like a promise, appraised him with glazed-over eyes above bleeding gums and yellowed teeth.
“From the chaos came the little animals, whose thoughts were easy but fast, and the bigger animals, whose thoughts were hard but steady. And we lived in peace among one another.”
Something moved beneath his feet, and he shifted, watching something black ooze up from between the fallen branches and leaves, struggling beneath his bare feet. It was slick and iridescent, like oil, and he knew if he touched it, it would never leave his fur. It raised up and up, in strands of glistening beads, and he wondered where they were going.
“But I thought—”
“Shush, my little kit. I will get there.”
Fear seized his heart. Beyond the strand he was watching, oil pooled from beneath the brittle bark in the trees, cracking open what remained of the flora. The animals between the trees came forward, opening mouths full of metal and alloy.
He turned and ran for where he saw the sea.
“One day, there came the biggest. They were like us, with thoughts complex and many, but they were strange to us, because sometimes they didn’t know what to do with their thoughts. We wanted to live with them, but they cut down the forests and turned green to brown and blue to grey. We talked with them, because we lived with them on the land and needed no such violence, and they told us it was progress.
“They had big machines and tore up the land and built cities, but they never replaced what they took. Our oceans churned wine-dark with chemicals and oil. They took Chaos, the trees and the undergrowth and the cliffs with stone, and replaced it with Order, lanes of straight roads cutting through mountains and buildings lined with perfectly spaced lights blotting out the stars.”
“But Aunt Metra, isn’t technology a good thing?”
“Oh, yes, it is. In moderation. You see, no one can say we don’t need medicine or computers or easier transportation. They save lives and make life easier and we can agree those are good things. But we need healthy trees and clean rivers and tall mountains, each filled with bountiful life. The biggest were young, and they did not know that their way of living would not last. Chaos and Order must be in balance, or they will tear the world apart in time. But the ones who disrupt the balance are not always the ones that see the consequences.”
The ocean was wide and seemingly infinite, but what unsettled him was how still it was. It looked like a mirror he could walk out on, even as he got closer and could see where it met the sand. The horizon was green and it swelled up into the clouds, cracking them into mares’ tails. Wind brushed against his face as he approached the edge of the ocean, and he turned to face the oncoming machines.
They were gone.
“There was one among the biggest who was truly evil and he hated the Chaos. He wielded technology like others wielded dark magic. He made machines that made more machines, apparatuses that covered the oceans in large oil slicks and clogged the sky in thick clouds of smog. He wanted to cover the world in metal and turn all into the same machine to create a facsimile of Order, and so he made a contraption that would do just that. He carbonized our bones and turned flesh to monocoque titanium, and so we became his slaves.”
“Huh?”
“He turned us into robots, my little kit.”
“Just like—!”
“Shush. When he committed these crimes, the green, the impossible, the Chaos came to him and said, ‘You’re hurting me.’
“And the old wizard laughed and said, ‘This is the future. Pain is temporary.’
“And the green said, ‘You’re killing me.’
“And he said, ‘I will kill you a thousand times to make my empire.’
“And the green said—”
“‘I will free me.’”
“Ah, you have heard this story.”
The breeze picked up and caressed over his muzzle. He shivered, ears going flat, as he turned upwind and squinted. The green on the horizon had grown, pushing through the grey clouds in electric arcs. It had reached above him, and he could see where it met in the sky.
Just below the epicenter of the web, something floated above the silky water. It looked like a person, with long arms and legs, but as he approached, its shape started to change. Fingers that reminded him of tree branches pulled back into the boulder-sized palms, which then began to shrink along with its stick-like legs. Like a mirage glistening on the horizon, the figure’s silhouette shivered and faded in and out of clarity as it shifted.
“He came from nowhere. He was no one, and yet he was all of us.”
He crept closer to the figure, ignoring the way his feet slid instead of sank into the wet sand. It was growing smaller and smaller. He could see flesh torn between patches of multicoloured fur, the fibers of muscle knitting back together over shimmering bone as he watched. It struck him that it was bloodless, and that the only thing he could smell was the still water to his right and the oil rising to the sky on his left.
“He freed us from metal shackles. He tore apart the wizard’s drills and wood chippers, and he disarmed his weapons of mass destruction, bombs and guns and lasers all. And he went to the wizard’s lair and the wizard begged and said once more, ‘This is the future.’
“And the hero said, ‘Then we shall make a good one.’”
The figure held up a hand to its chest, fingers slowly spreading across newly formed skin. As he grew closer, it slowly drifted to the ground, feet first. Toes dipped into the water and the ocean stirred, waves cautiously ebbing up the shore as the figure was fully deposited in the sand.
“Did he kill the wizard?”
“No, my little kit. Don’t you remember?”
Thunder cracked and broke the sky. His vision turned to static and fear flooded his mind. He wanted to run, to get away from the water, but the forest was still full of monsters, animals torn feral by hunger and robots designed to maim for masters that were no longer watching.
“The hero offered the wizard his hand. And he said, ‘I will give you a chance, as many times as it takes. And every time you spurn my mercy, I will fight you, as many times as that takes.’
“The wizard took his hand but he was already thinking of how to turn on the hero. He planned to go to a different land and start his machinations anew. But wherever he went, the hero followed.”
“This is getting to the sad part of the story, isn’t it?”
“Shush, little kit.”
Blue. The sky was blue, bright blue, almost white. No grey clouds. No green horizon. No growls of monsters from the forest deep. The ocean lapped at the shore gently. The figure did not stir.
He inched closer, trying to stay above the water in case the clouds returned and the thunder boomed. In the distance, along the shoreline, buildings reached up to the sky, but even as his heart soared at the thought of help, he could see the concrete had turned brown and green from disuse and reclamation.
“The battle between Chaos and Order is an old one, little kit. The wizard grew too elderly to fight, but his machines grew stronger in his stead. The hero was dealt a mortal blow, though there was irony in that the wizard had perished from his age a night before. The land the wizard had made was a lonely place, and so the hero crossed rivers and streams, oceans and seas, before he at last returned to the Land of the Sky.
“They say there was no blood, but the wounds were deep and they could see what the hero was made of and it scared the people. He calmed us by using his words as a salve and said, ‘I have one last gift for you, and then I must go. When the time comes, when the world is in danger and the center cannot hold, I will return, but not before and not after. Guard these gifts, and they will protect you just as fiercely.’
“He pulled from his wounds energy, and this energy became gems made of miracles.”
“The Chaos Emeralds!”
“Yes. The Chaos Emeralds. He gave us the Chaos Emeralds from his own body, and then…”
“And then?”
“And then he went to sleep. A long, deep sleep.”
“Like Ma and Da?”
“... Yes, Miles. Like Ma and Da.”
He stared down at the figure laying on the beach, watching as their eyes opened to gaze carelessly upwards. His heart was in his throat. On this abandoned beach, watching the clouds go by as though he’d never seen the sky before, was Sonic the Hedgehog.